Aapje58
18d ago
I suspect a difference now is that working class on up to even PMC women have a lot more negative experiences with men than in the past,
Historically, we see that (proto)-feminism became popular first with higher-class women, who had a far easier life than working class and farmer class women who didn't seem to be into feminism all that much. The mass adoption of feminism seems to correlate with industrial inventions & changes hollowing out the female gender role, also suggesting that boredom was a bigger motivator than feelings of oppression.
In modern times 'we' have unleashed the chads, which means that those chads can hurt many more women, which many of those women then generalize to all men (encouraged by feminist messaging that most men are under the spell of the patriarchy and thus about equally bad).
Underclass women have always had a horrible time almost by definition
But they tend to end up with underclass men who also have a horrible time and we can easily observe that feminists almost never even acknowledge those experiences, let alone hold them up as a goal for women to achieve.
Aapje58
19d ago
My issue is, as I said, with modern incels and incel-adjacents who say things like "If a woman won't be led, she won't be fed."
How is that relevant when there are a ton of men (and women) complaining about being unable to find a partner, who don't say those kind of things? Aren't you just focusing on what you consider aesthetically displeasing (and is most likely downstream of the cause(s)), and by doing so talking past people who want to discuss the actual issue?
Here on the Motte, some of them have a fondness for saying things like "maybe we should use what worked for 5000 years..." and if you read what they are proposing, it's basically that.
Aren't you violating the rules now by straw-manning people? Crowstep nor Faceh seem to suggest to use the threat of starvation. It seems pretty clear to me that the system Faceh describes curtails the choices of both men and women. Ignoring that first part by pretending that only women's choices would be limited, and then also framing that curtailing in an unreasonable way, suggests that you are incapable or unwilling to actually debate the real beliefs of the other person.
The entire 'settle or starve'-framing is completely absurd anyway, since in traditional cultures, women are or would be fed by her parents until marriage, or by the church. In those relatively poor cultures, the parents would want the daughter to marry early to offload the burden of providing from the parents to the husband. That starvation/severe poverty was a possibility was not by design. It was a consequence of food being expensive in the past and governments being poor, so they couldn't have welfare like today, nor have parents take care of their children for a very long period in most cases.
I think that one of the reasons for the decline of traditional marriage is that modern wealth has reduced the benefits of marriage, not just to the people themselves, but also to their parents and society as a whole. So the social pressure has declined.
However, if the resulting behavior is actually very bad for most people, then isn't it a fair suggestion to try to restore that behavior? If you want to discuss the mechanisms to do so, wouldn't it be better to ask people what they propose, rather than accusing them of making proposals that they never actually did propose?
Aapje58
1mo ago
The closest 2024 victory in a state that does not already require photo ID is either New Hampshire (which requires photo ID but student ID is allowed) by 22,965 or Nevada by 46,008 votes.
You are ignoring Hawaii with a 115 vote difference in 1960. With your suggested productivity per fraudster, that would require 3 people (15 minutes per vote, 12 hours) for a single day of voting. 1 person with early voting, who can take it very easy. And it regularly happens that a margin of less than 10k decides the election. That would require 28 people when using your calculation, with early voting.
Note that you are ignoring senatorial and local elections, which add up to a lot more chances for a close contest.
And voting integrity laws are often at least as much about the perception of security, both on the part of potential fraudsters and the voting public, as they are about actually preventing fraud. And I do observe that the reputation of voting without ID has a reputation of making fraud easy.
We're talking about getting 125+ people into a conspiracy without one of them thinking cheating is morally wrong
In polling, 25% of some broad groups approve of using violence for political ends: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/52960-charlie-kirk-americans-political-violence-poll
I'm sure that if you zoom in, you could find groups with way higher approval ratings than that (antifa, proud boys, etc).
Surely you would agree that fraud is generally considered less morally wrong than violence? And your entire premise is flawed anyway. To get people to commit fraud, you would logically convince them that their fraud is justified, or not even fraud. Like how doping athletes tend to justify it by: 'everyone does it, so I'm just leveling the playing field.' Every election there are a lot of people who believe in fraud anyway, on both sides.
And woke people already justify racial and gender discrimination by claiming that it is just a correction for discrimination happening the other way. Even to the point where they simply deny that discrimination is even possible in one direction, no matter how similar it is to what they would call discrimination with the genders/races swapped. So if they just apply the same logic to voting fraud...
30 states use ERIC
According to your link, the software is (also) used to identify people "who were eligible to cast ballots but were not registered to vote." But this is publicly available information and registering presumably doesn't require an ID check either in any states without Voter ID. So all it takes to create a list of exploitable people is to get a list of residents of a state (easy to get from data brokers) and then check whether they are registered. Then the fraudster can recheck the list in the voter registry just before the deadline, and then quickly register these people to vote, and vote in their name.
Normally, only 10-20% of the people who get mailings from ERIC actually go register to vote, but what percentage would register just before the deadline or vote despite thinking that they are not registered? Surely that would cut the risk down of the person then actually voting as well to a fraction of a percent. Then to detect this fraud (in total), a lot of other things would have to work out. It would have to be detected as fraud, the fraudster would have to be caught, and then this person would also have to admit to the entire scheme. If there is a conspiracy, the schemers would of course come up with a cover story and instructions to only talk with a lawyer present that preferably is part of the conspiracy.
It suggests nothing rather strongly, as "Why are you making me fill out this form? It's a waste of time!" is a perfectly coherent and rational response to someone trying to make you fill out an extra form that provides no useful purpose.
Except that there is an obvious purpose, to increase trust in the system.
Your fix isn't a good fix, since people don't canvas everywhere, as you yourself acknowledge.
Yet on the other hand, you just acknowledged that ERIC is used to contact voters on what they need to do to vote. So that serves a very similar purpose to canvassing, and is not limited to rural areas. So why is the question not whether voters all get the needed information to make sure that they can get an ID in any (valid) circumstance?
First of all, according to a 2014 study voter ID reduced white turnout by 1.5% and blacks by 3.7% in some states (pages 52-54 of the report).
Presumably this was a study that looked at the effect directly after implementing such a law? Did Democratic canvassers include information about IDs in their canvassing efforts?
Aapje58
1mo ago
You have to find like-minded individuals without tipping your hand to snitches.
The 'Watergate' conspirators had no trouble finding people who were willing to go much further than this. In that case, the seriousness of the crime provided motive for the conspirators to cut a deal, but there was no spontaneous snitching. In your examples, 3 of the 4 cases ended with just a probation sentence (the other one seems to have no data about the actual sentence), so is that bad enough for people to snitch? Doubtful.
You'd need at minimum hundreds of people coordinating to sway a presidential election by in-person voter fraud.
At minimum you need one, depending on how close the election is, in a state. Also, coordinating many people is one of the main activities of political campaigns (canvassing).
People may also simply worry about spontaneous behavior and want to discourage it. The level of hatred of the other side among leftists is so high that there have been multiple attempts on Trump's life and the risks of committing voter fraud are way lower than that. It is also a fact that we have seen coordinated behavior by individuals to evade checks and balances, for example, transgender activists who coach people on what to say to manipulate doctors into prescribing drugs, rather than answer the questions honestly.
What happens if this kind of voter fraud becomes a sudden (minor) hype and a bunch of people start to coordinate on how to do it with minimal risk of detection?
I think that it is factually true that there is no structural deterrence that would protect elections against this. Detecting this fraud is now either based on mistakes that can be avoided, like not going to the same polling station, or depends on post-facto research that is most likely going to be too late to allow the election result to be changed.
And investigations.
Earlier you referred to investigators finding a few cases of people voting for dead people or with wrong signatures, but as far as I can tell, these kinds of investigations happen only rarely, for a small sample of ballots. So it is perfectly plausible that even a fairly large operation could completely evade detection or not be detected until the election result has been set into stone.
Campaigns also do a lot of tracking of people, for canvassing, targeted ads, or other purposes, so it is also perfectly plausible that one or more data analysts could prepare lists of death people to use for fraudulent voting, without being aware that this is the purpose of the data.
I'd also add that fame can be a form of payment.
I would think that the people who want any-directional fame while destroying their own lives, would generally be crazy, and would not go for such boring things like election fraud, but would try to assassinate someone, like John Hinckley Jr.
Being (self-)selected for being a partisan in one direction, seems like it would make someone very unlikely to seek fame from the opposite political party.
Heritage's data goes back to 1982. According to their data in-person voter fraud has been proven to happen 34 times.
But if this is never seriously investigated, then we can only say that this is the minimum amount. Also, we could see a big upsurge in attempts.
Requiring an ID would, aside from making it harder to commit this kind of fraud, also provide more opportunities to detect fraud.
For instance, an accusation that has been levied is that after getting voter ID passed in red states, the GOP closed DMVs in poor areas, thereby making wait times longer and transportation more difficult. While that accusation could be true or could be conspiratorial thinking, it is the sort of thing you could do to effectively make a deal only to sabotage it later.
Your description is a bit disingenuous, because there was only one state, Alabama, that closed DMVs. The governor claims that it was a financial decision and was able to list a bunch of alternatives, like renewing online (which surely was very convenient during Covid) or government workers coming to people's house. There is also an option for a free voter ID if people are poor or such.
This kind of stuff is also on par with people forgetting how to register for voting, not knowing how, etc; which is one of the reasons why canvassing happens anyway. So if Democrats are worried about black people being more disenfranchised, they have every opportunity to combat this by asking whether people have an ID during canvassing and helping them get one if they do not. If the Democrats are right about their allegations, then this would make a big difference, so they would do it. If they don't, this suggests rather strongly that their rhetoric is false and just intended as a marketing exercise.
I'm pretty sure that Republicans are much less prone to canvassing, and there are in fact quite a few poor white people living in Alabama, that presumably would also have a relatively large percentage of no-IDers and would live far from DMVs (especially since they tend to live rurally). But these people are consistently erased from the conversation. So on the one hand we have the speculative racism from one side, but we also have the definitive racism from the other side, which also taints all the evidence from that side, because they are not even looking at poor whites as a group, even though there are a lot of similarities with poor blacks. Hmmm.
Aapje58
1mo ago
I'm generally of the opinion that in any conspiracy, someone will eventually snitch if the rewards are tempting, and I believe the Republican party will ensure the rewards are tempting.
Do you believe that the person who killed Kirk and the people who attempted to kill Trump, were paid by the Democrats or any other anti-Trump organization? Or do you believe what the evidence points to, that these people were willing to throw their lives away simply because of their political beliefs?
If the latter, then is it not very likely that you can find plenty of people who would be willing to forego a potential payout, just to advance their political side? Especially since taking that payout could have severe repercussions with regards to their relationships to their partner, children and community. Or even their safety.
And the assumption that the Republicans would be willing to pay is questionable as well, because the very act of paying for the information might discredit the witness, so they might be unwilling to pay, since the witness might only be of real value if the testimony is not paid. Your own argument that being paid would tempt people to snitch is of course equally valid as a motive for lying to get paid.
The reason I and I think the DNC don't push for this is because again I don't think it's really happening
You yourself have presented evidence that these things do in fact happen. Your claim that Democrat voters are fine with it, but Democrat politicians oppose it, is exactly what you would expect if those politicians knew or expected that fraud was happening to their benefit.
there's no point giving them an inch because they're just going to try and find a way to take more.
This is rather irrational a claim/worry, because Democrat politicians fight for votes, so if allowing voter ID is in fact not opposed by most democrats, then making the fight about that seems like a rather poor way to motivate the Democrats to go vote. Why not give in and if the Republicans then demand something unreasonable in response, use that as a much more effective way to convince people to go vote and perhaps also convince some undecideds?
Or is your claim that Democrats are in pure obstruction mode where they never give an inch, no matter how reasonable the proposal is? Because at that point, no facts would matter to them, on any topic.
driver's license-as-ID is a distinctly American thing to me
You can vote with a driver license in The Netherlands.
every EU citizen can vote in the local and European elections in the country they live in.
EU elections are extremely weird in that you vote for a national party, that then has to join a European party to have any actual influence. So very few people actually have a clue which European party they are actually voting for, or even which European parties exist or what they actually vote for or against. In my country, the media have mostly given up on reporting on it, so the politicians can pretty much do what they want without the populace noticing.
Aapje58
1mo ago
and it'd be far cozier since the women back then actually had to do hours and hours of meaningful domestic work.
When industrialization resulted in all kinds of machinery to make women's lives easier, they actually appeared to become much less satisfied with their lives.
get to watch soap operas or makeup tiktoks all day.
Does that really make women happy? Is not one of the reasons that women want to work today because the old neighborhoods that were alive with women and children are now mostly dead during the day, so they go to work to socialize?
Aapje58
1mo ago
Freedom favors the smart and responsible people who can control themselves and make good decisions.
And strictly speaking that is no one, as we all need guidance on what good decisions are, and that indoctrination is itself unfree. Your perception of what choices you have and what the consequences of those choices are, is to a large extent a product of your indoctrination. And people tend to even seek out the indoctrination that they prefer (hence: bubbles of like minded people).
Freedom says you are accountable to yourself. Freedom is for the people who make better decisions in their life than a central bureaucrat on a power trip could do.
This is a false dichotomy, because freedom or a lack of it does not merely come from what a government allows and demands, but also what a culture allows and demands, both explicitly and implicitly.
I believe that traditional society had a strong sense of noblesse oblige in the sense that the intelligent would accept being restricted by rules that work for people who think that they are smarter than they actually are, which actually also includes many smart people.
I don't think of myself as a retard, I think of myself as someone who knows better for my life than the government would. I want my freedom to do with myself as I wish.
Of course, but this perception is very much a product of modern culture, where narcissistic individualism is encultured in people. So of course you think that you know better than others and consider 'beating' others at the game of life to be an ego-affirming testament to your worth as a person. But is it not evidence that your 'freedom' is a mirage, that your perceptions fall so much in line with current culture, and thus do not seem based in independent thought?
Aapje58
1mo ago
When people write screeds like this about feminism, in my mind I always wonder "Which kind of feminism"? Because nowadays, "feminism" means pretty much whatever the person using the word wants it to mean, whether that is "Women should be able to vote" or "Evil civilization-hating penis-removing witches."
And yet there is one thing that it never means, which is applying the same standards to men and women. For example, is there any subset of feminism that (also) studies toxic femininity?
Aapje58
1mo ago
I think we're highly biased by our novelty-focused culture, but I would wager that America is producing excellent cultural and entertainment products at least as consistently as Ancient Greece or Rome did.
To be fair, Rome was also known for entertaining the masses with blood sports and the like, but Hollywood went from intelligent, well-written movies to Superhero-slop. Now that the audience has grown tired of it, they have apparently become incapable of producing new epics, and are mostly recycling old movies or existing IPs, usually poorly.
If you want to enjoy human artistic excellence in the United States, you can find it in virtually every large American city. You like opera? We've got opera. Ballet? Classical music?
All stagnating, mostly simply replaying the same old classics to dwindling audiences.
and performances that are probably at least as good as the average of what you could have experienced 500 years ago, or 1000 years ago, or 2000 years ago.
Yes, the US is very technically proficient. But that is not culture.
And let's be honest, most of the servants of Ancient Greece and Rome probably weren't deeply immersing themselves in the art and literature of the era (even if there are notable exceptions like Epictetus and Cleanthes.)
Traditional cultures are known for roaming troupes of artists, entertaining the masses, so I actually would expect people of that time (including farmers, not sure why you chose servants, unless you see the past through the lens of the rich, and have a blindness to the lives of commoners), to have access to art as well, but obviously more in line with the wealth levels and population density of the time.
Aapje58
1mo ago
To be utterly laughable. Seriously, I've been to Chinese New Year celebrations within my city, and it is a fun time. They do have drum performances, and dress in strange clothes, but I don't feel like a group celebrating their heritage once or twice a year is some death knell for Western civilization and culture.
The Chinese are famous for self-seggregating into a ghetto, and having a ghetto is one of the traditional solutions to prevent a non-integrating ethnic group from being a threat to the ethnic cohesion of the majority of society. Secondly, the Chinese are one of the least aggressive groups when it comes to demanding accommodations. They are also one of the least criminal groups around. As a result, frictions with other ethnic groups in various places tends to revolve around their economic success, not so much a negative impact on other civilizations and cultures, but you can't just assume that different groups have the same traits.
In fact, the very essence of ethnicity/culture is that peoples with a different ethnicity have different behaviors, so pointing to one group and claiming that these experiences generalize, suggest that you don't actually understand what ethnicity/culture is.
and we've successfully anglified basically every white ethnic group that has come here, we anglified the Native Americans, and sufficiently assimilated Asians and Hispanics so that they're no great threat to our society.
That 'basically' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, with there being quite a large population of 'white trash' in extreme poverty, high crime and otherwise poorly assimilated people. Native Americans have the highest poverty rate of any group, many of them live in ghetto's, and the only real success of that community is by being given an unfair advantage (being allowed to run casino's in places where other ethnic groups are not allowed to do that).
And you completely ignore black people in your comment, for seemingly obvious reasons.
People look at the statistics of Europe's failed immigration policies, and assume that they also apply to the US, but they just don't.
Perhaps that is because progressives have now gained a huge amount of informal power in the US and are using that to push the exact same failed immigration policies.
Aapje58
1mo ago
there’s a reason these guys are buying Lamborghinis.
A lot of them are leased and if they get used in video's, they can also be deducted as a business expense.
But this young man’s misogyny and performative meanness to women isn’t why he gets laid!
This kind of person is similar to the women with duck-lips and basketball-sized breast implants. They take something that is actually attractive to the other sex like bigger lips and bigger breasts, but then take it too far, but this makes them successful as social media personalities, because people who are inadequate in a way, tend to look for people who exaggerate in that area, not people who are normal.
I do think that for a guy who always does what a woman wants, is afraid of being negatively judged by women and thus does not approach them, is afraid to take up space, is afraid of saying things that women may disagree with, etc; can benefit from a higher level of misogyny where he starts believing that women are regularly full of it, stops caring as much about their opinions, their lack of comfort when an approach doesn't work out, isn't very afraid to speak his real thoughts and preferences, etc.
the primary victims of these men aren’t [...] It’s that short Mexican guy from the documentary who thinks that if he’s only a bit more masculine, more misogynist, more alpha, he can have the life of the tall rich white guy.
Or is that exactly the kind of person that can benefit from them, by applying 1/10th of what the streamer shows to his own life? I haven't seen the documentary, but did he really expect to have that exact same life, or just to get a result that is closer to that?
All of those version of Rome are the real Rome, whether pro-Hellenistic or anti-Hellenistic, whether Pagan or Christian, all of them were Roman.
This is completely incoherent, unless what you mean by the 'real Rome' is merely that these different cultures all existed in the same place. But then the 'real' is not doing any work. You can't just adopt a phrase while rejecting the premise behind it, which is that true forms exist in contrast to non-true forms.
So too, the West has been a lot of different things.
Yes, but this is not really relevant. If people interpret 'Western culture' as one involving things like individualism, democracy, capitalism, etc; then pointing out that parts of the history of Western Europe didn't have those things is at most a criticism of a sloppy choice of words, but it doesn't invalidate that people can have a preference for a certain culture and put a label on it. That the label is sloppy, does not mean that the things the label refers to is not something real, or that it is invalid to have a subjective preference for things that the label covers.
Note that by adopting the 'real' adjective, people are in fact making it clear that they reject your belief that just because things happen in a place, things all fall under that label of 'real X'.
We know that Cato the Elder considered Greek philosophy "un-Roman" and he probably would have hated to learn that his great grandson, Cato the Younger would be remembered as a sort of Stoic martyr and sage.
And historians recognize the distinction between the early 'Romanitas' and the later Greco-Roman culture, so a change happened, that destroyed the thing that Cato the Elder loved and considered to be true Roman. His belief was based on a true fact (a cultural distinction), plus a subjective preference. You seem to agree with the fact, but only disagree with the subjective element, but there is no right or wrong when it comes to subjective preference. There is a wrong when it comes to denying others their subjective preference, by claiming that this preference is objectively wrong.
That's the weird thing about concerning yourself about a civilization instead of a nation or an ethnos or a tribe. Civilizations contain multitudes and are ever-changing.
Your own argument can also be used to argue that it is weird to have a concern for a nation or an ethnos or a tribe, which are of course all ever-changing. Even the human race is changing or if you abstract away even further, the animal population of earth (with mankind being just one of the animals). So does your reasoning not require total apathy, even to the survival of humankind, or the quality of humankind (see Idiocracy)?
Aapje58
1mo ago
They think that it is working, but they are not actually achieving their goals.
Aapje58
2mo ago
Allowing the United States and its allies half a decade to prepare for a Taiwan contingency might render all of the squabbling over whether or not aircraft carriers are survivable with a ballistic missile threat essentially moot
And if I was Taiwan, I would be building a lot of cheap anti-shipping drones like Ukraine has used very effectively.
Aapje58
2mo ago
I gather that for the Iranians, literally nothing matters but showing strength/hiding weakness.
You are completely ignoring the religious element, which is remarkable, since they main feature is that they are a theocracy.
Aapje58
2mo ago
Iran has spent the last 40 years building up a gigantic military
They had a big war with Iraq in that period and the higher spending during that time would have largely attritted away during the fighting. Since 1990, their military spending dropped to ~2% of their GDP, which is lower than US spending both as a percentage and much more so in actual money. They also had trouble with spending that money optimally due to the sanctions.
I'm feeling a bit drunk on national power.
Are you sure that this is not affecting your assessment of Iran as some amazing military power?
The US can completely devastate most countries, even large ones like Iran, without putting a single boot on the ground
The power to devastate is a great power in some ways, and quite weak in other ways. The Taliban is back in charge in Afghanistan.
Aapje58
2mo ago
Consider AI videos. That is certainly going dissuade may people from going to Hollywood or from seeing filmmaking as a career.
There is already an enormous glut of artists, to the point where I had people just randomly message me on Discord in an attempt to get a commission to make some art. And this was an issue already before AI. If anything, we need more people being dissuaded from entering creative fields.
Aapje58
2mo ago
in a perfect and efficient world
should over time get arbitraged away as groups and populations mix
You assume that the population of the world is perfectly emulsifiable, even though in reality we see that populations also have tendencies to diversify (not even just based on ethnicity, location, etc, but even across generations, and within generations from the same ethnic group in a single location) and that placing people in close proximity often does not actually cause groups to adopt a shared culture. So the mechanism that you depend on, most likely does not actually work like you need it to work.
Furthermore, even if a single shared culture would come into existence in this way, there is absolutely no guarantee that it would result in everyone achieving the wealth of the most wealthy nations, or even the average of existing nations. So the "imperfection that we should be working to get rid of" might be a more prosperous world, which would make you an evil person in my eyes.
And finally, you ignore the benefits of diversity and of competition between cultures. It is far from a given that a single homogenic culture is even capable of being the most perfect and efficient world possible, or even capable of not being one of the worse world possible, in which case your solution would be self-defeating.
Aapje58
2mo ago
MRE's are not intended for long-term consumption. They are much lower in water content than the regular meals that people are used to, so soldiers tend to underhydrate, causing constipation. Also, they tend to lack sufficient vitamins and minerals.
Research also shows that soldiers would not eat all of it, causing them to eat fewer calories than with regular meals. Of course, this could be a benefit for regular people, who often overeat. Then again, the calories in an MRE are aimed at a very active young adult, so it may could also cause worse overeating than a regular meal. I think that this would require research to see what regular people would do.
Aapje58
2mo ago
I have to be honest I don’t understand how Epstein had so many people in his network.
He was extremely sociable and apparently didn't do much actual work, so automatically had a big network by virtue of being there for people, while the other rich people in the rich people network, would often be very busy.
He had very loose morals, but would not tell on others, so rich people with a dark secret like affairs with Russian women or those having a rapist son, could have him as the only friend that they dared to trust with those secrets and to ask help from.
He had a big island and invited lots of people over, where they could safely relax and meet away from journalists and such.
He was constantly working to expand his network with big names, so just by virtue of having a goal of having a big network, he had an advantage over those not working towards that goal.
He opportunistically engaged in all kinds of deals and schemes.
At a certain point the size of his network became a draw in itself.
Aapje58
2mo ago
Only now, 40 years later, it's still a lot of those same up and comers from the 70's clinging to power and not letting up and comers displace them.
I think that the issue is more that a lot of the up and comers who do replace them, come from within the same structure, having worked with the big directors, rather than having made their own way. Kathleen Kennedy never made something by herself. She was always the one who enabled others to do great things, but she didn't have a good creative vision of her own, nor was she able to spot new talent. Perhaps Dave Filoni will be better. At least he actual creative work on new IPs.
I think there are similar trends in politics and activism.
Perhaps that is because most of the elite is in the thrall of illiberal activism, so they are innately opposed to the idea that 'the people' get to have a say. So instead of giving a chance to directors/writers that punched above their weight on smaller projects, they select people that only appeal to them and their agenda. And even if these people turn out to be good by chance, they sabotage them with bad instructions, with bad advisors, etc.
Something similar seems to be true in politics.
Because for some groups it gets rewarded with status, attention, accommodations and money. So of course people seek those things.
And the loss of stoicism (which of course is 'toxic masculinity') causes people to be less respected for accepting that bad things happened to them, without demanding compensation in some way. So people no longer get pushed away from a victim mentality by shaming, and get pulled towards it with rewards.
Yet both the capriciousness and unfairness of who gets rewarded and how much, logically results in everyone feeling hard done by, even those groups with great victim privileges. Because there is always a group who (temporarily) gets more status, attention, accommodations and money.
Have you considered that many people may simply feel extremely dissatisfied with modern society, but have not been handed a narrative that correctly explains why they feel this way, so they latch on to whatever narrative floats around.
However, then those feelings are still real and they do matter. You cannot reason away feelings. If things in society create an increase in bad feelings, then this is an issue, even/especially if we don't know where these feelings come from.
Funnily, all of your examples are not cases where things are actually getting better over time, but your 'good news' is merely that things are getting worse, but not as much as some people are claiming. We have more data centers, which is a reflecting of the online world taking over, with many major downsides (including that the online world itself is enshittifying), but it takes a bit less resources than some thought. Yay? Autism is on the rise, but we have no clue why or how to fix it. We just know that we can't address the issue by going after vaccines. Yay? Migration issues are making people unhappy all over the world, but the minorities don't get shot by the police all that often compared to how often they kill each other. Yay? There is a huge rise in trans identification, including for young kids, who get experimented on medically, but things have not deteriorated so far that furries get medicalized. Yay?
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