Corvos
5d ago
Right, but every country stopped allowing duels because loads of healthy young men died.
Corvos
5d ago
I do appreciate the reality check, truly. But I just don’t see Europeans and Americans acting like Congolese warlords, or permanently destroying their country’s economics. There would be a significant amount of short term suffering, yes, but not as much as you are proposing and I don’t think the long-term effects would be so bad. Look at Spain, which had a reasonably modern Civil War and was basically okay.
Right, this I think is mostly a reasonable prediction. Perhaps I’m wrong but I think that @FCfromSSC pushed a valid point a little too hard and made it look silly.
On a lighter note, your post reminds me of a scene from Black Books:
Bookshop Owner: Military History is on your right.
Customer: I don’t want your dinky little history grotto! I want modern warfare. Infrared. Fallout. Killzones.
B.O: Military History is on your right. If you need any assistance please fire two rounds into the ceiling.
This seems exaggerated. You had a literal civil war and it wasn’t this bad AFAIK. Obviously quite a lot of people died but ‘the end of all good things and a life of permanent misery and terror’ doesn’t seem like a good way of describing post-civil-war America.
I was intrigued and looked up ‘transgender’ from within China. The Great Firewall is often quite heavy handed but didn’t seem to mind. From the first result, auto-translated from Chinese:
Transgender means that an individual's gender identity is different from the biological gender assigned at birth [1]. Transgender is a general term that includes gender identities such as transgender men, transgender women, and gender queer [2]. Transgender is a gender identity rather than a sexual orientation. [2][3]. According to internationally accepted medical standards, transgender is not a mental illness. [4][5]. Due to stereotyped gender perceptions in society and current legal and policy restrictions, transgender people are currently subject to widespread discrimination in society [6]. In addition, due to difficulties in self-identification, coming out, and medical treatment, transgender people also generally experience psychological problems such as anxiety [3]. As one of the concepts related to sex and gender, cross-gender will be expounded from the perspective of improving gender awareness in education. Among the relevant education documents issued by various ministries and commissions in my country, the "Guidelines for Public Safety Education in Primary and Secondary Schools" (2007) emphasizes the necessity of education from the perspective of strengthening safety and gender awareness [7]. The Law on the Protection of Minors in the People's Republic of China (revised in 2020) stipulates that schools and kindergartens should carry out sex education suitable for minors [8]. Gender equality, including cross-gender equality, is one of the important contents of comprehensive sex education and social equity.
I’d be interested in one of our Chinese posters’ opinions on how China has responded to transgenderism. @Pigeon, any thoughts?
Corvos
5d ago
Interesting, I hadn’t heard of such a movement before and would be interested to hear more: so you have links to forums or the equivalent?
I remember there was an online Roman city state where everyone messaged in Latin but that was openly a LARP.
Let’s say maybe 20% of the population is ‘long term without a relationship and unhappy about it’ as opposed to the specific incel subculture. (I freely concede that this number is pulled from thin air and intuition!)
My thesis is that about 15% of these people (us) are this way because relationships explicitly became opt-in rather than opt-out. I think it was @MaiqTheTrue who said that in the modern age things that everyone used to be able to do because they had no choice now split into skilled enthusiasts and unskilled avoiders. Incels being the latter.
In other times and places it was not this way. A friend of mine went back to his country after university and his parents immediately sat him down and said, “These are the sixteen eligible girls in our community, which would you like us to contact first?” Clearly such a society will have more men in relationships! And indeed the marriage rate for young men at 30 used to be much higher than it is now.
Many other potential policies have been floated on this forum: cracking down on men who juggle multiple girls, escalating taxes for singleness, government or church-organised speed dating, Victorian-England style ‘coming out’, and more drastic stuff. Arguments can be made against all of these but those arguments do have to be made.
At the risk of offending, I believe that ‘well, you don’t have a girlfriend/boyfriend because you have a bad personality’ is one of those evolved rejoinders that people use to avoid thinking about the problem. It’s trivially true, in the general form of ‘if you were the kind of person who could X, you would X’. And there are people who obviously have physical and mental deformities that render them unlovable, if backing evidence is required.
So people on the receiving end of this argument tend to shrink in on themselves and agree meekly to avoid humiliation, and people on the using end get to avoid having to defend a system they’re basically okay with. I don’t mean to aim this at you specifically, but I think this is how the debate generally goes and why.
This is just the euphemism treadmill. IMO the way you make it mostly uncontroversial is by:
- making the curriculum absolutely transparent
- making every individual lesson opt-in
I’m good with a chunk of that, don’t get me wrong. But if I were a parent, trying to calibrate how much independence to give my children, I would consider ‘cutting class and doing drugs’ as a VERY clear sign I’d erred too far towards lenience.
Corvos
6d ago
Right, but this is my point: times changed. The kind of places where left-wingers might occasionally bump into right wingers have mostly ceased to exist, online and offline.
Corvos
6d ago
Scott himself puts forth a few ideas in the now-linked essay before dismissing them all. In general there are loads of potential policy ideas of many different strengths for encouraging people to pair up, discouraging them from behaviour that makes pairing up difficult, and facilitating people finding matches.
The Israeli-Hamas conflict is intractable because both groups want the same land, they can’t both get it, they both consider the conflict existential, they have powerful backers and they’re willing to be extremely violent. In contrast the problem of inceldom and birth rates is very tractable and historically was a mostly solved problem, it’s just that seriously discussing it gets you nobbled.
I don’t mean he spends time in left-wing activist spaces as an ally, I mean that I imagine his friends mostly take cultural left-wing fundamentals as a given. Trans stuff, race stuff*, homelessness, etc. I would be very surprised if he had friends who were actually right of center, let alone someone like Moldbug or Diseach. So he isn’t exposed to those perspectives any more except when he wants to be, and he’s made it pretty clear he doesn’t want to be.
*Yes, he hid his stance on HBD for a long time but even now he’s more open I doubt it actually makes any difference to his day-to-day behaviour.
Love is unfair. Some people go on dozens of dates with supermodels, then have happy marriages with their perfect partner. Other people die alone, through no fault of their own. They were born ugly, or with fewer social skills, or with less money, or disconnected from the social networks that would allow them to meet good partners. Usually when something is this unfair, we demand it be made fairer, maybe through redistribution. In love, nobody demands this - except incels, who are universally loathed for it.
…
Probably some of these policies would make the world a better place overall, at least as a first-order effect. So why am I against them? Why is everyone against them? I can make up good reasons, but they’re not my real objection. It’s more of a gut feeling of “if we did this, we would be pathetic and less than fully human”.
Corvos
6d ago
And yet here we are. Mencken certainly didn’t predict S Korea. In general his lines are fun but there’s not much thought or truth in them.
Corvos
6d ago
I don’t disagree. I’m just saying that now when the whole thing has blown up, donating a little makes the big ‘fuck you whitey’ number go up and is therefore a cheap way of teabagging the outgroup (you and me).
Corvos
6d ago
Last I heard there happened to be one but I don’t think this is a matter of principle.
Corvos
6d ago
Quote from Highlights From the Comments on Polyamory:
"I want my wife to definitely be the most important person in my life and vice versa. But I find I can carve out a category “secondary partner” that doesn’t interfere with this, any more than her having friends , hobbies, children, etc interferes with this. Probably other people’s psychology doesn’t work this way, and those people wouldn’t enjoy being poly."
Corvos
6d ago
I think you’re reading too much into the specific example. But yes, SSC was a purely organic phenomenon that succeeded pretty much through word of mouth. Scott started out as just another poster, and even when he made SSC he was a frequent commenter. Now he does meet-ups and community content. He asked fans to write to the NYT for him.
When you have such a close relationship between blogger and readers it’s inevitable that there are mutual expectations. It’s not like having a crush on Daniel Craig and thinking he owes you something because you once bought a James Bond poster.
You’re half right.
It’s not about value, it’s about status. Lots of virgins have incomes that make it clear what kind of value they provide.
Leading a movement makes you a leader, and leaders get laid. They have or acquire a certain level of confidence and extroversion by the nature of the thing - I’ve seen people change quite drastically just from a promotion. They also become famous: someone well-known enough in any group of a good size is also well-known enough to be a catch of a sort.
It’s the eternal problem of all male solidarity, not just incels. The socialists had exactly the same problem - trade union leaders where constantly accepting knighthoods and buying grand houses with union money. Male status comes mostly from power and experience, and doesn’t start degrading until your 70s so potential leaders always evaporate off the top.
Perhaps it’s the result of different bubbles? Reading from a liberal university, stuff like “Reactionary Philosophy in a Nutshell” and “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup” was mind-blowing stuff, and the anti-feminist essays were unthinkable. I really, honestly looked up to 2014 Scott as the epitome of someone who didn’t even have right-wing views but was willing to follow the truth even when it was ideologically uncomfortable for him. So seeing what he became is hugely disappointing, even putting aside the stuff I wrote in my other reply. Not just the careful avoidance of anything likely to upset, but the pigheaded blinders he puts on when defending his actual ingroup and beliefs. (EA not Jews, to avoid doubt).
I think part of the problem is that he got really full of himself because of Dominic Cummings and COVID and the substack income. He started treating himself as a Public Intellectual. Lately reading his stuff makes me feel like I’m being communicated at rather than to, like I’m hearing what Scott wants me to think not what he actually thinks.
I would broadly define ‘us’ as some amalgam of ‘those who have had the pointy end of wokeness shoved up our rectum at some point’ and ‘readers of Radicalising the Romanceless’.
Especially as the latter, I’m pretty disappointed. Scott wrote a set of articles saying, “here’s a massive problem that makes lots of young men miserable, why don’t we discuss it, and can we at least agree on not accusing these young men of being entitled proto-rapists?”. Ten years later, having achieved fame and fortune on the back of his fans, and a wife and mistress thereby*, he writes another essay saying pretty clearly that, okay, nothing has changed, lots of young men are still unhappy, but ultimately he likes the system the way it is and thinks it would be inhuman to change it.
It’s not like he was ever a firebrand. He was never a Kulak-style writer, he never did anything as a young man he couldn’t do now that he has more stability. But when he was unhappy he wrote about young men’s problems, and now that he’s happy he’s decided that everything is fine even though nothing has changed except his own personal welfare. That’s just pure intellectual cowardice. If you’re going to ‘mellow’ as you get older, either you have to admit that your original beliefs were wrong and explain why, or else you have to admit you hold beliefs purely because they’re convenient for you and that you’re okay with letting your less fortunate peers sink.
To take an example that goes in my favour, it’s very common for young socialists to become capitalists when they become rich. But this means that either you have to be aware you really fucked up when you were younger, and understand why socialism actually doesn’t help the poor, and try some other way instead. Or else it means that you’re a coward who cared about the poor when you had no money and became willing to disregard them the moment it became convenient for you. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to call the latter ‘betrayal’.
*he mentions somewhere that he explicitly dates by going to meet-ups and having eager young women come up and say “wow, are you Scott Alexander?!”.
Perhaps I misread you but it seemed like you were arguing exactly that:
Thus some level of shock and bemusement. In The Black Swan Taleb describes his experience in the Lebanese Civil War and it wasn’t like that. Most people adapt to most things.
Only if you use a very non-standard definition of ‘kill’. BLM killed perhaps 30 people: the CHAZ murders, that poor old man who got his head cracked open. Maybe the 2 people who Rittenhouse shot.
But ‘assisted in the death of, via second order effects on murder rates’ is a rather different phenomenon.
Message received, and I will think about it carefully.
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