Crowstep
22hr ago
The American identity survives regardless of who makes up our population
I wouldn't call the country splitting into two halves who hate eachother 'surviving'.
Meanwhile Germany, in spite of the political changes you mention is the most politically stable country in the world (I didn't go looking for a list with Germany at the top I swear, I googled 'least partisan countries' and that's what came up).
Germany's form of government may have changed, but it doesn't matter because it has a core ethnic group whose similarity transcends political organisation. Meanwhile in the multiracial proposition nation, everyone hates eachother and can't agree on anything.
Crowstep
8d ago
I can't give a definitive answer to your question (which I guess you're not really expecting). It's far too personal, and reasons you've given are valid to consider.
Louise Perry likens pregnancy and giving birth as the female equivalent of going to war. It's dangerous, intoxicating, glorious, painful and rewarding all at once. It's brings you close to death and closer to life. You're going through something that all of your female ancestors went through and coming out the other side having created a new soul.
If you do go ahead and have another baby, you'll be doing something heroic. That's all I can really say.
Crowstep
8d ago
I always found this weird, as mathematically for every lonely man there has to be one lonely woman and vice versa
I assume when people are talking about male loneliness they mean a lack of friends, not necessarily a lack of romantic engagement. Nobody thinks of the widowed church lady who spends all day drinking tea with her friends and looking after her grandchildren as lonely.
Crowstep
9d ago
Isn't Ozempic-face just an effect of rapid weight loss, rather than something specific to the GLP-1 agonists?
Seems like the solution there is just to take a lower dose and lose the weight less quickly. Maybe take collagen supplements.
Crowstep
9d ago
One statement I've found that cuts across the bipartisan spectrum is 'the internet made us all crazy'. Conservatives will imagine liberal craziness, liberals will imagine conservative craziness, but everyone I've said it to agrees. Something broke in the 2010s. It was probably the smartphones, the internet was safer when it was anchored to a desktop that you had to walk away from to do anything else. Now we spend most of our waking hours plugged into the outrage machine.
Crowstep
15d ago
Israel receives new U.S.-backed Gaza truce proposal: state media-Xinhua
Offers from Hamas to give up the hostages remind me of Zeno's paradox. Right now they're offering ten living hostages, of the twenty suspected alive. Presumably at the end of the 60 day truce they'll offer five of the remaining ten. Then two of the remaining five. If living hostages could be divided up I'm sure they'd try that.
Crowstep
16d ago
How does one both have the opportunity to go on 60 first dates in a year and also none of them go well enough to terminate the process?
My guess would be that women on the apps always have a better option than you. Unless you're obviously her Prince Charming on the first date, why would she bother on a second date if she's matched with five other guys in the last hour?
In my dating days I used the apps and had lots of first dates but far fewer second dates. It's possible that I was just a bad date, but then I didn't have the same issue with girls I met in real life.
Crowstep
17d ago
if you had fifty women throwing themselves at you, would you pick the top ten most attractive ones or would you sleep with all fifty?
Top ten. Even if I'd want to sleep with all fifty women, to sleep with one each day would take almost two months, and also involves losing every evening to womanising. And that's assuming every single one would put out on the first date. Even libidinous 20-year-old Crowstep would find that tiring.
Crowstep
18d ago
And statistically she'd be more likely to divorce her partner later
That's not what the link you posted says. A woman who has slept with six men is (statistically) a safer bet than a woman who has slept with two. Although even then the effect is small. The only significant effect is for women who have slept with 0 men, which is pretty clearly a proxy for conservative religiosity. If you want that kind of woman, they're pretty easy to find, they all go to the same place on a Sunday...
Oh, and guess what, obese women won't settle for an obese man, even though the reverse isn't true.
Women on dating sites won't settle, but men apparently will? Aside from a few fetishists, men don't like fat women. This seems more of an effect of the imbalanced ratios on dating sites than actual preferences. Nobody prefers a fat partner, but beggars can't be choosers.
Women get bombarded with attention during their most attractive, fertile years, decline to settle, and as time comes on become less marriageable overall.
And yet according to surveys, both men and women are equally likely to want to marry, and women are more likely to want to marry now (as opposed to some vague time in the future).
And speaking more personally, my experience has been that the most attractive women are most likely to have boyfriends or husbands, because it's much easier for them to attract said boyfriends and husbands. Women don't actually like the modern promiscuous dating market. It's an inadequate equilibrium that benefits womanisers to the detriment of basically everyone else.
There has been a decline in partnering and marriage. The decline in partnering seems to be a consequence of atomisation, digital interaction replacing real-life interaction and perhaps excessive female pickiness due to social media. But crucially, it's not because women are sleeping around, because they're not sleeping around.
Crowstep
18d ago
5 as a body count is definitely an ‘arbitrary’ number, but again, you get much above that and it implies more bad decision-making.
Very arbitrary. A 26-year-old woman who became sexually active at 16 and slept with one guy every two years would exceed it.
It's much more likely to reflect the reality of serial monogamy than bad decision making.
Not ‘obese.’
Not unreasonable to include, but remember that obesity is an equal opportunities offender. Most non-overweight men aren't going to want a fat wife, but then most men are fat too.
This is also true, to a lesser extent, with mental illness. Women have more mental illness than men (or at least they say they do) but the numbers for men aren't zero.
In fact, we can really apply this filter to most things you've listed. Men have high levels of obesity, student loan debt, mental illness, existing paternity and STIs. We can't apply it to everything of course. Men want a woman below 30 for obvious biological reasons that don't apply exactly to women, but broadly the way you've framed the question implies an average eligible man and an average ineligible woman. Whereas in reality, most of these things affect the numerator as well as the denominator. Loads of women are fat, but so are an equal number of men, which reduces the competion for the slim women.
Crowstep
21d ago
Reminds me of Ross' wordless sound poems.
Crowstep
21d ago
The youths that were indoctrinated and acculturated during the awokening are irreversibly woke at this point. Those who stopped virtue-signalling are the older ones who haven't received such indoctrination.
I'm not so sure. I've heard more than one young woman who came of age at the height of it all use the phrase 'man in a dress' (as opposed to 'transwoman') which was previously only used by stubborn conservatives like me.
I can't find it now, but I read a survey showing that typical woke attitudes (innate white racial guilt, the belief that sexism is all-encompassing etc) were never actually popular with the majority, they were only popular with a very loud minority that was allowed to police the overton window. Now that has broken down, it feels like people are more willing to say what they always thought now, and that includes young people.
Crowstep
21d ago
Rumours are that Keir Starmer was the basis for Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones. A handsome, intelligent human rights lawyer, the perfect man for a neurotic woman in the Cool Britannia years.
I guess this is what governance by human rights lawyers looks like, doing anything, regardless of how stupid, if international/human rights law says we have to.
In the UK we have an expression 'the Blob', which is something like our version of the Deep State. A collection of civil servants, QUANGOs, tribunals, the BBC and lawyers. Keir Starmer is the Blob personified.
Crowstep
21d ago
Maybe not a full Syrian Civil War, but at least another Days of Rage similar to the period in the 1970s after the great wave broke and began to recede. I would appreciate hearing anyone’s thoughts.
I find myself quoting Noah Smith a lot recently. He's written about the main thesis in the book Days of Rage that the wave of terrorism of the 1970s was due to evaporative cooling. After the huge social changes in the 1960s, the more moderate activists got on with their normal lives, leaving only the most radical remaining, who in turn radicalised eachother.
Now that the Great Awokening is in decline, the normies are quietly removing the pronouns from their email signatures and taking down their Pride flags, while the crazier fringe are shooting Israeli diplomats and bombing IVF clinics.
Crowstep
22d ago
The Scandinavian countries have low levels of population density because vast tracts in the frozen north are empty, but that doesn't mean the people are spread out. Excluding city-states, Sweden is the 8th most urban country in Europe. It's significantly more densely populated than Germany by that metric.
Crowstep
24d ago
Antinatalism may not have been left wing, but it is definitely left-wing now and that's what matters for both movements, not what men from a century ago thought.
Crowstep
25d ago
And they intentionally had twins?
What makes you say that? The babies weren't IVF-conceived according to Scott.
Crowstep
26d ago
Strict textualism just gets you extremely dumb stuff like this, where you redefine the whole neighborhood as a collective private house so you don't have to follow the rules of the sabbath
I wonder if there is some merit to the absurd rules-lawyering that you see in Orthodox Judaism. Clearly, sticking a wire around Brooklyn doesn't make it a 'household' but I can see a more 'spirit of the law' ethos moving the borders of the rules one stage at a time until you're at Reform Judaism and nobody believes in God any more.
Crowstep
27d ago
It's as if the vast majority of the voters aren't interested in attractive women
It's not for nothing that Eurovision is known as the gay olympics. But never forget Poland. The red-blooded man often makes his voice heard.
My favorite were the Icelandic boys
Same, it was classic Eurovision. The audience in the past few years seem to be going for technical proficiency over feel-good nonsense.
I was happy with the prevalence of violins and key changes this year.
Crowstep
27d ago
Israel has done very well with audience votes in the past few years for basically one reason, in Eurovision, you can't vote against a country.
If I'm a pro-Israel partisan, I can vote for Israel 20 times. If I'm an anti-Israel partisan, who should I vote for? Palestine isn't in the contest (lol) and there are 25 other entries to pick from. If I know who the favourite is I can vote for that country, but that can be hard to guess. Sweden was the favourite this year and didn't do particularly well from either the juries or the audience.
I wish Israel had won, for the ensuing political drama. But hey, I'm sure they're very happy with second place, even if their contestant had to perform with a booing crowd (kindly edited out by the producers).
I was also surprised at the dearth of Palestinian flags in the arena. They were allowed (I think I saw one) but people mostly waved the flags of their own countries. I didn't see any keffiyes either. Maybe people are just getting bored about Israel as a topic?
Crowstep
29d ago
Because our welfare system is set up in such a way that they only need to work for five years before being entitled to live off the taxpayer indefinitely. And the statistics suggest that, as low-skilled immigrants from third world countries, they are much more likely to end up doing so than say, Polish graduates.
Crowstep
29d ago
I think it's fundamentally a mistake to think about these foreign care workers as workers. They are not people who migrated in order to work, they are people who are working in order to migrate.
They are simply people who are desperate to move from poor countries to rich countries. The care worker visas were the only way for them to do that, which is why for some countries (Zimbabwe being the best example) there were ten dependent visas issued for every worker. All they needed to do is work for five years and then the whole family can get indefinite leave to remain, access to the British welfare state, the right to import even more relatives. At that point, there's no reason for them to continue working in care homes (or at all, really).
Now these absurdly large holes have finally been plugged, the Conservative government that introduced the visa removed the ability for migrants to bring along dependents, and the current Labour government abolished the visa route to new entrants (although those who previously came in can still work in the sector) and extended the time needed for indefinite leave to 10 years in most cases (we'll see how many exceptions they grant).
I personally am in favour of increasing wages (or at least allowing the market to do so) for care workers. Pensioners are far too wealthy in the UK. The care sector would allow some of that wealth to be transferred to younger, poorer people, allowing them to buy houses and start families. With fewer low-skilled immigrants, the welfare state bill will be less. If that means fewer waiters, so be it.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Testing that would run into general statistical illiteracy among the population, I think. if we asked the average person to say how much taller and heavier men are than women, I'm sure you'd get some zany answers, even though people intuitively know how large the difference is from constant observation.
Crowstep
1mo ago
I'm not sure how true (being better at learning foreign languages) is, and how much of it is a reflection of interest rather than aptitude.
Interest is a prerequisite to being good at something, at least if that something requires you to put in the hours, as is the case for language learning. But it actually does look like there are differences in how men and women's brains process language, not just a difference in interest.
multi-tasking/task-switching
See my other comment. This has been shown empirically.
Are women faster typists? I think I type faster than every single woman I know.
You may well be. It wouldn't shock me if typing speed was affected by greater male variance. But nonetheless, 82.5% of court stenographers are women. When typist was a job, it was a woman's job. Secretaries (who do/did lots of typing) are almost all women. I don't think these are coincidences.
I'm not sure it'll make a big difference. Months of civilians getting starved, displaced and blown up is quite different from a short, narrowly focused military operation targetting high-ranking members of a regime plus military/nuclear hardware. Israel's actions against Hezbollah didn't elicit much of a negative reaction.
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