Crowstep
22hr ago
Did you ever read Scott's essays Radicalizing the Romanceless and Untitled which describe the broad atmosphere of online feminism in the late 2000s/2010s?
Yes I did, and they are excellent essays. But to explain the coupling and birth rate collapse on the excesses of anglosphere feminism is parochial. Coupling is down everywhere. I mean literally across the entire world. Since 2010 birth rates are down in Mongolia, Russia, Nigeria, Japan, Egypt, Brazil. Name a country that isn't Israel and you can be almost certain that its birth rates have been dropping recently.
Mongolian shepherds aren't coupling up less because they are worried about getting Me Too'd. They're coupling up less for the same reason as everyone else. It's obviously the phones.
Crowstep
22hr ago
I tend to doubt it. If you are a 5/10 who will only marry an 8/10, the deck is going to be stacked against you no matter where you look.
Did you look at the link? Men and women are both socialising less. That's not my opinion, it's a fact. What about that fact do you doubt?
I am pretty sure that in recent years, it's become much more socially acceptable and economically feasible for a woman to live her life alone without a husband. You disagree?
Yes I disagree, the birth rate collapse started around 2010, before then, birth rates were going up. Has the world really changed that much in 15 years? I'm not talking about the 1950s here.
I would say it's similar to obesity. People have always had the propensity to pig out on unhealthy, addictive foods, but in the last 30 years such foods have become widely available. Analogously, women have always had hypergamous instincts, it's just become much more socially and economically feasible to act on those instincts.
What's hypergamous about sitting at home, alone, scrolling for hours and hours?
The addictive digitisation of life has harmed everyone, and it has harmed the ability of men and women to socialise and couple up. To blame that on women's hypergamy* is like blaming inflation on greedy corporations.
*Incidentally, I'm not sure you can describe women's dating preferences as hypergamous. Women prefer men who are taller and earn more than they do, and men prefer women who are younger and more beautiful than they are. In that sense, both men and women are 'hypergamous' but about different things. But regardless, assortative mating is extremely strong. Rich men don't marry beautiful young waitresses, they marry women of their own age and their own class. The beautiful waitresses marry handsome working class men.
Crowstep
1d ago
Why do you only focus on women though? It takes two people to form a relationship. Neither men nor women are socialising much in person, and yet you blame the resulting lack of coupling as exlusively the fault of women, as if our hypothetical twenty-something woman is somehow obliged to break into the apartment of the modern porn- and video game-addicted young man and drag him down the aisle?
Crowstep
1d ago
Or is it because neither she, not her would-be suitor, are going outside?
Women have always had higher standards than men, and yet the fertilty collapse is (very) recent. In the 2000s, birth rates in the western world were going up, not down.
'Women be too picky' explanations have the same problem as 'people be too lazy' explanations for obesity. You can't simply point to an eternal characteristic (women are picky, people are lazy) and use it to explain a time-restricted phenomenon. You have to explain why the characteristic matters now when it didn't matter in say, 2005.
Crowstep
3d ago
I stumbled across a twitter thread on the idea that SIDS is a conspiracy and actually just a way of covering up infanticide. I can't say whether I believe it not, but the story was at least internally consistent.
This study suggests that about 10% or less of SIDS cases are infanticide.
Crowstep
3d ago
they can't find a man to impregnate them
Yes, that's exactly what I've been saying. Young people are failing to couple up which has caused the recent birth rate collapse. But that's not a unilateral decision on the part of any individual woman or man. It's a coordination problem. Leaving aside the fact that blaming 'women' is incoherent because 'women' cannot make a collective decision as billions of autonomous individuals, you seem to be ignoring the fact that it takes two people to have a baby. The average young woman wants to get married and have children, but no woman can do that on her own. She needs to find a man who wants to do the same, and do it with her. The coordination mechanisms we used to have for this (in person socialising in most societies) have broken down, so the birth rate has collapsed.
Blaming individuals for systemic problems, or blaming one sex for a problem that involves both sexes, is a lazy copout.
Crowstep
3d ago
We were picking out clothes for her and her younger sister at Walmart. I was partly amazed at just how low in price some items could get. $3 t-shirts seems a little crazy to me. The most expensive item was a $12 sweater made of a fluffy white material.
One of Gwern's ordinary life improvements since the 90s was that clothing is now 'too cheap to meter'.
Crowstep
3d ago
That's false. According to surveys, women still want to have children. If every woman had as many children as she wants, every country barring a few would have above-replacement fertility.
But young people aren't coupling up, and that's obviously not 100% women, how could it be? That would have to mean that young men are asking out as many women as they always have, but the women are all saying no for some reason.
In reality, both men and women are socialising much less, and the effect is more pronounced among men than women.
Crowstep
3d ago
The fact that a band like Kneecap can name themselves after a torture procedure and have backing from the country's elites is pretty remarkable to me as someone not from the country
I interpret their name as a straightforward imitation of the violence (real or bragged about) in hip hop culture generally, plus the obvious fact that the IRA used to kneecap people.
As to why they have backing from the country's elites, I'd say this article puts its well:
This is Kneecap: they steal valour from physical-force republicanism to give their bien-pensant ‘West Brit’ views the lick of radicalism. They pull on a balaclava to hide the truth that their every utterance is likely to get the Trinity grads at the Irish Times rattling their jewellery in vociferous agreement.
It’s the performative nature of Kneecap’s radicalism that endears them to so many bourgeois youths in Britain and Ireland. I would wager that a majority of the people leaping up and down at Kneecap gigs as they rap ‘Brits Out!’ and ‘Fuck Israel!’ are kids of privilege. Indeed, the Irish Times published a piece earlier this year titled: ‘A middle-class millennial at a Kneecap gig: am I just cosplaying at republicanism?’ Yes, you are. But you’re not alone. Disguising milquetoast guff in radical garb is all the rage. So where posh young Brits will don Novara Media’s 25-quid earrings that say ‘Literally A Communist’ before wanging on about how fucking dumb ‘the gammon’ are, Kneecap fans will pull on a t-shirt featuring a Mick in a balaclava before wringing their untoiled hands over how pitiably traumatised the Irish are. Everyone hides their class prejudice behind class politics these days.
They express quintessentially bourgeois views with a fake veneer of working class radicalism.
Crowstep
4d ago
You frame it as if the birth rate collapse is being caused by women choosing not to have children.
It's not, mothers are still having as many children as they did in the 1970s. The issue is that fewer women are becoming mothers. And it's not because they are choosing not to. Childless by choice women have always existed, but they've always been a tiny proportion.
The birth rate collapse is happening because young men and young women are not coupling up any more.
And given that men make up 50% of the non-forming couples, I think we are perfectly entitled to talk about it.
Crowstep
4d ago
What does that have to do with my sister's predeliction for books about terrorists or the popularity of true crime podcasts?
Crowstep
4d ago
I'm not talking about relationships or anything like that. I'm talking about a woman thinking about, say, a burglar entering her house or a mugger accosting her on the street. Men fantasise about how they would fight off the assailant in those situations, women fantasise (arguably more realistically) how they would escape him.
You seem to be talking about why women enter into relationships with (more or less) violent men, which is a completely different context and timescale.
Crowstep
5d ago
A podcast I'm listening to quoted a study which basically said you should triple the modern murder rate in order to translate it into the equivalent rate in the 1960s.
Crowstep
5d ago
One of the main themes, I think, would be that Married Woman True Crime pathology is an extreme form of the same pattern in trash romance novels; the danger is the attraction.
I assume that women like True Crime for the same reason that men like fantasising about how we'd win a fight. Some profound evolutionary instinct to prepare for violence. But whereas men fantasise about how to confront violence, women fantasise about how to escape it.
My sister reads books about terrorists. She's not doing it because she has the hots for Osama Bin Laden.
Crowstep
7d ago
Because Jews tend to push multiculturalism and communism.
America is not the only country.
American Jews support the American left (for now, although they are shifting right). Jews everywhere else are right wing. Especially the Israeli Jews. Of course, even that is overstating the Jewish influence. Wokeness was an invention of Anglo-Americans, primarily. American Jews vote left because they associated the American right with Jim Crow and segregation, with its obvious parallels to the way Jews were treated in Europe before and during WW2, plus the fact that they are a highly educated, urban population. Not because they have a sinister plan to undermine western civilisation.
You can't blame the pathological altruism of the Anglosphere on such a tiny group. We did this.
Crowstep
7d ago
The whole "pull yourself up by your bootstraps, nobody is coming to save you, life doesn't owe you anything" mindset/'advice' that gets handed down to young men is blatantly contradicted by the fact that the entire social, legal, and political fabric is arrayed against them achieving the most reliable, rewarding paths to long-term success.
Where's the contradiction? Both of these things can be true:
- The institutions are hostile to you
- Nobody is coming to save you, you need to be responsible for yourself.
In fact, I would argue that 1 leads into 2. If the institutions are hostile to white men, then obviously no institution is going to come in and save you.
Crowstep
7d ago
Israel has low PISA scores
That's not too surprising. It is 20% Arab, and of the (school-age) Jewish population, most are Sephardi, and of the (more intelligent) Ashkenazi, a large chunk are Haredi, who do poorly on PISA because they reject secular education, not because they're stupid.
When people talk about Jewish intelligence, they're talking about the Ashkenazi Jews, because they make up about 80% of global Jewry, and almost 100% in western countries.
The interesting question is what happens when the Haredi take over the land between the River and Sea demographically. They're smart, but a population where the men spend most of their time studying the Torah and refuse military service is gonna struggle surrounded by hostile neighbours and dwindling global support. Israel needs to work out how to keep the Haredi pumping out children while putting them to more productive use.
Crowstep
7d ago
Muslims are not a biological group and "Muslim-majority countries underperform" is a cultural explanation, not an HBD one.
It's true that Muslims are not a racial group, and so the label isn't a biological one.
But 'people who marry their cousins and so suffer from inbreeding-related mental retardation' is a biological category, and well...
Crowstep
8d ago
On a more interesting note, sex-based insults are so common because they work.
I'm reminded of the suffragettes who would purposely wear white to their protests in order to emphasise their chastity, because their critics (evidently somewhat successfully) been calling them a bunch of sluts.
Crowstep
9d ago
Saying that the UK is a country where people regularly get arrested for saying mean things online is like saying the US is a country where schools regularly get shot up. It's misleading at best and outright false at worst.
I kind of agree with you, in the sense that for most people, most of the time, the state is nothing to be feared. But that's also true in literal dictatorships.
At the same time, we can't base our model of the world on what we experience ourselves. If I did that, I would assume that everyone in the UK is gainfully employed (because these are the people I associate with). But I also know that something like 25% of the working age population are on unemployment/disability/sickness benefits.
In terms of speech crimes, there were about 12,000 arrested last year (only 8% leading to convictions). For comparison, there were about 15,000 arrests for robbery.
Crowstep
11d ago
these health insurance ceos need to be reigned in so they aren't causing so much damage to society
But they're not. US healthcare is overpriced, but the money is flowing to doctors and hospitals, not to the insurance industry, whose profits are small. The insurance industry are just the middle man, paid to redirect the customers' ire from those lovely doctors and nurses.
Although your misunderstanding does really highlight how bad the 'randomly execute people I assume are responsible for my problems' method of political activism is.
Crowstep
13d ago
Kids under sixteen rely on their parents to drive them to every single activity since they have no other means of transportation.
This is the key problem with American suburbs. Zoning laws make it impossible to build anything other than houses in suburbs, and there's no public transport because US zoning is designed around cars.
In the UK, suburbs have pubs, shops, schools, parks, churches, and buses to get to denser areas if you want. We get most of the upsides (our houses and gardens are smaller, to be fair) and few of the downsides.
If only we could build more of them...
Crowstep
13d ago
Are Chinese cities 15 minute ones? My impression is that, outside of the big metropolises, you just have a bunch of high-rises surrounded by 4-lane roads. Like the worst of Asian high-rise living combined with the worst of American car culture.
Then how on earth did people get married during the Baby Boom, and other periods of near-universal marriage? How was it possible if female pickiness is so strong that the US reached replacement TFR in 2007? 5/10 women do, in fact, marry 5/10 men. They always have and they always will.
Actually, US birth rates have been on a downward trend since 1800 (in fact earlier, but those are the earliest modern records go). The Baby Boom was a temporary abberation, not the historical norm. But between 1975 and 2008, birth rates were going up. I think it's reasonable to conclude that they would have continued going up if it weren't for smartphones, social media and the internet, so I think it's more practical to focus on fixing the social damage done by those things than by bitching about women being too picky or fantasising about war rape.
And yet somehow such a society has never emerged at any point in history or anywhere in the world. Even in societies that tolerate polygyny, it is outcompeted by monogamy. That is why only about 2% of humans alive today live in polygamous households.
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