Crowstep
1mo ago
I think you'd do better to emphasise personal risk to him. In the vein of 'she clearly has a high libido and seeks sexual novelty, how do you think she'll react when she gets tired with her married sex life?'
Appealing to (your) revulsion or asking him to not marry the woman he loves because of abstract second order effects isn't going to help.
Crowstep
1mo ago
I can assure you, the fact that France doesn't measure statistics based on race doesn't mean that it lacks urban dysfunction or racial grievance. In fact, I'm not sure if this policy makes any practical difference compared to other European countries that do measure this stuff.
And while police and other organs of the state may not officially measure race or ethnicity, they do measure 'where your grandparents were born' which is effectively the same thing.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Median white household income in 2021 was $74,932, median black was $48,297
Which, notably, is around $1,000 higher than the 2021 median household income in the UK, as well as higher than 2/3 of European countries.
I guess it really demonstrates how much these are really zero-sum status concerns. Black Americans are, globally speaking, rich.
Crowstep
1mo ago
'Weak affirmative action' as you describe it, doesn't exist. It can't exist, because, outside of academic studies with fake resumes, there is no such thing as two equally qualified candidates. Equally qualified candidates would have to be literally identical, and real candidates obviously differ in terms of their work experience, academic background and interview quality.
In practice, 'tie-goes-to-the-runner' acts as a fig leaf for more aggressive discrimination. I've seen this first hand. I had to shortlist candidates for an academic programme, giving each one a score. This list then went to the higher-ups, who simply removed the five lowest scoring male candidates, even if they had higher scores than the female candidates. The remainder were given offers. Although the official guidance said preference should be given to the 'minority gender' when deciding between two equally qualified candidates, in practice they just penalised the male candidates.
Crowstep
2mo ago
When I say that women civilise men, I mean within marriages. My expectation is that a higher female to male ratio would lead to fewer marriages as more men play the field as they do at college campuses with similarly lopsided ratios.
Crowstep
2mo ago
My gut is that we'd see more male misbehaviour rather than less. Women have a civilising effect on men.
I would expect a situation with more women would lead to more promiscuity and less stable marriages, more children born out of wedlock, and generally more rootless lives among underclass men.
I've heard it myself a few times from young women, although I would describe it more as a flippant comment, in the vein of 'Oh, big oil will never let electric cars succeed'. I'm not sure about the extent that they literally believed it.
I also saw the 'I wish exceptional women had the confidence of mediocre white men' meme just this morning from a woman who literally has a PhD.
This is just a straight up gish-gallop. None of these arguments address the central HBD thesis (individuals and groups differ in personality and intelligence, and these differences are at least partly genetic). Most of them are non-sequitors, some are just straight up lies.
To address just one randomly selected point, 'Africans have greater genetic diversity than the rest of the world'. This is entirely meaningless because genetic diversity does not guarantee phenotypic diversity on any one trait within an ethnic or racial group. For example, all SSAfrican ethnic groups have darker skin than every ethnic group in Europe. Their genetic diversity doesn't provide a range of skin tones matching the breadth that we see in humanity as a whole, so why should we assume that same genetic diversity would provide a range of IQs matching humanity as a whole.
The Ashkenazi Jews obviously have less genetic diversity than the whole of Subsaharan Africa, but that doesn't stop them having the highest IQs in the world.
I guess a question I would put to a HBD-skeptic would be:
Why do IQ scores correlate with brain size, academic achievement, income and criminality? What is the cause of these correlations if not intelligence?
Crowstep
2mo ago
Seems unlikely. People drank a lot in colonial America, something like three times as much as moderns. My understanding is that the Puritanesque turn against alcohol was a reaction against that, and was carried along by one of America's regular religious revivals.
Crowstep
2mo ago
Putting on my lateral thinking hat, couldn't you just...cheat on her?
Obviously, breaking up with her would be dumb and you would regret it. But you also say that you're currently long distance. Some carefully planned infidelity could scratch your casual sex itch and hopefully make you realise how little you're missing out on.
Of course, you would be betraying your girlfriend's trust, and there is a risk that you get caught even if she doesn't live near you. I suspect that your 'sleepy conservative hometown' isn't overflowing with loose women, and if you are religious then, as you say, the Bible is pretty clear on infidelity.
It goes without saying that if you do listen to the suggestion from the devil on your shoulder some asshole on the internet, you should never tell her or anyone else.
Crowstep
2mo ago
The Gulf states do not have open borders. You can't work there without a visa, and they aggressively deport visa overstayers and foreign criminals.
Plus they are not democracies, don't give citizenship to foreigners (or make it extremely difficult to get) and don't give welfare to non-citizen residents.
The Western countries that we're talking about are democracies that rarely deport illegal immigrants or foreign criminals, give welfare freely to both legal and illegal immigrants and give out passports like candy.
Crowstep
3mo ago
Maybe The Art of Resilience? Or The World's Fittest Book, from the same author?
I started reading the first one before getting bored, but from what I recall it was about him swimming around Great Britain to break some record. Seems to match what you're looking for.
Crowstep
3mo ago
The end of the speech is particularly beautiful:
I'm not trying to have grandkids so they can fund Medicare. I want my kids to have kids so they can learn the Christmas morning is actually better as a parent than as a kid. I want my daughters to have sons and my sons to have daughters, and to care intensely what happens to them, and watch as that transforms their whole perspective on the opposite sex. I want them to see all the little imperfections and embarrassing things that they were insecure about as kids in this other person who's just the best and realise that all that was completely okay and not a big deal it didn't make them unloveable. You're supposed to observe your life again in third person.
Crowstep
3mo ago
Your premise rests on the assumption that AI and robotics are a magic money cheat that will allow a nation of retirees to be kept in the manner to which they have become accustomed. You might be right, and I certainly hope you are. Infinite wealth for humanity sounds great. But on the (perhaps more than) slim chance that technology doesn't go foom and solve all our economic problems, it's probably worth worrying about birth rates.
If only so that politicians don't have an excuse to import millions of low-IQ workers to maintain the dependency ratio.
No, he's not, he's an object lesson in why you don't go to a corrupt shithole under military rule by Nazis and start advocating for the country they're in a state of total war with.
Nazis? Do you believe that Zelensky is a Pythonesque Jewish Nazi or are you using the Russian government's definition of Nazi?
Crowstep
3mo ago
60% infidelity seems insanely high. Figures from the UK* show adultery given as the reason for divorce by 7.5% of men and 8.7% of women. Crime victimhood figures show 5% of adults being victims of domestic violence. Either Americans are far worse than I thought or those figures are wrong. My money is on the latter.
*It's worth noting that until 2022, the divorcing partner was forced by law to given a reason for divorce. Hence most divorces were either codifying separations that had already happened (one of the reasons allowed) or recorded as 'unreasonable behaviour', which was the essentially the dump stat for amicable divorces.
Crowstep
3mo ago
Focusing on stranger violence by men is misleading. When it comes to domestic violence, child abuse and infanticide, there is a much greater balance. Depending on the figures you look at, it is easy to find studies showing that women commit the majority of domestic violence (both reciprocal and non-reciprocal), the majority of child abuse and the majority of infanticide. In addition, lesbian relationships are the most abusive and relationships between gay men are the least abusive, which suggests that men being more violent in general than women is not that relevant when specifically looking at violence within households.
And let's be frank, women's groups oppose men having custody of children because they are reflexively pro-woman. Talking about domestic violence is the best soldier-argument they have, but that doesn't mean it's the most honest. Courts never award custody to known abusers, but that isn't what feminists campaign against. They campaign against laws that allow ordinary, non-abusive men the right to see their children for any meaningful amount of time. These kind of laws exist in countries like France and the Netherlands, and their introduction did not increase family violence. If feminists campaigning against presumption of shared custody laws were really interested in equality or child welfare, they would know this. But as Bryan Caplan points out, their guiding belief is not that men and women should be treated equally by the law (most people believe that), rather, it is the belief that society generally treats men better than women. If men and women are two opposing teams in zero-sum conflict, then any concession to team man is a loss to team woman. Hence, legislation which involves treating men and women equally before the law, which encourages children to have stronger relationships with their fathers and which helps both men and women to not be bound by their gender roles is opposes by activists who supposedly support all these things.
Crowstep
3mo ago
I think you could look at the existence (or absence) of lobbying groups arguing for either side.
If women were being screwed over by divorce courts, we would expect feminist groups to campaign for their reform, whereas as far as I can tell, most feminist lobbying is to stop reform of the divorce courts. Men's groups campaign for the right to see their children, women's groups campaign against laws that would allow them to do this. Divorced men campaign against permanent alimony, divorced women campaign to keep it.
The very fact that the miniscule and powerless men's rights movement focuses mostly on unfair divorce laws suggests that perhaps they might have some legitimate complaints. After all, even if the law is written in a gender neutral manner doesn't mean it needs to be applied evenly. Hell, two-thirds of divorcing women acknowledge that men are treated unfairly when it comes to child custody. I struggle to think of any woman who is known for losing out from an unfair divorce ruling, and yet multiple men come to mind immediately.
Crowstep
3mo ago
Most of the 'food' that we feed cattle is agricultural waste that cannot be eaten by people and would otherwise simply be left to rot, and most cattle are raised on marginal land that cannot be used to grow crops. Farmers have a direct financial incentive to reduce inefficiency as much as possible, as inefficiency eats into their profit margins.
However, I think that Zeke was referring to small mammals getting killed during harvesting, which my googling suggests is more due to increased predation from loss of cover than getting chewed up by machinery. Depending on how you balance the utils of cows versus mice versus birds that prey on mice, it's certainly plausible that harvesting a field of wheat could produce more animal suffering than grazing cows on that same field.
Crowstep
4mo ago
I can recommend a minimalist phone launcher like Before for Android. That, combined with an ad-blocker for the browser (which allows you to block certain sites) has turned my phone into a device that I can't scroll on. It still does everything I need a smartphone to do, but it's a tool, rather than a distraction.
Crowstep
4mo ago
Such a dilemma never existed. There's a reason that 'spinster' is a word used in English to describe a single woman. It's how they very often supported themselves. If we take England in 1377 as an example, a full third of adult women were single, and 10-20% never married at all. The idea that the only options were marriage or prostitution is a fantasy, formed (as far as I can tell) by people extrapolating the experience of the midcentury American housewife far off into the past and across the planet.
Crowstep
4mo ago
Not sure whether your question was only refering to European politicians, but I tried in vain to explain to an American I was drinking with the other night that democracies don't put election losers in jail, because that disincentivises all politicians from respecting the results of future elections.
She didn't seem to buy it though. In her view, Trump will go to jail because his actions were treason and everything will go back to normal with no long term consequences.
Crowstep
4mo ago
They're fighting to not be genocided
Crowstep
4mo ago
I was always impressed by the way that my mother was able to bring someone round to her point of view, while making them feel like it was their decision. I would contrast it with rhetoric or debate, which is usually about convincing third parties rather than the person you are talking to. This was more like counsel. Men are better debators, but most of real life happens on a smaller scale where female tact is more useful.
She is also very wise. Intelligent, but intelligent in a way that was practically useful and leads to good decisions, although I'm not sure how female that is.
Who is 'them' in this context? Bob isn't planning to marry twins, he's planning to marry an individual woman.
Sorry to call you out over a minor thing but the misuse of the gender neutral they is a terrible grammatical trend. Why withold information from your listener if that information is built into the grammar of the language you're using?
More options
Context Copy link