Crowstep
1mo ago
I'd point to the wealth of social science evidence showing that religious people are happier, have more friends, give more money to charity, have more trust, have more children and, my personal favourite, have more satisfying sex lives. In our atomised, lonely, anxious, childless and sexless age, all that stuff seems even more important.
Answering why Christianity is a harder question, but I guess I'd point to the alternatives. Only the Abrahamic religions seem to have a strong pronatal effect (Hindus in India have fewer children than Christians and Muslims). Of those, Judaism you really need to marry into and Islam leads to gestures wildly at the Middle East.
Crowstep
1mo ago
That's interesting, and it does make me reconsider my hypothesis. I suppose if you've got an obvious state failure (in this case, the government being too weak to take on the cartels, plus maybe a corrupt police force) then gun ownership would be more appealing to the common man.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Poland hasn't liberalised its laws, Czechia did in 2021 but then tightened them again last year after the Charles University mass shooting. Austria and Sweden have recently tightened their laws, as has Switzerland.
Crowstep
1mo ago
It's not definitive evidence, but it's definitely evidence. The fact that no country on the planet except the UK has something like the NHS is good evidence that a single, national health service is a bad way to run things, because if such a system were good other countries would have copied it.
Similarly, the fact that the entire world has looked at US gun culture and laws and nobody has decided to copy them is evidence that they aren't worth copying.
The European elites all attend the same universities, go to the same cocktail parties etc
No they don't? The European elites overwhelmingly attend the universities in their own countries, like everywhere else in the world. The Anglosphere universities do suck in some of them, but I can't find a single European head of state or government outside of the UK that was educated in a UK or US university.
Socialisation is similarly within countries, for the obvious fact that Europe is a multilingual continent of dozens of countries and elites aren't all jetting to the same city every weekend. British elites socialise in London, French elites socialise in Paris (in French), Polish elites socialise in Warsaw etc.
This is without touching on the EU, and the member states' obligation to implement EU law.
As far as I can tell, none of the authoritarian measures you mentioned have anything to do with the EU. The cancelled election in Romania was done by the Romanian judicary. I'm not sure which arrested opposition politicians you are talking about but the ones that Google came up with (Belarus, Turkey, Armenia, Moldova and Georgia) are not in the EU. Legally penalising speech and building digital panopticons is, I assume, a reference to the UK, which is not in the EU.
Do you live in Europe? Because this reads like someone who just thinks of it as the USA plus funny accents, which is wrong.
Crowstep
1mo ago
What about them? They, like the US, have had liberal gun laws for centuries. These aren't recent innovations that have been lobbied for by activists eager to imitate the US experience.
Europe isn't a country. Talking about stuff that Europe is doing is like talking about how Americans love Samba dancing, mate tea and poutine.
On the other hand, if you start breaking down homicide rates by sub-populations, the claims about the "ability to easily kill" start looking less credible.
Surely more credible? Making it easy and legal for your citizens to own guns includes making it easy and legal for sub-populations (you mean black people right? You can just say that here) to get hold of them too.
Crowstep
1mo ago
In my mind, the best arguments against guns is to consider opinions on guns in other countries.
In countries where guns are legal, there are lots of people who want them banned or restricted, for obvious reasons that giving huge swathes of the population the ability to easily kill their fellow countrymen will increase the number of people killed.
In countries where guns are illegal, the number of people lobbying to legalise them is approximately zero.
Are red Americans irrationally attached to their weapons, attaching civilisation-preserving significance to them that they don't merit, or are the children wrong?
Crowstep
1mo ago
That's fascinating. I knew about mallard forced copulation, but I didn't know that the hens tried to elicit it. Science factoid providers not wanting to victim-blame mallards, maybe?
Reminds me of boxing hares.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Anti-recommend The Return, I thought it was pretentious arthouse nonsense.
Fire Walk with Me is the sequel that Twin Peaks deserved.
Crowstep
1mo ago
When the hot woman engineer turns 40 or gets chubby, she will be nothing - literally will be able to say a thing in a meeting and have nobody hear it at all, until Bob repeats it and people listen with interest
I realise I'm replying quite late (got here for the Quality Contributions thread) but I don't think this is the case. There are plenty of studies that show that gendered opionions (both positive and negative) neutralise with age. Older women are treated like men. Not worse than men, the same as men.
Shakeri and North found that, in general, women were viewed more positively than men, and younger and middle-aged adults were viewed more positively than older adults. However, when looking specifically at intersections of age and gender, the results revealed a more nuanced picture. Younger and middle-aged women were both rated more favorably than their male counterparts. But when it came to older adults, perceptions of women and men were virtually identical, suggesting that gender differences in attitudes tend to level out in later life. This pattern provides empirical support for what the authors call the “gender convergence effect,” where distinctions in attitudes based on gender diminish with age.
TLDR: Women are wonderful, until they get old, at which point they lose the benefits of their femininity and get treated like men. At no point are they treated worse than men.
Crowstep
1mo ago
In the new reporting he "suffers from a “muscle disorder” for which he receives specialized nutrition and physical therapy." and has “cerebral palsy, hypoxemia, and was born with a serious genetic disorder”.
I wonder if this is related to the Muslim penchant for cousin marriage.
Crowstep
1mo ago
How do you square your version of the 'Israeli' position with the fact that 80% of Israelis surveyed want a ceasefire?
Crowstep
1mo ago
So what ? Why is it so bad if Hamas gets food ? Blockading food supplies is considered a war crime in the post-war world.
Hamas sells the food back to the civilian population it was intended for and uses the funds to pay its fighters. Israel's new aid systems aims to give food directly to civilians, thereby ensuring that a) civilians actually get the aid (instead of having to buy it from Hamas) and b) that Hamas' funding gets cut off.
The current situation is also compounded by the fact that UN refuses to allow its aid to be used by Israel's system, so it just sits there in trucks. Does this make the UN war criminals too?
Crowstep
1mo ago
Sure, the data is there, but it says nothing about what men want, as there is no causal direction implied anywhere outside of editorialized headlines. It does, however, fit the Red Pill box of women 'rejecting' men they see as lesser than them and instead looking for men who make at the very least equal. To that extent it isn't rich men choosing rich women, it's rich women hunting down every single rich man they can.
Why do you assume that only women have agency in this situation? Surely the wealthiest men have the most romantic options (controlling for age)? If millionaire men want younger women, we can assume they can get them more easily than poorer men who are the same age. But what we see is that it is poor men who are most likely to be in relationships with younger women.
Crowstep
1mo ago
The second attempts to address root causes that lead people to engaging in these behaviors in the first place.
I guess my problem with 'root causes' strategies is that the root cause of most crime is 'he's just like that'. Most 'root causes' that get highlighted by activists are just correlates of criminality (e.g. poverty) not causes. If poverty caused crime then our grandparents' generation (in every developed country) would have been extremely criminal during their youth, and they weren't.
Crowstep
1mo ago
There's definitely some other studies showing that graduate women are marrying high-earning non-graduate men, like your plumber friend. That explains how graduate women have been able to maintain their high marriage rate despite a lack of graduate men to go around.
How did the wives of your friend compare to him in terms of age and educational credentials?
Crowstep
1mo ago
Boys don't like girls, boys like postgrad housewives
What does the man with a lot of romantic options want?
Does he want a beautiful young trophy wife? Does he want a high-earning girlboss?
The answer, according to Lyman Stone, is neither. What he wants (according to the data) is a woman around his age, with the same academic qualifications. Men with younger (and indeed, older) wives are the ones earning less money. What rich men want, it seems, is a (cultural, educational) peer.
With earnings is becomes a bit more complicated. As a man's income goes up, so does the income of his wife. But richer men earn a larger proportion of household income, and the women married to these men are the most likely to not work at all.
So what's going on here? The Red Pill explanation of men preferring younger women doesn't seem to fit, since the men with the most options (high earning ones) are more like to choose women the same age. However, these couples also choose housewifery at the highest rate. My interpretation of this is that the more money a man earns, the more secure in their class position the couple can be. Therefore, they can afford to have the wife give up work without losing their place in the class hierarchy.
The bitter professional woman explanation (men are intimidated by my qualifications and high salary) doesn't seem to work either. Sure, wives of rich men are the least likely to work, but those that do work are also the highest earners among women. A more parsimonious explanation seems to be that high earning women want higher earning men, and they (mostly) get them.
High earning men seem to want class peers. A woman's qualifications are a marker for class, and a woman's high salary is a manifestation of her class. Of course, once married, they can afford for her to stay home more easily than poorer families.
The thing that surprises me most is that you don't see richer men marrying younger women, as all of the older-younger pairings I've seen in real life have involved high-earning men. It might be that richer men marry younger, and therefore there is simply less scope for large age gaps. Or it might be that richer men are more sensitive to judgement from their peers, who would disapprove of larger age gaps.
Crowstep
1mo ago
The Divine Economy, by Paul Seabright.
Basically it's a look at religion through the lens of consumer economics. It can be a bit dry at times (although thankfully there's no equations so far) but otherwise it's really interesting. Living in the secular West it's good to be reminded that, for most of the world, religion is a huge part of daily life and is genuinely important.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Americans are taught from a young age that we "shouldn't judge a book by its cover," that we should "judge by the content of their character," that we "ought to walk a mile in their shoes," and so on
The argument is particularly strange when the book is literally choosing to draw its own cover. It makes as much sense to judge a tattoo as it does to judge something that someone has written on a piece of paper and handed to me.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Please, stick around. Every forum needs new blood.
If you're interested, the origins of the forum are that there is a blogger called Scott Alexander. His subreddit had a politics discussion thread. This thread moved to its own subreddit (r/themotte) and later to this site.
The aspiration is for civil, charitable political discussion and a place where tone is moderated rather than content.
Crowstep
1mo ago
But we should probably demand better
The optimal amount of crime is not zero.
I would love a system that deports 100% of illegal immigrants and never mistakenly deports a legal immigrant, but such a system cannot exist outside of fiction. The world is messy and complicated and people make mistakes and lie and misremember and enforcement of any law is expensive and difficult.
The developed world has been experimenting with the 'better system' and it has been abused to such an extent that it has lead to fully fledged volkerwanderungen and ethnic replacement of a native people in a single generation.
The idea that the West should be more lenient to illegal immigrants because of a few sob stories seems laughable when one considers the scale of the thing.
Crowstep
1mo ago
In a civilized country like the UK, firstly something like this would never have happened as the man would have a right to argue against his deportation in front of a judge, so none of this "ambush deportation" would ever be possible
The UK, it should be noted, cannot deport illegal immigrants at any meaningful rate, and its capacity to do so has completely collapsed. To give foreign readers an idea of how farcical the system is, one Nigerian woman appealed her deportation eight times before deliberately joining a Nigerian terrorist organisation, and then (successfully) arguing that she would face persecution in Nigeria because of her membership of said terrorist organisation.
I'd rather have a system that occasionally unjustly deports a tiny number of people to one which deports almost nobody.
This is also probably the only case I've ever seen where the euphemism 'undocumented migrant' is appropriate. He literally lost his documents, as opposed to just not having them because he's in the country illegally.
Crowstep
2mo ago
It's worth mentioning that the Pink Tax probably doesn't exist.
Unsurprisingly, feminist academics who look into whether women are arbitrarily charged more because of sexism tend not to be the most dispassionate researchers.
Studies have looked into that, and there does seem to be a causative effect, even among identical twins raised together. The Japanese are certainly prosocial, but they are also lonely, atomised and have infamously low fertility. Probably if they were as religious as Americans they'd have more friends and more babies.
The OP was asking why religion is important for a society. Any society with below replacement fertility will eventually be outcompeted by ones with above-replacement fertility. A TFR above 2 the bare minimum for a society to survive, let alone thrive, long term.
Were. The Islamic Golden Age was almost a thousand years ago. Now there are five times as many books translated into Modern Greek (13 million speakers) than into Arabic (400 million speakers). We can speculate why the Islamic world declined so precipitously. My theory is that Islam brought with it cousin marriage, which in turn brought clannishness and (relative) mental retardation. But in any case, arguing that society would be better if we all embraced Islam because it would lead to more learning and knowledge seems fanciful.
More options
Context Copy link