Crowstep
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr ago
They're fighting to not be genocided
Crowstep
2yr 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.
As a disinterested atheist, it seems pretty clear to me that the Vatican is just trying to slow-walk gay marriage. I'm sure they'll do it bit by bit, with just enough continuation between each change to avoid getting called out too heavily, but the end result will be rainbow flags in St Peter's Basilica.
I wonder at what point all those young, high-TFR, head-covering, Latin Mass-enjoying traditionalist Catholics I hear so much about just straight up break away from the church? Would they just be another protestant denomination at that point? Can they appoint their own Pope? Or get one of their own elected to the Papacy?
This Reddit thread is hilarious. A handful of posters acknowledging what this is, another handful criticising the Vatican for ambiguity (as if this wasn't part of the plan) and another group saying that it doesn't technically involve blessing gay unions so there's nothing to see here.
Crowstep
2yr ago
I noticed the crazy woman in the comments. I can't imagine she convinced anyone of her position.
I think this is a great example of the fact that most of what you read on the internet is written by crazy people.
Crowstep
2yr ago
I finished Louise Perry's The Case Against the Sexual Revolution over the weekend.
I was broadly in agreement with her arguments. Anyone familiar with conservative(ish) complaints about the current sex/dating/marriage situation will find them familiar. But I agree with what Kvetch wrote in his review. The inescapable conclusion of her book is that women shouldn't or can't have full agency around their love lives, but she never actually says it explicitly.
Crowstep
2yr ago
That's a good point. I'd rephrase my initial comment to say that young women (let's say, 18-24) are less threatened by younger women than the next cohort (25-30).
Crowstep
2yr ago
I'm pretty sure that the number one reason to have a hot girlfriend is to have a hot girlfriend. It's an end in and of itself. Rich men have attractive mistresses in spite of the fact that they absolutely can't show them off to their peers.
The social disapproval I got wasn't from men, it was from women. Honestly, I didn't really get any reaction from men, positive or negative.
Crowstep
2yr ago
I noticed it in a previous relationship I was in. Women my age (late-20s) were unhappy to see me dating a girl six years younger. I think they were unhappy to see a guy from their cohort with a younger women, since that norm (if tolerated) would allow the men they were interested in to date younger. That would fit your assumption about mate competition.
This study suggests that people disapprove of both older man and older woman relationships, but that the power imbalance assumption only holds for the older man relationships. That suggests to me that there's an 'ew gross' effect for both types of relationship, but the women are wonderful/female hypoagency effect makes the participants assume that a younger woman is being exploited, whereas there is no such concern for a young man in the same situation.
We'd really need to see which people (or realistically, women) are trying to enforce this taboo. My gut would say that it is most strongly enforced by women from 25-35, who have noticed that the beauty they took for granted in their early 20s is starting to decline and who are looking for husbands. Younger women are probably too confident in their looks to care, and older women are having to look at increasingly older men themselves to have a realistic shot in the marriage/dating market.
Crowstep
2yr ago
I'm wondering how to square this with the data that suggests that modern parents do way more parenting. Apparently modern fathers spend almost as much time on childcare as 1960s housewives.
Children seem to have had more freedom 50 years ago and were less neurotic. It seems more intuitive to me that overparenting would contribute to poor mental health than the wrong kind of parenting.
Crowstep
2yr ago
Satoshi Kanazawa argued that more intelligent people are more likely to engage in behaviour that is evolutionarily novel, which included homosexuality.
His old blog was quite fun while it was running, if a bit try-hard with the edginess.
Crowstep
2yr ago
Well upping my fat didn't actually help in the end. I think the issue was a lack of tryptophan caused by the low protein diet.
Crowstep
2yr ago
For kids, O Little Town of Bethlehem is a good one.
I personally like In the Bleak Midwinter, but it is a bit...bleak.
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.
More options
Context Copy link