Crowstep
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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.
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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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.
Crowstep
5mo ago
Do they know that he actually was a cuckold?
I agree that it was occasionally hilarious though. The line about the English having boats had the whole cinema laughing.
Thomas-Alexandre was briefly shown in the film as I remember, but I think the actor was full blooded African rather than biracial, which would have been more accurate.
Josephine's maid was also afro-Caribbean, which is plausible since she grew up on Martinique.
But yeah, there were a few other Africans that were thrown in awkwardly. My suspicion is that Scott did the absolute bare minimum to keep the diversity-mongers happy, which is all we can expect from him I guess.
Incidentally, Oppenheimer has a similar 'bare minimum' moment where the camera lingers on the face of an African woman inexplicably attending a 1930s physics class in the Netherlands before never showing her again.
Crowstep
5mo ago
If you've ever used Amazon then you have benefitted from Bezos' success. You've benefitted from the consumer surplus generated by Amazon's existence. Whether that is from cheaper goods, faster delivery, greater choice, more convenience, the fact that you've used the website demonstrates that you've derived value from doing so relative to what else was available. The same goes for any other company that you've ever interacted with.
And if everyone's jobs get replaced by AI without any financial recompense, then nobody will have any money to spend on these companies that have done the job-replacing. They would need to compete with eachother for what small purchasing power remains, which means lowering prices to near-zero. This is easy enough when your labour costs have been reduced to zero by the AI that took everyone's jobs.
AI represents a potential increase in productivity, and increasing productivity is literally what economic growth is. From the industrial revolution to now, increasing productivity is why we were able to escape the zero-sum world that existed before.
Whether it destroys the world is another thing, of course.
Crowstep
5mo ago
How exactly are the coastal PMC types going to get rich in a way that doesn't enrich the rest of us?
If AGI can manufacture goods much more cheaply, then that means cheap goods for everyone. If AGI can provide services for zero to low cost, that means cheap or free services for everyone.
While there are situations where individuals can get rich at the expense of the masses through rent-seeking (I'm thinking someone like Carlos Slim monopolising Mexican telecoms) the overwhelming majority of billionaires got that way by providing something useful to the masses. Elon Musk sold luxury electric cars, Jeff Bezos provided an online retail experience far superior to anything that came before it, Steve Jobs sold consumer-friendly, well-designed electronics.
If Sam Altman ends up a trillionaire, how exactly could that leave the rest of us poorer?
Crowstep
5mo ago
I started giving this high-carb, low-fat, low-protein diet a go. I started losing weight almost immediately, but found myself feeling anxious/depressed after a couple of weeks (I think from lack of fat). At the moment I'm trying to up my fat intake but keep BCAAs (specifically isoleucine and valine) low to see if I can keep losing the weight.
Crowstep
5mo ago
What's happening is linguistic evolution, in real time.
Old English used to have an extensive case system, which changed to the limited form that we currently have. The use of 'me' is the example you gave is just a continuation of that evolution. There's nothing wrong with 'me and John got a burger' because it sounds perfectly fine to native speakers. And if it sounds right, it is right. Language is formed by consensus. 'Me got a burger' sounds wrong, so it is wrong. But if enough people said it, it would become correct.
In English, a bunch of historic linguists tried to make the language work in the same way Latin does, leading to absurd rules like 'you can't end a sentence with a proposition'. Real languages laugh at prescriptivists' petty rules.
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.
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