Crowstep
2mo ago
Anti-recommend The Return, I thought it was pretentious arthouse nonsense.
Fire Walk with Me is the sequel that Twin Peaks deserved.
Crowstep
2mo 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
3mo 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
3mo ago
How do you square your version of the 'Israeli' position with the fact that 80% of Israelis surveyed want a ceasefire?
Crowstep
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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.
Crowstep
3mo ago
The biggest benefit of her being into chess that I can see is that she'll find it easier to find a very intelligent husband if she sticks with it into womanhood. Given the sex ratio of the game, she'll have her pick of the litter.
Reading is nice, but antisocial. Soccer is social and involves exercise, so that's good.
Crowstep
3mo ago
Am I missing something here?
He has written some genuinely good stuff. His best article is probably Women's Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas, although I have a soft spot for Why Asia Stopped Having Kids.
Crowstep
3mo ago
Crowstep
3mo ago
The experiment we're running in the West since 1965 now is not even half done. And perhaps I'm wrong. But it will be a fascinating thing if the acceptance of LGB leads to a significant decrease in their population come 2065. This will be especially poignant if there's far more gay folks outside the tolerant west -- a world with gay Muslims but no gay Swedes.
I had a very similar thought myself the other week when past the local Pride parade.
All these people, and everyone who tolerates these people, are refusing to breed. This is all a flash in the pan. Unless AI flips the table and changes all the rules, the Europe of the future will not have Pride marches.
Crowstep
3mo ago
I've been trying to work out what the position of the average Uniparty politician is regarding the small boats. Clearly they don't want to stop the boats. The actions you've outlined have been proven to work in other countries. At the same time, they're not exactly keen on having tens of thousands of young men who are, at best, drains on the welfare state and, at worse, serious criminals, coming to the country. Especially with the papers carefully documenting every landing.
The conclusion I've come to is that they want the boats to stop, but they don't want to stop the boats. The more deluded ones think there is some form of action (the Rwanda scheme, 'smashing the gangs') that can stop the boats coming without actually turning away or deporting any of them. The more clear-headed I think just don't think that the actions needed to stop the boats, and the fight with the blob that it would require, are worth it. So they muddle along and hope the problem will solve itself, or that France will generously decide that it would rather keep all these vibrant young men.
Crowstep
3mo ago
Without doxxing myself too much, a friend of mine recently witnessed a hostage situation in his building, with a particular lowlife slashing his girlfriend across the face and threatening to kill her baby.
The kicker, this guy was the baby's father, and the third child the mother had had with him.
Admittedly, this was an underclass woman, so not exactly the heiress and Jeremy Meeks.
My explanation is just that same women are hybristophiles, just like some guys are into feet or whatever.
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.
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