Crowstep
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo ago
How do you square your version of the 'Israeli' position with the fact that 80% of Israelis surveyed want a ceasefire?
Crowstep
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo ago
Crowstep
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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.
Crowstep
6mo ago
I've never really had good mental image of what it's like for normal people with normal appetites let alone obese people with obese appetites
Imagine drinking water made you fat. You can try to dehydrate yourself, but ultimately your thirst will win out.
Crowstep
6mo ago
The personal testimonies of neither nazis nor inmates can be trusted whatsoever
My grandmother used to tell tall tales. She told us that she befriended a cat that followed her to school on the bus, she told us that my aunt was the lovechild of a public figure, she told us that she briefly travelled with circus gypsies as a teenager.
She also told us that she was evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz, that her future husband fought on a submarine, and that her cousin was on a Japanese POW ship which was sunk by a US strike.
Should I therefore conclude that the Battle of Britain and the Allied war against Japan didn't happen?
The difference here is scale. No matter how many Looney Tunes-esque stories Jew-haters can dig up (and you must have noticed how strong the overlap between people who hate Jews and people who deny the Holocaust is), the fact is that the Holocaust was massive. Europe had millions of Jews, and then it had millions less. There are hundreds of thousands of testimonies, not just from the victims who survived or Nazi soldiers, but also Allied soliders who liberated them. There are mass graves, gas chambers, millions of pages of documentation. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that most people in Europe have family or personal stories that interact with the Holocaust in some way. My high school history teacher had German grandparents who were housed in an apartment that had been forcibly vacated by its Jewish inhabitants the very same morning (the coffee was still warm). I have Jewish friends whose family trees are full of lives cut short. I have personally spoken to a woman whose entire extended family was killed except her and her father, and who saw her mother get shot in the head by a Nazi soldier.
This forum is full of contrarians. Contrarianism can be useful. It helps us to question things at are false, but if you don't control the scale, you end up questioning things that are true. You start doubting everything and everyone, and end up believing in massive conspiracies.
An industrial state putting huge resources into mechanically killing a slave labor force while it's in the middle of an existential war for existence just doesn't add up.
A dictator who wanted to establish a Thousand Year Reich deciding to declare war on half the world, thereby dooming his country to defeat in a few short years doesn't make sense. But that is what happened. Death camps may be a waste of resources, but so is invading Russia.
it was obviously enormously politically beneficial for the winners to record history so as to make the losers look as bad as possible
This isn't Ancient Rome. We're not relying on a few parchments from the court propagandists. There are photos, videos, radio recordings, billions of pages of documentation, millions of eyewitnesses, and all of the wonders of modern technology to investigate the recent past. The idea that 'they' (every government, every university, every professional historian, WW2 veterans, both sides of the Cold War, millions of civilian eyewitnesses, right down to chumps like me) is somehow involved in this vast coverup of the truth boggles the mind.
The truth is more prosaic. The Holocaust happened in the way that the historical consensus agreed that it happened. It happened in the same way that every other big event in WW2 happened. It happened because the dictator of Germany, who was always very open about hating Jews, was finally able to enact his will.
Anti-recommend The Return, I thought it was pretentious arthouse nonsense.
Fire Walk with Me is the sequel that Twin Peaks deserved.
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