Crowstep
7mo ago
5 as a body count is definitely an ‘arbitrary’ number, but again, you get much above that and it implies more bad decision-making.
Very arbitrary. A 26-year-old woman who became sexually active at 16 and slept with one guy every two years would exceed it.
It's much more likely to reflect the reality of serial monogamy than bad decision making.
Not ‘obese.’
Not unreasonable to include, but remember that obesity is an equal opportunities offender. Most non-overweight men aren't going to want a fat wife, but then most men are fat too.
This is also true, to a lesser extent, with mental illness. Women have more mental illness than men (or at least they say they do) but the numbers for men aren't zero.
In fact, we can really apply this filter to most things you've listed. Men have high levels of obesity, student loan debt, mental illness, existing paternity and STIs. We can't apply it to everything of course. Men want a woman below 30 for obvious biological reasons that don't apply exactly to women, but broadly the way you've framed the question implies an average eligible man and an average ineligible woman. Whereas in reality, most of these things affect the numerator as well as the denominator. Loads of women are fat, but so are an equal number of men, which reduces the competion for the slim women.
Crowstep
7mo ago
Reminds me of Ross' wordless sound poems.
Crowstep
7mo ago
The youths that were indoctrinated and acculturated during the awokening are irreversibly woke at this point. Those who stopped virtue-signalling are the older ones who haven't received such indoctrination.
I'm not so sure. I've heard more than one young woman who came of age at the height of it all use the phrase 'man in a dress' (as opposed to 'transwoman') which was previously only used by stubborn conservatives like me.
I can't find it now, but I read a survey showing that typical woke attitudes (innate white racial guilt, the belief that sexism is all-encompassing etc) were never actually popular with the majority, they were only popular with a very loud minority that was allowed to police the overton window. Now that has broken down, it feels like people are more willing to say what they always thought now, and that includes young people.
Crowstep
7mo ago
Rumours are that Keir Starmer was the basis for Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones. A handsome, intelligent human rights lawyer, the perfect man for a neurotic woman in the Cool Britannia years.
I guess this is what governance by human rights lawyers looks like, doing anything, regardless of how stupid, if international/human rights law says we have to.
In the UK we have an expression 'the Blob', which is something like our version of the Deep State. A collection of civil servants, QUANGOs, tribunals, the BBC and lawyers. Keir Starmer is the Blob personified.
Crowstep
7mo ago
Maybe not a full Syrian Civil War, but at least another Days of Rage similar to the period in the 1970s after the great wave broke and began to recede. I would appreciate hearing anyone’s thoughts.
I find myself quoting Noah Smith a lot recently. He's written about the main thesis in the book Days of Rage that the wave of terrorism of the 1970s was due to evaporative cooling. After the huge social changes in the 1960s, the more moderate activists got on with their normal lives, leaving only the most radical remaining, who in turn radicalised eachother.
Now that the Great Awokening is in decline, the normies are quietly removing the pronouns from their email signatures and taking down their Pride flags, while the crazier fringe are shooting Israeli diplomats and bombing IVF clinics.
Crowstep
7mo ago
The Scandinavian countries have low levels of population density because vast tracts in the frozen north are empty, but that doesn't mean the people are spread out. Excluding city-states, Sweden is the 8th most urban country in Europe. It's significantly more densely populated than Germany by that metric.
Crowstep
7mo ago
Antinatalism may not have been left wing, but it is definitely left-wing now and that's what matters for both movements, not what men from a century ago thought.
Crowstep
8mo ago
And they intentionally had twins?
What makes you say that? The babies weren't IVF-conceived according to Scott.
Crowstep
8mo ago
Strict textualism just gets you extremely dumb stuff like this, where you redefine the whole neighborhood as a collective private house so you don't have to follow the rules of the sabbath
I wonder if there is some merit to the absurd rules-lawyering that you see in Orthodox Judaism. Clearly, sticking a wire around Brooklyn doesn't make it a 'household' but I can see a more 'spirit of the law' ethos moving the borders of the rules one stage at a time until you're at Reform Judaism and nobody believes in God any more.
Crowstep
8mo ago
It's as if the vast majority of the voters aren't interested in attractive women
It's not for nothing that Eurovision is known as the gay olympics. But never forget Poland. The red-blooded man often makes his voice heard.
My favorite were the Icelandic boys
Same, it was classic Eurovision. The audience in the past few years seem to be going for technical proficiency over feel-good nonsense.
I was happy with the prevalence of violins and key changes this year.
Crowstep
8mo ago
Israel has done very well with audience votes in the past few years for basically one reason, in Eurovision, you can't vote against a country.
If I'm a pro-Israel partisan, I can vote for Israel 20 times. If I'm an anti-Israel partisan, who should I vote for? Palestine isn't in the contest (lol) and there are 25 other entries to pick from. If I know who the favourite is I can vote for that country, but that can be hard to guess. Sweden was the favourite this year and didn't do particularly well from either the juries or the audience.
I wish Israel had won, for the ensuing political drama. But hey, I'm sure they're very happy with second place, even if their contestant had to perform with a booing crowd (kindly edited out by the producers).
I was also surprised at the dearth of Palestinian flags in the arena. They were allowed (I think I saw one) but people mostly waved the flags of their own countries. I didn't see any keffiyes either. Maybe people are just getting bored about Israel as a topic?
Crowstep
8mo ago
Because our welfare system is set up in such a way that they only need to work for five years before being entitled to live off the taxpayer indefinitely. And the statistics suggest that, as low-skilled immigrants from third world countries, they are much more likely to end up doing so than say, Polish graduates.
Crowstep
8mo ago
I think it's fundamentally a mistake to think about these foreign care workers as workers. They are not people who migrated in order to work, they are people who are working in order to migrate.
They are simply people who are desperate to move from poor countries to rich countries. The care worker visas were the only way for them to do that, which is why for some countries (Zimbabwe being the best example) there were ten dependent visas issued for every worker. All they needed to do is work for five years and then the whole family can get indefinite leave to remain, access to the British welfare state, the right to import even more relatives. At that point, there's no reason for them to continue working in care homes (or at all, really).
Now these absurdly large holes have finally been plugged, the Conservative government that introduced the visa removed the ability for migrants to bring along dependents, and the current Labour government abolished the visa route to new entrants (although those who previously came in can still work in the sector) and extended the time needed for indefinite leave to 10 years in most cases (we'll see how many exceptions they grant).
I personally am in favour of increasing wages (or at least allowing the market to do so) for care workers. Pensioners are far too wealthy in the UK. The care sector would allow some of that wealth to be transferred to younger, poorer people, allowing them to buy houses and start families. With fewer low-skilled immigrants, the welfare state bill will be less. If that means fewer waiters, so be it.
Crowstep
8mo ago
Testing that would run into general statistical illiteracy among the population, I think. if we asked the average person to say how much taller and heavier men are than women, I'm sure you'd get some zany answers, even though people intuitively know how large the difference is from constant observation.
Crowstep
8mo ago
I'm not sure how true (being better at learning foreign languages) is, and how much of it is a reflection of interest rather than aptitude.
Interest is a prerequisite to being good at something, at least if that something requires you to put in the hours, as is the case for language learning. But it actually does look like there are differences in how men and women's brains process language, not just a difference in interest.
multi-tasking/task-switching
See my other comment. This has been shown empirically.
Are women faster typists? I think I type faster than every single woman I know.
You may well be. It wouldn't shock me if typing speed was affected by greater male variance. But nonetheless, 82.5% of court stenographers are women. When typist was a job, it was a woman's job. Secretaries (who do/did lots of typing) are almost all women. I don't think these are coincidences.
Crowstep
8mo ago
Most of your claims seem to be stereotypes
Stereotype accuracy is one of the strongest results in social science. The word stereotype is not a synonym for 'myth'.
women aren't actually better at rapid task switching
Crowstep
8mo ago
-
Better people skills, at least in the sense of tact, curtesy and reading body language. Male charisma is its own thing but in the median social situation, women are better.
-
Relatedly, better memories about personal and biographical information. I've noticed that my wife and female colleagues are much better at remembering stuff about people, whereas me and the men I know are better at remembering stuff about stuff.
-
Better at learning foreign languages. This should be obvious to anyone who has ever taken a language class.
-
Better at multi-tasking/task-switching. This one is well known.
-
Definitely more conscientious (at least with certain subtypes of conscientiousness)
-
More conformist and neurotic. These are more trade-offs than straight advantages, but if you want to avoid big life-ruining screw-ups and danger then they are definitely helpful.
-
Better fine motor control. Women are faster typists and have neater handwriting.
-
More organised? I'm less sure about this one but the stereotype of a husband asking his wife where something is and her pointing out that it's right in front of his face is definitely a real thing.
Crowstep
8mo ago
They said rap should be subversive, well what did they think subversive meant? Vibes? Essays?
Honestly it's a pretty good song, bizarre subject matter aside. This Youtube link is live as of this writing, although it seems like the platform keeps taking new uploads down.
Maybe I will live to tell my incredulous grandkids about how we were all expected to perceive one specific 20th century dictator through a prism of quasi-superstitious dread.
I wonder if 'racism is the paramount evil' would still be a defining characteristic of western ethics if WW2 hadn't happened? I mean, the Transatlantic slave trade and the scramble for Africa still happened, smallpox still wiped out the American Indians. Maybe we would just find some other kind of racial guilt? My assumption is that it all stems from the fact that we're so outbred and WEIRD, not from the particular events of the early 1940s.
Crowstep
8mo ago
Crowstep
8mo ago
I agree. The US presidency is powerful inasfar as the US is powerful, but relative to the power of the country, the US president is weak. He is restricted by Congress, by the Senate gerrymander, by random partisan judges and by the Supreme Court. Comparatively, the UK Prime Minister is basically an elected king (albeit one who can be deposed by his MPs if they're not happy with how he's governing).
Crowstep
9mo ago
It sounds like you mostly disagree with the transactivist agenda, which makes me wonder why you have bothered to swallow their (obviously motivated) definitions of sex and gender. But it sounds like we mostly agree, except for a few things.
Sports are not fair, and being female is just one of the many ways someone can be disadvantaged. Why should that be singled out?
Because if we don't single it out, then female sports literally cannot exist. Women are worse than men at every sport (including things that aren't really sports like chess). The only exception I'm aware of is ultramarathon. Without female-segregated sports, women cannot practically play sports competitively. Whether or not there is federal funding (remember that other countries exist) seems kind of immaterial to this fundamental issue.
I view freedom as absolute, so there should be no weighing involved
You can view or define freedom however you want, but the reality is that real life always involves compromises, tradeoffs and zero-sum situations. We need a way to adjudicate these. Given your own limited definition of freedom cannot apply to most of them, how should they be adjudicated?
Crowstep
9mo ago
People should be allowed to choose their gender, because more freedom is better than less freedom
Does that include the freedom to describe the world accurately, for example, by describing the Wachowski brothers as brothers?
Or the freedom for a woman to get undressed without a man watching?
The freedom for women to compete in sporting competitions amongst themselves without being outcompeted by physically superior men.
Transexuals were always allowed to describe themselves as the opposite sex, and to dress as the opposite sex if they wanted. It's the desire to force everyone else to play along that generated the pushback. There are genuine tradeoffs here, and if we're going to use 'more freedom' as the heuristic, surely we should weigh the freedom of the majority more than the freedom of a tiny, tiny minority?
Crowstep
9mo ago
Defining the word "woman" based on biological sex is just redundant and makes it harder to discuss things
The words woman and man have always meant male and female adults. It's only in the past decade or so that trans-activists have tried to redefine them to be somehow unrelated to biology, for the sake of being able to force everyone to pretend that a man in a dress is actually a woman.
Things were easy to discuss before, transactivists made it harder by trying to forcibly uncouple the words man and woman from what they have always meant.
Crowstep
9mo ago
That's pretty much the position of professional demographer and pronatalist Lyman Stone. Polygamy reduces fertility, because although a polygamous man has more children than otherwise, his wives (after no. 1) have fewer. Funnily enough that's what happened with Musk. He had six kids with his first wife, but 'only' four with his bottom bitch Shivon Zillis.
Of course, we can also consider quality rather than quantity. If Grimes had a baby with a rockstar, he probably wouldn't change the world. But a baby with a genius, maybe.
That's not what the link you posted says. A woman who has slept with six men is (statistically) a safer bet than a woman who has slept with two. Although even then the effect is small. The only significant effect is for women who have slept with 0 men, which is pretty clearly a proxy for conservative religiosity. If you want that kind of woman, they're pretty easy to find, they all go to the same place on a Sunday...
Women on dating sites won't settle, but men apparently will? Aside from a few fetishists, men don't like fat women. This seems more of an effect of the imbalanced ratios on dating sites than actual preferences. Nobody prefers a fat partner, but beggars can't be choosers.
And yet according to surveys, both men and women are equally likely to want to marry, and women are more likely to want to marry now (as opposed to some vague time in the future).
And speaking more personally, my experience has been that the most attractive women are most likely to have boyfriends or husbands, because it's much easier for them to attract said boyfriends and husbands. Women don't actually like the modern promiscuous dating market. It's an inadequate equilibrium that benefits womanisers to the detriment of basically everyone else.
There has been a decline in partnering and marriage. The decline in partnering seems to be a consequence of atomisation, digital interaction replacing real-life interaction and perhaps excessive female pickiness due to social media. But crucially, it's not because women are sleeping around, because they're not sleeping around.
More options
Context Copy link