Crowstep
3mo ago
This is the best review I've seen of Adolescence.
It's culture war angle is really two-fold. Firstly, the idea that middle class native British boys from nice families end up stabbing their classmates, whereas in reality it's invariably second generation African boys (I mean, the show has a scene with a white boy mugging a black boy for his lunch money, come on!).
The social problems Starmer wishes to confront do exist, just not in a way that makes audiences feel comfortable. In the week that Adolescence was being watched by millions, a school in Elm Park on the London/Essex border held a party which was overrun by knife-wielding teenagers. That was close to where a real teenage girl was murdered by two real teenage boys in 2019. You’ll notice that none of the perpetrators resemble the star of Adolescence, because teenage knife crime in Britain is predominately a problem with young black men. This is testified by the fact that, according to Graham, who both wrote as well as acted, the show was inspired by the fatal stabbing of Elianne Andam by Hassan Sentamu, as well as other real-life cases. These are unpalatable realities, and audiences for drama don’t like them.
So too with Andrew Tate:
Even the baleful influence of Andrew Tate and ‘toxic misogyny’ is, again, disproportionately a problem among minorities, as Rakib Ehsan pointed out, and ‘there are several issues that may make young black men more likely to be drawn to Tate’s rantings’, the obvious one being fatherlessness: ‘Young black males are a group disproportionately impacted… This means young black men are the least likely group of young men to have a positive male role model living with them at home – a world away from Jamie’s nuclear family, as depicted in Adolescence, in which the boy is “radicalised” by online influencers.’
The second is that this could be caused by something called 'the manosphere':
Instead they’ve found new moral evils to focus on in the form of the manosphere or online hate, and the agents of the state even sympathetically view Jamie as subject to forces outside of his control. Misogyny is part of the pyramid of harm, that strangely gormless worldview in which tiny infringements of social codes are linked to far more serious problems (edgy banter at work > > > something something > > > the Holocaust). The boy’s father doesn’t have female friends and sometimes loses his temper; his son murdered a girl. Can’t you see the link there, between behaviour typical of perhaps 50-90 per cent of men and one characteristic of 0.001 per cent?
One reason that society now feels so uncomfortable with young men is because social norms have moved to a more feminine centre, focussed on empathy and harm-prevention, one major cause of the Great Awokening. It is a way of seeing the world, and of organising human relationships, which many males indeed find difficult to negotiate, but contrary to the fears about men suffering from smartphone use, the data shows that social media is disproportionately harming girls, ‘and is more likely to cause depression than radicalisation.’
Ed West concludes that the real reason for this kind of moral panic isn't that middle class British boys will become misogynists and murder their classmates. It's that those same boys are rejecting progressive politics.
Crowstep
2mo 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
1mo 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
6mo ago
Wikipedia tells me that Scientific American is published by Springer Nature, a German British publishing house.
Which means that, like the Holy Roman Empire, Scientific American is neither Scientific, nor American.
Or perhaps I should say was, because the magazine's slide into political propaganda hasn't gone unnoticed, and perhaps the editor resigning last month for calling Trump voters fascists was the woke wave cresting. I can't imagine many of the actual contributors to the magazine are happy to have their bylines on a publication that thinks men and women are equally good at sports.
Crowstep
8mo ago
and it’s obviously in the public interest to keep them on a tight leash
In the UK? Hardly. The country has a tiny number of highly vetted, very well trained firearms officers, supporting a mass of unarmed ordinary police. We have one shooting by police marksmen every few years, and it's almost always a guy who is deep in with armed gangs. Armed police are not a threat to the public at all.
'Keeping them on a tight leash' (i.e. taking the side of criminals they interact with) has the second order effect of emboldening those criminals, which is definitely not in the public interest. We see this every few years when some bright spark in the Met decides that stop and search is racist. The police stop using it for a while, the black on black murder rate spikes, and then they quietly go back to using it because it works.
Hang on a sec, didn't Unicode introduce skin tone modifiers a few years ago? What was the point of that if they were going to replace them all with generic human beings?
EDIT: This is why
I also found this amusing piece from a month ago. Apparently Elon Musk reintroduced the pistol emoji (it had previously been replaced on Twitter by a water pistol, in line with Android and iOS). In response, a former Twitter employee said that:
fascism is given the pass of open carry rules
Crowstep
3mo ago
Do any of these progressives believe in God or go to church?
Because I'd say that's the absolute bare minimum. Someone who doesn't believe in God isn't a Christian, and someone who doesn't go to church isn't a practicing Christian.
Christian isn't a synonym for 'virtuous' or 'progressive'. It's a religion.
Crowstep
5mo ago
I was about to post about this, I think the top comment on the subreddit post puts it best.
Holy vibe shift Batman
Between this, Steve Sailer's book tour and Elon letting the world know about the Pakistani rape gangs in the UK, it really does feel like something has shifted. The stuff that edgy rightoids were reading about 10 years ago is now just out there in the open (relatively speaking).
Wokism is over. It overplayed its hand. What comes next? I don't know but I'm excited to find out.
Crowstep
11mo ago
Every Conservative prime minister since Cameron said immigration is too high and promised to reduce it. Tony Blair said immigration was too high and promised to reduce it (in 2005!). Kier Starmer said the same. I think we agree that these parties lack credibility on the issue, but you can hardly argue that voting for politicians who promise to reduce immigration doesn't count as voting for lower immigration. Especially since UK Prime Ministers usually resign after they lose an election, which means that in each election, the voters are voting for a different potential government.
Plus, a general election is not a single issue referendum on immigration. It's voting for MPs under a massively undemocratic electoral system which essentially forces voters to choose between the two main parties. The fact that Reform didn't win a majority is in no way evidence that people support higher immigration.
Crowstep
13d ago
That's not why Tina Brown is criticising him though, according to Wikipedia she did exactly the same thing. She had an affair with a married man 25 years her senior. Ironically if Bezos had married a younger woman Brown might not have written the blog post, because her readers could criticise her for hypocrisy.
This looks like class hatred to me. Lauren Sanchez looks tacky and low class, with her big fake tits and duck lips. Tina Brown can't criticise her for that, so instead she insists that her sneering is on behalf of womankind, for feminism.
Crowstep
1mo ago
One statement I've found that cuts across the bipartisan spectrum is 'the internet made us all crazy'. Conservatives will imagine liberal craziness, liberals will imagine conservative craziness, but everyone I've said it to agrees. Something broke in the 2010s. It was probably the smartphones, the internet was safer when it was anchored to a desktop that you had to walk away from to do anything else. Now we spend most of our waking hours plugged into the outrage machine.
Crowstep
7mo ago
maybe even a Motte poster
You're not kidding. Halfway down I remembered I was looking at the account of an (alleged) murderer and not just some guy whose Substack I have bookmarked.
Crowstep
7mo ago
Towards a grand unified theory of birth rate collapse
Ask someone without any interest in the topic why birth rates are collapsing globally or in their own country, and they will usually find some way of saying it's too expensive. Either wages aren't high enough, house prices are too high, childcare costs too much. Often they will bring in their own pet issue as a rationalisation (global warming, inequality, immigration, taxes).
They are of course, wrong. Global GDP per capita has never been higher, and global TFR has never been lower. Countries with higher GDP per capita numbers tend to have lower birth rates, although the relationship isn't necessarily causal. Clearly, 'we can't afford it' isn't factually true.
So what is causing it? There are certainly things that governments and cultures can and have done to encourage births on the margins. Cheaper housing does allow earlier household formation, which increases births. Dense housing suppresses birth rates, even if the dense housing lowers overall housing costs. Religiosity increases birth rates, all other things being equal. Tax cuts for parents increase birth rates. Marriage increases birth rates vs cohabiting. Young people living with their parents decreases birth rates. Immigration of high-TFR groups works until the second generation. Generous maternity leave and cheap childcare seem to help. However, none of these seem to be decisive. There are countries that do everything right and yet birth rates still continue to decline.
The universality of the birth rate collapse suggests that the main cause must be something more fundamental then any of the policies or cultural practices I have named. Something that affects every country and people (with a few notable exceptions that will be the key to working out what's going on).
Substacker Becoming Noble proposes that the birth rate collapse is caused by one thing:
Specifically, I contend that the basic epistemological assumptions which underpin modern civilization result in the net status outcome of having a child being lower than the status outcomes of various competing undertakings, and that this results in a population-wide hyper-sensitivity to any and all adverse factors which make having children more difficult, whatever these may be in a given society.
In such a paradigm, if a tradeoff is to be made between having children and another activity which results in higher status conferral (an example would be ‘pursuing a successful career’ for women) then having children will be deprioritized. Because having and raising children is inherently difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, these tradeoffs are common, and so the act of having children is commonly and widely suppressed.
I won't spend too much time summarising the article. It is excellently written and I wouldn't do it justice. The key thing to take away is that, within global culture, having children is neutral or negative for status.
But let's apply the hypothesis to various groups with unusually high or low birth rates and see if they match the predicition.
Becoming Noble gives the example of Koreans. Infamously, South Korea has the lowest birth rate on the planet. It is also hyper-competitive and status obsessed. Children spend most of their waking hours studying for the all-important college entrance exam, so they can get into the best college, to get into the best company from a small selection of prestigious Chaebols (the most prestigious is Samsung, as you'd imagine). According to Malcolm Collins, the Korean language even requires its speakers to refer to people based on their job title, even in non-professional settings. In a country which is defined by zero-sum status competition, the main casualty is fertility.
Of course, South Koreans aren't the only East Asians to have low birth rates. All East Asian countries have very low birth rates, and the East Asian diaspora also has very low birth rates, even in relatively high-TFR countries like the USA or Australia.
Richard Hanania proposes that East Asians, being particularly conformist, are particularly sensitive to the status trade-offs of having children. This would explain why we see similarly low TFRs among the diaspora.
So now we move on to groups with unusually high TFRs. The most famous are the Amish and the Hasidic/Haredi/Ultra-Orthodox Jews.
The Amish are rural, religious people, so we would expect them to have a relatively high TFR, but even compared to other rural Americans, the Amish stand out for extremely high fertility. They don't spend long in school, they marry young (and don't allow divorce) and stick to traditional gender roles. But according to this description of Amish life, the key factor is that among the Amish, being married and having a large family is high status, for both men and women. Amish culture is cut off from global culture in important ways. They are not exposed to television or the internet, they don't socialise much with the English, and they are limited in what modern status goods they can buy. So for young Amish, the only way to gain any status is to marry and have children.
Unlike the Amish, the Haredim are urban people. Instead of leaving school at 14, the young men spend their most productive years in Torah study, supported by their wives and government benefits or charity. Meanwhile, their women pop out children and work at the same time. Urban living, extended education, and a rejection of traditional gender roles should all suppress their fertility, but they don't. Tove (Wood from Eden) proposes that the religious restrictions on Haredi men reduce the worry from Haredi women that their menfolk might leave them. This, combined with a religiously-motivated rejection of global culture encourages them to focus their status-seeking energies on having large families. This also seems to have the knock-on effect of increasing Israeli birth rates among other Jewish groups there.
Another interesting example of high birth rates in non-African countries are central Asian countries like Mongolia and Kazakhstan. These countries seem to have been able to reverse, and not just slow down birth rate decline. Pronatalist Daniel Hess argues that this is because these countries make motherhood high status in a way that most others don't. Their Soviet history and the fact that their languages don't use the Latin alphabet means that the populations are not very exposed to English-language global culture.
So what is to be done? There is of course no magic button that a president can push to make parenthood high status. But the most obvious thing would be for governments to simply tell their citizens that having children is pro-social. They should promote having kids the same way they promote recycling or public transport. Promoting marriage would likely help, as well as pivoting school sex education away from avoiding teenage pregnancy (which has essentially disappeared in the developed world) and towards avoiding unplanned childlessness.
Crowstep
2mo 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
Well it looks like embryo selection for IQ is here.
A US startup, using data from the UK Biobank, is offering embryo selection for “IQ and the other naughty traits that everybody wants”, including sex, height, risk of obesity and risk of mental illness.
What surprises me most about this is that they were able to use the Biobank data, and that the head of the Biobank is defending its use. The Biobank is, as I understand, the world's best source of genetic data and I had always hoped that it would be used for this kind of liberal eugenics. However I'd assumed that doing so would be hampered by 'bioethicists' or at least the default political caution of these kind of institutions. However, the head of the Biobank seems to...think this is good?
UK Biobank … has confirmed that its analyses of our data have been used solely for their approved purpose to generate genetic risk scores for particular conditions, and are exploring the use of their findings for preimplantation screening in accordance with relevant regulation in the US where Heliospect is based. This is entirely consistent with our access conditions. By making data available, UK Biobank is allowing discoveries to emerge that would not otherwise have been possible, saving lives and preventing disability and misery.
Well that's a pleasant surprise. I guess I shouldn't be too shocked that the head of a massive genetics project actually understands the implications of his scientific field, but it's great to have my default cynicism proven wrong.
The quotes from the 'bioethicists' are maddening, of course:
Dagan Wells, a professor of reproductive genetics at University of Oxford, asked: “Is this a test too far, do we really want it? It feels to me that this is a debate that the public has not really had an opportunity to fully engage in at this point.”
Not an argument, he's just vaguely gesturing at the implication that it might be bad. It's also unclear why, in a context where IVF is already legal and accepted by almost everyone, this needs to be subject to a public debate. This is just IVF with more informed choices over which embryo to implant.
Katie Hasson, associate director of the Center for Genetics and Society, in California, said: “One of the biggest problems is that it normalises this idea of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ genetics.” The rollout of such technologies, she said, “reinforces the belief that inequality comes from biology rather than social causes”.
Translation: This scientific advance is bad because it reminds people of facts which I am politically uncomfortable with.
If being slim, happy, kind, law-abiding, rich or intelligent is better than being fat, depressed, cruel, criminal, poor or stupid, and if these things are affected by genetics (which they are) then there is such a thing as superior or inferior genetics.
Either Ms Hasson believes that genes don't influence anything (in which case she should not be working at a centre for genetics) or she believes that all human characteristics are equally good (in which case she should not use the term 'ethicist' in her title). Or perhaps she is a bioethicist who believes in neither biology nor ethics.
By late 2023, the founders of Heliospect claimed to have already analysed and helped select embryos for five couples, which had subsequently been implanted through IVF. “There are babies on the way,”
This is probably the most important part in my mind. It will be extremely hard to argue against embryo selection when there are happy, healthy, intelligent children running around. In the same way that skepticism around IVF vanished as the first IVF babies grew up, there will one day be embryo-selected adults giving interviews on TV, eloquently defending it.
Tiger mothers of the world, rejoice. You can now give your kids a heads-up that actually works, and doesn't require you driving them to extra-curriculars all the time.
The UK, like the US, has essentially full employment, in that everyone who wants a job can get one. There is still huge amounts of unskilled labour to be done due to a few things:
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A huge number of people who could work, don't. This goes beyond the normal numbers of underclass people who are incapable or unable to hold down a job. The UK lags behind the rest of the developed world here. It seems to be a case of our easy to access welfare system coinciding with COVID idleness and people moving onto disability benefits due to 'mental health issues' (what proportion of these are malingerers are left as an question for the reader).
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The previous Conservative government seemed to believe the dire warnings from business and threw open the borders to all comers to avoid labour shortages post-Brexit. It turned out that most of those being imported were inactive (either students or dependents) and lacked the high labour participation rate that previous EU immigrants showed. They later tightened up the rules a bit. So the labour market's needs weren't met by these immigrants.
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Business wanting to keep down wages. This is most obvious in the care sector. The previous government explicitly allowed wages for work visas to be 20% lower than the standard in the UK, although they did abandon this after Labour flanked them on it.
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Low productivity growth. UK business is addicted to cheap labour from abroad, obligingly provided by every government since Tony Blair. This means they don't invest in productivity enhancements, which means that the only way governments can generate more tax revenue and GDP growth is through yet more immigration.
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Left-wing pro-immigration attitudes. In my view, these are best described as anti-anti-immigration attitudes. Left wingers don't make an explicit case for importing deliveroo drivers from Pakistan, but they (and their base) are strongly opposed to any restrictions on immigration, which smell of nativism to them.
The current government is saying that they expect immigration to reduce to 'reasonable numbers' (a net figure of 200,000 per year, still massive of course). It's unclear what Kier Starmer actually believes on immigration at the moment. His authoritarian streak has shown itself in his reaction to the recent anti-immigration riots, but whether he will follow this up with more immigration (to spite the nasty racists) or less immigration (to avoid future riots) is unclear.
Crowstep
1mo 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
1mo ago
I can't give a definitive answer to your question (which I guess you're not really expecting). It's far too personal, and reasons you've given are valid to consider.
Louise Perry likens pregnancy and giving birth as the female equivalent of going to war. It's dangerous, intoxicating, glorious, painful and rewarding all at once. It's brings you close to death and closer to life. You're going through something that all of your female ancestors went through and coming out the other side having created a new soul.
If you do go ahead and have another baby, you'll be doing something heroic. That's all I can really say.
Crowstep
2mo 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
7mo ago
Hogwarts
Definitely woke, even if it was inspired by the works of a woman who later became a wrong-thinker. 1890s rural Scotland having the same demographics as UCLA, plus the deliberate inclusion of a wizard in a dress witch with a croaky voice.
It's worth remembering that JKR was very politically correct back when it was called that. She retroactively made Dumbledore gay, and in the stage show made Hermione black (and then tried to gaslight her fans into believing she always was).
Of course, the success of the game in spite of the attempted woke boycott probably strengthened the belief among dev companies that they can just ignore an angry twitter X Bluesky mob and sell games anyway.
Crowstep
8mo ago
The pro-immigrationists know that claiming different ethnic groups have different propensities to violence is still mostly beyond the pale, even for anti-immigrationists. Therefore, they can dissimulate by claiming that anyone born in the UK is 'British' and therefore any crimes ethnic minorities commit cannot be blamed on immigration. They can be safe in the knowledge that the obvious counter-argument to this won't be made publicly, even if it is true.
There's a good chance that many of the pro-immigrationists have secretly noticed who commits most of the crime though. From there, I can see two approaches. Either blame racism for minority crime rates, or secretly read Steve Sailer while keeping quiet for the greater good. I'm sure the latter is pretty rare though.
Crowstep
10mo ago
At what point do you expect African Americans to assimilate (that is to say, start getting outcomes around the US average in terms of crime, educational attainment and earnings)? Why do you think that Haitians will be more successful than they have been?
Crowstep
7mo ago
though I'd note that as a Brit, I find the concept of Presidential pardons to be pretty odd, and in tension with the idea of legal equality of all citizens.
OP's post lead me on a minor rabbit hole about government pardons. Apparently we do have them in the UK, although they are rarely used. The last couple were Alan Turing (posthumously) and Steven (nominative determinism) Gallant, a convicted murderer who, while on day-release, fought against the jihadi who carried out the London Bridge attack in 2019.
Although if I'm honest, pardoning a relative totally feels like something Boris Johnson would have done.
Crowstep
10mo ago
my home state of Pennsylvania doesn't allow kids to go without one until the age of 8!
Meanwhile, in the land of 'you got a loicence for that?' kids are required to have a car seat until they're 12! (Although I just learned that there is an exception for families with three children which seems sensible)
Plus we have the lowest nursery teacher to child ratio in Europe so childcare is crazy expensive. It's like they don't want us to have children! (I say that flippantly, the real culprit is safetyism).
My immediate reaction to this 'movement' is the same as when I see the 'we're not having kids because it's too expensive' or even 'we're not having kids because of global warming'. A rationalisation for what's going on, not a true reason. After all, Korea's birth rate been low for decades, and only now are the women supposedly swearing off men?
There are clearly a lot of things that contribute to Korea's low birth rate; the punishing work culture, the educational arms race, the pathological status obsession, hyper-urbanism, the lack of in-person socialising (and the comparative amount of spending time online), the sleep deprivation. I see the breakdown in gender relations as a symptom of all this, rather than the cause.
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