Thoughts TheMotte?
Was it a beginners class? My experience with kizomba is that the classes (particularly the beginner ones) may be heavily male, but the socials are overwhelmingly female. Because kizomba is easy to follow, women learn super quickly and stop going to the classes, but still go to the socials because they like the dance.
I don't know enough about swing dancing to say whether or not that's the case, but if it's significantly easier to follow than lead, then that could be something. Although that wouldn't explain the change in the last couple of years.
Crowstep
2hr ago
Oh please I visited the UK three months ago and stayed there for a few weeks, it was a trivial matter to find sites that didn't demand some form of proof.
I agree, but the system is new and there's obviously going to be a degree of cat and mouse. If we required perfection for every system we wouldn't have any systems at all.
I assume any teenager with decent motivation and a lack of retardation can also do it
I'm less concerned about teenagers and more concerned about very small children. 40% of six year olds own a tablet in the UK, and another 40% have access to one. Before the current rules were in place, most of them had access to the infinity of online porn. My eight year old neice doesn't have a smartphone, but kids at her school do and have shown her videos of ISIS beheadings. This concerns me (and approximately every parent). I suspect you don't have kids. I assure you, internet libertarianism becomes much less appealing once you do.
Then why did the discord leak happen?
Because Discord used a different third party verification company with a different process.
Crowstep
2hr ago
Requires your face, thereby identifying you.
That isn't what I said. My exact words were '90% of them use third parties like AgeGo which don't require you to upload ID'. That obviously means uploading e.g. a driving licence, not age estimation through the camera.
Because yes, in order to use age estimation, AgeGo will need a short video clip of my face, which will then be deleted once the verification is complete. If this counts as 'identifying me' then fine, I don't care. It's worth it if it makes it harder for children to watch porn.
Crowstep
5hr ago
from my understanding, users have to buy a card from a retailer that validates age, typically in person?
I haven't heard of that one. Ofcom lists a bunch of acceptable methods here, but none of them involve buying a card from a shop.
Crowstep
5hr ago
The only meaningful way to have age verification is to have ID verification
As I mentioned, the UK manages porn sites perfectly well without mandatory ID verification. It may not be completely impenetrable, but that's fine. Surely you would be happy about this fact, rather than demanding something that you say is bad? You seem to be arguing that a) the current system is insufficiently robust and must be reformed and b) a more robust system would be bad. Why not be happy with our imperfect system?
Parents can do that already anyway!
That is a very naive position. It's technically correct, in the same way that I can technically go and live in the woods. In practice, peer pressure is immensely powerful, and parents find it extremely difficult to tell their kids 'every child in your class has a smartphone, but you can't have one'. Even if successful, it still causes parents a huge amount of stress having to constantly re-fight the battle every day. That is why we have rules around kids smoking and drinking. Technically, we could abolish age restrictions and just say to parents 'it's up to you'. In reality, humans are a social species that work around norms. The free for all status quo simply allows those norms to be set by tech companies, rather than by parents.
If you seriously believe that they're deleting everything, I got a bridge to sell you if you want.
And why exactly does Pornhub or AgeGo want a grainy, 3 second video of my face at 2am? Leaving aside the fact that big companies do, in fact, obey the law as a rule, because breaking it is bad for business, you seem to imply that these companies are holding on to data that they have explicitly promised to (and are legally obliged to) delete for the sake of being evil and creepy, in spite of no actual benefit to them.
Crowstep
7hr ago
Is that still worth it? Haidt correctly diagnosed a problem in society and then decided the only solution is nuking everyone's freedom just to fail anyway.
The social media ban isn't really the main goal of organisations like Haidt's. The goal is to get kids off smartphones. That is much easier for parents to do when 'I need Snapchat to talk to all my friends' is no longer true. Even if a social media ban can be bypassed, there's no reason to do so if none of a child's peers are using the platforms. The same is true of school smartphone bans. It's much easier for parents to say 'no you can't have a smartphone' if smartphones are a prohibited item in school.
Worrying about kids' privacy when preventing them from accessing social media is kind of ironic. The kids are already sharing their deepest, darkest secrets with these platforms. We're trying to prevent them giving up their privacy.
It's also worth talking about the actual technology used for age verification. In the UK we have it for porn sites already. 90% of them use third parties like AgeGo which don't require you to upload ID (although you can), they just use age estimation from a face scan, which isn't even saved once the check has been done. It's fine.
Crowstep
7hr ago
I don't like the paradigms of the discussion, but have trouble articulating why.
I just listened to the episode myself. He wasn't a great guest, nor did he go into the depth about 'screens' that the subject really merited. If you want that, Jonathan Haidt has done a million interviews.
But I think it's reasonable to use 'screens' as a substitute for 'increasingly addictive technology'. Even tiny, black and white TVs showing linear programming were powerful enough to begin the process of disengagement described in Bowling Alone. But massive, HD colour TVs with infinite TV and video games, plus smartphones with addictive apps and social media have supercharged it. I don't think it's too unreasonable to use 'screens' as shorthand for atomisation, digital addiction and social disengagement, even if something like podcasts and Spotify contributed.
Crowstep
2d ago
Immigration restriction has been the $100 bill lying on the ground for decades. Tariffs and trade war with China at least $20.
Immigration restriction, sure (although he still refuses to do the one thing that would actually work, which is go after employers who hire illegals).
But were the voters really hankering for tariffs and trade wars? Were the voters champing at the bit to start taxing imports from all of America's allies and making consumer goods more expensive?
Crowstep
3d ago
My friend Dylan and I are embarking on a quest to read as many quality books as we can about US history this year.
May I recommend Albion's Seed? Fascinating book for anyone interested in the history of America or the Anglo diaspora.
Crowstep
4d ago
Hmm, this document uses 20 to 64 as working age, which gives us an upper bound but a different lower bound.
This source suggests that labour force is defined crudely (as you suggested) as anyone over the age of 15, but it also says it excludes people who are retired. And since the average life expectancy is only 62 in SSA, I don't know whether that means African women are retiring to be supported by their (large) families or whether they just work until they drop, especially since for subsistence farmers, there's probably always something that can be done around the farm, even if granny isn't really contributing much.
In conclusion, I'm stumped.
Crowstep
4d ago
I believe a man that his marriage is happy as much as I believe a hostage saying that his captors treat him excellently.
Why? Both men and women who are married report being happier than those who are unmarried. If the men are lying, are the women lying too? And if so, why the hell are they choosing to couple up and marry if it's making both sexes miserable?
Crowstep
4d ago
The denominator is all women over 15, so Africa should have a higher ratio just because it has a lower percentage of women past retirement age.
The denominator is working age women above the age of 15, so it already excludes women of retirement age.
Crowstep
4d ago
I think one problem with relying on TRP for advice about women is that the community is subject to evaporative cooling. Any guys who end up happily married or in relationships aren't gonna stick around, so you're stuck in an echo chamber or men who have failed to coexist happily with the opposite sex.
The second is that intelligence isn't merely reversed stupidity. The Red Pill guys might be right that the mainstream is lying to you about women and relationships, but that doesn't mean they have good advice on how to exist in the world they describe. As someone said the other day on here, they have a correct description but an incorrect prescription. That's why they're so unhappy.
Surely it would make sense to take advice from the men who have succeeded, i.e. the happily married ones?
Crowstep
4d ago
Really? Which part of the internet told you to never tell your wife how your day was (or conversely, so get a woman who doesn't care)?
Crowstep
4d ago
You know you've been spending too much time on the internet when your reaction to your hypothetical wife asking 'how was your day?' is 'Don't you manipulate me she-devil! You just want my money!'
Crowstep
4d ago
I always find these 'we need more women in X' arguments funny. Because the advocates never say which industries we need fewer women in. Their rhetoric seems to imply that women are an infinite resource than haven't been tapped, whereas in reality female labour, like everything in economics, is a scarce resource. More women in construction means fewer women in e.g. healthcare.
But to your point, there's surprisingly little relationship between the female employment rate and the birth rate. The region with the highest female employment rate is...Subsaharan Africa, which is also the region with the highest birth rates. The next highest is East Asia, the region with the lowest birth rates.
Crowstep
5d ago
It's frustrating to read about 'fascism' as if the sample size is enough to draw conclusions from. There were a handful of self-avowedly fascist regimes in 20th century Europe, and that's it. Even using the present tense to talk about fascism is misguided, because there are literally no governments that describe themselves as fascist, nor have their been for eighty years.
Crowstep
6d ago
There's the famous statistic that at one point 17 women reproduced for every man. But if you trace down that claim, it's likely that such an event happened during our hunter gatherer past, not during civilization
My understanding is that it was during the bronze age, not among hunter-gatherers. And that it was driven, not by massive harems, but by warfare.
The men of one village/clan (who mostly share Y chromosomes due to their shared kinship) attack another clan/village, kill the men and take the women as war-brides. This wipes out the Y chromosomes of the conquered group but not the mitochondrial DNA from the women. The newly expanded clan branches off, forming new villages. So successful male genetic dynasties expand while unsuccessful ones are wiped out. Over time, you get the 1/17 ratio showing up in the genetic data.
It's not as if a typical family structure was one patriarch and 17 wives. More like one man with a wife from his own clan, plus maybe a slave-wife from a conquered clan.
Although you're absolutely right that polygamy is unstable, it also leads to lower birth rates. A polygamous man may have very high fertility, but his 2nd+ wives have lower fertility than if they'd just married monogamously.
Crowstep
6d ago
but we've had several posters talk about how younger women tend to stick together and just spend time with each other at bars/clubs/events in a way that wasn't necessarily true in the past.
I guess that's what I'm skeptical about. I was hitting on girls 15-20 years ago, and women going around in groups was normal then too. The old pickup guys designed strategies around it. The image of a young woman sitting at a bar waiting for men to hit on her was just a thing that happened on TV. Women, agreeable as they are, are more likely to say 'I'm just here to hang out with my friends' to a guy they're not interested in, rather than be truthful and say that they would be interested if he were better looking or more charismatic. So the guys on this forum are getting rejected, which is obviously frustrating, and taking the reasons women are giving literally, which is the classic male-female communication failing.
There doesn't seem to be good data from significantly far in the past but this source suggests that the decline in singles looking for love has been driven mostly by men, between 2019 and 2024.
Crowstep
6d ago
This conversation doesn't seem like it's going anywhere. I don't see a productive way to reconcile data with your 'lived experience'.
But I will address your last part:
a guy who argues a lot on the internet
That's everyone on this forum, including you.
and has gotten bitter about it
Bitter about what?
and this is driving your white knighting of women and attacks on young men.
My interest isn't in white knighting women. It's in lowering the temperature on the gender war. I'm happily married with kids and I want that for everyone. I think the decline is socialising, coupling, marriage and birth rates are all tragedies and so I argue (with data) against moralistic positions that blame either sex for what is clearly a technological issue. On this forum, that manifests as arguing with incels who think that the coupling decline is driven exclusively by women being bitches or being too picky, on Reddit it manifests as arguing with feminists who blame men for being misogynists or manchildren.
'Women and men have different media habits' is obviously not the key part of your argument that I'm addressing, it's that the coupling recession is the fault of women and not the fault of men, contrary to all the actual evidence that both sexes are retreating from the social sphere. The reduction in people coupling up isn't driven by men getting rejected and women doing the rejecting, it's driven by the men and women who aren't going outside at all.
Because from the perspective of forming a relationship, staying at home scrolling Instagram and staying at home playing video games are exactly the same.
I do try and steer away from Bulverism, but this really seems like you're just a guy who has gotten rejected a lot and is bitter about it, and this is driving your explanation of why coupling is decreasing. Am I wrong?
I will quote my earlier response here.
So what reason does AgeGo have to keep a grainy, 3 second video of my face at 2am?
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