Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
No bio...
User ID: 3132
I wrote the above before I saw that it's Mother's Day, lack of tact, mea culpa, etc.
To be clear, I don't want to just dunk on women — I like the women in my life and bear no ill will towards their sex. I'm just skeptical of uncritical complementarian narratives that declare that men and women are simultaneously unequal in their dispositions and yet equally valuable in their own domains, because it seems pretty obvious to me that men get the better deal. Earth Mother and Sky Father might be of equal value in nature, but the story of civilization has been of reaching to the stars with only a minimal umbilical connecting us to our roots.
If I were dictator, I'd look into ways of (eugenically or otherwise) partly relieving women of those traits which most negatively impact their eudaemonic potential (neuroticism, conformity, lower risk tolerance, lower agency) and augmenting their traits which legitimately compliment men's (verbal IQ, social intuition, physical endurance, sensual sensitivity).
Damn, I legitimately forgot it's Mother's Day, I look like an asshole. To the women here, I apologize for my oh-so-masculine lack of tact.
...but if you'll afford me some charity, I'm trying to highlight the other admirable qualities of women besides their (definitely important!) biological prerogative.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
1mo ago
Girls hit most developmental milestones before boys, so in a certain sense a "longer" adult life is possible.
That faster development could be part of the cause of the spatial/logical intelligence gap, as faster development is (at least interracially) correlated with lower intelligence after the completion of puberty. I wonder if girls who get their periods later are consistently more intelligent, or if there are racial differences in average age of menarche?
When I say "advantages", I mean those things which make it better to be of one sex over the other in a particular practical circumstance. It is true that mammalian biology places the burden of gestation on the woman; my question is about what other aspects of her biology might take the sting out of her manifest physical inferiority and considerable neurotic pathologies.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
1mo ago
I've seen some evidence that women's better fine motor control is largely an artifact of their smaller hands, which would make sense. There could still be something there, though: weaving and spinning are traditionally women's work, at least in western culture.
I forgot about g-force tolerance in my OP, though again that's partly a side effect of their smaller bodies. Even controlling for that, women seem to have an advantage. Gynoid fat distribution might be the cause, but I'm unsure.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
1mo ago
And only men can produce the sperm required to conceive said child. Primary sex characteristics are table stakes.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
1mo ago
What physiological/psychological advantages do women have over men? The only solid ones I can think of off the top of my head are a better immune system, greater flexibility, and greater conscientiousness. I've also seen some stuff about more acute color vision, more efficient use of fat stores during endurance activity, and better scores on verbal/memory IQ subtests, though I haven't investigated those as thoroughly.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
1mo ago
Yep, I recall reading somewhere that Asians tend to respect Jews for their disproportionate influence, the thought process going something like:
You're telling me that this tiny minority dominates your finance, media, and government? Sounds like they're doing something right, what's their secret?
This is frequently to the detriment of their drastically reduced number of children
Most of the Western fertility decline was justified and needed. Infant mortality rates approaching 50% were near-universal before the 19th century; the average woman doesn't need to and shouldn't have 4+ children anymore, lest we tempt the spectre of Malthus. (The demographic argument for pro-natalism still applies, but in the long run fertility still needs to converge on replacement.)
Mothers can't be "more precious than rubies" when the job prerequisite is the bare biological minimum expected of a mammalian female. I've seen such pro-natalist exhortations to value motherhood more before, but since status (especially female status) is a zero-sum game, the end result of such efforts is going to look much more like shaming barren women rather than celebrating mothers. It only makes sense for women to branch out into the male realm when the need for their singular area of expertise has been significantly obviated.
Sure, childcare and housework is necessary, but I'd contend that it actually isn't all that valuable in an economic sense, nor is it really that hard. A back of the envelope calculation suggests that a near-majority of housewives aren't earning their keep:
From a quick google search, the median cost of daycare in the US is $12.5k/yr and the median salary of a maid is $27.5k/yr. Housewives only need to maintain one house/a few children and don't need to adhere to professional standards for cleaning/childcare, so let's halve the sum and add maybe $10k/yr for other miscellaneous responsibilities, coming out to a $30k/yr equivalent salary for the responsibilities of a housewife. The average male salary in the US is ~70k, so if the median man is spending >40% of his income on supporting his wife, it could be said that she's got a bit of a grift going for her, with the scale of the grift increasing with greater male earnings and investment.
It's crass to lay such things bare, but I think it's an important point to be made, and to note alongside it that it wasn't always this way. Good housekeeping used to include responsibilities such as practical crafts, tending to the hearth, spinning wool, etc. that made women far more economically valuable, if not as primary providers. As the functional value of home economics has been hollowed out by technology, the expected role of women ought to adapt to the circumstances.
"The guillotine is far too gruesome and traumatic for moderns"
[Hanging] is violent enough to make a point, but, at least in its long-drop form, not too gruesome to witness.
Public execution is already wayyy outside the realm of consideration for modern Westerners; if it should be reinstated, I'd prefer that we go the whole nine yards, as it were. Also, have you seen the comments on gore sites? Asides from stupid teenagers, I'd wager that ~everyone who frequents those sites to see anything more graphic than bodycam footage are somehow mentally disturbed.
Besides, the broader objection I have is towards the instrumental value of your formulation. When there's just not that much crime that deserves capital punishment compared to how it was in the past (at least among the blue-blood races), you don't really need to drive the point home in that way; it seems like your ought doesn't follow from the is. I'm curious: what crimes do you think deserve the death penalty (and while we're on topic, which deserve caning)?
(That would be the practical implementation, but the syllepsis works better this way. (Also, the image of a hooded executioner with a massive axe fits the demand for spectacle better than a mere scaffold with a blade.))
I favor hangings, although I’m open to other methods which are similarly visually evocative without being overly torturous.
On that point, hanging is a lot more fraught as a method of execution than you probably think it is. Short-drop hanging is obviously not the way to go: the most fortunate of such condemned lose consciousness in 8-10 seconds from compression of the carotid arteries obstructing bloodflow to the brain (possibly along with the carotid nerve reflex causing decreased heart rate/blood pressure, but this is heavily disputed), though this period is still undoubtedly agonizing. From historical accounts of short-drop hangings, it can be assumed that many of the condemned experienced insufficient cerebral ischemia and suffered terribly for significantly longer.
Long drop hanging, meanwhile, has long been thought of as the humane form of hanging. As practiced by the British after the 1888 creation of the Official Table of Drops, the process involved weighing the prisoner and evaluating the thickness/muscularity of their neck to set the drop they'd get. As the condemned reached the end of the rope, the tightening of the knot would jerk the head backwards with sufficient force to break the C2 vertebra, sending the broken fragment forwards and severing the spinal cord for instantaneous death.
Setting aside the issue with presuming that severing the spinal cord produces instant brain death/unconsciousness (wouldn't it just paralyze them?), some investigative studies suggest that the actual cause of death in long-drop hanging is far more variable than previously assumed. In [this] study, among the 34 examined vertebrae of British prisoners executed between 1882 and 1945, only seven were found with cervical fractures, with only three of those being the classic "hangman's fracture". Contemporary autopsies reported far more fractures than had been found in the study, and the fractures that did occur showed no relation to sex, height, or length of drop. A later autopsy of a 1993 hanging using the British method [here] suggested that the quick loss of consciousness observed after the drop was caused by massive cerebral hemorrhaging from torn vertebral arteries, as the spinal cord was again undamaged.
Even using the most rigorously designed protocols, hanging is an inconsistent and occasionally quite cruel method of death. My preferred method would be Soviet-style shooting, but if you really want executions to be a spectacle while solving the problem of undue suffering, you ought to cut the hangman's knot with the headsman's blade.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
2mo ago
But at this time the provenance of the attack is unknown, and no one has taken credit.
…it was the Sharty(semi-NSFW). For those unaware, Soyjack.party (aka. “the Sharty”) is a splinter board from 4chan that broke off around 2020. Since then, its users have gained notoriety for their esoteric, soyjack-based culture and the raiding/doxxing attempts they frequently make against their enemies. This isn’t silencing, it’s fratricide.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
2mo ago
Yep, Scott's at his worst when he's complaining about his outgroup. Not that most of the twitterati who employ POSIWID are particularly shrewd analysts, but the concept has plenty of explanatory value.
For another recent example of Scott getting sloppy, see his article on how the BAPist "based post-Christian vitalists" were hypocritical for caring about the victims of the Rotherham grooming gangs when they normally sneer at caring about poor people an ocean away as cucked slave morality. Of course, the obvious counterargument is that the Rotherham victims were white Westerners like themselves, aggressed upon by a far more alien outgroup.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
3mo ago
The most intuitive explanation is that the feeling of disgust at the above scenarios is an evolutionarily useful heuristic against deviancy.
It's already known that most mental illnesses are varyingly comorbid, so it's not a stretch to conjecture that even benign sexual deviancy suggests more serious malfunction. Thus, the disgust response should be treated as an update torwards moral suspicion, but not full condemnation in of itself.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
3mo ago
I have noticed a difference, yea. WMBF kids tend to be able to pass for white more often, and if not they don't look especially "black" either. I fall into the latter category, my brother's more the former. As for your stereotypes:
- Very true
- Nope
- Don't know, but I'd guess not
- True enough
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
3mo ago
I'm interested in the potential somatic effects of distant admixture, independent of parental selection effects. Partly because I'm biracial myself (white dad, black mom), partly because I predict that it'll become a hot button topic in the near future. Opposition to miscegenation is still quite gauche in the right-wing zeitgeist, but I don't see it staying that way for long.
What's the state of research into the physiological/psychological effects of race-mixing?
The last good look into this question I've come across was Emil Kirkegaard's blog post, which covered the overrepresentation of certain psychological and behavioral risk patterns in mixed-race adolescents. I haven't seen anything else on this subject from the HBD crowd, but I might be missing something. I'm particularly curious about research into differences between first-generation mixes with total racial heterozygosity and later-generation mixed people with greater homozygosity, seems like there could be some interesting differences there.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
4mo ago
Are these scientists the front-line Wehrmacht, or just civilians throwing a quick heil before going about their business? The German public needn't be prosecuted, just shown that the Nazis aren't in charge anymore.
Women's importance to the continuance of the species is absolutely important, I agree. My concern is that on an individual level, it seems to me like women get the short end of the stick in their potential for eudaemonia, to the point where the Athenian prayer isn't unwarranted. See here downthread for my elaboration.
(I appreciate your enjoyment, thx!)
More options
Context Copy link