Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
No bio...
User ID: 3132
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
2mo 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
3mo 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.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
3mo ago
When the scimitar is to one's throat, the sincerity of the Shahada should be downweighted accordingly.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
4mo ago
AFAIK, all we really know is that authoritarian measures (kinda) work, very high religiosity works (almost too well) and just paying people to have kids doesn't (or only has marginal effect). The possibility space has barely been explored in the past 100 years; perhaps more moderate cultural nudges will suffice. (Of course, if you don't wan't merely "moderate" cultural change, this argument is moot.)
Besides, the role of woman as exclusive homemaker was adapted to a very different environment than the post-industrial age, back when being a homemaker entailed responsibilities other than "operate the washing/cleaning/cooking machine" and "make sure the kids don't kill themselves". Women have it too easy for their own good, and good times make weak(er) (wo)men.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
4mo ago
A 100 IQ Westerner is both perfectly mediocre and within the top ~10% of Third World cognitive ability; raising the baseline is a worthwhile goal in of itself. That said, you have a point re. extra steps: the question is whether independent fertility-increasing measures can offset the extra cost/inconvenience.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
4mo ago
More tolerant than before, but still quite puritanical relative to Europe. As I understand it, nudity in Europe is much more divorced from sexuality than in America. The shocked reaction demonstrated here seems exaggerated for a dress (well, "dress") that's 15 square inches of fabric away from a bikini.
Recent examples of nudity in American media reinforce the contrast. Even now, anything including nudity/involving sexuality is Adult and Mature and even the mere acknowledgment of genitalia is risqué. Meanwhile, the Netherlands has a children's show about a man's prehensile penis.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
5mo ago
If a chick is down to eat her own shit off a guy’s cock, or eat her own vomit for his viewing pleasure if he’s into that, bon appetit for her and Slay, King for him.
Maybe it's just me, but I find it pathetic and unbecoming of a supposedly dignified being, and I hope I'd have the strength to mock such a woman to her face. Female submission is overrated - if I wanted a sex object, I could just buy one, it'd be much cheaper in the long run too.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
6mo ago
The male equivalents of the women in question aren't the ones doing the dirty work, we're talking >85th percentile IQ. It is true that women have a certain baseline privilege, but with it comes a certain cap on their expected competence. It's a tradeoff that works to the favor of some, perhaps even most, but certainly not all women.
...why would they tell curious young women that the boys get to do all the cool shit
It's not explicitly said, but that's the message that at least one teenage girl got (though granted, perhaps she isn't a representative sample)
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
6mo ago
Ehhh... in the strictest sense yes, and it's inevitable that women will bear the brunt of childbearing/childrearing, but the burdens of both don't seem great enough to be any woman's sole occupation. It's already well established that people massively overestimate how much work needs to be put into raising children, leading to terribly stifling parenting styles that are net negative for the affected children. With how trivialized housekeeping has become, it seems to me that intelligent, childbearing women would be well served by WFH positions so they can contribute to the household in a more tangible sense.
Besides, you be the one to tell a curious young woman that the boys get to do all the cool shit while she gets to be the factory to make more boys.
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
6mo ago
My main concern isn't whether a ~2.0 TFR is attainable, it's whether it's sustainable. The reactionary route of mostly/entirely restricting women to the homemaker role seems to result in fertility rates higher than really needed, and all other approaches seem to converge on sub-replacement fertility. For as much as we've avoided Malthusian collapse, the prospect of population growth outpacing productivity is theoretically sound, and I don't want to push our luck much further.
For nearly all of human history, populations were kept stable despite TFRs of 4.5+ by massive infant mortality, appreciable maternal mortality, and more death in general. The social technologies that ensured fertility was kept that high are now mostly unneeded, potentially harmful, and crippled by the Pandora's box of contraception. In their absence, the paradigms that have emerged haven't been any more adaptive, to say the least. I have no idea what the optimal arrangement for fertility in industrial society might be, but I'd bet it won't be as simple as retvurning to tradition.
The male/female dynamic to me appears to very closely mirror the adult/child dynamic and I'm not sure why more people don't frame it this way.
Such a comparison is "saying the quiet part out loud", and so it's only said explicitly by /pol/acks who don't care about optics and only intend to maximally offend. It's rhetorical suicide in the same way that saying "we want women to have the right to kill babies" would be.
I can't express these thoughts in a more coherent manner right now, so here's an array of tenuously connected musings vaguely related to the subject of women's role in society. If this sucks, let me know.
- On the whole, the concrete utility that women provide to men is sex and reproduction, their biological prerogatives. This affords them a certain intrinsic privilege, but it must be disheartening to know that much or possibly all of your value to society is fundamentally animal in nature, divorced from your sapience. The golden goose is well cared for, but it is still caged.
- The most egalitarian societies have been those where women are economically productive. If every woman refused to go to work tomorrow, what would actually happen?
- Fertility rates seem to be bimodally distributed between <1.8 TFR liberalized societies and >3.0 TFR patriarchal societies. Much concern is had over sub-replacement fertility in the West, but is is possible to increase fertility up to "just" replacement levels?
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.
More options
Context Copy link