More popular than before, but still not that popular among Republicans. I think that the average Republican is at least not anti-Israel (and even some of the ones who dislike Israel hate Muslims even more), does not actually care about the size of government at all but just occasionally mouths words about wanting small government, and believes that Trump was not involved with anything bad having to do with Epstein.
Goodguy
1d ago
Recent events have peeled off some of Trump's Republican support, but generally speaking Republicans still love him. He bestrides the Republican party like a colossus.
Goodguy
1d ago
But most people who criticize Clav don't criticize him for trying to become better looking, they criticize him for encouraging men to do dangerous things like using a cocktail of powerful drugs to improve their looks and lower their social anxiety and to hit themselves in the face with a hammer (which is not actually particularly dangerous I think, since the hammer in question is more like a rubber mallet, but the critics don't know that because they don't bother to actually read a lot about looksmaxxing).
The majority of women's looksmaxxing attempts do not extend to the kind of dangerous practices that Clav encourages men to do. Even most cosmetic surgery, when done by actual doctors, might be less dangerous than Clav's drug habits, although of course all surgery carries some risk of severe injury.
Goodguy
1d ago
Yeah, people find it funny because they don't actually know much about Clavicular, so they don't realize that he doesn't claim to be the most attractive man in the world.
Goodguy
1d ago
You are absolutely right, and it's not even just in the right-wing media bubble. Telling men to get in shape, dress better, get a haircut, and develop better social skills is some of the most common mainstream dating advice for men. Leftists will generally give men the same advice. Another common bit of mainstream dating advice is to just treat women like human beings, which some people might think is "woke"... except if you interpret it correctly, it's actually not. Human beings have sexual desires, and treating women like human beings who have sexual desires is good advice. So is the advice to look better and develop better social skills.
I'm not sure that knocking out the power plants and oil refineries would affect Iran's ability to deter commercial ships from transiting the Strait of Hormuz or make the Iranian leadership more likely to make a deal.
Iran's drone and missile arsenal doesn't depend on the power plants and oil refineries. They might be able to keep the Strait closed to commercial shipping all the way until the midterms with their current remaining arsenal, unless the US launches a ground invasion.
The Iranian leadership likely sees this war as existential and views the idea of surrendering after getting their power plants and oil refineries knocked out as being the equivalent of putting themselves in Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi's position (killed by their own domestic political opponents after the West launched a military operation that allowed those political opponents to come to power). Even if they don't get killed after surrendering, they would probably get Maduroed, their lives as they knew them over. In any case, if they are not surrendering after being directly targeted for assassination, often successfully, I don't know why they would surrender after power plants and oil refineries get bombed.
Bombing their civilian infrastructure would weaken Iran long-term, but at the cost of a lot of bad PR for the US, a general reduction in the US' soft power in the world.
A ground invasion would work pretty swiftly and effectively, but Trump does not seem to have the will to do it for whatever reason.
Goodguy
2d ago
They do have perverse incentives. However, in certain contexts it might be possible for them to be profitable even if they do not act on the perverse incentives. For example, medical professionals make money despite, generally speaking, not acting on the perverse incentives that would make them more profitable if they did a somewhat worse job of treating patients. Or am I wrong about this, and medical professionals actually do pursue these perverse incentives more often than I think they do? In any case, of course in medicine there is strong government regulation trying to prevent people from acting on the perverse incentives, whereas in dating apps there is not.
I am, but I think that most women I've been with have been less promiscuous than me, or about equally promiscuous, so I'm not sure that my impression of female horniness has necessarily been formed by experiences with unusually promiscuous women.
That said, I guess that "less promiscuous than me" might possibly still be more promiscuous than the average woman. I've certainly spent a large fraction of my sexual energy among the kind of people who did not settle down in a long-term relationship at a young age.
Now that I think of it, it's also kind of hard to compare male and female promiscuity anyway. A man and a woman might have the same level of raw desire to fuck, yet fuck different quantities of other people due to other factors... it's easier for the average woman to find a willing sex partner quickly than it is for a man, but on the other hand, casual sexual adventuring is also physically more dangerous for her than it is for a man. Etc.
Goodguy
3d ago
There's something counter-productive about women going on dating apps, as needing to jump through hoops, filing forms and boxes and so on is a signal that a woman is not attractive enough to just have a knight in shiny armor show up for her.
Really, it's the same for a man. Attractive men (some combination of looks, personality, and social presence/status) don't need to put more than a cursory effort into getting women. They just show up to places and women make themselves available to them - maybe not every single time they go somewhere, but often enough that "meeting decent women who are willing to fuck" is a solved problem. Of course, meeting a woman that the attractive man would be willing to settle down with is a completely different issue.
So I think that if an attractive man is using a dating app, it's just for convenience.
Goodguy
3d ago
Are women actually less horny than men on average? I think I have about an average sex drive for a man, and while it's hard to remember clearly, I feel that at least half of the women I've fucked had a higher sex drive than me. They might have been more selective than the average man when it comes to deciding whom to fuck, but once they selected me (or any other man who passed the selection, I'm sure), they wanted to fuck a lot.
Of course, it's possible that my behavior and/or looks has been selecting for unusually horny women. Hard to say.
As for the gay couple example: I'm not actually sure that works as differently from straight couples as you might think. Sure, men like (or think they like) random acts of intercourse. But men also like sexual variety, indeed it's possible that most men are hard-wired to desire sexual variety whether they want to fuck women or they want to fuck men. What if Stevie suggests the quickie and, despite their marriage being happy in all other aspects, Fred thinks "Not again... I'm tired of fucking this guy"? Besides the issue of sexual variety, it's also likely that one of either Fred or Steve just naturally has a higher sex drive than the other, even though they are both men.
Goodguy
4d ago
This is in the US. That is interesting, I did not know that Europe might have more discussion of the topic coming from "ordinary people".
I don't think the theory of a civilization scale parasite is necessary. There is a simpler explanation: the vast majority of people simply don't see falling fertility rates as a problem. It's not that people would naturally see it as a problem but a memetic parasite is blinding them. It's that people generally don't see it as a problem unless something brings it to their attention. The vast majority of people have never have paid any attention to social-level fertility rates at all. People 1000 years ago had large numbers of kids because of very local and immediate factors: basically, the poor needed kids for labor and as a form of welfare in old age, the rich could afford to have a bunch of kids and then not work much to take care of them (servants could do it), contraception was primitive, women viewed having kids as more central to their identity than they do now, and so on. People were having many kids because of these immediate local factors, not out of a personal interest in their society's overall fertility. When you take people's basic disinterest in overall fertility rates and then remove the factors that previously kept fertility high, the fertility rate drops. The removal of the factors that had previously kept fertility rates high was not caused by some singular memetic parasite. It was caused by several separate things: technological change that reduced the importance of physical human labor, improvements in contraception, the feminist movement. Now of course, these things are related: the technological changes also helped to enable feminism to begin with, improvements in contraception were partly motivated by a feminist-leaning desire to help women, and so on. But to think of them all as being part of one social contagion is, I think, going too far. It overly compresses the actual complexity of the historical phenomena into one supposed dimension.
Now, one could certainly argue that there exists a widespread ideology that helps to make it harder for people to tackle the problem even once they begin to think of it as a problem. One can call it "leftism", or whatever. But even if one removed this ideology, that does not mean that people would automatically start to think of falling fertility rates as a problem. That's a separate thing. The "survival instinct" that you mention does not activate until and unless the problem becomes very visible. And we are not yet at that point. So falling fertility rates fall into the same class of problems as climate change: the vast majority of people do not have any sort of inherent tendency to pay attention to the problem. They only begin to pay attention to it either after individuals and groups put significant efforts, on a massive scale, into "raising awareness" of the problem, or after the problem has begun to create such obvious negative consequences that even the average person notices it.
Goodguy
4d ago
I think part of the reason is this: It's easy to imagine the supposed Russian threat. It is very unlikely that Sweden would fight Russia any time in the forseeable future, but pretty much anyone in Sweden over the age of 7 or so could imagine a war against Russia, and of course the idea of a war with Russia became much easier to imagine about 4 years ago than it had been before. Fertility rates, on the other hand, are something that only a small fraction of people think about. I don't think I have ever, in my entire life, heard anyone discuss fertility rates "in real life", outside the Internet. Personal fertility, sure, or the fertility of friends and family members. But not fertility rates. That's a topic the discussion of which is mostly confined to certain government circles and to certain usually right-leaning online spaces.
Goodguy
6d ago
To summarize my own viewpoint:
The existence of consciousness makes pure reductionist materialism/physicalism non-credible.
However, there is no good evidence for and no good argument in favor of any of the various conventional religions (Judaism, Christanity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or any of the others).
It is possible that the nature of consciousness is in principle beyond the reach of any sort of rational or scientific investigation. And I consider it almost certain that it is beyond the reach of any sort of rational or scientific investigation that would seek to reduce it to a purely material/physical explanation.
To the extent that I am spiritual, it is because I perceive this mystery. I am more or less comfortable with, and find beauty in, the mystery as a mystery. Not because I would not like to know the answer. I would love to know. But it is not clear that it is possible to know. The various answers that people have tried to give over the course of human history are all, as far as I can tell, not credible. The existence of the mystery, on the other hand, is real. We do not know the answer, but we do know that there is a mystery. And that in itself is spiritual.
Goodguy
6d ago
The STEM people are convinced that Science Explains It All, us religious types have been in this fight once too often before, and we end up talking past each other.
There is a third category that I belong to: people who think that it is quite likely that science will never be able to be able to explain consciousness, and are thus not materialists/physicalists, yet who at the same time are not religious in the conventional sense of the word - that is, we believe that there likely is something beyond the material in existence, something that likely is in principle beyond the reach of science, but we do not believe in any of the established religious traditions and do not believe in some kind of divine creator-intelligence, unless that divine creator-intelligence is simply a synonym for "the universe".
Goodguy
7d ago
Realistically, it would be such a gigantic insult to the US' standing in the world that, even though a large fraction of the country and of politicians would be happy about it, the US' leaders would feel compelled to take strong measures. Chinese nuclear weapons and enormous conventional arsenal would, I think, prevent the US from launching a full-scale conventional war against China (but full-scale war is not out of the question). The US would immediately detain every important Chinese citizen and PRC-connected individual on its soil and in territories under its control. The US would also begin a full-scale naval blockade of Chinese shipping. The question with the blockade would be, how close to Chinese soil would the US risk moving its naval forces. In any case, given geography and US naval strength, the US could certainly effectively end China's overseas trade.
It's an extreme hypothetical, however, since China has little to gain and much to lose from taking Trump hostage. Vance, whatever he privately feels about Trump's China policies, would feel politically compelled to not only continue, but even to expand on Trump's anti-China moves in response to China taking Trump hostage.
Goodguy
12d ago
Some Native American hunter-gatherers used alcohol too, but it's probably easier for farmers to make in large quantities I suppose.
There might also be a factor, though, of greater social disruption leading to the greater alcohol abuse by North American natives as opposed to Mesoamerican natives. That's if there actually is higher abuse, of course. The Mesoamericans went through very profound social disruption, but most of them went from being farmers working for native elites to being farmers working for Spanish elites. Many of the North American natives, on the other hand, were forced entirely off their lands, killed, or "just" had their original ways of life almost entirely ended.
Goodguy
13d ago
Do modern descendants of Mesoamericans have better alcoholism resistance than modern descendants of North American natives? The Mesoamericans, after all, were not hunter-gatherers, they had advanced civilizations that were perhaps roughly at the scientific/technological level of the Mediterranean civilizations of about 1000 BC.
Goodguy
14d ago
I think that the Marxist platform is very diverse because there are many kinds of Marxists. I think that most of them do not want to abolish the family.
As for Marx himself, as far as I know he did not want to abolish the family, he just wanted to get rid of the "bourgeois" style of family.
I'm no expert on Marxism though, so correct me if I'm wrong.
Some of the ethnic groups of the Caucasus tend to look quite different physically from Europeans or even from Iranians, and many of the languages of the Caucasus are not Indo-European despite the Caucasus being located very near to the likely origin point of the Indo-European languages and despite the Caucasus having spent thousands of years having strong Indo-European-speaking powers on its borders, so I suppose it's possible that they too retain strong pre-Indo-European genetic traits, although I have no idea whether there is any connection to Early European Farmers.
Yeah, I think there is definitely a danger to escapism, but not all fantasy/sci-fi worlds have a negative effect, at least not on all people.
I've spent many hours with J.R.R. Tolkien's stuff, diving into relatively obscure writings by him, reading other people's theories... but it all tends to have a sort of uplifting, elevating, ennobling quality. I disagree with his moral worldview in which goodness is on a deep level more or less synonymous with obedience to the kind of God who is ok with drowning an entire continent because its people were corrupted by an evil being that He himself created in the first place. But that doesn't stop me from absorbing moral lessons and spiritual ennoblement from his work.
H.P. Lovecraft's writings are very different, and not what I would call ennobling, but from them I've received a lot of education in how to write in an interesting and grammatically advanced way, also in things like architecture and history. And there is something that I find very mystically interesting in his concept of "adventurous expectancy" that he touched on in some of his letters.
On a different note, there is Stephen King... I like his Americana, the noble blue collar workers and artists, the landscape of gas stations, diners, and small towns. It is also just good clean entertainment, there are many Stephen King fans but I've never heard of anyone becoming so obsessed with his work that it began to harm their lives.
Even something like Star Wars, which some people do get obsessed by, has a fun playful quality. It's basically an homage to many different kinds of other real and fictional worlds... tales of knightly chivalry, greaser movies, samurai movies, the Roman Empire, Nazi Germany, etc... but in space, and all put together into one fictional universe. I've spent some hours reading through Star Wars lore, but I've never been tempted to buy Star Wars merchandise or devote more than a small fraction of my life to Star Wars.
There is also reading about actual history, which I've done a lot of. It can have an escapist quality, but one can also learn valuable lessons from it. It would be difficult, I think, to have a reasonable notion of modern politics and geopolitics without having read history. There's something to be said for understanding today's reality from first principles and direct perception, and certainly that has a lot of value, but reading history is at the least a valuable aid, at least if one does not let it bias you too much (and of course one can also become biased while attempting to understand today's reality from first principles and direct perception). I've spent many an hour reading about obscure details of this or that World War 2 campaign, but I've never become tempted to devote more than a small fraction of my life to such activity.
I do think there is a real danger. I was maybe too bookish for my own good when I was a teenager. But I am not sure to what extent the distance that I kept from more direct involvement with reality was caused by my bookishness, and to what extent the bookishness was just what I did while I had that distance from more direct involvement with reality. It is possible that even if I had forced myself to put away the books, I would not have engaged more directly with reality any quicker than I actually did. It's hard to say.
What eventually drove me more out of the books was a combination of things... making friends and getting invited to do things, sexual frustration forcing me to learn how to develop social skills, becoming more rebellious in my attitude toward social structures like school, going away to college and living on my own, also just a deep sense of "there is more to life than just reading about life" and a deep dissatisfaction with a life spent merely on reading.
Some people get caught at some point on that journey and never actualize much further. But if it wasn't for the fantasy worlds, it's possible that they would not necessarily actualize much faster, or at all. I don't know. I just know that for me, the worlds of books have been a beneficial and, I think, not really particularly stunting part of my life. On the contrary, I think that they have probably enriched my life more than they have taken away.
Goodguy
15d ago
I think no, right-wing authoritarian governments have a similar level of tendency to suppress dissent.
Suharto killed over 500,000 civilians in the 1960s as part of a supposed anti-communist battle.
As for the Soviet Union, it was great at suppressing dissent back during Stalin's time. After it softened, the tendency to suppress dissent reduced to such an extent that by the time the system fell apart, it barely used its massive security forces and military to try to hold itself together by force.
Goodguy
19d ago
I don't think those urban communities are underserved when it comes to abortion. I know you're just being snarky, but I mean, still. I think it makes strategic sense for pro-choice activists to focus their efforts on parts of the US where there are legal challenges to abortion.
Goodguy
21d ago
Depends on how Chad the Chad is and what woman or women he is interested in getting with at the moment. Chad might strategize if it's a question of how to sleep with a gorgeous woman he feels is out of even his league. Chad might strategize if for whatever reason he has become particularly interested in a given woman, if he has started to think about her in more than just a hit-it-and-quit-it sexual way. But when it comes to just run-of-the-mill getting laid, I don't think Chad strategizes much. He just feels sexually confident, playful, and relaxed. This projects out effortlessly from him in his eyes, facial expressions, body language, vocal tone, and subjects of conversation when he is interacting with a woman. He experiences interacting with women as something fun, pleasurable, and playful rather than like an existentially fraught job interview. This too communicates itself to them. Normally I think the extent of his strategizing is to just come up with some "excuse" to start talking to a given woman or women, if an excuse is even necessary. Once the interaction starts, I don't think he's thinking much about what he's doing at all. This all applies whether he's a Chad who is Chad because he looks great or if he's a Chad who is just sexually confident without necessarily having great looks.
I don't think that woke is over. However, I do think that woke has been dealt serious body blows in the last few years and is much weaker than many people here thought it would be at this point.
It's not just that Trump won despite being widely considered both by wokes and non-wokes to represent a repudiation of wokism.
It's also that woke failed to censor the Internet. Non-wokes successfully created myriads of their own websites. Woke didn't even manage to destroy 4chan. Non-woke took over X. Race realism, actual racism, anti-immigration stances, and open misogyny are now common on mainstream social media. Even on Reddit a few non-woke positions can be seen: for example, being against mass immigration is common on /r/europe, even while the sub sticks to woke positions on all other major issues.
In addition to this, woke overreached on policing and affirmative action. It is now common to see Trump-hating Democratic Party voters on city subreddits support strong policing against street crime and vagrancy. City residents noticed the 2020 crime spike.
Even back in 2020, California Proposition 16, which would have made certain banned kinds of affirmative action legal, failed to pass. In San Francisco in 2021 a public backlash caused the school board to scrap a plan to rename a bunch of schools for woke reasons.
Woke also overreached on trans issues. Peak trans activism is over. Woke pronouns are starting to seem like a brief, now-dated fad. Still in use, but much less talked about these days, and they seem to be of a certain time period.
None of this is to say that woke has been defeated. It will probably rise again in some form, and relatively softer versions of woke continue to have strong influence in institutions. But woke has not overwhelmed the country like many feared, nor is it likely to do so even after Trump is gone.
To be fair, one of the reasons why woke is much weaker than many people here thought it would be at this point is precisely because many people all over the place who thought that it would become overwhelmingly powerful took action to try to stop it.
More options
Context Copy link