Goodguy
2d ago
When one uses the word "freedom" in its most common, everyday meaning of "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action", that's not twisting language, that's just using the most common, everyday meaning of the word. I would argue that it's actually more of a twisting of language to use the word "freedom" to mean something more philosophical, like you are doing. But in any case, this is just a semantic argument.
Goodguy
2d ago
No, I'm just using the normal, everyday meaning of the word "freedom", the one that can be stated as "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action". In that sense, we are undoubtedly sexually more free than people were 150 years ago. If you prefer a different definition of "freedom" that's fine, this is just a semantic argument after all. My point, though, is that I did not say what I said because I have some kind of progressive ideology. I said it because it's objectively true if you use the normal, most common, everyday "man in the street" kind of definition of the word "freedom".
Goodguy
2d ago
I feel like your statement kind of might just boil down to "things I like are freedom, things I don't like are not freedom".
From an objective point of view, we absolutely have more sexual freedom right now than people in the West did 150 years ago.
I think one can argue that the modal man of 1875 was some farmer who spent his life at the mercy of his father and his local community, or some city factory worker who was at the mercy of his local political machine's boss. Also, they had actual conscription back then, the government could force you to join the army against your will (technically that's still true but in practice it's extremely extremely unlikely to actually happen). More freedom back then? I doubt it.
I think that getting away with assassination doesn't just require smarts (and it requires plenty of that in our heavily surveilled world where there are cameras all over the place), it also requires a lot of coolness of nerve so that you don't make simple, stupid mistakes in the middle of the act, in the throes of overwhelming fear, adrenaline and other kinds of emotions. I think that there are very very few people in the world who not only have the smarts to get away with an assassination of a high-value target, but also have the sort of emotional coolness where they can actually apply their intelligence to the situation while they are doing it, instead of having 90% of their smarts wiped away in the moment by raw adrenaline while trying to pull off the act, and/or just stumbling into the sort of friction that always happens when trying to implement a plan in real life as opposed to in theory or daydreams ("no plan survives contact with the enemy"). Dostoevsky wrote a great description of how this works in Crime and Punishment.
At this point, the main reason why I write about politics online isn't to change other people's minds necessarily, although I do enjoy that when it happens. I have too many more directly pressing personal concerns around money, personal relationships, and so on to dedicate any substantial amount of energy to attempting political change. I think at this point the main reason why I write about politics online is to get feedback that makes me feel less like an outlier. I equally dislike the left and the right, so it is affirming for me to discuss politics in places where not everyone is totally a fervent supporter of one political side or another. Places like Reddit and X generally disgust me, I dislike both the "everyone to the right of Bernie Sanders is an evil fascist and it is our duty to punch them" vibe and the "I am a based trad-wife-seeking Aryan and we should literally kill the libs" vibe. I wish I could find more places online with more of a detached, looking-at-politics-objectively vibe that avoids ideological dogmatism and that kind of simple "my political opponents are evil and we should kill them" moralism that is so common online. /r/moderatepolitics can be good sometimes. TheMotte is definitely more right-leaning than I am, but you can have decent interesting discussion here so I appreciate it. rdrama.net has a few sociopathic ghouls on it, but the politics discussion generally mocks both the fanatic left and the fanatic right so I appreciate that places as well. I can't really think of any other places, which really surprises me. One would think that, with hundreds of millions of people online, it should be easy to find many forums that avoid virtue/vice signaling, empty moralizing that treats the opponent as ontologicaly evil while saying nothing interesting about politics, or just general chimpanzee-like shit-flinging at others. But I haven't been able to find many.
I think that the US actually has an incredibly low level of political violence if you consider how easy it is to buy a gun here. Far from being a country rife with political violence, the US actually is a country where the vast, vast majority of people either don't care enough about politics to use violence, are not politically polarized enough to do political violence, are morally or ideologically against political violence, and/or simply don't want to get killed or spend decades in jail as a consequence of using political violence. I don't know what the relative significance of these different factors compared to each other is.
Surveillance and policing seem to have gotten to a point where it's very difficult to attempt an assassination and get away with it. Low-level unsolved murders of random ordinary people happen all the time, but the system takes political violence pretty seriously. See Mangione for example. And it turns out that very, very few Americans, no matter how politically outraged they are, are willing to throw their lives away for the sake of political violence. This goes for both the left and the right. It would be completely trivial for a leftist to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a young Republicans meeting, or for a right-winger to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a leftist protest. It requires no special planning, no careful strategy. Yet it almost never happens, even though there are hundreds of millions of guns in civilian hands in the US, and even if you don't have one it's usually pretty easy to get one.
Let's do a quick back-of-the-envelope estimate. Let's say that 1% of the adult US population would love to commit an assassination or several if they knew they would get away with it. That's already over 2 million people. Yet there are only a handful of political assassination attempts in the US every year. This shows that far from the US being rife with political violence (I know you're not arguing that it is, but just saying), the US actually has an almost shockingly, surprisingly low level of political violence, given how easy it is to attempt an assassination here against the average politician or corporate executive (successfully killing a President is very hard, but that isn't the case for the vast majority of politicians and corporate executives) and given how polarized the political discourse has become.
I do think that the "you'll almost certainly get caught if you try" factor is a very important one. It is part of the explanation for why actual political violence seems to so often be committed by mentally disturbed people instead of by fervent but largely mentally stable ideologues. The vast, vast majority of fervent ideologues in the US are not committed enough to their causes to throw their lives away for those causes' sake.
All that said, it does seem to me to be the case that the frequency of assassination attempts has been slowly increasing the last few years. Very very slowly and nowhere comparable to how polarized and frothing the political discourse has become in the last 20 years (the left and right regularly accusing each other of being fascists, pedophiles, and so on)... but still, very very slowly, increasing.
Goodguy
4d ago
I don't see any reason to think that the India-Pakistan war earlier this year came anywhere close to a nuclear war.
Goodguy
4d ago
The US participated in a massive campaign to lull Iran into thinking an attack was not going to happen immediately
I think that the campaign can't have been that massive, given that the US telegraphed the likelihood of something like this happening by starting to withdraw non-essential personnel from its Middle East embassies a few days ago.
Israel would have almost exactly the same national security interests and likely strategic patterns of behavior even if it had no element of racial-supremacist Abrahamic cult-myths, though. Its strategic behavior is much more driven by its status as a small country that is populated by an ethnic group with a recent history of being genocided and that has a powerful superpower friend than it is by Jewish ethno-supremacist sentiments or Abrahamic cult myths.
A similar train of thought, by the way, is also why I don't think Israel or the US have anything much to worry about if Iran develops nuclear weapons. Iran might be a theocratic state with a lot of political influence from true believers in Islam, but I think that the chance that, if it developed nuclear weapons, its leaders would launch a nuclear strike that would get themselves annihilated... is close to zero. Hence the idea that Israel must prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons no matter what strikes me as pretty silly if evaluated from a cold objective perspective (of course in practice, it's not surprising that emotions run high if another country rhetorically calls for your country's destruction and is trying to build nukes). Realistically speaking, if Iran develops nukes relations between the two countries will probably just follow the India-Pakistan model.
Why has the tech sector revolutionized work without dramatical increases in productivity
Is this true? Granted, it's hard to measure productivity. But US GDP per capita, adjusted for inflation, has increased by about 40% since the tech boom began in the mid-1990s.
I wonder what are some good metrics of productivity.
Goodguy
9d ago
Granted, I don't understand economics very well. That said, I doubt that the amount of government spending as a fraction of the total economy is going to decrease, barring a collapse of the United States. The US federal budget as a fraction of the US GDP has actually been rather constant since the 1950s, with a slight but not huge upward trend: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S.
If we assume that government spending as a fraction of the economy is very unlikely to substantially decrease, which it probably will not since the political will for that simply does not exist on a large scale, then I figure that the government running a deficit is actually a good thing for me. Sure, they are spending a lot of money on stuff I do not want them to fund. But they are very unlikely to significantly reduce how much they spend, so for me at least having lower taxes seems beneficial, as opposed to having the government spend just as much money as now, but also fix the budget deficit by taxing me more.
This does not mean that we should stop trying to get the government to spend money on different things than it currently is. I'm just saying that, even if less government spending would be beneficial (a complex question), I don't see any realistic political pathway to making it happen.
What am I missing?
Goodguy
11d ago
No, if it was a staged fight there is no reason for Musk to use what in our society is the rhetoric equivalent of nuclear weapons, which is implying that Trump had sex with underage girls on Epstein's island. It would be easy to effectively stage a fight without going that far.
Also, there's Occam's razor. It seems more likely to me that these two guys, both of whom have a track record of being emotionally volatile, abrasive, and vindictive, actually did just get into a real spat, than that it is staged.
Musk also routinely drives traffic to various random X posts by posting one-liners like "Interesting" or "100%" in response to them. Which, while not any sort of heinous deceptiveness, nonetheless is clearly just a way to put his finger on the scales of what gets amplified without having to literally manipulate the algorithms. It's not the kind of action that a pure guileless engineering-minded person would take, I would think.
I also find it a bit hard to believe that Musk would get $300 billion without having some understanding of Machiavellians. In our society, pure brilliant engineer-types tend to max out at a net worth of a few tens of millions, don't they? To get more than that people generally need to have a lot of business acumen, and it's a bit hard for me to imagine having that level of business acumen without understanding how to deal with Machiavellians.
I do think that the overall notion of Musk as being more of an autist type and Trump more of a Machiavellian type seems correct to me, but I quibble with some of the details of Davon Eriksen's purported explanation.
Goodguy
19d ago
You are correct about my meaning. I probably should have made that more clear in my original comment.
Honest dating advice coaches aren't like "just improve yourself and then supermodels will jump on your cock every day", they're more like "improve yourself and you will be able to maximize whatever you're starting out with". It's not like the Internet dating advice space is just entirely made up of the sort of "bro just improve yourself and you'll start having to fend off supermodels all the time" material. There's plenty of that, but there is also more realistic stuff out there. Sure, there are many grifters out who promise unrealistic abilities, but there is also plenty of dating advice out there that actually works to maximize whatever basic gifts you started out with.
I don't know what serious actions could be taken about the issue on a wide-spread level other than sexual communism. But I myself do not desire sexual communism. Partly for a moral reason... I do not wish women to be coerced to have sex with people they would not otherwise want to have sex with. But also for non-moral reasons. I prefer to compete openly in the sexual marketplace and thus know from an ego perspective that whatever I am getting, I am getting due to my own qualities rather than because of some outside pressures. This is also why I have never had any interest in visiting prostitutes. Which is a funny two-sided thing. Because on the one hand it shows that I value sex for more than just sex, but then if I really dig down into it one of the main reasons why I don't want to visit prostitutes is just because it would be an ego decreaser. I just don't have a sex drive so high that I want to fuck no matter what... for me the satisfaction of having the other person want me is a key part of it, and while that might sound good abstractly, it actually might say more about my ego than about my morality.
In any case, I can't think of any political answer to the issue that wouldn't restrict women's liberties, and I'm not into restricting women's liberties. Most of why I'm not into it is because my morality, the rest is because of a sense that wanting to restrict women's sexual liberties as a man is loser-coded and the proper masculine thing to do is to let women do whatever they want and attract them anyway, not to try to restrict their sexual decisions.
There is something about the human psyche that makes it very difficult for many of us to actually emotionally come to terms with unfairness. We might understand the unfair nature of life perfectly well intellectually, yet not come to grips with it emotionally. We live in a world where some people are just born with vastly more wealth, and/or sex appeal, and/or intelligence, and/or health than others... there are things we can do to improve on our starting position, but there are no guarantees of success.
There is a tendency to develop compensatory psychological narratives, defense mechanisms... ideas like "in the afterlife god will judge us and I will be compensated for all of this unfairness", or "if I am a good boy I will be reincarnated in a higher caste", or "I swear in just two more weeks I'll launch the great people's revolution that overthrows the rich", or "women aren't attracted to me but they're a bunch of degenerate sluts anyway and I'm the real based sigma male, I don't really want those evil whores anyway".
Another common way of dealing with it is to give up on any hope of actually remedying the unfairness while emotionally latching on to more powerful groups through psychological identification mechanisms. One example of this is the depressed housewife who spends eight hours a day watching the lives of celebrities on TV so that she can emotionally exist in a virtual world in which she feels like she has some stake in their lives. Another is the nationalistic soldier who is willing to go fight and die for the interests of his country's elite class because he has become emotionally identified with the entire nation as if it was his family - even though, even if he wins the war and survives, he will become no richer for it.
I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of The Motte posters are well aware of the enormous variation in men's attractiveness to women. It's not like it's some secret knowledge that is only available in obscure corners of the dark web.
Goodguy
22d ago
makes sense that the revulsion is instinctual; from a biological standpoint women who intentionally seek out sex are malfunctioning since it's very risky for zero benefit.
Evolutionarily speaking there can be lot of benefit to a woman seeking out the best men instead of letting her genes' destiny just entirely depend on male decisions. This does not have to necessarily include seeking out actual sex with many men, but in practice the two will be correlated.
Goodguy
22d ago
Thinking of a lover being with another man in the present or the future distresses me. Thinking of a lover being with another man before I even met her does not affect me in the least bit.
Goodguy
22d ago
Your native community's sexual ethics do not surprise me, in the sense of me being surprised that they exist. When I say that I don't understand, I mean that, while I abstractly intellectually can mentally model the inner experience of men who are different from me in this way, I do not share their feelings. It is similar to how, I like broccoli and some people hate broccoli. I can mentally model not liking broccoli, but I don't really understand it from the perspective of my own tastes, all I can say is "oh well those people's tastes are different from mine".
I would never tell a man to settle for a girl, though, unless maybe he is desperate to have kids and is reaching the age where even a man has to just take the best out of whatever mother options are available or else go without progeny.
What I would tell him is that if he actually likes the girl, he shouldn't let the number of guys she has banged stop him. And if he just simply has a visceral repulsion to that idea, I'd say fine, then go find some other girl. But I would recommend that he examines his own feelings and tries to figure out whether this is a true repulsion, like just not being into fat people, for example, or whether this is just a temporary insecurity that goes away with more experience.
Instead of recommending to a man that he settle, I'd recommend that he either goes and finds more girls or that he becomes more comfortable with having no girls, since being alone is better than being in a bad relationship.
I wouldn't worry too much, abstractly, about whether her promiscuity made her less likely to stick with me, if she was making me happy in other ways and I didn't see any evidence that she was actually pursuing other guys. Especially given that, since it is extremely easy for an attractive woman to get laid, for a woman to only have had sex with 12 guys strikes me as almost closer to celibacy than to promiscuity. Any attractive woman could easily have sex with 1000 men if she for some reason wanted to.
As for thoughts and feelings for previous lovers, I would find it a bit weird if she didn't have any at all. If by thoughts and feelings you mean that she was still carrying a torch for them, pining over them, etc. then sure, I think that would be weird and I would not be into that at all. But I would find it strange and almost inhuman if she completely put them out of her mind as if they had never existed. I guess you probably mean the carrying a torch version, though.
How does a woman make it to her 30s without landing in a stable, committed relationship?
Well, it takes two to tango. Even assuming that the woman in question wants a stable, committed relationship, it's pretty easy for her to have a run of bad luck and end up dating one or more men for years each, but every time the guy turns out to be crazy, or there is some other incompatibility issue that is too much to overcome. Sure, sometimes it is more the woman's fault than the man's, but it's possible for even a well-intentioned and mentally stable woman who is seeking marriage and who puts effort into her relationships to just happen to spend years in relationships that turn out to go nowhere.
I think that men who are insecure (whether or rightly or wrongly) about their own sexual value on the market often fear and resent promiscuous women simply because the promiscuous woman is an extreme version of the already huge difference that these men feel between how easy it is for themselves to get laid and how easy it is for the average woman to get laid. Also, they fear the power differential in a relationship - they perceive that the woman could leave them at any moment and be fucking some other guy an hour later, meanwhile it might take them much longer to find a new sex partner. These fears are somewhat understandable, but become quite pathetic-looking when instead of being honestly acknowledged, they are instead wrapped up in some ideological cover such as religious LARPing, posting pictures of tradwives on social media, or performative misogyny meant to get likes from other men.
There are much healthier ways of dealing with this insecurity. For example: 1) maximizing one's own sexual value and game to the extent possible, 2) realizing that men and women have different kinds of advantages in the sexual marketplace and that it's not really a situation where women hold all the cards, 3) realizing that since women tend to not be as driven by constantly wanting to fuck hot new partners as men are, even a relatively promiscuous woman, if she actually is into you, is not necessarily going to ditch you to go bang some other guy who happened to wander by. And if she does, it's not the end of the world, there are plenty more women out there.
Very high status men don't need to feel any of this kind of insecurity to begin with. If a business mogul or rock star's hot partner leaves him, he can easily find a replacement an hour later, too. Very high status men generally don't spend their time chasing hot women, they spend their time fending off all the hot women who are throwing themselves at them. So these men just have much less psychological motivation to care about a woman's promiscuity than the average man does.
Yes. Some of them just used this extra freedom to make decisions that made them less free. But the decriminalization itself made them freer. They just didn't necessarily make good choices with that freedom. Part of what freedom is, is that it sometimes allows people to make decisions that make them less free in the long run. That does not mean that it is not freedom, though.
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