IdiocyInAction
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User ID: 695
IdiocyInAction
11d ago
At the cost of the chilling effect of the government being able to correlate your posts better. Mind you they already can probably for the vast majority of unsophisticated users so who knows, maybe it doesn't matter.
IdiocyInAction
11d ago
It may not be wrong but it's also a bit of a thought-terminating cliché. Anyone who you disagree with is a pernicious putinbot or whatever. It's people discovering the island of quokkas that was the open internet and then poisoning the commons for marginal geopolitical gains. I am not saying this is to be fought, just observing.
IdiocyInAction
11d ago
What are Ukrainian women living in Poland meant to do, live out their lives as chaste old maids waiting for dead men?
Yeah, kind of? Have you seen what these people have to go through to defend their "homeland"? What does "country" even mean at that point.
IdiocyInAction
11d ago
Are the men of the UK the most absolutely cucked human beings to ever exist on planet earth ever in the history of time? Is there another time in history where this would have even been remotely tolerated? You allowed a foreign rape-brigade to rape an entire generation of your children, and the response has been essentially nothing.
Are these women meaningfully their women at this point? Would you ruin your life for someone who considers you despicable? I am sure fathers (if present at all, this is all lower-class people) should have done more but the people in those gangs probably knew how to pick out the vulnerable ones. You can't kill chivalry and then expect no consequenes.
IdiocyInAction
11d ago
People actually have less sex than ever and the younger generations of neurotic women probably dress less revealingly than they used to as it's become a status symbol to be in a relationship even if you try not to be appealing (I believe that is what a "Pick-Me" or whatever is)
The gradual death of the open internet and ideological capture and where this all leads
One interesting thing you get to do when you get older is to take stock of your predictions, observe trends over a longer timespan and see if your mental models were actually worth their salt.
When I was growing up, I was at the very tail end of the people who still grew up with what I'd like to call a relatively "open" internet. Open in the sense that there was no Reddit, no walled gardens, the iPhone was young, Facebook was beginning to be a thing when I was in school.
Internet norms were very libertarian in most "serious" places, much more male, much more autistic. People thought that we'd have this open space forever where there are no central authoritarian rulers, censorship was mocked as technically impossible even with the Great Chinese Firewall having been a thing, the Arab spring was heralded as a prototype of internet-enabled uprising against authoritarian rulers, the whole thing was very much end-of-history-like. Things like the EFF and Richard Stallmann were relevant, nerds cared about open source, etc.
Then it all came crashing down. People began to concentrate on social media, on sites like Reddit. Network effects did their thing and centralised power and moderation. Eternal September became truly eternal. The word "echo chamber" became a thing. Smartphones meant tech literacy was no longer a prerequisite. The whole thing became politicised, with Trump, Cambridge Analytica, etc. Now everyone is a Russian, Chinese, Israeli shill. Nobody ultimately cares about privacy, censorship, speech norms, etc. that much. Stallmann got cancelled, I think the EFF and the various open source orgs are now all either into AI grifting or grievance stuff. It's gone or going away. I won't look at wrongthink when I have secure-boot enabled TPM-secured age verification built into my OS and sending all my wrongthink to the government.
It was fun while it was closed up. I am sure none of this is novel.
But the interesting thing is the further direction of travel.
- Censorship is steadily moving further and further into the Overton window
Australia and Britain now have age-verification laws which require everyone to submit ID. I think some more authoritarian Asian countries (like South Korea) already have this for things like video games. It is also talked about to make things like VPNs illegal or harder to access in the UK (with the usual suspects pointing out that this puts the UK in company with countries like Russia and NK), the other non-US Anglosphere countries usually follow (seriously Australia/UK/Canada/NZ have a weird thing for paternalism). The sad thing is that this is bipartisan and nobody really opposes this. The evidence base for social media bans is actually quite thin so this will probably not even make the kids not miserable while entrenching ideological control
You can picture children being fed state-backed news from a young age now too, which I guess is Lindy in a way. Will probably entrench and accelerate existing biases and trends even further though. I don't expect "peak woke" to have been passed.
- Censorship is very unevenly applied
The big boogy-men of the Internet are incels, right wingers and Andrew Tate. Incel discourse is a personal bugbear of mine because it is completely detached from reality in the sense that even though even right-wingers come up with plenty of theories about supposed resentful incel violence, the people most likely to rape and murder women are actually the sex havers. But I digress.
So the governments come up with weird dystopian schemes of censoring and tracking this stuff while other kinds of probably actually harmful stuff (neurotic and mentally ill women amplifying their neuroses about men and society, viz. the "Angry Young Woman", race-grievance amplification, various untrue "tax the rich stuff" verging into blood libel and calls for assassinations) is left untouched, amplified or even supported. Moral panics are nothing new I suppose.
- LLMs are the ultimate frontier
I am a very heavy user of LLMs. I talk to them basically all day at work at this point. Not everyone does, there are still plenty of people who don't use LLMs but younger people use them more than others. I imagine usership heavily skews intellectually as well, as a lot of the general population hates interacting with textual media. I imagine that in the coming years the censors and nudgers will also try to get a front-row seat to this as well, so when you ask for certain things you not only get a Reddit Markov Chain but one where all the "wrong" opinions have been RLFH'd out.
In the future when everyone outsources their thought processes to LLMs that presents a level of ideological centralisation Stalin could have only dreamt of. Should Amanda Askell et al. get to decide how everyone thinks? Maybe not in my opinion, but who knows what'll this stuff do to the kids.
- The US being a holdout or not?
This stuff is particularly pernicious in the non-US anglosphere. I think the EU is also thinking about OS/device-level censorship but in Germany a court struck down the social media ban idea for kids for now (with the argument being something like "kids are people", which is very Kantian and German-idealist in a way). I think California or something tried to force the Linux kernel to put this stuff in and right-wingers will jump on this just as left-wingers would, with different bugbears (porn for right-wingers, wrongthink for left-wingers). Not sure if the US will be a holdout or not. At least speech norms are a thing.
As someone who skews Libertarian, this is all a great disappointment, especially because I like being able to argue with smart people, even if they have viewpoints many consider despicable. I personally mostly just want to be left alone and not have goons sent to people's houses because of wrongthink. Do they still make the kids read Orwell? But I guess not only has the experiment of giving everyone a seat at the table to talk to each other failed spectacularly, it has also manifested a vector of ideological state control hitherto unparalleled that governments are now starting to seriously use. Who knows, maybe complaining about having to pay 50+% of my paycheck to Boomer UBI will be criminalised in 20 years. At least the Chinese are honest about this stuff and don't pretend to be into free speech.
IdiocyInAction
27d ago
Well in my mind society deemed women mature when they fulfilled their gender tole which was mostly wife, mother, etc.
Also why spinster lacks a male equivalent
IdiocyInAction
27d ago
"Spinster". However current western society expects, for better or for worse, almost nothing from women (one could argue, in a "the purpose of a system is what it does” sense, that it exists primarily for the whims of women) so the term is outdated.
IdiocyInAction
1mo ago
That depends on the society. There have been plenty of social contracts and there are plenty of social contracts that have absolutely no problem placing obligations on women.
IdiocyInAction
1mo ago
Fairness being something only autistic people want is something someone came up with here but it's not really correct in the sense that only autistic people care about fairness; autistic people merely care more about mechanical rules rather than things like inclusivity or reciprocity, but people still deeply care about their notions of what their deserts should be, that they get a decent deal. The entire edifice of western thought and society is built upon some idea of (Christian) fairness. Fairness is so important to people that income inequality, etc. is the biggest topic du jour. All this stuff is about fairness. The entire idea of bodily autonomy you cite is downstream of that.
The ultimate question is, to paraphrase a book title, whose justice, whose notion of fairness? Or if we forgo fairness entirely, then what? What virtues, what values is your post-fairness society based on? It used to be Christian-adjacent virtues, but I guess now it's post-Christian "woke" virtues like racial equity (is that not fairness?) and "bodily autonomy".
A very common bias or tendency I see among ideologues of different stripes is that they implicitly carry a value system and expect everyone to abide by it and just not care about "what's in it for me". But people do care about that. You have to think about what your value system actually is, what it's based on, what are its precepts. Otherwise people will defect, your system will lose alignment, bad actors will fill the vacuum.
If we go with a value system of "nature is unfair", then we move past our corpse of Christian morality straight into "the weak suffer what they must, the strong take what they can". Which is a value system you see and which exists, like as Judge Holden articulates in Blood Meridian or more broadly a sort of law of the jungle. Or maybe you have some sort of gynocracy in mind. Or maybe you think AI will save us all. We shall see. But it's not a value system which would tend to place women's suffering or bodily autonomy very highly at all.
Things don't happen until they do. If a war happens then your value system of women's bodily autonomy being the prime concern of society might collide with weak armies and men fleeing (as they did in Syria, Ukraine, etc.) and the barbarians raping all your women (or worse, like what happened to German women after WW2). Then nature will truly assert itself. That is also a value system not based on fairness.
I guess you might just say your value system includes noble male self-sacrifice in return for nothing. Again, you might find it a bit hard to get buy-in for that.
IdiocyInAction
1mo ago
Women report significant and markedly lower sex drives and also far more variance in sex drive than men over their lifetimes. This is pretty robust. Also women's sex drives are more reactive than men's.
IdiocyInAction
1mo ago
At least in Europe, mass migration on the scale that it's a noticeable and negative thing for most people is actually shockingly recent. And if you dig into when it hit various countries, there absolutely was backlash, pre-2010s included. German guest workers were promised to be temporary. Asian migration to Australia was promised to be modest. The US had such backlash that until 1965ish there was a law on the books to basically freeze their demographics.
I would also argue that the idea that restrictions = nazism and racism post 1945 was used in the west to push it heavily. Also, usually populist parties that actually stopped migration also bundled rather odious populist policies and/or nationalist stuff with the whole thing. Why that is can be discussed at another time.
IdiocyInAction
1mo ago
First of all, having no or very controlled family reunification and discerning permanent residency and citizenship does not preclude getting geniuses. Singapore, which, if it weren't well run, would be a much worse place to migrate to than the US, manages to attract very good people just fine.
Secondly, while I admire what Jensen Huang built to an extent, it's not trivially true that in his absence there wouldn't be an equal or marginally worse Nvidia equivalent. Indeed, many GPU manufacturers exist and it does not follow that a more restrictionist US would not be at the technological frontier.
Thirdly, this is ultimately a values question. You seem to find having "Asian Grinders" as a good thing. Many White Americans pre mass-migration, if told that their kids would have to compete in school and participate in the habits and mores of "Asian grinders", would have recoiled in horror. Not that they got a say anyway, no western country in history ever voted for mass migration.
Also, take Australia. Australia gets far more Asian grinders than the US ever did, indeed, it has some of the most elite immigration in the world measured by your system. And yet, it has stagnated against the US in the last decade in GDP terms and is facing heavy anti-immigrant backlash.
Immigrants actually have a pretty pro western selection effect overall. Some of the proudest most patriotic free market loving freedom desiring American dream appreciating people I know are immigrants.
If you look at actual polling you'll see that Asians are extremely happy to jump on the whole anti-white anti-western culture bus and that they often bring things like speech norms from their places of origin.
Here's Ronald Reagan saying this same thing.
Immigration in his time was from very different places than it is now.
Ultimately it gets down to whether nations should be economic zones or actual coherent nations.
If you only believe in short-term GDPmaxxing (which is a valid position I suppose), sure. View people as fungible, import the best according to some metrics.
The truth about the US immigration system is that most green cards are family-based and that cultures and people are not fungible. Even if Chinese people and Indians increase your GDP they also change your culture, make use of family reunification (which can often negate economic advantages), bring grievances from the old world with them and often promote ideologies that go against the host population (white people). Not to mention that things like IQ =/= social trust, "western" morality, etc.
People have pointed out that Asians are importing things like Childhood-destroying striverism (see the whole Vivek thing), Caste-like dynamics, etc.
I am not nearly as reactionary as a lot of posters here but I do not believe in the fungibility of people. I think the US was smart to consider demographics in immigration policy, not just due to economic reasons, but much more because of cultural cohesion. Just like places like Singapore or the UAE (to a lesser extent) do. That doesn’t mean "no Asians" but maybe being very discerning about to whom you grant permanent residency to is not a bad idea. And it's not like you could just move to India or China either.
IdiocyInAction
1mo ago
I am not necessarily a "believer" in the strong sense, but I guess I believe in a weaker sense that genetic differences can cause some group differences in intelligence. The extent and magnitude of that is debatable. I guess I simply don't believe group differences can be ruled out a priori and I also don't see why they should be especially unlikely. They are definitely not the sole explanatory variable but they seem to be a pretty good one for some cases.
I think for Indians the party line among strong proponents is that India is genetically very diverse and most immigrants are from higher-functioning sub populations. Hispanics are a mix, between blacks and whites and Arabs I don’t know what the party line is.
IdiocyInAction
1mo ago
IIRC Aspergers and the like are uncorrelated. Smart people are generally functional.
Do they make her a good wife? Doctors often have to move and she might care more about her patients than you. I can see this with other girlboss office jobs though. (Full disclosure: I am a guy dating one. I do love her but the job comes with a lot of negatives for relationships and well, the money angle isn't compelling for me for various reasons. A lot of my GFs female colleagues are single, none of the male ones are).
IdiocyInAction
1mo ago
After a certain age you also get adverse selection (on both sexes). Can concur with the bossbitch thing. Some women try hard to cultivate disagreeability which while maybe adaptive in their careers make her a pretty bad partner (especially if paired with being neurotic, which women are on average more than men). For men this kind of works (though only to a point, I'm not fully aligned with the manosphere people here) but for women it's generally quite off-putting.
Also as a higher earner myself I always felt like having a high earning partner raises expectations rather than providing any security. Some people would call me insecure for thinking this but I've not yet met a woman who contradicts this idea (I'm sure they are out there but most women want to be provided for).
IdiocyInAction
1mo ago
Intelligence and autism are probably anticorrelated.
I think you have to either be talking to a pretty high decoupler or approach this stuff in a sensitive and safe way. One reliable, evidence-backed thing is that women score about 0.5 SD or similar higher on neuroticism (OCEAN trait) than men - meaning the average woman has a bit of a more sensitive trigger for threats. Someone talking about this stuff can both trigger insecurities (bad for higher neuroticism) and also, as mentioned, make you look like someone who generally has a bit of zero-sum mindset.
Also female dating is and has never been grounded in cultivation of resources and positive traits. I find a lot of women get this wrong and are surprised in a kind of female nice-guy-ism, like I read about a female doctor that expected to be a hot commodity but was then surprised most men cared about looks, agreeableness, etc. over her career and that all her hard work didn't make her good prospect. So it might be hard for women to empathise with what this means to be a man (a common trope for men is that non-parental love is always conditional). As a man this stuff sounds like acknowledgment of a tough (shared) reality, as a woman you might sound like someone who sees things as being an eternal competition and who can't care/love unconditionally which looks bad even for a platonic friend.
IdiocyInAction
1mo ago
A lot of women would discuss some of these if put using different terms.
Also, it doesn't just produce a negative female reaction. It produces a negative reaction in a lot of humans because you are signalling a lot of things by discussing these:
- Commoditising people ("SMV")
- Instrumentalising and dehumanising women for their fertility (even if everyone does that to an extent, signalling you do makes you look bad)
- Being superficial (everyone is to an extent, acknowledging and leaning into it is however again a negative signal)
You are probably also opening wounds and triggering insecurity about where they would stand in "SMV" or whatever. A lot of people find the Darwinian nature of early dating bad.
I think as humans a lot of us have an ideal of (unrealistic) somewhat unconditional care and of being loved for things we influence, for our deeds and words. Entire religions are founded on this. A big part of later-stage dating and relationships is about trust, kindness, reciprocity and related things.
The manosphere gets some regrettable aspects of dating and early relationship formation right but there is actual evidence that being a decent person is pretty important for actually having quality long-term relationships. If you are signalling early that you instrumentalise and commoditise people that is a pretty negative signal and will rightfully put people off. Not everyone would be of course, package this stuff in the right language and I'm sure you could discuss it with some women.
I honestly get put off when people enthusiastically talk about having a zero-sum mindset about these things even if I think they have a point. It's just a signal that this person is probably not very kind. And why would you want to talk about this enthusiastically and with a partner? It's honestly inherently quite an awkward topic.
I think it's important to first identify who the principal opposition to age gap relationships is and at least in my experience, it's almost always women. "Dirty Old Man" and the like. In particular, it's older women. (Not absolutely old but older than the younger age gap partner). Which makes sense. Men famously have a rather constant age of women they find attractive. IIRC in practice age gap relationships are actually rather rare but if an average guy got to choose an idealized partner she'd probably be about 20-25 in age. Which is usually just biology. Just like an idealised female would pick a 6'3 billionaire.
Women are on average better at things like using emotive language and at enforcing and creating social norms ("the longhouse"). Indeed, I can think of no real social norms that have recently been created by men. Women excel in doing things like creating social legitimisation for personal bugbears (see the proliferation of female-centered therapy language). Since we live in a post-violent, heavily language and discourse centered world and since the discourse creators are now all female, you should expect "the discourse" to reflect the issues and wishes of the women forging the discourse.
So that's something to keep in mind with age gap discourse, a lot of it's probably the collective grievance of older women in terms of not wanting to compete with younger women for higher-value mates.
IIRC actual research finds that large age-gap relationships aren't that common but also that they tend to produce slightly better and more durable relationships. I think that 18 is a reasonable Shelling point for these things. People are allowed far more destructive things from that age than dating someone older than them.
Ask Sahaj: Isn’t it racist to insist your kids marry within their race?
This article posits it's OK to demand your kids marry another Indian (or South Asian), due to, uh, racism or something, while it's not OK for whites to do this.
Cultural context matters here, too. In many collectivist cultures, where the group is prioritized over the individual, the norm around marriage is that it’s a family affair. Love is not between two individuals but a joining of families, so things such as what the partner’s parents do, or social standing, can matter more because each family is inheriting the other family’s reputation. The first questions my parents asked when I told them about my now-husband was what did his parents and brothers do, how did they spend their time. What they were really asking was: Can they protect you? Will they be able to provide for you? Will they tarnish your name? When a daughter gets married to someone else’s son, tangible proof of stability, or security, can matter in a way that may not be as relevant here. It took time to challenge this narrative and given the context in which they grew up — with their gendered roles and marriage norms — I can understand their concern.
Well, but the point is you left your collectivist culture. Marriage in the modern west is an individualist thing. Also note the shameless promotion of family honour ("tarnish your name")
In the process of immigration, a lot is lost that cannot be seen. Things such as family roles that are left behind, access to general and family support, cultural norms from how to get money from a bank to the social etiquette at the park or school. Because so many strands are broken along the journey, the ones that remain — such as cultural traditions/rituals and language — are held on to even tighter. There’s often a fear that a culture will end with the next generation, and even an anxiety around being misunderstood or even isolated within one’s own family. Add to this a historical expectation that immigrants will assimilate, and, in order to challenge this, many may hold on even tighter to parts of their identity and culture to maintain a semblance of who they are.
I mean I get that it sucks that you don't get to keep your culture as such, but it's a good deal. You get to often 10-20x your resources after all. I guess the presupposition is that you should keep your culture and all it entails. Which is a bit disrespectful to the host country in my opinion. Do they not get a say at all about all this?
I don't care too much about the article or the premise itself, but I work with a lot of Indians. I don't generally dislike them at all. But I do notice certain behavioural patterns. I have also been to the place. I know people who spent a lot of time there. One thing that came up is that they can be very racist themselves. Almost fractally so in fact, it's quite incredible. Casteism is also still a thing, though less so in the big cities.
I guess it's also notable how they act as immigrants. Indians care a lot about honour. They are quite irredentist, think they are heirs to a great civilisation state, if only it weren't for the pernicious English they'd split the world in two with China or something. Many a time when I spent time with one I was lectured about how the west is in decline, how it's going to be an Indian century, etc. (insert 2025 superpower meme) They are quite protective of their culture, they don't change their names when they emigrate, don't outmarry as much (though WMIF is a thing) and are generally quite quick to jump on the whole AA grift.
Even as a tourist, when I'm in a foreign country, I generally try to be polite, I certainly don't serenade people with some weird nationalist screed about how my civilisation used to better than theirs etc. So this is quite foreign to me. Hindu nationalism can be very funny though as an outsider. It's a bit whimsical, a bit like Balkan nationalism.
There are a lot of allegations that they like hiring their own and well, I have seen this more or less first hand. Though Russians and others also do that (viz. "thick" vs. thin cultures, I think people from "thin" cultures make better immigrants). They generally don't want to assimilate. Assimilation is out now anyway I guess. You can contrast this with East Asians. They generally still tend to have more of a 2000s classroom globalism view, where everyone ought to work together etc., they change their names and they often try to intermarry. Even though China is irredentist even recent Chinese immigrants tend to shut up about this while IME Indian ones generally don't.
They may be very good for GDP etc. but I am not sure that mass Indian immigration is a good thing in the long term. Do you want a group in your country that will quite openly have split loyalties? People used to fuss about this in the US with Catholics. I guess we have a natural experiment with Canada and Australia to a lesser extent. We shall see. Indian emigration is continuing apace anyway, they have dreadful youth unemployment rates.
IdiocyInAction
2mo ago
Yeah and they won't be shut as a lot of immigrant groups form blocks and demand entry routes for their brethren (which you see in many Anglosphere countries these days).
I just finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I kind of liked it? I felt it's written in a very sincere and fearless way and it's nice that there isn't a "moral" to the whole thing. Unfortunately I think McCarthy sucks at writing SF so the apocalypse feels a bit contrived or unbelievable. Not that that is the point of the book whatsoever but it does detract a bit and require at least a bit of suspension of disbelief. The prose was very nice and lurid. I liked Blood Meridian a lot more, I felt that book actually changed me a bit.
I think he does a good job at portraying the evils of a post-apocalyptic world though. One semi-popular Reddit-tier opinion that often gets repeated is that video game writing is really bad compared to literary/book-writing. So what comes to mind here is comparing The Road with the first two Fallout games (the third onwards, while being fun as games, are utter slop on a writing level so I'll discount them. NV could be included). And if I look at the first Fallout game and at least some parts of the second and consider them as what life in a post-apocalypse would look like, I don't know if I would say The Road is that much of a more of a compelling story. Fallout (again, discounting the slop Bethesda written later entries) did a good enough rendition of things like slavery, cannibalism, crime, etc. Not as dark as The Road but video games generally can't be for various reasons. Not as personal maybe (with the whole father-son thing in the Road) but I think as an overall experience I wouldn't say that they stuck with me much less than McCarthy's work. Maybe you could say modern video games have shitty slop writing (and you'd be right to a large degree), but that's also true of most books. Maybe I'd also rate it different if I had a kid. There are definitely a lot of literary works that blow any game out of the water but that's comparing the greatest of the great of a medium that's more than 2000 years old with a 30-40 year old medium. I don't know, I feel like you can feel creative mastery in any medium and it's also quite rare in any medium.
I am also reading Roadside Picnic by the Strugastky brothers. I'm actually really enjoying it so far. The main character going from being a young man with all that entails, i.e. not caring as much about the future, not caring about engaging in daring adventures to becoming more settled as he has a wife and a child is quite relatable to me. I am not at the child part but life at the end of your 20s with a GF is very different to my early 20s. You mostly don't have to care as much when you're younger? It's very nicely written, the Zone is described in a very compelling way and the characters seem real. You notice it was written in the Soviet era but that's charming more than anything. Halfway through but it's very enjoyable. Can see why it had such a long tail as a literary work (the Stalker movie and later games).
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