MadMonzer's profile

MadMonzer Temporarily embarassed liberal elite 8hr ago

I don't think the Wife of Bath or the Merry Wives idolise adultery - in so far as Merry Wives of Windsor has a villain, it is Falstaff and he gets his comeuppance in the finale. The point I am making is that they only make sense in a society where middle-class men couldn't lock up their wives the way middle-class Arabs do. Falstaff seducing another man's wife isn't good, but it is possible and Page and Ford have to worry about it, and ultimately given the nature of the society Shakespeare was living in and writing about, they have to rely on their wives' virtue to prevent it.

Early Modern cisHajnal Europe was much closer to your standard of "rather strict about policing women" than post-sexual revolution societies (but everyone agrees those are only able to exist because we have contraceptive tech that the Merry Wives didn't). But by the standards of pre-contraception societies, it was among the loosest.

The evidence of whether the actual nonpaternity rate has increased as a result of the sexual revolution is thin. There are a number of studies estimating Western nonpaternity rates over centuries by linking Y chromosomes to surnames - they all have small samples and large confidence bounds, but they converge on a range of 1-1.5%. Because of the methodology, this counts undocumented adoptions, including informal adoptions by stepfathers*, as nonpaternity but doesn't count cases where one male-line blood relative cucks another. See also this article about a Dutch research group that have reached the same conclusions more recently with a larger sample size and the added advantage of being able to cross-check against birth records rather than relying on surnames. They also cross-checked against a mitochondrial-DNA based estimate of nonmaternity (which you can't do with surnames), and discovered that nonmaternity is, as expected, vanishingly rare. The article says that the nonpaternity rate increased significantly in the 19th century (i.e. long before the sexual revolution) due to urbanisation - they say roughly 6% but don't give the error bars on the subsample.

The really hard part is estimating nonpaternity in the here and now. The taboo against unnecessary paternity tests means that the headline rate of nonpaternity from paternity testing (well north of 10%) is meaningless - it is an intentionally biased sample. To measure nonpaternity rates in cases where there isn't enough pre-existing suspicion for a DNA test to be ordered you need to get permission to test (anonymised, but paired) samples of father-child DNA taken for other reasons, like tracing genetic diseases. As far as I can see from the limited number of papers where people have got permission to do that, you get a nonpaternity rate of about 3% for the population as a whole, and 1.5-2% if you restrict the sample to unsuspicious cases. Which would mean that the sexual revolution reduced nonpaternity (presumably because cheaters use contraception) relative to the industrial-age urban baseline.

* I am aware that the manosphere considers this "pre-cucking", but it doesn't qualify under the conventional definition.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarassed liberal elite 11hr ago

The revealed preference of Swifties and Arianators implies that miniskirts etc. can be a status performance for other women more than a sexual display for men.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarassed liberal elite 11hr ago

Which is a specific defining feature of all successful civilizations until very recently.

Where "very recently" means the establishment of cisHajnal Europe as a distinct "western" civilisation around 1000AD, not the sexual revolution in the 20th century. Middle-class women having (and needing, to do their share of the work of the society) enough freedom to cheat on their husbands was enough of a thing in pre-modern society that Chaucer and Shakespeare both wrote about it (although it is probably significant that neither the Wife of Bath nor the Merry Wives of Windsor actually do the deed)

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarassed liberal elite 11hr ago

Democratic western society has a taboo about talking about unearned wealth, at least at the upper-middle-class level. It developed because inherited wealth is awkward in a nominally-classless society, but the taboo also covers talking about wealth from divorce settlements.

A man living off a divorce settlement is just unexplainedly rich. To ask whether it is an inheritance, a divorce settlement, or crypto profits is to breach the taboo.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarassed liberal elite 11hr ago

People are willing (though less willing than they used to be) to pay a premium for mediocre chain-restaurant food served in a full-service setting compared to mediocre chain-restaurant food served in a fast-casual setting. At the high end there are a number of elite power-dining restaurants where the food, while good, is not worth the money and the name on the door is a status symbol. I think this is inconsistent with taste being as much as 90% of what normal people care about.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarassed liberal elite 11hr ago

The 19th century scientific racists worked this out, and it has been confirmed by modern DNA testing. There are three major surviving racial groups, separated by the Sahara, the Great Steppe and the Himalayas:

Caucasians, including North Africans, Turks etc. who are white, but also Indians, who are closer to whites than either is to East Asians
East Asians
Black Africans.

There are then the various groups that didn't develop agriculture and got mostly-genocided when they came into contact with people who did. The pygmies and Khoisan in Africa are genetically distinct races and would be on the list alongside the big three if there were enough of them left. Native Americans (whose ancestors crossed the Bering Strait relatively recently) and Polynesians are subgroups of East Asians. Australian Aborigines have been genetically isolated for long enough that they are de facto a separate race too.

From the point of view of HBD-driven policy, this is complicated by the fact that endogamous sub-populations can be subject to relatively rapid selection for IQ or other pro-social traits (definitely over a timescale of centuries, possibly faster), leading to a hierarchy of desirability that doesn't track the big-picture genetics.

From the point of view of normie ethno-nationalism, none of this is relevant because "white" as an identity group that one can be a nationalist of is a political category and not a genetic one. The ethnogenesis of "whites" happened in America (and South Africa with the need to unite Anglos and Afrikaaners) and largely didn't in other places, and the boundaries of who can assimilate to American political whiteness are roughly "culturally Christian with no visible sub-Saharan African ancestry". The nearest equivalent to political whiteness in the UK is "non-Muslim", with Jews and Hindu Indians being politically whiter-than-white. Vivek winning the Ohio gubernatorial primary suggests something similar could happen in the US, with anyone who is neither Black nor Muslim ending up tarred with political whiteness by the far left and welcome in the politically white coalition on the right.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarassed liberal elite 12hr ago

Not that they got a say anyway, no western country in history ever voted for mass migration.

Western countries didn't exactly vote against mass immigration either, until well into the 2010s. There is a very noisy anti-immigration movement going back to Enoch Powell in the UK and Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, and it has real mass working class support, but it doesn't actually move votes.

Even now, anti-immigration populist parties seem to face a hard cap of 25-30% support and centre-right parties who go into coalitions with them are punished - in other words about 70% of the voters are opposed to anti-immigration populism. (Trump wins because the US system allows you to capture the Presidency with 26% of the vote by winning a close primary and then a close general - in a jungle primary he would get 25-30%).

The British far right and populist right are an electoral irrelevance until UKIP get 16% of the vote in a low-turnout European election in 2004, and the first time a party running to the right of the Tories gets a significant vote share in a general election is 2015 when UKIP get 12.6%. The Tories run an anti-immigration campaign in 2005 (with the slogan "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" and it goes down like a lead balloon. David Cameron includes a pledge to cut immigration to the tens of thousands in the 2010 and 2015 manifestos, but the voters (correctly) don't believe him, he wins anyway, and doesn't cut immigration. Boris gets a landslide in 2019 despite having published policies that imply he will do a Boriswave.

The lack of ballot-box support for an anti-immigration insurgent party is unlikely to be purely because FPTP suppresses it - other third parties get mass support during this period, with the SDP-Liberal Alliance peaking at 25.4% in 1983 and the Greens getting 15% in the 1989 European elections.

So the big picture in the UK is that the Tories don't need an anti-immigration message to win, which is good because they can't effectively use one. And there is no meaningful opposition to their right until Farage, and even Farage doesn't have enough votes to matter until 2024 - his impact on British politics between 2010 and 2024 is driven by the impact of Farage panic on the internal politics of the Conservative Party.

In France, you have a serious anti-immigration party opposing the Gaullists from the right going back to Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National in the 1980's, but it's stuck on about 15% of the vote (with very little chance of winning anything under the French electoral system, because the other 85% will hold their noses and vote for anyone-but-FN in the runoff) until Marine Le Pen's 2017 breakthrough.

In the US, socially conservative insurgents (who, among other things, oppose immigration) consistently get about 20% in Republican primaries until Trump. The GOP grassroots are obviously more anti-immigrant than this suggests, but when they get into the polling booth they pull the lever for a GOPe tax cutter.

What does all this mean - the simplest interpretation is that immigration is low salience for normies until well into the 2010s. Talking about the issue (in either direction) is a vote loser even among anti-immigration conservative voters because it implies you don't care enough about the bread-and-butter issues voters care about. The other point is that effective anti-immigration politics is very visibly tied to the failure of traditional centre-left and centre-right parties to offer a positive programme voters could vote for. The best example here is the French Presidential election in 2017, where the traditional two big parties came third and fifth, but you see the same thing happening in the UK (where Boris can only win in 2019 by running against his own party's record in government) and the US (where neither the GOPe nor the Democrats can manage run a replacement-level candidate against Trump).

So the interesting question is the direction of causation. Do centre-left and centre-right parties decline because the public finally means it when they say they are fed up with mass immigration, or does anti-immigration politics exploit a vacuum left by the decline of centre-left and centre-right parties for other reasons? Those other reasons are obvious - some combination of social media-driven negativity and very real policy failures including the 2008 financial crisis and Iraq, with the relative impact depending on how sympathetic you find the old-school politicians.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarassed liberal elite 1d ago

In the UK, nonpaternity is an absolute bar to a statutory child support claim, with the obvious exceptions for fathers named on adoption papers. (If the cuck was married to the slut, she may still be able to get some child support indirectly as part of a "needs"-based divorce settlement.) The UK is, as far as I am aware, the only country where this is true.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarassed liberal elite 1d ago

Has anyone seen an attempt to do a HBD explanation for North/South England? Ooop norf has been a basket case since Thatcher stopped subsidising their coal mines and outdated factories, and dependent on those subsidies since the UK emerged from Great Depression.

If it is HBD, the relevant gap has to be between white British sub-populations because the divide predates the impact of mass immigration.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarassed liberal elite 3d ago

Otherwise it does feel like complete control of social media plus financing plumbing had been accomplished.

Remember that about half of the Patrick McKenzie article is about an attempt by the SPLC and allies to debank conservatives which failed. See for example this post where he points out that you can tell that there have not been large-scale debankings for conservative political speech because rich Republicans still pay for their lunches in DC using Chase Sapphire Preferred.

There were three sets of contacts between the SPLC and the banks discussed in the article:

Maintenance of a blacklist of extremist nonprofits that various donation platforms used to deny service. McKenzie points out that this blacklist was not widely used to deny basic banking services, because the culture that it is banking does not (and to a first approximation never did) outsource its conscience to the SPLC in the same way that the culture that is nonprofit fundraising did (and probably still does). In so far as the article contains criticism of how SPLC maintained the list, it is that it was underinclusive of extremist organisations that the SPLC found sympathetic (like left-coded terrorist orgs), not that it was overinclusive of mainstream right-wing voices.
Fraudulently opening bank accounts in the names of straw orgs in order to pay off the informants used to maintain (1)
Mostly after the foundation of Change the Terms in 2018, an explicit pressure campaign to kick specific MAGA voices (including the Trump campaign) off the internet, including pressure to debank them. This wasn't done using an electronic blacklist, it involved a series of FTF meetings between activists and bank employees. What was said at those meetings was a combination of "if you don't do what we say, you are a bad person and should feel bad, in particular because you personally will have contributed to black people being murdered by extremists" and "if you don't do what we say, we will call you racist on the internet".

McKenzie is carefully vague about the extent to which (3) succeeded - even more so re. banks than re. big social media platforms. But if there had been widespread debankings after January 6th in response to SPLC pressure, or even with no need for SPLC pressure in the climate that existed in early January 2021, he could have said so. What he says is that there were widespread social media bans, and that some bank accounts that were set up specifically to fundraise for the insurrectionists were closed. If you compare what he says about the post-Jan 6th environment in the US to what he says about the debankings in response to the Canadian trucker convoy, the logical reading is that McKenzie does not think there was a Canada-style debanking of conservatives after Jan 6th, but is not willing to explicitly claim it didn't happen because of the difficulty in verifying a negative.

I'm not going to claim that this was a storm in a teacup. Some bad things happened, and some similar bad things did not happened. Everything in the latest SPLC expose is consistent with the picture in McKenzie's first debanking post, which is that "Americans were denied access to core banking services based on right-wing political speech" is one of the things that didn't.

The world where a coalition of anti-freeze peach leftists controlled bank compliance departments in the way they controlled Silicon Valley Trust & Safety departments looks very different to the one we lived in.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarassed liberal elite 3d ago

"Everything is bank fraud" is a lot less troublesome than "everything is securities fraud" in that bank fraud still requires the same specific steps (a false statement of fact, made to a bank, under circumstances where you can convince a jury that it was intentional) that it always did. People don't usually do that unless either they are committing fraud or there is some other underlying wrongdoing they are trying to conceal.* Whereas securities fraud lawsuits have been brought based on innocent behaviour including true-but-potentially-misleading public statements, omissions, and honest managerial incompetence. On the other hand, "everything is bank fraud" is more dangerous because bank fraud is a crime whereas securities fraud is civil.

So the real argument about "everything is bank fraud" is

On the plus side, it makes complex white-collar cases easier to bring and therefore allows serious criminals who would otherwise skate on Chewbacca defenses to be convicted.
On the minus side, it turns a lot of non-criminal (like paying hush money to a hooker) or less-criminal (like small-time tax evasion) wrongdoing into federal crimes with a 30-year statutory maximum sentence because you lie to the bank about it.

There are two other practices which make this worse in practice:

Prosecutors pushing cases (both to poorly represented defendants and to the media and public) based on cumulating statutory maximum sentences across multiple counts, when the actual sentence will be a single sentence in line with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (and the guideline sentence for a first offence of bank fraud is probation unless the loss to the bank exceeds $15k).
The fact that "fraud-for-housing" (lying on a loan application to get a loan you wouldn't otherwise qualify for, but do make a good-faith effort to repay) is almost never prosecuted unless there is a quick default (in which case it looks much more like "fraud-for-profit" where someone is planning to abscond with the loan money) - even if there is an eventual default with a crystallised loss to the bank. So some types of fraud-for-housing (like the occupancy misrepresentation Letitia James was charged with) become common behaviour and are magnets for selective prosecution.

* I don't know why Trump systematically and spectacularly lied about the value (and even the square footage) of his personally-owned real estate in the case that led to the Letitia James lawsuit given that both the Trump Org and the banks insist that it didn't affect the credit decision, but normal businesses absolutely do not do this - partly because it is a crime.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarassed liberal elite 3d ago

In every jurisdiction where the issue has been subject to democracy (mostly countries outside the US, but now including red and purple states which have had abortion referenda post-Dobbs) the voters behave a lot more sensibly than the advocates. "Abortion legal until the baby is pronounced alive by the duty paediatrician" is not an electorally serious position except in places where trolling conservatives is more important than policymaking. "Abortion banned from day one and the law actually enforced" is not an electorally serious position in post-sexual revolution societies. If it is still the case in ten years time that every non-referendum state in America is at one of those two poles, it will be because state-level democracy no longer works.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarassed liberal elite 3d ago

I tend to be a federalist on a meta-level, and so I tend to think kicking a controversial issue to the state level to let the voters decide is probably the better choice. Especially since I assume a federal ban, or a return to federal permissiveness will probably continue to have a corrosive effect on American politics.

This isn't going to stick. In a world where abortions were minor surgeries and where travelling across state lines to have the surgery was (a) hard to conceal and (b) likely to be a long way because abortion policy would follow the red/blue divide, which is approximately sectional, rather than being an idiosyncratic feature of each state, this could stick. But in the world we live in, most abortions involve a small number of pills which can be posted from a legal clinic in a blue state, or in extremis illegally by a private citizen who obtained the pills with the tacit approval of her blue-state government. So either the federal government enforces laws* against mail-order abortion pills, or red state abortion laws are unenforceable. And enforcing those laws against the wishes of the (people and governments of) the blue states where the federal crimes are being committed is likely to become an ongoing ICE-in-Minneapolis level ugly political standoff.

Admittedly all this is an improvement because it takes federal abortion policy away from SCOTUS and puts it back into democratic territory.

* One relevant law is already on the books - the Comstock act prohibits sending abortifacients through the US mail. My understanding is that there is also a broad power for the FDA to restrict prescribing of drugs which are at risk of being illegally diverted without the need for new primary legislation.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarassed liberal elite 4d ago

Is she's talking to you, your preferred pronouns are "you/your". If she needs a third person pronoun on the first date, it implies she gossips about first dates, so not a keeper. See, easy.

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MadMonzer Temporarily embarassed liberal elite 6d ago

By its own lights, it's supposed to be the for-real, actual undistorted picture of reality, no myth-making or noble lies.

The same is true of Christianity if you actually believe in it, which by all accounts Tim Keller does.

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