MayorofOysterville
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User ID: 3800
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
Yeah the nones are tricky. I still suspect they are a psyop by the liberals to raise the number of secular people but I nevertheless think they are a useful category. Someone who will tick the box Christian when given the choice between Christian and Atheist but none when that is presented is definitely not a standard believer but neither are they a capital A secular Atheist as the term is. I feel most "disorganized religious practice" is too disparate and ironically disorganized to accurately measure via polling and statistics without something like in depth interviews.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
Well white is honestly probably the hardest as they don't tolerate autists very well. East Asians in Asia are pretty tolerant of Autism well as much as can be said for anyone (IDK about Japan with their insane etiquette situation. You could probably find a nice Vietnamese girl in a year or two if you went there.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
Yes I agree with all that. I probably should have been more specific. I just meant that a lot of the talk of teenage brides is not actually trad for Northern Europe.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
Most Western Democracies aren't electing either far left or far right extremists mostly the policies stay the same. Wasn't Biden a steady moderate elected by a skittish electorate? It didn't seem to have much effect even if he wasn't demonized the way Trump or Obama were.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
Are those women not settling down leaving a number of men who want to? Or are they just part of the urbanite endless casual dating scene?
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
I've wondered about this. I'm not sure if I'll live long enough to see the whole effects. Even post 1965 homosexuality only became fully normalized like 15 years ago.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
Look a single dude straight in the eye and say "Yeah she's banged 6-12 dudes prior to you, but I'm sure that she won't ever be thinking about any of them or comparing your performance and YOU'RE the one she's going to stick with" with a straight face.
Ok but this is entirely normal in Western culture and has been since like the 70s so about 50 years now. And it's not just her that's expected to have 6-12 previous partners it's you as well. If you don't well that's probably part of it but the vast majority of men in modern Western society would not be at all phased by a body count of 6 and thinking they would be shows you as an extreme outlier. I realize modern Western culture is also an extreme outlier but nevertheless that's the culture you live in.
Now it's actually not that hard to marry a virgin in the US you just need to sincerely convert to one of the dozens of conservative religious denominations that enforce this many of which have more women than men. The other way is to ingratiate yourself into a more conservative nonwestern culture and try for marriage there. But acting like a body count of 6 is some damning thing when that is what is culturally expected of modern secular women is not going to get you very far. Modern secular women and men are expected to have several previous relationships and flings from high school and college that's the cultural expected norm. It's totally fair to not like that but understand you are like a Saudi woman searching for a sensitive feminist hipster plenty of those exist but you are going to have to go out of your cultural comfort zone to find them.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
Serious question. Would ever consider an arranged marriage in India or dating a Filipina overseas, in order to find a match?
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
I appreciate this post. Too many people view the past as something like Saudi Arabia and don't realize how much freedom and independence women had in Northern Europe historically or how late the marriage ages were there. Settling down in your 30s was just what sensible middle class people did to have a good life. Just like going to university or putting money into a 401k today. At least in Northern Europe it wasn't girls getting married at 15 to much older men.
That list is basically for dating middle class girls off the apps. Become a line cook and you'll see plenty of the bottom 50% get laid and have the chance to date working class girls yourself lol. Marriage hasn't collapsed for the bottom 50% because they can't get laid but because they don't participate in any social institution these days. Ala the Fishtown of Bowling Alone. I feel like this whole world is invisible to the programmers and engineers on the Motte chasing girlbosses on the apps.
It's not a problem that can be fixed with self improvement. But it's a pretty easy problem to solve, for any non-obese, non-insane, white guy 45 and under, just outsource. Open FilipinaCupid.com or go study some bullshit continuing education course in Manila and you'll have dozens of eligible pretty slim women falling over you. Yes there will be pure gold diggers and green card hunters but also don't discount the natural attraction being wealthy and high status induces is women.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
Not Western Buddhism as practiced in America no it isn't. Scripture will only get you so far, Paul discourages marriage in his letters yet to say American Christianity is against marriage and procreation would be foolish. Not all Christian denominations were against Gay marriage in the culture war either but the overwhelming perspective of secularish young people is that Christianity has a lot of nonsensical rules about sex and Buddhism doesn't. I don't think Buddhism is going to hugely boom up. But it's definitely an advantage as you get a lot less pushback being a Buddhist in certain circles than a Christian and it's easier to syncretize with modern progressive values.
Yes Evangelical churches are growing in a large part because they are scooping up converts from the collapsing mainline denominations. Religion as whole in the US is still declining, but the Evangelicals do present an interesting data point as the rest of US mirrors the secularization of Europe and Evangelicals don't It's possible that the Evangelicals stop the tide or even reverse it. My guess is they'll hold steady they have a high fertility rate but a high defection rate of the youth and secular culture has a strong pull. They are also massively less influential than they were in the 80s and 00s and they'd have to work pretty hard to get that power back.
Yes you aren't now, but if current trends hold (always a big if) TradCaths are going to be so wildy out of step with society morally and socially that I expect the gap to widen. In 200 years I don't see the West being more sexually conservative given that we've been liberalizing since the enlightenment. There's a lot of stuff grandfathered in but when todays Zoomers are grandparents I think it will be a lot harder for practicing Catholics to mesh into society.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
Only if they can hold enough of those kids. Mainstream religion is collapsing in America. On a long enough timeline that might lead to a society of tradcaths and Hasidics. But at the moment those are niche communities. The "mainstream" religious don't appear to be sustainable.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
During the Bush administration it was pretty close to at least being co-equal, but by that time it's foundations were crumbling at it could never last and indeed didn't.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
This strikes me as a just so story and maybe a bit limited to engineering. I don't think marketing or law departments work like that. In many marketing departments these days it's a majority hot women at least on the less senior levels.
The Catholic church cares and a bunch of traditional Christian churches and systems of morality care. A lot of Churches forbid masturbation and have shame circles where men confess to masturbating and try not to do it. I don't think the Catholics go that far but masturbation is still considered a sin.
Also while in traditional cultures the bride might not care if the groom is a virgin. She will care if he's a known womanizer because she wants him to be faithful to her after the wedding.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
I think America particularly will become more and more secular. I think that the TradCath community will grow but will end up like the Amish or Hasidics. I think the majority will be secularish. Axial age religions are not they only religious framework and Science can replace a lot of what pre-axial religions are very mechanistic and less concerned with morality. Sumerian religion barely had an afterlife and in that sense was rather athiestic. China was morally guided by philosophy more than religion for thousands of years. I don't think a retvrn to societies centered on moralistic religions promising eternal bliss is a given. The intense religiosity of the Middle Ages and Early Modern period seem to be something of an outlier.
I could see a kind of Progressivism as a unifying philosophy combined with many different faiths ala Confucianism. We can see this a little bit with woke people today they don't care what religion you are as long as your beliefs are subservient to woke tenants.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
Not being against the Gays is one of the more salient points. Christianity being seen as anti-Gay has significantly harmed it's worth as a moral philosophy to modern western people. Also why the texts of Christianity are very anti materialist it tends not to be seen that way in the US.
MayorofOysterville
1mo ago
Hey I appreciate your response I was pretty disappointed when my effort post didn't show up forever so glad to know you at least saw it!. For what it's worth I think despite all the time it gets holocaust education in the West is pretty bad and pretty much any thinking person is going to have them based in the high school curriculum version of it we get taught. I spend a fair amount of time on /r/askhistorians and the amount of liberals with massive doubts about the holocaust is pretty telling. Well not doubts exactly they tepidly come in writing paragraphs of disclaimers about how they believe the official story but there are massive gaps where the tory they've been told makes no sense. Most true deniers start here as well and they are almost always arguing against the version they were taught in high school. IE the camps separated out of all context and a lot of myths thrown in combined with strawman version of Nazi ideology.
Most teachers are unwilling/incapable and probably just a little scared to actually explain Nazi ideology and goals and the Eastern Front is severely undertaught and without either of those the Holocaust narrative taught doesn't actually add up. and there are tons and tons of "Good Liberals" with those same doubts they are just to scared to voice them for fear of being labeled a denier. I actually think one of the reasons people get so hysterical when the Holocaust gets even slightly questioned is because many of them can't counter skeptical arguments at all so they are just running off pure emotion.
MayorofOysterville
2mo ago
This is also more rational then it looks on it's face the Soviets were the weakest they were every going to be from not having finished preparing their defensive lines on the new border to the officer corps still being a mess from Stalins purges. They likely would have done worse if they invaded the next year, also they needed the Soviets oil and were running out of goods and tech to sell for it.
MayorofOysterville
2mo ago
How top down the holocaust was is actually huge debate in Holocaust studies. Saying your a functionalist ie the Holocaust happened organically through on the ground radicalism and local functionaries working towards the Fuhrer is a totally mainstream opinion in academia.
Can you say why you think the numbers are substantially inflated? We have a pretty good idea of the Jewish numbers throughout Eastern Europe from pre and post war census records and the Jewish community largely just vanishes. You can say those records were doctored but then that gets into the problem of those communities still not existing today.
I think you make some very reasonable objections based on the way the holocaust is often taught and framed in Western countries. And indeed many people one /r/askhistorians coming from not a skeptical position at all but still nor understanding why the Germans took certain actions. Because the way the Holocaust is taught in high school as a singular event and not how it fit into the broader German war effort and also because I think most high school teachers and principles would be uncomfortable articulating Nazi arguments in a Steelman way. This leads to some holes in the framework and I think you'd be surprised how close you are to the academic and not the pop culture version of the holocaust.
The death camps we all know were part of a much larger machinery of forced labor ranging from keeping farmers on their fields in Soviet collectivized agriculture (the Ukrainian peasants who though the Germans were going to re-introduce private property were bitterly disappointed) to conscripted foreign laborers in factories, to forced labor in work camps, to finally the death camps. The economy of the third reich, especially in the war's later periods ran on tens of millions of slave laborers the majority of which were not Jews. Now if the Germans were simply using the Jews as a slave labor and ill treating them to death we would expect to see a demographic hole in Jewish communities, remember in pre-war Poland 10% of the population was Jewish and in the Western Soviet Union many towns were majority or plurality Jewish not mention many villages that were essentially 100% Jewish. If the Germans were just taking slaves we would expect to see the able bodied gone and the very old and very young remaining but this is not what we see instead we see essentially all of Eastern European Jewry just vanish the very old and the very young included. Sometimes people will say they just went to Israel at all but the numbers just do not add up at all even if you only use Poland and there is no reason to do that, say what you will about the Soviets but they were pretty autistic about demographics.
The idea the holocaust cost lots of resources is something of a myth about the holocaust it didn't take huge resources to do it was done reasonably efficiently and on the cheap and likely turned a profit. The actual number of German camp guards was fairly low as the actual function was mainly ran by capos and it just doesn't take that many people with guns to control large number of people especially when you are just going to kill them and bring in the next batch. You say killing a slave labor force when they were in the middle of a war doesn't make sense but they largely didn't do that. They largely killed the ones who couldn't work and then put the rest to work in conditions varying from being worked to death on starvation rations, to treated semi-ok as long as they were doing productive labor. The reason Oscar Schindler was able to save the Jews he did because they were doing productive labor for the war effort. If they stopped being productive well... We also have other examples of states doing similar things see the Ottoman Empire killing the Armenians while losing a war instead of even attempting to use them for labor. I feel like you are overly focused on the Jews being a useful slave labor force when from the German perspective they were an especially dangerous slave labor force subversive and radioactive. The Germans perceived, at least by the later stages, WWII as a war against Jews as they blamed Jews for both Anglo Capitalism and especially Bolshevik Communism. They viewed the Jews under their control as racial enemies and the entirety of the war as a race war but especially on the Eastern front.
We can see the Germans take special efforts to get their hands on Jews specifically such as in Hungary after the coup when the Germans had more influence over the government they used it to deport the entire Jewish population. If they needed these slave labor positions filled why weren't they already using Poles or Russians and why take the very old and very young and virtually the entire Jewish population of Hungary? In the standard narrative this does include lots of able bodied men being killed because of the sudden influx.
Another case where the Germans did kill able bodied men were the Einsatzgruppen and if you respond to anything in my post. respond to this I'm curious about what you think about them because they are often left out of alternative holocaust narratives and arguments and you didn't mention them either. A typical denier argument or even question by a curios redditor on Askhistorians (I know you don't identify that way and didn't make this argument) Is why didn't the Germans just shoot everyone? and the answer is they tried! But it turns out shooting tons of people is hard and plays hell on the psych of people doing it. Not to mention using bullets this way strains the war effort a lot more than working people to death. the Einsatzgruppen are also incredibly problematic for both the Western and Soviet narratives as they often were heavily involved with local collaborators which even today is something of a problem of the West in terms of Ukraine and the Baltics, which makes them incredibly unlikely for the West to falsify.
I'm not sure I agree about the witness testimony and historians don't actually give continence to stories like that it's not a hidden thing in holocaust studies and any event involving millions of people is going to have a lot of people making crazy shit up. But we do have evidence outside or witness testimony we have reams and reams of paperwork we have stuff like the Wannsee Conference and General Plan Ost. We have train manifests and none of the people put on trial for it actually denied it. You can say they were tortured but we don't actually have any evidence of that and the Nuremburg trials seem like the fairest version of victors justice I've ever seen given that some of them were acquitted. As for your idea the numbers can only go up in the narrative This is not the case the numbers of those killed at Auschwitz have been revised down several times by historians. If the evidence is there holocaust scholars will lower them. In fact deniers use the lowering of numbers killed out Auschwitz as something of a gotcha.
I know this is a long post and I don't expect a response to all of it or really want to get in a tit for tat. but if you respond to anything. I'd ask you opinion on the Einsatzgruppen, the lack of a demographic hole of missing able bodied Jews and what you think of the existing documentation we do have. I'm curious if any of this changed your mind and if not why not?
MayorofOysterville
2mo ago
They are definitely leftist. But they are not that radical and not even close to abolishing capitalism and to be clear I think a few of these are horrible policy. Namely rent control and free buses but I don't consider these policies communist/socialist. They are common and not terribly radical bad urban policy.
Do you really think shoving all the gays back in the closet and teaching masturbation is evil will fix everything? I get that's low hanging fruit but that's what a return to Christianity also implies, the wages of sin are death. If so what do you actually think we should do about the gays? I feel like we have enough Scientific and psychological knowledge about them and their are millions of them just in the US so what are we gonna do? I think that a quiet return to Christianity works a lot better when you have secular society for your gay sons to fade into
In addition to mindfulness centering outside oneself distrust of materialism and all that good stuff. It seems a some sort of neo-Confucian philosophy without the anachronistic rules of Christianity would work much better. Of course if you believe Christianity is true well than that's that. But every religion says the same thing about it. A Muslim might say the same you just haven't come back to God yet. Actually that's why English speaking Muslims tend to call converts reverts. They've finally abandoned the sinful world and returned to the true faith.
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