Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
New in Compact Magazine: Neither Side Wants to Emancipate Women
Twice this year, I found myself at conferences where a familiar question surfaced: Why do women not vote conservative? The tone was not hostile, only puzzled. Conservative women asked it themselves, with a kind of weary civility. But none of the answers seemed to satisfy. Some cited the state’s failure to support both motherhood and career; others blamed the lingering shadow of a conservatism that once sought to tether women to secondary roles.
No one could explain why so many women still turn away from even the most progressive forms of the right. Why do they keep voting for a left that consistently throws them under the bus, prioritizing for instance ideologies that deny biological sex and insist on men’s feelings and desires? The answer is simple, although no one wants to see it: Conservatives offer women performative reverence. Progressives offer equally performative protection. But no one offers women the thing they were once promised: freedom.
What freedom? How are you not free?
Of course, we already know that there's something rhetorical about this question, at least in the sense that we can reasonably ask whether anyone is in fact free. It's not an easy thing to nail down, you know? Lenin was asked if the revolution would bring freedom; he responded, "freedom to do what?". You have to specify, it's not self-evident. It's easy to be envious of the apparent freedom of others while also failing to appreciate their own unique forms of unfreedom. The master is relatively more free than the slave, no one can deny this; rare is the master who would switch places. But is the master free, simpliciter? Now it's not so clear. Marxists would say that no one is free, not even the capitalists, not as long as the task of capitalism remains unfulfilled. Capitalism is freedom, to be sure, but it is an unfree freedom, a freedom that poses a riddle that remains unsolved. But, let's stick to the issue at hand.
In the United States, women have leaned left for decades, not out of fervent ideological commitment, but through the steady pull of education, work, and shifting social norms. In 2020, Edison exit polls showed that 57 percent of women voted for Joe Biden, compared to 45 percent of men. Across Europe, too, women often favor center-left parties offering tangible supports: childcare, healthcare, material security.
But the dilemma runs far deeper than electoral politics. It touches upon the very essence of what it means to be free. I remain loyal to the feminist promise, however battered or dimmed, of genuine emancipation for women. This vision is not content to merely manage or glorify womanhood, but to transcend its limitations altogether, to be more than a body assigned a function, to move beyond the scripts of sex and tradition, and to claim the dignity of self-authorship. I never wanted merely to be accepted as a woman; I wanted to be free.
[...]Women do not lean left because it offers a credible path to emancipation. They do so because the right never even tried, and because the left, despite everything, still carries a faint echo of that promise.
What are you "transcending", and how? How do you not already have the "dignity of self-authorship"? What are you talking about?
(I'm going to tell you what I think she's talking about, just hang tight.)
Well, let's start with the objective facts of the matter. Women can already "self-author" themselves into essentially anything. Vice President (admittedly not President of the United States yet, but there's no reason we couldn't get there in short order), professor or artist, blue collar laborer, criminal, and anything else above, below, or in between. There are plenty of female role models to follow in all these categories. To the extent that there still exist "systemic privileges", actual explicit institutional privileges, they're mostly in favor of women now: in university admissions, in hiring, in divorce and family courts, and so on. Women are doing pretty good for themselves! Maybe they weren't 150 years ago, maybe they aren't if we're talking about Saudi Arabia or Iran, but in the 2025 Western first world? What freedoms are they missing?
And yet the author of the linked article perceives that something is missing. She perceives that women, as a class, do not have freedom, do not have the dignity of self-authorship. What do these terms mean? She doesn't say. But nonetheless, we should take her concerns quite seriously. Plainly, there are millions of women who share in her feelings, and millions of men who think she's onto something, and this continues to be the animating impulse of a great deal of cultural and political activity that goes under the heading of "feminism". Millions of people don't make things up. They're always responding to something, although their own interpretation of what they're responding to and what their response means can be mistaken. Plus, the author alleges that whatever phenomenon she's getting at, it plays a role in electoral politics, so you should care about it in that sense as well.
We should again note the author's hesitation to concretely specify her demands. If the issue were "the freedom to have an abortion" or "the dignity of being taken seriously in STEM", then presumably, she would have simply said that. But she makes it clear that the issue is freedom as such, and dignity as such; it's a gnawing, pervasive concern that you can't quite put your finger on. It's an abstract concern. So, we may be inclined to try a more abstract mode of explanation to explain why she feels the way she does.
Human interaction is predicated upon the exchange of value. There'd be no reason to stick around with someone if you weren't getting something out of it, even if all you're getting is some company and a good time. (There is a philosophical problem regarding whether pure altruism is conceptually possible; if you help someone, and you receive in exchange nothing but the satisfaction of having helped someone, then haven't you received something of value, thereby rendering the altruistic act "impure"? What if you don't even feel good about it, could it be pure then? But then, how were you motivated to help in the first place if you didn't even feel good about it? Regardless of how we answer these questions, I believe we can put the idea of absolute pure altruism to the side, because if it exists at all, it surely encompasses a minority of human interactions.)
We want to provide things of value to other people. But value is both a blessing and a curse. You want to have it, but it also weighs you down, it gets you entangled in obligations that you can't quite extricate yourself from. When you have something of great value, it tends to become the only thing that people ever want from you. We can consider Elon Musk as a figure of intense material and symbolic value. He's one of the wealthiest men alive, he runs X, he runs SpaceX, he had a spectacularly public falling out with Trump, and these factors undoubtedly dominate in virtually all of his interpersonal interactions. It's probably a bit hard for him to just be a "normal guy" with "normal friends", innit? Imagine him saying to someone, "when we're hanging out, I don't want to be Elon Musk, I just want to be Elon, y'know? Don't think of me as Elon the business tycoon and political figure. Think of me as, Elon the model train builder, or Elon the DotA player. Yeah, think of me like that instead. That's the identity I want you to symbolically affirm for me". His relations might make an attempt to humor him, although I don't think they'd be particularly successful in their attempts. His extreme wealth alone will always warp his interactions in ways both conscious and unconscious.
It is my contention that (healthy, reasonably attractive) women experience a heavily attenuated version of this phenomenon essentially from birth, which helps explain the pervasive irritation that some women feel at the simple fact of, well, being women. The constant nagging feeling that something is still not quite right, no matter how much progress is made on formal and even cultural equality (or even cultural domination, as may be the case in certain contexts).
If you were born with a female body, then you were gifted ownership of one of the most valuable possessions on planet earth. This is, again, both a blessing and a curse. This confers to you certain privileges and opportunities, but on the flip side, there is no way to ever turn this value off (aside from ageing -- but, even then...), to take respite from this fountain of value. You're in for the whole bargain, all of it, all the time. The value of the female body is a matter of pure economics; it is not based on the internal subjective psychological states of any individual or class of individuals. A man can impregnate many women in a single week. A woman, once impregnated, is tied up for 9 months. Her time cannot be apportioned as freely. Scarcity is the precondition of value; this is the law of everything that is, was, and shall be.
As a natural consequence of the extreme value of her body, the body comes to dominate her relations with others, both materially and symbolically. She correctly perceives that when people (well, men, at least) think about men, the properties they notice in order of salience are "web developer, white, middle class, male, father...", something like that. But when people think about her, the ordering is "woman, web developer, white, middle class...". Her body is what people want, it's what they're seeking; or at least, this is always necessarily a lurking suspicion. This, I believe, is the root of the aforementioned "abstract" concern with "the dignity of self-authorship"; it's not just the ability to become say, a prominent mathematician or artist in material reality, but to have that reciprocally affirmed as your primary symbolic identity by others. That's when we feel like we have dignity: when we can control how other people see us. I don't doubt that there have been times when a woman was being congratulated by male colleagues on the attainment of her PhD, or her promotion to the C-suite, and still there was a nagging doubt in the back of her mind that went, "........but you still see me as a woman before anything else, don't you?" Or, perhaps on the verge of frustration when talking with a male friend, she wanted to say, "look, I know every time you look at me I have this glowing halo effect around me, like you're wearing fucking AR goggles and they're telling you I'm an NPC that will give you a quest item or some shit, but can you please just take the goggles off for one day and just look at me as, well, me for a change?" And, I'm sorry to say, but here comes the really depressing part of the story: the goggles can't be removed. That glowing halo effect is glued to your tooshie, and it's not going anywhere. "Sexists" are at least appreciated for their forthrightness on this point; the reviled "male feminist" is correctly perceived to be simply dishonest about it. I suppose that's a bit of a downer. But, we all got our own shit to deal with. Take solace in the fact that you're just like everyone else in that regard.
Elon could at least conceivably give up all his wealth, his titles, his positions of symbolic authority, and start from zero. Because the male body has little to no intrinsic value, it's easier for men to become a "blank slate". But when your body itself is the source of this overbearing value? That's a bit harder to rid yourself of.
This, at any rate, is a psychological theory to explain the origin of the discourse in the linked article, a discourse that would otherwise seem to fly in the face of all available evidence. But I'm open to alternative theories.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
14d ago
I also disagree with the ban, but I do understand the frustration.
We have a history on TheMotte of people who show up and intone in a solemn voice, "I'd like to play a game..." At which point they begin constructing an elaborate series of arguments and hypotheticals that are high on word count but light on content, the aims of which are never entirely clear. And when people point out that it seems like they're being evasive about their own genuine beliefs, and they're not being entirely forthcoming about their intentions, they respond with "oh don't mind me, I'm but a humble explorer of political thought-space, my only aim here is to educate..."
For obvious reasons, interacting with these people is very obnoxious, and their threads generate more heat than light. So tolerance for these characters is low. And Turok, while not one of the more extreme examples, does pattern match to this sort of archetype.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
What dating crisis? This is just the almighty hand of the free market at work. Standards are high, as they inevitably will be when all parties are equally free to enter into voluntary associations.
We need to take "collective action as a society" to remove impediments to men's access to women (including, presumably, the "ugly, mean, and poor bottom 50%" of men) -- yeah, ok, have you asked the women how they feel about that? "I have this plan that will make it more likely for you to date someone who's ugly, mean, and poor". Wtf that's a terrible sales pitch.
Guaranteed monogamy for all is nothing more than the socialized ownership of the means of reproduction.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
14d ago
Mostly trolls whose names I've forgotten. That guy who keeps making alt accounts here to post WN articles and then delete them is kinda like that.
Apparently darwin was kinda like that, although I never interacted with darwin personally.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
Of course, I keep pointing this out to @Primaprimaprima, and they keep ignoring the point to drill down to individual solutions, which as we see are just not viable.
Bit of an odd way of phrasing it, considering I just wrote a post a few days ago where I said "we need to look at structural factors for the downturn in dating and not just individual factors".
So why, in spite of that, do you perhaps perceive that I still put a strong emphasis on individual factors?
One of my biggest pet peeves is whining. I can't stand whining. I'm empathetic to a great many things, I pride myself on my ability to consider things from other people's perspectives in fact, but even then, my sympathy has limits. And one of the fastest ways to make me lose sympathy for your cause is for you to start whining about it. We've all got a sob story, and rare is the stranger who will care about yours.
There's a very fine line between whining, and suffering just the right amount of righteous indignation so that you're actually motivated to go out and do something about what's bothering you. A very fine line indeed. It's a tough line to navigate, it requires judgement. We would never be motivated to change anything at all if we didn't suffer some sort of emotional wound. And "doing something" may, indeed, involve enlisting other people to our cause. But you have to thread the needle where you manage to do all that without being a bitch about it.
I'm not criticizing lonely men from the outside. I'm on the inside with all of you! I have a long history of being spectacularly unsuccessful with women. Like, actually embarrassing shit that I still cringe about when I remember years later. I'm a weirdo autist, I can't hold a normal conversation with a normal human. Women, predictably, find these traits repellent. So I know what it's like to suffer.
But I don't just go bitch and moan in the corner about how the world's unfair and how people should like me more and how we need "communism for pussy" as @HughCaulk so eloquently put it. What I do instead is I look in the mirror and say, "I'm a weirdo autist. That's not going to change. That's what we have to work with. So it's time to figure out how to make the best of that, rather than getting all mopey about it."
You are, apparently, suffering from some financial troubles. I'm genuinely sorry to hear that. But there are lots of poor people who fuck, y'know? There are poor people fucking right now, as we speak. There are even poor people in committed long term relationships. You could be one of them. What's stopping you?
It always comes back to your attitude, y'know? Forget about the structural and the individual and the historical and the metapsychological and whatever the fuck else it is. Think about your attitude first. Are you happy with your attitude, or are you being a bitch? Start there.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
15d ago
In this post, you condemn and criticize the concept of white solidarity. This is a sentiment that you share with almost everyone else in the Western "first" world today, except for a tiny minority of self-conscious white advocates.
Your primary motivation for writing the post was your negative sentiment towards white solidarity, rather than your positive support of an alternative political program. We can tell this by the way you framed your post: almost the entirety of it is dedicated to criticisms of the white identitarian right. If your goal was to give people positive, substantive reasons for supporting your own preferred political program, you would have instead titled your post "why I think the right should support pure meritocracy / free trade neoliberalism / race blind Nietzschean will to power / whatever terms you would use to describe your own ideology".
Why does the concept of white solidarity make you uncomfortable? It can't be a purely "formal" concern like, "I think the Online Right is wasting their time pursuing a futile and unhelpful set of policies; they could instead be devoting their time and resources to my cause instead". The Online Right is small and powerless; you can't be that eager to enlist their help. Whatever your preferred political program is would probably find itself right at home in the agenda of Ramaswamy, or Musk, or Thiel, or the Koch brothers, or maybe even Trump himself. You have far more powerful and influential backers you could be appealing to, instead of wasting your time trying to persuade the "Online Right".
So, again, let's start with the heart of the issue: why does the concept of white solidarity make you uncomfortable?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6d ago
[comic sans]UAP DISCLOSURE UPDATES[/comic sans]
The mood in the UFO community has been rather dour lately due to a string of disappointments and setbacks, but Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri dropped some promising indications this week that Congress has not forgotten about the topic and full disclosure may very well still be in the works:
"We're pursuing a hearing date. We've got a list of people that we're looking at. We're actually looking at potentially doing two. One with some people that are direct whistleblowers, who have had direct, and when I say direct, they had eyes directly on or have personally encountered UAP. In their formal operations."
"Not somebody out and about like Joe Blow out there that saw something. There's thousands and thousands of people like that. We're talking about people that worked for the Pentagon, worked in a government program, where they worked in and around this technology. Whether it was through crash retrieval, or through reverse engineering, that's what we're pursuing right now."
"The next hearing after that, once we're able to get information, we're looking at doing some interrogatories, which is where you take some of the things that have been said in these briefings, in these open hearings under oath. And then we send a formal letter as a committee, asking for answers from, whether it's Tulsi Gabbard, or whomever it is that we need to be asking these questions of. And then which would send up the potential second hearing, which would hopefully be able to clear people like Tulsi Gabbard to come forward."
"And I've been told she's very... friendly when it comes to this topic. That she wants disclosure. She wants to help bring about disclosure on this topic."
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
Some of them became single moms, some decided to get into deeper debt for a master's degree, some of them got fat.
Again with the fat, it's always the fat... is it really that much of a dealbreaker?
I think fat girls are sexy af, so I'm biased, and I'm aware my biases are not shared by everyone. But, it can't be that bad, right?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
AI girlfriends (and boyfriends) have already one-shotted some of the more mentally vulnerable of the population.
Talking to an AI feels like trying to tickle yourself. I don’t get it at all.
When I was a kid I used to be somewhat surprised that there were older people who had never played a video game, had no interest in ever trying a video game, they were perfectly fine with never playing one, etc. And I was like, how can that be? How can you not even be curious? I suppose video games just got popular at a point in their lives when their brains were no longer plastic enough or something. And I suppose I’ve hit that point with new technology now as well.
I can’t enjoy talking to an AI when I know that I’m in control and it’s trying to “please” me. Even if I told it, “oh by the way, try and add some variance, maybe get moody sometimes and don’t do what I ask”, the knowledge that at the end of the day I’m still the one in control ruins it. I suppose if we imagine a scenario where the AI is so realistic that I never get suspicious, and you’re able to trick me into thinking I’m talking to a real human, then sure, ex hypothesi there’s nothing to distinguish it from a human at that point and I would enjoy it. But short of that? Not for me.
There was a Sirling-era episode of the Twilight Zone where a bank robber died and went to Heaven. Angel tells him that he’s made it, he can have anything he wants for all eternity. So the dude lives out all sorts of wish fulfillment scenarios, winning big at gambling, beautiful women, some bank heists, etc. But he gets bored fast, says something is missing. There’s no danger to any of it, no bite, he wins every time. Angel says “well you can set whatever parameters you want. We can make it so there’s a 50% chance of your next robbery failing”. Guy says “no no, it’s still not the same. Look, I don’t think I’m cut out for Heaven. I’m a scumbag. I want to go to the other place”. Angel says, “I think you’ve been confused. This IS the other place.”
That’s what AI “relationships” feel like to me.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
19d ago
Had a friend who got really into shrooms. It basically ruined his life for a while, and he was only able to recover after he fully quit doing drugs. Went into a sustained severe manic state, spent his entire life savings in short order, lost multiple jobs in quick succession due to erratic behavior, revealed to me detailed plans that if acted upon would have lead to severe social and potentially legal/criminal damage. And the entire time he was subjectively convinced that he had achieved enlightenment and his actions were infallible. It permanently put me off of ever trying shrooms and has made me skeptical of all accounts that portray psychedelics as "harmless".
(Full disclosure, this was confounded by the fact that he was also doing massive quantities of THC at the same time. But then, people present THC as harmless too, so you'd think that harmless thing 1 + harmless thing 2 would be fine...)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5d ago
I honestly don't know why some women are so stupid. Yeah, loving and devoted up to the minute he swings at you with a sword, you silly girl.
Because up until that point, they think it's hot that he could attack other people with a samurai sword, but he could never do that to them because he just loves them that much / they alone have the power to tame him / he's so emotionally dependent on them that his world would collapse without them / insert-their-preferred-framing-here.
So the hotness can win out over prudence and risk aversion.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10d ago
In order to genuinely enjoy any sort of fiction, you have to be able to suspend disbelief.
No not at all. "Suspension of disbelief", as if you were hoping that you could be "taken for a ride" if you could only make yourself believe that the story really was a window to another world, is an immature way of approaching art (immature in the sense of pre-critical, pre-reflective, pre-self-consciousness).
The mature, critical way of approaching art (which actually just turns out to be straight up more fun) is to start from the recognition that the artwork was deliberately constructed as a product of human intentionality. Like all other artifacts of human labor, it was designed according to certain specifications in order to serve certain purposes. So our analysis begins with questions like, why was this created, what narrative did the artist tell themselves about why it was created and is it in any sense different from the truth of why it was "actually" created, what is the background casual chain of social/material conditions that lead to the production of this specific work in the specific way that it was produced, how are its formal features related to the conditions of its production, how do its formal features relate to its conceptual features, etc...
Some works reveal themselves to be richer and more amenable to this type of analysis than others, which is how the term "genre fiction" came to take on a derisive connotation.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
14d ago
If anyone thinks ChatGPT is ready to replace programmers then just like... ask it to build some software for you. Enough to run a sustainable business. It's ready to be an employee, ok then, go employ it. That's free money for you that's just sitting there for the taking.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7d ago
Probably seen friends, family and coworkers spend a weekend in jail on some trumped up charges.
I was gonna say "surely that's exaggerating" but then I remembered that I know someone who literally went through this kek
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
22hr ago
5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’). Under age 30.
Oh come on this is just getting silly now.
People have sex, and age. If that's a dealbreaker then you're basically just looking for an excuse to stay single at that point.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
22hr ago
have yet to ruin everything by Excel spreadsheeting statistical models of damage and critical chance and elemental resistance until they derive, mechanically, the ‘most efficient’ build, after which everyone adopts the new meta
If a game gets worse when you play the meta then it's just a shallow, badly designed game.
There's been some controversy over how AI has impacted top level Chess and Go, but my impression is that top players of those games still find them enjoyable and worthwhile, even though many hours of AI study are required to succeed at the top professional level in both games now.
I play a lot of fighting games, which for the most part only get better and more fun as you get deeper into the meta. Learning the meta gives you more tools and options to integrate into your gameplay, but because the game has inherently unpredictable elements (twitch reactions, making reads on your opponent, etc), they always stay fresh and it's impossible to fully "solve" them.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6d ago
Do you think there's no alien life anywhere, or do you just believe that it's implausible that it's a) intelligent and b) has the means and desire to get here?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7d ago
more people are single nowadays and unhappier nowadays because more people have avoidant attachment styles in the past
There are a lot of structural/social factors to look at before we zoom into the individual level and start talking about "attachment styles":
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We invented a technological solution for boredom. You can entertain yourself infinitely without ever leaving your house. Many people find it easier and more fun to stay at home and watch Netflix than to go out to bars and clubs, talk to people, enter into relationships, etc.
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Women's economic independence means that the range of men they find attractive is increasingly restricted, because men have fewer things of value to offer them. ("I have a career, I make more money than a lot of the men I know, I don't particularly want kids, what do I need a man for?")
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Dating apps and hookup culture make it so that it's easier for people (well, some people, anyway) to achieve sexual gratification without entering into a committed relationship.
Anecdotally, the majority of men I know are in committed relationships right now. Frankly, none of them fit the "classical" definition of a "high value man". They are perfectly average people, with average looks, average jobs, average levels of social acumen. So in spite of the structural factors I listed above, I really do think that a lot of the "singleness epidemic" is due to a combination of personal choice and unrealistic standards.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9d ago
AAQC'd even though it doesn't fit the "normal" profile of an AAQC because I really appreciate these types of comments that tell me about something interesting I didn't know about before (especially on topics that don't fall within the ambit of what normally gets discussed on TheMotte) and I want to encourage more of them.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
17d ago
· Edited 16d ago
Male sexuality is a lot simpler than female sexuality. Jeff could have destroyed his marriage for a nubile twenty-something with naturally big assets, but he went for tawdry 'sexy' with the trout pout and plastic boobs
I have to be careful to distinguish here between how much of my experience is idiosyncratic and how much of it can generalize, because I find the Sanchez woman to be rather repulsive, but evidently there are many men who do not.
If you listen to TRP/manosphere content, you'll frequently hear them say "men have the biggest variety of preferences, men can fall in love with anything, but women only want one thing (and that thing is Chad)". This is one of their favorite talking points, they repeat it quite often. And women often react with incredulity when they hear this, and they claim that reality is in fact the exact opposite. "What? All men just want a 'hot' woman. But my hubby, he's got a bit of a potbelly and he isn't the tallest, but he's got a great smile and a heart of gold, so I love him all the same. Obviously women's preferences are more varied and less superficial."
I think the key to resolving the dilemma is that, although the secondary and tertiary traits can vary greatly, there are certain key traits that, if absent in a man, will make it very hard for a woman to be romantically attracted to him. As far as my observations can confirm anyway. Although, pinning down exactly what these traits are is a bit difficult. It's not stability per se, nor is it social dominance per se, nor is it social adeptness per se, but rather it's more like an abstract distilled commonality that forms a part of all these traits. We might call it "agency", or projecting a sense of "in-control-ness", if not over his external environment then at least over himself. If a man can't demonstrate at least a minimal amount of "put-together-ness", then he's not going to have much luck with women.
What the TRP guys are correctly intuiting is that men have no such minimal criteria. In spite of the fact that there are clear patterns, at the end of the day they really can go for absolutely anything. There's an active 4chan thread right now where guys are swapping stories about how much they love NEET girls. As in, "whoa, you're telling me she hasn't had a job since college, AND she never leaves her room, AND she has severe social anxiety? Now that's what I'm talkin' about, I want that". You'll have to take my word for it that they really are fetishizing the status of NEET-ness itself. And they can do this with anything, rich or poor women, fat or skinny, smart or dumb, socially successful or an anxious wreck, it don't matter. Could you imagine any woman saying "you know I really just want an unemployed loser, that's what really gets me going"? If there are any such women, they're a rare breed indeed.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
24d ago
My continual take away is that I don’t like war being called ethnic cleansing.
Yeah that’s one of the obnoxious aspects of the post-WW2 mythos.
Stop trying to guilt trip me into seeing one side or the other as intrinsically righteous. Everything has to be a “genocide” or an “ethnic cleansing”. Why can’t it just be a fight? Men fight with each other. Always has been always will be.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
Otherwise, what is 'wrong' with letting the AI fill in that particular gap?
You'll always feel inferior to men who were able to build a relationship with a real woman. It'll gnaw at you.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
For example, how would this situation be handled in India? [...]
Firstly, the extended family would have much more power. This is the rare case where both the husband's side and the wife's own family would probably agree that something needs to be done, the latter for reputational reasons as well as concern for the kids. She'd probably end up committed, if she wasn't beaten up or ostracized to hell and back. The police would turn a blind eye, should she choose to complain, they'd be profoundly sympathetic to the family's plight and refuse to act against them.
When dealing with questions of punishment, we always have to confront the problem of how the authority figure's prosocial motivations can be disentangled from the pleasure he gets from enacting the punishment itself. Can they even be disentangled? Is it possible that they're always one and the same?
For the suburban Karen who calls CPS because her neighbors let their son ride his bike without a helmet, the wellbeing of the child is of secondary importance at best. Her primary motivation is the feeling of power she derives from being able to commandeer an instrument of state violence.
In your case, the violence is not even mediated through the state, but is dished out by the man's own hands, "with a good conscience" -- this makes the charm all the more seductive. Are we to suppose that the man is not secretly, or not-so-secretly, hoping that his wife will someday commit a transgression which merits some familial intervention? An "evolutionary genealogy" of such a system might reveal that its primary and originary purpose was as a system of ritualized violence, with its usage as an instrument of "justice" being vestigial or epiphenomenal.
There are no pure assertions of "negative" restrictions on rights -- there are only positive assertions of rights. "You should not have the right to do X" can be rewritten as "I should have the right to punish you for doing X". Or, more explicitly: "I want the right to punish you for doing X".
And people still wonder why feminists get up in arms over the concept of "traditional family structures". In the system thus described, is it ever the wife who beats the husband for his transgressions? She can try, and she may even have the support of the community on her side, but due to physical asymmetry, it's unlikely to end well for her. She can get male relatives to do it for her; but the prerogative of deriving full enjoyment from the act of punishment remains with the man. That hardly seems fair.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
14d ago
Well, there's suffering and there's suffering.
A pain signal that tells you to pull your hand away from a hot stove is "suffering".
This, on the other hand, is suffering:
The New Mexico State Penitentiary riot, which took place on February 2 and 3, 1980, at the Penitentiary of New Mexico (PNM) south of Santa Fe, was the most violent prison riot in U.S. history. Inmates took complete control of the prison and twelve officers were taken hostage. [...]
Events spiraled out of control within the cell blocks in large part due to the actions of two gangs. The first were the Chicanos, who protected each other and dished out targeted retribution for specific grudges. The other gang was loosely labeled the Aryan Brotherhood and was led by some of the most dangerous inmates (who by this time had been released from segregation in Cell Block 3). They decided to break into Cell Block 4, which held prisoners labeled as informers. Cell Block 4 also housed inmates who were mentally ill, convicted of sex crimes, or otherwise vulnerable, and held a total of 96 prisoners. [...]
During an edition of BBC's Timewatch program, an eyewitness described the carnage in Cell Block 4. He saw an inmate held up in front of a window; he was being tortured by using a blowtorch on his face and eyes until his head exploded. Another story was about Mario Urioste, who was jailed for shoplifting. He was originally placed by officers in a violent unit where he was gang-raped by seven inmates. Mario had filed a lawsuit against his rapists, so prison officials had housed him in Cell Block 4 for his own protection. Urioste was one of the targets for revenge. His body was found hanged, with his throat cut and his dismembered genitals stuffed into his mouth.
The former is a useful biological mechanism; the latter raises suffering to the level of a genuine philosophical problem (as in, should we sacrifice everything else to make the elimination of suffering our primary goal? If the choice is between a universe with suffering and no universe at all, would it be better to just not exist at all? etc).
Recently on LessWrong: Estrogen: A trip report
(Yes, he's treating estrogen HRT as the type of psychedelic drug that might necessitate a "trip report".)
There's a lot to sift through here, but the most interesting part of the post to me was being introduced to the concept of the schizotypy spectrum, a related-but-distinct counterpart to the autism spectrum. Autistic traits and schizotypal traits both have similar outward manifestations (e.g. introversion and difficulties with social interaction), but they have different root causes and different internal subjective manifestations (principally, autistic types are higher in detail-orientation, and schizotypes are more prone to disorganized and delusional thinking):
The author of the post then goes on to claim that, subjectively, estrogen caused him to experience a shift away from autistic traits and towards schizotypal traits:
Obviously this all has to be taken with a grain of salt, because the risk of confounding factors and psychosomatic/placebo effects in this case is high. Nonetheless, I'm curious whether pre-existing schizotypal traits in an individual (contrary to the author's experience in which HRT induced these traits) might play a causal role in explaining the abnormally high incidence rate of MTF transsexuality among so-called "terminally online" young men. By "terminally online" I mean the prototypical image of this demographic: likely to be in a STEM field, likely to have had little romantic success with women, likely to have obsessive "nerdy" interests like anime and video games, etc. This demographic is often stereotyped as "autistic", although that label may potentially conflict with the fact that MTF transsexuals are disproportionately drawn from this demographic as well, since it's not clear a priori why a disorder that allegedly gives you a "hyper male brain" would also make you more likely to want to be a woman. But if some of these "autistic" men actually belong to other personality clusters that have a tendency to masquerade as autism, it could help us build a higher resolution mapping of this region of cognitive space and provide more accurate explanations of the trajectories of different individuals (especially because one of the schizotypal traits is, as mentioned previously, a predisposition towards delusional thinking).
Regardless of which theory ultimately turns out to be correct, I think the biological basis of LGBT traits (or at least, which intrinsic traits increase one's predisposition towards being LGBT) is a subject that deserves further study. In my experience, anti-wokes are more likely to entertain the possibility of race and sex differences being biologically intrinsic, but they shy away from applying biological explanations to LGBT, preferring instead to endorse social constructivist theories (and in particular, the "social contagion" theory for transsexuality). Wokes are the opposite, heavily opposing biological explanations for race and sex differences but somewhat warmer towards biological explanations for LGBT (although they may not allow themselves to present it in exactly those terms). I prefer the simple, consistent position: it's all (at least partially) biological! Social contagion is undoubtedly a part of why the incidence rate of transsexuality has skyrocketed in the last several decades, although I think it's clear that only some people are susceptible to "catching" the contagion in the first place, and one's individual susceptibility is biologically mediated.
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