To_Mandalay
1yr ago
It's pretty typical of the mainstream historical method, too: ignore the thousands of WVHA documents dealing with the administration of the prisoner labor force, which did not regard them as slaves (and they were paid for their labor)
Nazis burned down Polish/Ukrainian villages and marched people onto trains at gunpoint to be sent to the Reich to work but at least they got paid in worthless money.
The Nazis conducted slave raids across Europe insofar as the Soviets conducted slave raids across Europe, but nobody says the latter because the only real purpose of the former is to draw distinctions that don't actually exist
Yes the Soviets also made extensive use of slave labor and Stalin was also a bad guy.
My point was that just because the Israelis have no plans to use Palestinians for forced labor does not mean their proposals to expel the Palestinians to the Sinai peninsula cannot be compared to German plans for the resettlement of Jews.
Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is quite horrible and still isn’t half as horrible Nazi treatment of the European Jews.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
The Nazis conducted slave raids across Europe, ultimately kidnapping millions for forced labor. Himmler being characteristically blunt:
If we do not fill our camps with slaves - in this room I mean to say things very firmly and clearly - with worker slaves who will build our cities, our villages, our farms, without regards to any losses, then even after years of war we will not have enough money to be able to equip the settlements in such a manner that real Germanic people can live there and take root in the first generation.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
“Middle aged redpill e-celeb moves to BAYSED Eastern Europe to fuck Slavic teenagers; gets himself killed by advocating publicly for the military conquest of the country he’s currently in” is such a hilarious sequence of events.
Can anybody convince Rollo Tomassi to move to Taiwan?
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
I guess it just doesn’t seem plausible to me that all of the exacerbation in sexual inequality would have taken place immediately in the first decade or two following the 60s with little to no change afterward.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Generally the claim is that it's been "super-charged" as of late because of dating apps and our ever-worsening gynocracy.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
I'm honestly scratching my head here and am wondering how you strangely seem to admit the point I'm making with simultaneously denying it's significance. I think there's some profound illogic going on here.
There are 100 men and 100 women. A a thousand years later, 50 of those women have living descendants, while only 10 of the men do. This does not mean only 10 of those men ever reproduced, it means only 10 of those men established lineages that persisted for 1000 years and were not wiped out at some point over the centuries. It does not mean that, of those 100 original men, 95 died childless.
I'm granting that you're arguing in good faith here, but if it's a body of historical research that you're looking for, the work has been done.
Having never read the book, what kind of historical data does Unwin work with to establish the sexual continence or lack thereof of pre-modern civilizations?
but (conservative) Islamic theocracy is singularly to blame because they haven't reversed their demographic trend?
I have no point except that theocracy in Iran manifestly does not keep fertility above replacement, and I only brought it up because you suggested Iranian adultery laws as a model.
The only way I see that someone can conclude that is that they haven't read the data or are indifferent to it. I think this is a good place to leave this conversation.
I spent my whole OP discussing data.
That wasn't the point I was making.
What point was it?
It's also the same reason why religious factions like Conservative and Reform Judaism will be looked at as a historical footnote in upcoming generations. Precisely because it's the ultra-conservative ones that are reproducing themselves.
If life was going to continue pretty much as it is today for the next century, then the “Haredim and Amish will inherit the earth” people might be right, but it almost certainly isn’t.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Per the link I provided, historically it's been backed up by reproductive rates. Seems to me to be quite clear.
If, of the human population 8000 years ago, only 1 man has surviving descendants today for every 17 women, that doesn’t actually mean that 8000 years ago, only one man had children for every 17 women.
A documented case is a documented case. It's one of the things you're asking for, right? There you go... seems like you're trying to now move the goalpost.
Sexual libertinism did not cause the collapse of the USSR. Nor did it cause the famines, the mass executions, or any of the other bad things that happened in Soviet Russia.
Okay. And? That's unrelated to what you originally asked for. I don't know what this response is supposed to make me think in light of what I quoted.
It means Iran’s reactionary dictatorship has completely failed to arrest the demographic decline or general secularization of the country.
And your ultimate conclusion is what? We have 'zero' data that's worth absolutely 'anything'? A hard sell if you ask me.
The conclusion is that the data doesn’t support the thesis that the sexual Revolution was a bad thing.
It's most certainly not a non-issue to those women who value their freedom and emancipation getting sent off to die for a narrow set of political interests.
We don’t have conscription in the west so anyone, male or female, who doesn’t want to die for a narrow set of political interests can just stay home.
And so what should they be concerned 'with' in your view? The entire project of politics is about competing visions of society and the group trying to impose their way of life on the community.
Conservatives are entirely justified on rejecting the sexual Revolution based on their own conservative premises, but they have no real argument to convince anyone who doesn’t buy into those premises.
I have no idea what this even means, or why "conservatives" should care.
To simplify, the things conservatives hate about modern societ are either good or aren’t the fault of modernity/the sexual Revolution/liberalism/whatever.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Not sure how long your time horizon is here, but he's pretty easily vindicated on this point.
"More women than men have surviving descendants" is not necessarily the same thing as "more men than women reproduced." This doesn't really matter though, what matters is there's no good evidence in the modern, post-sexual revolution west for a minority of men monopolizing a majority of the women.
What's your empirical evidence to the contrary?
What's the evidence for it? As extensively discussed in the link I provided, it's not backed up by partner counts, it's not backed up by virginity rates, it's not backed up by STD rates.
Their SR was even more libertine than the American one was.
For five years in a handful of big cities, sure.
In Iran you can get executed for adultery, so at least there's a start.
Iran has a TFR of 1.7, is regularly roiled by massive anti-regime protests, and religious affiliation is sharply declining among the nation's youth. Not much of a start.
What 'do' you put your stock in then? You ask me how I rate my life satisfaction in the country I live and I give you an answer, you're telling me I'm an unreliable source on my own happiness?
Even if you take this statistics at face value, the conclusion isn't borne out, which is the point.
Declining demographics
Will be rendered a non-issue by the end of the century at the absolute latest, almost certainly sooner.
lack of family formation
What is the argument for this being a bad thing that doesn't begin with the premise, "family formation is good."
dysfunctional men being raised by single mothers
Is there good evidence for the causal impact of single motherhood on male dysfunction?
sending women off to war
This is a non-issue. Why should I or anyone else care?
bending other important norms to reduce everything to a woman's private advantage
I don't know what you have in mind here, so I can't answer.
If running through and enumerating the long list of problems doesn't suffice in convincing you there's something rotten
So much conservative critique of modernity boils down to waving one's hands and shouting, "look how horrible everything is!" with the listener left to draw the conclusion that things would be less horrible if we were more conservative. When I try to quantify things I usually find that the horrible things are A) much less bad than they're painted to be B) have no causal relation to conservativeness or C) are only horrible if you assume the conclusion that conservatism is good.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
But it means at the end of the day there are more guns floating around, and most illegal guns were legal guns at one point.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
People in Europe work significantly less than people in America, so I assume women in America also work more than women in Europe. I will admit I'm speaking from a very American-centric perspective but the cultures in Europe and America are very different even if both are Western nations. It's very difficult to compare statistics across countries as it's difficult to account for the hundreds of other factors that could play a role. An analysis on a single country is easier because fewer of these factors have variance to consider (but should still be considered for an actual, statistically valid analysis). I don't know if the factors in consideration are the same and to the same degree between the European countries and the United States.
Cross-country comparisons are always shaky, but it is at the very least clear that it's not as simple as "60s liberalism line go down."
Look at the chart and you'll see widowed mothers have -0.19 on 9th grade completion and -0.13 on college completion relative to two-biological parents households. Widowed mothers like I pointed out earlier are a very small percentage of the population so the sample size of widowed women may also have been small enough to make it difficult to achieve the desired p-value of 0.001.
Those seem like pretty small effects. But there should be more research done on this.
The idea that female labor force participation automatically generates liberal sexual mores simply isn’t as obvious as some people seem to think
It's less that female labor force participation automatically generates liberal sexual mores than that technological advancement undermines the property relations upon which traditional marriage and patriarchy in general was built, which in turn creates an environment conducive to liberalization of sexual mores and to increasing participation of women in the labor force.
Yeah, but it’s not that good, either.
Is it worse than what came before? I don't think so.
women don’t really get anything out of casual sex.
Women don't have to have casual sex, and in fact most women don't have casual sex. Average number of life sex partners is something like 6, and those tend to be long-term partners in a relationship, not bar or tinder hook-ups. Casual sex is more common than it was in the 50s, but it's not really that common.
Data on things like how promiscuity affects relationship success and satisfaction lead detractors of the sexual revolution to often note the fact that many young people today probably would be happier getting married in their mid twenties to an exclusive partner.
This data is naturally very confounded. I can't find the stats at the moment so I guess you should have lower confidence in what I say next, but promiscuity sex only leads to lower satisfaction among those who believe promiscuity is wrong. So if you think promiscuity is wrong, don't be promiscuous. It's true that married people generally report being happier than unmarried people, but that is also extremely confounded, the evidence that it's a long-term effect is shaky, and the effects are small anyway.
But there’s a scene in the second season where the protagonist, who has wasted her twenties and early thirties doing nothing and having endless casual sex with strangers, is sitting in a confession box at a church begging the priest, begging God, to tell her what to do, to give her a path, to free her from the atomized and empty and depressing nature of her existence.
What does it mean for married life with kids to be more meaningful or less empty than the contrary? I'm not religious, so I don't think Jehovah or Allah or anyone else has prescribed that as the "correct path." What do I have to believe in order to believe that there is some kind of real 'meaning' or 'fulfillment' in traditional life that is not found elsewhere? When e-trads talk about the meaning, happiness, fulfillment etc. of getting married and having kids I just have to wonder what they're talking about. I don't live in a cave. I have seen married couples with kids, many of them close up. Some of them are happy, sure. Some of them are hilariously miserable. 50% of marriages end in divorce, and I highly doubt 100% of the other 50% are happy. It seems like most people who get married aren't actually satisfied with the way their life turns out.
I say all of this as someone who does not live a particularly hedonistic life by most standards. I don't drink or smoke weed or use any harder drugs. I like reading books, hanging out with my friends and family, exercising, and arguing with people online, most of which would be unobjectionable to even the most conservative conservative. But I still think I have benefited from the revolution, because if it hadn't been for that, there's a real chance I'd be married with kids on the way by now, and if not now, then almost certainly within the next decade, which is something I don't want in the slightest.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
As I mentioned in the post, I don't really put that much stock in self-reported happiness rates either. But they are routinely used to demonstrate the failure of feminism/liberalism/whatever, so it's worth checking whether they support that argument, even at face value. With regards to the possibility that the European suicide rate is distorted by Europeans being worse at killing themselves and advancing medical technology saving overdoses but not gunshot suicide victims, it seems to add an extra wrinkle. "Americans report being unhappier + they kill themselves more often" and "Europeans report being happier + they kill themselves increasingly less" is suggestive.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
I don't care about individual level self-reported happiness. You agree with this later in your post. I care about generative social functioning in a free society.
That’s fine. But these statistics are often marshaled to make a conservative point. That’s not to say you, individually, have done that.
As a society, we shouldn't trade new options for old ones; being a stay at home Mom should be viewed as well as it was before, not as a traitors action to the Boss Babe lifestyle.
It is an article faith among some that modern society shames or devalues motherhood, but is that actually true beyond the extent to which women’s entry into the workforce inherently devalues motherhood? I’m not sure the mass-shaming of SAHM is actually real. If traditional motherhood is viewed as inferior to being a career woman or whatever, I think that’s simply a consequence of the fact that women’s work and the woman’s ‘sphere’ in general has pretty much always been considered inferior to that of men. The ‘women aren’t less-than men, they just have different roles’ line that is common among modern conservatives is really itself a historically recent anti-feminist rear-guard action. For centuries most thinkers had little compunction about saying simply that, yes, women are just inferior to men. It’s why historically, women who distinguished themselves in primarily male fields such as science or statecraft were often lauded (often specifically by being compared to men) while overtly feminine men received very much the opposite reaction.
Apples and oranges. Europe, until the last decade, was still interconnected pockets of monocultures. The U.S. was not. Which leads me to....
So the real cause of self-reported unhappiness and suicide rates is racial diversity? That would be a different argument, since you can have social/sexual libertinism without racial diversity and vice versa.
APPLES AND URRNGES. Massive difference between a woman who loses her husband to unexpected death versus a woman (or man) who makes a bad mate-pairing decision early on. It's about choices, risk, and commitment.
Do you think it’s the case that the children of single mothers do poorly without a father but would do fine with one, while the children of widows do fine either way? That’s certainly possible, but I can’t really think of a way to test it.
I would argue that this is a point in favor of pre-SR norms. The entire concept of permanent monogamy in marriage is that it moves past the natural order of one male impregnating a whole bunch of females.
It’s debatable this is really the “natural order.” Polygamous societies are actually not especially common, even among hunter-gatherer tribes. And where they exist, they’re generally the result of male sexual preferences being enforced upon women rather than vice versa. Very few women want to be in a harem.
It is impossible (as your own statistic clearly state) to deny that the number of sexless and single men has gone up since approx 1980.
Maybe? Slightly? It’s certainly not clear there’s some inexorable trend towards mass inceldom.
It has, was, and always will be real.
It empirically isn’t.
Difference alimony being paid and judgement rendered. "Actually, too many dudes are too poor to pay anything. They're getting off scott free!" Isn't the counterpoint you want to lead with.
The number is for alimony awarded.
Small-c conservatives don't care about sexual orientation at all. Sexual behavior is different, and that's independent from orientation.
If someone is secretly homosexual but never acts on it and stays in the closet his whole life then he might as well not be homosexual. When I talk about “people being gay” I mean people being gay in a way that is apparent to you and society at large.
The 40+ years of obivous societal decay ... I'd say that's more .... convincing.
Can you be more specific?
What conservatives / tradtionalists today are trying to do is (1) Get people to admit that the SR was on-net bad
Plainly I don’t think it’s true.
Devise ways of using traditional / conservative values to devise ways of change for a more stable society.
What would this look like, concretely?
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
What are the numbers on homosexual behavior in Europe?
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Why should it plateau until it goes up? Nobody expects an economic plateau before the singularity.
idk why I said, 'inevitably,' that's not true. It does seem plausible though that we will or will soon hit diminishing returns short of some breakthrough technology.
If wealth naturally turns people into disgusting flesh piles dependent upon mobility scooters and diabetes medication then that sounds like an argument against wealth.
At least in the modern west, you can opt out of eating 6,000 calories a day, while in the premodern world you couldn't opt out of the terrible effects of poverty and disease.
Murder should've been falling consistently, not going up and down. Medicine gets better over time, more murders are turned into assaults.
I am familiar with this point, and it seems undeniable that it's true to some extent, though homicide in the 50s was unusually low even by historic standards. Though I would postulate that plausibly, this is offset to an extent by more widespread access to killing tools, since guns per capita rate has increased pretty steadily in the US for the better part of a century. I wonder how much of the rise in homicide is down to urbanization.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
No, I would not have any idea how to find that information. But I don't see why foreigners would mask the effect in Europe but not the USA. And if modernity is making people depressed, why would it not have the same impact on migrants from more 'trad' societies?
There are also many other explanations I considered "such as social media, the use of drugs and anti-depressants, the sexual liberation of women, dating and casual sex, marriage and divorce, and the decline of religion". The topic of sexual liberation of women is being discussed here so great opportunity to expand on that topic.
Why isn't female happiness declining in Europe, where all of these same factors are in operation? The 'paradox of declining female happiness' is sometimes said to exist in Europe as well, but this is misleading, because while in the US female self-reported happiness has been declining in absolute terms, in Europe it has been declining only relative to men. Both sexes report becoming happier over the past several decades, which doesn't seem like a problem to me.
Can you fix the link here? Seems to go to an ancient reddit post about a hat.
Fixed. It's a graph.
And widowed single mothers are only a small percentage of mothers, Wikipedia says 1.7%. The other categories of mothers we still see significant outcome differences. From your same source
At least for young boy, they do need a father figure in their lives.
The question is whether the lack of a father is what is responsible for these poor outcomes, or whether it's down to confounding. The lack of poor outcomes among the children of widows suggests the latter. Of course it's not 100% positive proof, it's possible that the children of non-widowed single mothers would do fine with a father, but do poorly without one, even though the children of widows seem to do alright either way. But I don't see a better way to test this question short of highly unethical experimentation.
I previously addressed this point when you brought up it up last time. Definitely an important statistic to consider that isn't brought up but it doesn't address the division of assets (which financially hurts men) and as greyenlightenment's response to this post points out there are other factors to consider other than alimony.
I can concede that child support is a drawback of modern society for men (though it seems child support is awarded to only about 60% of custodial mothers, which while a majority, is actually lower than I expected). Overall I think pre-modern society was worse for women than modern society is for men.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
If life expectancy is plateauing
Life expectancy is inevitably going to plateau, at least until LEV.
if people are getting fatter
This is pretty straightforward. In the developed world, good-tasting food is cheaper and more plentiful than ever, and manual labor is less necessary than ever. Why would people not be getting fatter.
and more depressed
As noted in the OP, if this is a real phenomenon, it appears to be localized to the US, and not present in other countries that have experienced modernity.
if murder rates are rising
Murder rates had been falling since the 90s, prior to 2020.
It's not actually clear that everything is getting worse.
Most importantly, nobody is having children anymore. Our civilization is literally unsustainable with > 2.1 fertility and it seems to still be declining.
Worrying about whether or not there will be enough children in 50 or 100 years is like those people in 1900 who worried about the cities of the future being buried in horse manure (that's actually a myth but you get the point). The world then is almost certainly not going to look or be configured remotely as it is now.
There were other causes like urbanization but the sudden drop in the 1970s is staggering. It's well-established in the literature too - female empowerment, labor force participation and female education are agreed to reduce fertility.
For me this is an argument against fertility rather than an argument against female empowerment and education.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
But it's more than that: child support, loss of visitation, and other downsides.
I couldn't find the statistics, but I don't actually think the majority of divorced couples have children.
A couple weeks ago I had an argument with people on here about the Sexual Revolution, and its terrible effects on society, or lack thereof. Just about everyone except me was in agreement that the SR was a bad thing.
My thoughts and responses to objections were scattered throughout the thread, so I decided to collect them and make a brief and incomplete case as to why the SR, and the social revolution of the 60s in general was not a bad thing, and most of its purported deleterious impacts are overstated, wrongly attributed, or nonexistent.
Did the social revolution of the 60s make everybody unhappy and miserable?
Straightforwardly, yes. American self-reported happiness rates have been on a fairly steady decline since the 70s. With regards to women in particular, there is a phenomenon referred to as the ‘paradox of declining female happiness’, the observation that even as women have attained greater legal rights and generally been raised in status relative to men, their self-reported happiness has declined. This is often used by social conservatives to argue that women were happier as wives and mothers and that forcing them out of their ‘natural’ roles and into competition with men was a mistake.
I am generally skeptical about self-reported happiness, because it’s not clear if measurement invariance holds over time. Does the question “are you happy?” mean the same thing to someone in 2020 as it does in 1970, let alone 1900?
But suicide rates have also been rising in the US for a long time, so it’s fair to say people becoming unhappier is a real phenomenon. The trend is actually worst among young-ish adults. Here’s a tweet from middling right-wing e-celeb Indian Bronson blaming this trend on the usual right-wing bogeymen.
The problem with the “everyone is depressed and killing themselves because we aren’t based and trad anymore” story is that it doesn’t hold internationally.
It’s pretty undeniable that Western Europe underwent the same social revolution as the US. On many metrics like irreligion, illegitimacy, and rates of people identifying as LGBT, what a social conservative would probably call ‘the decay’ is actually significantly more advanced than it is in the US.
Yet over the past several decades in Europe, self-reported happiness has tended to either hold steady, or increase.
Suicide rates back this up. Over the same time period that suicide rates have spiked among Americans, especially American youth, they’ve declined in western Europe
It seems that everybody being atomized gay atheists hasn’t made Europeans more depressed or suicidal.
What about the dreaded epidemic of single motherhood? Well, as noted above, multiple European countries have single-parenthood rates (and as in the US, the vast majority being single mothers) equivalent or greater than those of the US, without the associated social dysfunction.
There’s not as much research as one would like, but from what I have found, the children of widowed mothers do not tend to differ much on outcomes from the children of biological, two-parent households, so “growing up without a father” doesn’t seem to be that important net of other factors.
What about the supposedly meteor-tier impact on the ‘sexual marketplace’? This is honestly worthy of its own post, but the short answer. Is, no, the idea that the upper 20% (or 10% or 5% or 1% depending on how blackpilled your interlocutor is) of Chads hoarding all the woman while ordinary guys starve is very thinly supported on the ground.
Last year a headline proclaiming “most young men are single. Most young women are not.” went viral. Specifically, GSS data showed that 63% of young men reported themselves as single while only 34% of young women did. This was of course immediately seized upon as proof that a huge proportion of girls are in “chad harems.” Since nobody bothers to read beyond a sensationalist headline, not many dug deep enough to discover that this proportion has been roughly the same for over thirty years, so if the chadopoly is real, it’s been going on for a long time.
As for the “divorce rape” the manosphere has spent the last fifteen years insisting is endemic under our gynocracy, only 10% of divorces actually result in any actual alimony paid.
I add this cautiously, because it’s the only study I could find to treat the question, and it’s about the UK, and it’s about twenty years old, but there is at least some evidence that men actually end up richer long term post-divorce. Which makes intuitive sense to me. Most men are breadwinners, so naturally when you don’t have to support a whole other human being, you’re going to have more disposable income on hand.
If you’re a conservative, then you think single motherhood, divorce, people being gay, and promiscuity, are bad in and of themselves, so from a conservative perspective, the social revolution of the 60s was tautologically a bad thing since that revolution was explicitly an anti-conservative one. But that is not likely to convince anyone who is not already a conservative.
When I have this argument elsewhere someone always hits me with “oh so you think everything is great, huh? You think this degenerate feminist deracinated hellscape we inhabit is a paradise, don’t you?” People on here are not generally that abrasive but anyway, no, I don’t, I think there are plenty of problems in the world. but I also don’t think there’s much evidence for “everything would be better if we RETVRNED” thesis.
This is all besides the fact that I don't think it's POSSIBLE to retvrn because I think the massive social changes of the past two centuries are down less to the Frankfurt School indoctrinating everyone with Cultural Marxism and more to the seismic shifts in the actual underlying material basis of society, which could not be undone short of some kind of totalitarian anti-technological world dictatorship (which of course would have to make significant use of modern technology to impose itself) enforcing the law of Ted Kaczynski upon the earth, but that is another story and I am tired of writing.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
I don't see how this could be true. A decentralized state which leaves more power in the hands of regional/local authorities provides many more opportunities for rebel groups to emerge and organize.
I started this comment chain and the comment I was replying to said nothing about conscription or taxes. I think "is there conscription and high taxes" is a bad measure of government strength compared to "does this government face any serious threats to its monopoly on force."
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
The problem of the White Russians wasn't that the emerging Bolshevik state was strong -- actually it was significantly weaker at the time than any of the countries to which the émigrés went -- it's that it was Bolshevik. The US government was much stronger than the Soviet government, despite being less overbearing.
that fleeing conscription and taxes isn't a common reason for migration throughout history.
The US does not have conscription, while countries with significantly weaker governments like Syria or Ukraine do.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
There are places with weaker and stronger governments on the earth and generally people do not move from places with stronger governments to places with weaker governments.
It seems like the rapid economic advancement of East Asia is an argument against hard racial hereditarianism. Because the HBD arguments goes that Sub-Saharan Africa is poor, underdeveloped, and wartorn because black Africans are just have bad genes. But if we grant the HBD premise that EAsians are, for genetic reasons, more intelligent than whites, blacks, American Indians, Arabs, etc. then it becomes clear that a people with high "genetic potential" can spend centuries mired in poverty, before some environmental stimulus induces rapid development. Because prior to the mid-point of the century, many EAsian countries were as poor or poorer than many SSA and Latin American countries. Someone in the 19th or early 20th century who claimed EAsian poverty was for genetic reasons would have been on as solid footing a someone who claimed the same of SSA poverty today, but he would have been wrong.
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