To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Tyranny is the undue restriction of liberty, and especially historically, there are many powers besides the state that can restrict liberty. However, as the state expands, it generally displaces and destroys these smaller power centers, which is generally a good thing.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Stop, your tyranny is showing.
So many historical revolts and risings in the name of 'freedom' are really calls for petty local tyrants to maintain their personal absolutisms in the face of a greater central authority threatening to temper their abuses. The Southern slaveholders revolting for the freedom to tyrannize their slaves (and to a lesser extent, everyone else in the antebellum south, which was a pro-slavery police state where it was literally illegal to be anti-slavery) is the best-known and most relevant example of this dynamic for an American audience, but there are also any number of European aristocratic revolts against some horrible tyrant king whose crime is trying to circumscribe the power of the landed nobles over their subjects, or even the conspirators who killed Julius Caesar.
Often 'tyranny' is narrowly defined as the tyranny of the centralized state, while the tyranny of clerics, slave masters, regional notables, the paterfamilias, etc. are defined as 'liberty.'
I read this a few days ago.
1 - The author's conclusion is "we need to make women poorer so they will be desperate enough to fuck and marry men they don't otherwise want to fuck and marry." This is a value judgment not an empirical statement, so I can't say it's incorrect as a matter of fact, but it's certainly an unappealing suggestion to me and everyone else who isn't already all-in on RETVRNING.
2 - The author says:
This gives the false impression that, while the Baby Boom was significant for the 20th century, it was only a blip compared to the massive fertility decline preceding it. This is misleading. TFR works well for 20th century Western countries, and for most of the world past World War II. But it falls apart when dealing with countries with high infant and childhood mortality, as was universal before the late 19th century.
Once Malthusian constraints are lifted by the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, you have a near-constant net fertility at around three, before a major decline in the early 20th century to around replacement5, followed by a major resurgence to around the original level during the Baby Boom.
Regardless of pre-twentieth century infant mortality, people's behavior was still changing to result in fewer children being born, whether or not some of those children died before adulthood doesn't really matter. The point in the first half of the 20th century where people were having about three children and all of those children survived just seems to be the point where declining fertility rates intersected with advancing medical technology which allowed for near 100% childhood survival rates.
3 -
It’s worth noting that this is not just a natural consequence of the shift from an industrial to a service economy. Affirmative Action in favor of women is common across the Boom countries, as is disproportionate female employment in state-created regulatory jobs such as HR. There are also thousands of organizations explicitly dedicated to promoting women’s careers at the expense of men’s, and almost none of the converse. These combine to artificially raise women’s wages above the market rate, and lower men’s.
I was waiting for the author to mention this. He just handwaves the impact of this transition with "well there's affirmative action and feminist initiatives." He doesn't attempt any kind of analysis to quantify what kind of impact affirmative action and feminist initiatives have or have not actually had on women's earning power. That's unfortunate, because his thesis stands or falls on this. The question is whether the M:F income ratio would still have shrunken in the absence of such efforts, and to what extent. The transition from an industrial economy meant that, in developed countries, manual labor was less important than ever. Since upper-body strength is the single biggest advantage men hold over women, it would be quite shocking if the decreasing importance of jobs requiring upper body strength did not result in a narrowing of the M-F income gap. And if much or most of this narrowing would have taken place purely as a material consequence of this transition, then just getting rid of AA and feminism wouldn't actually have the desired effect, you would have to artificially restrict the labor market to LARP as if the economic foundation of the western world is the same as it was in 1950.
4 - One imperfect but perhaps useful way to test the "M-F income gap make fertility go up" thesis would be to compare across nations, and see if developed countries with larger income gaps in favor of men have higher fertility rates. Let's see what fertility rates look like in the OECD country with the largest income disparity between men and wome - oh no
One more nitpick:
This particularly increases the costs for men through the mechanism of family courts (as divorce usually means he loses his assets, income, and children).
It doesn't actually mean that. The manosphere loves these horror stories but alimony is awarded only in a minority of divorce cases, about 10%. Women tend to wind up significantly poorer after divorce, not richer.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
30% or more were prostitutes in the big cities, which I don't think anyone has suggested
Some people did actually. I was thinking not of London but of 19th century New York. According to this book estimates of the percentage of young women in NY who were prostitutes over the 19th century ranged from 1% all the way to 40%. The author says that 5 - 10% seems likely because the police tended to lowball their figures and reformist societies to overstate them. He also suggests that during economic downturns the number may have gone above 10%. Obviously the numbers are extremely uncertain because moralists had a motive to exaggerate them, and at the same time a lot of prostitution was part-time and freelance, and so slipped under the radar. What seems clear is that women being driven to prostitution out of economic desperation was many times more common than it is today.
I have no idea what prostitution looked like in village communities or to what extent it existed. In the 19th century medium-to-large towns and cities in the USA and Western Europe are pretty much the only places with anything resembling reliable statistics.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
No, but I don’t have “number (of humans) go up” as a terminal value. I think most people wouldn’t be thrilled about high or even replacement level fertility if all of those children being born were going to spend the their entire lives in conditions equivalent to a Soviet gulag or a Caribbean sugar plantation. That’s how I feel about high fertility in a context in which the children being born will spend their lives in societies like those which prevailed before the 20th century.
I don’t view falling fertility rates as good in and of themselves, simply as markers of things I DO view as good, such as female emancipation, wealth, literacy, the demolition of traditional clan-kinship structures, etc.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Don't worry we will get the non-developed countries. Sub-Saharan Africa is the last holdout, but we're coming for them too.
Reliable statistics from the medieval era are pretty non-existent but 10% actually seems to be about the rate at which women became prostitutes in the 19th century. It was quite common. Significantly higher than say, uptake on OnlyFans is today. You can also swap "prostitute" for "indigent." Nobody ever accused spinsters of living comfortably.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
The liberation of women from the age-old dilemma of "marry this guy and have six of his kids or become a prostitute" is one of the greatest triumphs of human history, on par with the elimination of smallpox and possibly the invention of agriculture. Thank you industrial revolution and twentieth century social democracy.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Militant atheists in the west grew up in a Christian-influenced culture, and a lot of them grew up in conservative Christian homes, which left them with distaste and contempt for Christianity in particular.
If you go to, for example, ex-Muslim communities online, you will find every bit as much low-brow fundies-owned vitriol directed towards Islam.
This is a mega crazy idea I have no evidence for, but I think the tail end ultra violent genes have largely been killed/exiled off in the more populated old world, creating a new mean. This probably didn't happen in the new world.
I've seen this idea bounced around by HBD-types and as far as I can tell there's not only no evidence for it, but evidence against it. Indians in Latin American countries are not broadly more criminal than whites. There's actually a negative correlation in Mexico between how native a state is and how violent it is. It's generally not Indians getting in cartel shootouts. Even as far back as the initial European contact, Spaniards always commented on the remarkable peacefulness and good order in Indian cities. Looking at the US, the hispanic homicide rate has actually been more than halved since the 80s, as the composition of hispanic immigrants shifted from largely-white northern Mexican Chicanos to heavily Indian Guatemalan/Salvadoran/etc. type laborers.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I guess it depend on when he reckons the current cycle to have started.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
It has been said, both disapprovingly and otherwise, that Satan was the first revolutionary.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
This question tends to be a good barometer for how far-right somebody is. The most anodyne of normiecons will say things went wrong in the 90s or even the 2000s and on the other end of the spectrum you've got Yarvinite types who will say that the left has been on a winning streak since 1789.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I don't know if I'm an "SJer" but I'm probably to the left of like 90% of the userbase here so:
The culture war doesn't have to end, at least not anytime soon. The left-right culture war has consumed western civilization since the French Revolution. To the extent it will end, it will be because new issues come to prominence and the old ones come to seem less relevant, rather than a clear and total victory of either 'side.' And anyway, left and right are moving targets. A victory of today's 'left' or 'right' wouldn't necessarily look like a victory to the 'left' or 'right of fifty years ago, or fifty years in the future.
Frankly, the Blue Tribe's been writing all the history books since before I was born, so it's hard for me to even picture it.
When would you say the left started writing all the history books?
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Yes, but on a broader scale he was still significantly to the ‘left’ of most of his continental rivals. Conservatives of the day never really stopped seeing him as the revolution incarnate. And a lot of the changes he reversed were less actual significant material reforms and more silly LARP stuff like getting rid of the revolutionary calendar.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I think Napoleon was pretty cool, not only for the all of the cool military victories, but also because he dealt the deathblow to the old church-and-king order of Europe. I find it strange that he has such popularity among right wingers for that reason. Pretty much every other Napoleon fan I’ve ever run into online besides myself is a right winger, and usually a pretty edgy one, I don’t think there are many normiecon Napoleon fanboys. Napoleon was obviously not exactly a progressive by today’s standards, nor was he personally a liberal or anything like that, but his overall historical role was certainly to destroy traditional Europe. He was an icon of liberals and revolutionaries in Europe for decades. If I was a reactionary conservative I think Napoleon would be high on my list of historical villains.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Functionally. I'm not conversant enough with philosophy of religion to say God doesn't exist, but I'm 99% all revealed religions are false.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
It’s been a while since I read either one. I just remember a part where Kemp repeats the Franco line about Guernica having been burnt by the republicans on retreat.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
This was (mostly) a joke. I do hope technology will come to at least our aid, if not our total salvation, but I’m dreaming more of automation than BNW.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
How do you think that worked out in reality
Fairly well.
The stigma on pre-marital and promiscuous sex did significantly decrease. None of my friends or family of a similar age that I can think of are virgins, unless some of them are lying, and that's not scandalous or anything anybody thinks about too much. It hasn't prevented a lot of them from entering LTRs or even getting married. STIs and pregnancy are much less problematic and dangerous than they used to be, and pregnancy in particular is completely a choice these days. All that came about as promised.
Obviously it has not created a paradise on earth, and none of the problems it promised to take care of have completely disappeared, but so what? What has? It seems to me clearly better than what preceded it.
given the rise of the "incel"?
There have always been a minority of people, mostly men, who through no fault of their own will probably never find a romantic relationship or even have sex, but it's not clear to me that number has actually significantly increased in recent years (because I think a lot, if not a majority, of incels online are not actually 'truecels'). The so-called 'sex recession' began abruptly in the late aughts, early 2010s, so I would need an explanation on why the SR only had such an impact fifty years after its beginning. What is the proposed mechanism of action here? The standard answer is, "all the women are fucking chad" but that isn't really backed up by any data.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I think excluding trans generational mental health data is a bit of a cope for the pro sexual revolution side. It’s a back door way of ignoring data that points to the traditional relationship view.
Looking at the statistics of people seeking treatment for anxiety and depression show people seeking out more treatment today than in 1983 or 1963.
I don't think the data is worthless but I think it's highly problematic for the reasons mentioned. It's extremely hard to control for all of the other potential factors at work.
We know there’s much more divorce now than there was in the past.
I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. If people can dissolve relationships they don't want to be in, I think that's generally a good thing. The alternative to being divorced usually isn't being in a good marriage, but being in a bad one. I'm not convinced the purported terrible effects on children are all that large or relevant net of other factors.
even statistics that show generational problems like school success, family formation, drugs and alcohol as much bigger problems now than in the past.
I'm not sure what you mean by "school success." More people go to school than ever before. Certain test scores have dropped since the 60s (but others haven't), but way more people take tests like the SAT than they did back then. Alcoholism is significantly lower today than it was in the 70s. Druge use appears to be worse, yes.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Peter Kemp is like the mirror George Orwell. Both left interesting accounts which are valuable as primary sources, and they both get recommended incessantly by extremely online right-wingers and leftists respectively when books on the Spanish Civil War are requested. But if you're trying to actually understand the socio-political background/context of the SCW reading Orwell or Kemp will probably leave you less informed than you started, because both were Englishmen who knew next to nothing about the country or the war they had just volunteered to fight in and had a tendency to just uncritically believe propaganda from one or the other side.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Is that based on entire states like Utah, or levels of religiously / conservatism of specific groups.
I'm pretty sure conservative/religious fertility is at almost exactly 2.0/replacement, while self identified liberal/secular is at 1.75 or so. Maybe it will maintain there, but considering how much higher it was a century or two ago, it strikes me as unlikely.
Well, if you want us all to go extinct, if we fail to endorse your Brave New World utopia, you kinda are.
I state my preferences. Many people, including you, disagree.
My point is there is no "us" here, or if there is
Obviously we have totally incompatible views on what human society should look like in the future.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I have mentioned neither Russians nor peasants, the trend of more religious / conservative people having more children than secular / progressive ones is clear as day.
Even among conservatives and the religious, fertility rates have been falling for decades and are barely at replacement. Even Utah is now below replacement. Only full on parallel societies like the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews seem to be robustly reproducing and likely to keep it up for the foreseeable future.
No one's forcing you to return to anything, you're free to believe that and act accordingly, but I don't see what gives you the right to speak in the name of all of humanity.
I didn't claim to speak in the name of all humanity.
Technology is there to serve us, not to reshape us according to the wants of those who own it.
Technology serves us precisely by extending the production possibilities frontier and allowing us to get away with stuff that we couldn't in prior generations. Like hypothetically, allowing for the fertility rates of the 18th century without having to readopt any of the social mores or taboos.
In the modern developed world we've mostly but not entirely gotten rid of non-state tyrannies. In the past, I think it would be appropriate to refer to a slaveholder or a the head of a clan as a tyrant over his subjects.
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