To_Mandalay
6mo ago
So was the sexual revolution a failure? Everyone in the linked thread seems to take it for granted, and just argues about why it was a failure and how bad of a failure it was. What's the evidence that the SR was worsened people's lives, and what metrics are being used to assess that?
Further developments on the ayy lmao front
You may recall a few weeks ago, former intelligence officer David Grusch came out with claims that the US has several alien spacecraft in its possession, and has been studying and reverse-engineering them for decades. While claims like this have floated around for decades, including from former government employees, Grusch was different because of his undeniable credentials, and because he is going through 'proper' whistleblower channels.
This was the latest act in a drama that goes back to 2017 (well, 1947, but let's not get ahead of ourselves), when Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal published a piece in the New York Times disclosing the existence of a pentagon program dedicated to studying UFOs, known as AATIP (or AAWSAP, depending on when and where) led by a man called Lue Elizondo. This sparked an apparent sea change in government, and UFOs and aliens, formerly dismissed out of hand, began to be taken more seriously.
Everyone from Obama to former CIA director John Brennan started dropping hints that hey maybe aliens might possibly could be here. Some apparently very sober Navy pilots came forward and shared their apparently inexplicable experiences on 60 minutes. Lue Elizondo did the talk-show circuit.
'UFOs' were rebranded 'UAPs' since over the past few decades, 'UFO' had become synonymous with 'flying saucer.' Congress held its first UFO hearings in over fifty years. A new office, AARO, was founded to investigate and classify UAP sightings..
Well, now the latest development. Chuck Schumer has sponsored a congressional amendment with bipartisan support mandating that, if it exists, any alien biological or technological material, or any evidence of non-human intelligence (and yes the bill uses those terms) held by any private or illegal government entity be turned over to congress.
I've been pretty skeptical about this whole thing. NY Post journalist Steven Greenstreet provides an alternative narrative, where this is the result of a small but fanatical, well-financed, and well-motivated group of UFO/paranormal fanatics that has been pushing all of this stuff for years in and outside of government, without any real proof to back any of it up. He has provided evidence that AATIP started out not as a 'UFO program' but as a pet project of senator Harry Reid, who in conjunction with Robert Bigelow, another big-time paranormal fan, wanted first and foremost to conduct a study of Skinwalker Ranch, which they believe(d) to be a hot-bed of supernatural activity, including werewolves and (as Greenstreet never tires of pointing out) "dinobeavers." While the media has focused on the apparently more grounded, sober claims of mysterious craft in the sky demonstrating apparent technological superiority to any known human craft, a lot of people don't realize just how closely aliens and UFOs are tied up with werewolves, bigfoot, demons, ghosts, remote viewing, and every other kind of woo.
That said, now that Chuck Schumer is sponsoring legislation that boils down to "show me the aliens!" it's getting harder for me to believe that this is all down to a small band of committed UFO nuts taking everybody (themselves included) for a ride. I'm still skeptical, and I still don't think this is going to end with a flying saucer being wheeled in front of congress. But it seems increasingly undeniable that something is going on here. The lazy counter is "it's a psyop" but one has to ask, "a psyop to what end?" To increase government funding for the military? I don't think the military needs to put on a dog and pony show like this to squeeze some extra dollars out of congress. To "distract us"? This stuff tends to not be front-page news, actually. I don't think a lot of people have even heard about this new amendment. To fake an alien invasion and use it as a springboard for a one-world government? I kinda doubt it. To scare Russia and China? That would be the most plausible version of the "psyop" hypothesis I think, but it still doesn't ring true for me.
Another possibility is this: it is known that the government has, for ulterior motives, psyopped people into believing in UFOs and ultimately driven them insane.. It's entirely possible that this is all 'sincere' insofar as, within the tangled web that is the US federal government, there are SAPs staffed at least in part by people who believe they're studying or have studied alien spacecraft or alien bodies, even though they aren't, because they've been lied to or misled by their colleagues and superiors.
IMO at this point, that's the most likely explanation.
Or maybe it really is aliens.
As to the culture war angle, interestingly, with the exception of Kristen Gillibrand, who is not the leftiest of dems, most of the representatives and senators who have been vocal and active in pushing for UAP transparency have been republicans like Marco Rubio, Tim Burchett, Mike Gallagher, and Anna Paulina Luna. If some government official does come out and say, "yes, okay, fine we have a flying saucer in the basement" it is interesting to think that aliens might become a new culture war battlefield, with aliens-are-real being right coded and aliens-are-fake being left coded. But seeing how in-flux political alignments were in the early months of COVID, who knows?
To_Mandalay
24d ago
To claim that modern society has devalued motherhood and femininity, or made them low status, is completely backwards. Motherhood and femininity in general have been devalued for as long as patriarchy has existed, so pretty much the whole of human history. I can't think of any human cultures, let alone any of the big-name European and near-eastern ones that the modern west is descended from, which have not considered the female sphere and female pursuits to be intrinsically lesser than that of men.* The "oh, women aren't inferior to men, they just have different strengths/they're made for different roles" line you hear from conservatives nowadays (what Christians call 'complementarianism') is itself an anti-modernist rearguard action. For the great majority of the history of western civilization, philosophers, theologians, and intellectuals, whether Pagan, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or atheist, have been happy to state that actually, women are just strictly inferior to men. It's the reason you occasionally get figures like Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great who are praised for being essentially men in women's bodies, but you never get men praised for being essentially women in men's bodies.
What happened in more resent centuries isn't that motherhood and womanhood were devalued. Motherhood and womanhood were devalued way back in the primordial past, and only recently have women been allowed to escape such devalued roles at scale.
You can't make motherhood 'prestigious' because motherhood has never been prestigious. Closest thing would just be banning women from doing actually prestigious things.
To_Mandalay
10mo ago
My thoughts point by point:
Men are vastly more likely to be victims of the worst kind of violent crime: murder. In the US, 82% of total homicide victims are male, 18% are female. Women probably endure more sexual violence, but men definitely endure more violence overall given the 4:1 murder ratio.
Fair. Though if you aren't involved in criminal activity, your odds of being murdered drop dramatically.
Men do the overwhelming majority of the nasty, dangerous work, such as roofing in the summer, oil rig operation, management of sewers, garbage collection, etc.
True, but the vast majority of men in first world countries don't do work like this. I don't think it says much about the experience of the average man. A lot of very dangerous, hard work is also quite well-paying.
Men are much more likely to be homeless (70%:30%) or imprisoned (93%:7%). I think this speaks to the greater competitiveness of the male world: If a man fails in life, he's judged a complete fuckup, and ends up a homeless low-status loser. If a woman fails, she can almost always just get married.
Basically no one who isn't severely mentally ill and/or addicted to hard drugs ends up homeless long-term. It's not like the majority, or even a significant minority, of men are living on the knife's edge of homelessness.
Men are much more likely to kill themselves
I'm not sure how this really relates to the concept of a "minimum deal." Unlike most of the other things on this list, suicide can't just happen to you as a result of extrapersonal factors. If you don't want to die by suicide, just don't kill yourself.
And no, I'm not persuaded that childcare is harder than conventional employment.)
'Conventional employment' is a pretty broad term. Would I rather take care of children than fight in Ukraine or mine coal? Yeah, probably. Would I rather take care of children than work in an air-conditioned office or as a cashier? No way. Childcare sucks, even if some things suck even worse.
The law heavily favors women in child custody and child support disputes, and the institution of alimony transfers far more male wealth to women than female wealth to men.
True, but ameliorated by the fact that a huge number of men don't even bother to contest custody, and that alimony payment is in fact very rare. The vast majority of divorces don't end in alimony settlements. The whole horror story where your wife divorces you and takes all your stuff so she can fuck chad is much less common than the internet would have you believe.
Men are much more likely to die in combat; in fact, during serious military conflicts, they face military slavery (“the draft”).
True, but the draft hasn't been a factor in half a century and IMO is unlikely to be one for the foreseeable future. Any American who gets killed in battle these days quite literally signed up for it.
Our culture automatically cares more about female suffering and wellbeing than male suffering: "The ship is sinking! Save the women and children first!"
Maybe (though I have posted previously on here about how I think the narrative of 'if you're a man nobody gives a shit about you, your existence is a lonely void' is quite overblown). That said, fair to point out that "women and children first" was not an old maritime law but a rather recent innovation at the time the Titanic sank. Through most of history, women and children have had much worse survival rates in sinkings because, well, the rule was 'every man for himself' and the men could swim.
The dating market is more competitive for men than for women; women are far more selective than men about sex partners. Imagine an attractive person of the opposite sex walking up to you on a college campus and saying, “Hi, I’ve been noticing you around town lately, and I fnd you very attractive. Would you have sex with me?” How would you respond? If you are like 100 percent of the women in one study, you would give an emphatic no. You might be ofended, insulted, or just plain puzzled by the request. But if you are like the men in that study, the odds are good that you would say yes— as did 75 percent of those men (Clarke & Hatfeld, 1989). As a man, you would most likely be flattered by the request.
I have great news for you: you too can have sex on demand. Simply download tinder onto your phone, set your preferences to 'men,' and start swiping. I guarantee you within a few hours tops you can have a hook-up arranged with an extremely attractive man. "But I don't want to have sex with men!" you cry. Well...
Women are more likely to be superficially treated as mere "sex objects" by men. That said, men are more likely to be superficially treated as mere "success objects" by women.
This seems like a wash even on your framing. But it does remind me of what I think is one of the sillier mansophere/PUA/redpill/whatever it's called now, slogans, which goes something like "women are loved for who they are, men are loved for what they can provide." Silly because it implies there's some kind of core essence of 'you' separate from your character and actions (what you can provide), and because what "women are loved for who they are" really means is "women are loved for their looks" which doesn't sound nearly as nice. Moreover this is usually said said in such a way to make women out to be the shallower sex, but when it really comes down to it I think loving someone because they make a lot of money or are a famous musician or something is less shallow than loving someone because they're hot (even if both are kind of shallow by the standards of storybook 'true love.') At least the former qualities are reflections of character.
Modern technology has greatly minimized the pain of childbirth, but has it equally lightened the burden on men's shoulders?
Absolutely. I think the majority of men in the first world today would probably drop dead if they had to do the work their grandfathers did, let alone those grandfathers' grandfathers. I know I would. People, especially people who romanticize pre-industrial society, really have a tendency to underestimate how brutal and treacherous life was just a little over a century ago (and much more recently in some places, and still is in less developed parts of the world).
There are ways that life is easier for men. You have already listed female advantages. For men, it's mostly the fact that people take you more seriously, and that men tend to be physically much stronger than women. Those two factors divide into a lot of different smaller sub-advantages in social and daily life. Personally I think walking around knowing that about 75% of the population is physically stronger than me and there wouldn't be much I could do about it if one of them chose to do me harm would be very psychologically distressing, and I'm glad I don't have to deal with that, and no amount of cultural messaging will fix that particular problem.
As for your "minimum deal" for women being "just get married," again, imagine that your alternative to being homeless and killing yourself (though again, you can avoid the latter by just not killing yourself) was getting married to a man (and yes, you have to have sex with him). Would that be a great deal? Would you be happy to have that option?
Imagine the following hypothetical movie:
The protagonist is a middle aged white divorcee, whose ex-wife has unjustly poisoned his daughter against him, leaving him with very little to live for. He is very bitter about the state of the modern world, and believes America has gone down the tubes. Finally, he snaps, and with the help of a female accomplice, goes on a cross-country Natural Born Killers type murder spree, mowing down all the people he blames for the deterioration of society. And it's not a dark Oscar bait psychological drama, it's a light-hearted comedy that encourages the audience to cheer on the bloodshed.
First of all, such a movie would almost certainly never be made. Second of all, if by some miracle it was, it would be abundantly clear to everyone that it was shamelessly partisan wish-fulfillment produced by particularly bitter, particularly edgy right-wingers.
In fact, such a movie does exist. It's called God Bless America and it came out in 2011. But no one who saw it when it came out would have mistaken it for a right-wing manifesto; just the opposite, the Bush-era liberalism of the film's creators is so unabashedly on display that it feels like a screed from the other side.
I saw this movie back then when I was in middle school. Most of the politics went over my head, and I enjoyed it on the level that most teenage boys enjoy movies where a lot of people get shot. I rewatched it recently and found it fascinating what a political time capsule it is.
The protagonist, Frank, is exactly as I've described him above. While "middle-aged white man who thinks America sucks now" is a wholly and purely conservative caricature in 2023, the film is almost totally on his side. In the opening scenes, before Frank embarks on his killing spree, he gets to deliver a few author-insert monologues about how society has gone to hell. This scene is pretty interesting. "What happened to America?" is firmly right-coded, but the things Frank is angry about in particular are things that 2000s liberals didn't like. He's ranting about the vulgarity of "gay-bashing" and "xenophobic" radio shock jocks, which he views as emblematic of the decline.
What finally sets him off, is he gets a terminal cancer diagnosis. Since his life already sucks in every other way, he decides to commit suicide, but while he's about to shoot himself in front of his TV, one of those "Sweet 16" reality shows that were big a few years ago comes on, and he finds Chloe, the bratty, spoiled star so annoying that he decides to kill her first. So he tracks her down to her school and murders her, and then goes back home to commit suicide.
However, one of Chloe's classmates, Roxy, who also hated Chloe, witnesses the murder. She follows Frank home and ultimately convinces him that there are so many more people who need to die. So together they embark on their killing spree.
Not all of Roxy and Frank's targets are political (for example, people who won't shut up at the movies, and inconsiderate drivers), but filmmakers' politics come through pretty clearly when they mow down thinly-veiled stand-ins of the Westboro Baptist Church and a thinly-veiled stand-in for Limbaugh/Hannity type conservative commentators.. In the finale, they go down in a blaze of glory while shooting up a thinly-veiled 'American Idol' stand-in show.
This wasn't a monster hit or anything, and as far as I know it got pretty mixed reviews when it came out. But I think it's sort of fascinating in that filmmakers with the same politics, apparently mainstream US liberal, would never make a movie like this today.
The basic premise of likable spree shooters you're supposed to root just wouldn't fly now for one. Which is interesting on its own. Mass shooters have been present in the national consciousness for decades, but this sort of plot feels more taboo than it would have been even a decade ago. Nowadays "spree-shooter" is more likely to suggest in the popular imagination a political extremist, while back then it was more something that people just did because they were nuts or because they had personal grievances at work or school.
Frank's murderous hatred of modern American society and longing for the good old days, even if the specific things he calls out are things liberals think are bad, is much more firmly right-coded now. And some of the specifics, such as railing about consumerism and the shallowness of modern entertainment, have also become more common on the right over the past couple of years.
When Frank kills Chloe, we're supposed to get some cathartic enjoyment out of it, because who doesn't hate reality TV stars? Nowadays with sexual harassment having so much more salience in political discourse, I doubt any director would film a scene where a middle-aged man murders a teenage girl because she's just so vapid and annoying, and portray him as the good guy in the situation.
There are a bunch of jokes through the movie about how Roxy and Frank are totally not fucking, which would be unlikely now for the very same reason.
Watching this movie in the 2020s is a very bizarre experience for me. It was like a time machine. I don't have any more conclusions to draw from this, just that it's interesting how strongly art can reflect culture, and how strange those reflections can look a few years down the line.
Fertility has been dropping steadily since the early 19th century across the developed world. The sexual revolution at worst accelerated an ongoing trend, but if you look at the graph even that doesn't seem to be true, since the rate of decline since the 60s is actually lower than it was prior to the 40s - 50s baby boom.
A lot of people seem quite depressed and need powerful drugs to cope
Were people less depressed in 1932? 1832? Obviously most people would have said 'no' because 'I have depression' was not something that would have even crossed most people's minds, even if they displayed the same symptoms as someone who was 'diagnosed' with depression today, but would they have been popping SSRIs if they were available and socially acceptable? Does the question even make sense? Like I said in another comment, I don't really put a lot of stock into downward trends of positive answers to questions like "are you happy?" over time, because I doubt the invariance of the measurement. People were different in the past, even in very basic psychological ways. Someone then saying "I'm happy" and someone now saying "I'm not" doesn't imply the modern would be happier with the life of the premodern. Even if people are significantly more miserable today than the historical average, the sexual revolution is hardly the only thing that's changed in the past few decades. There's a huge inflection point in rates of self-reported anxiety and depression right at 2012 when social media exploded.
Having children is probably good for you. At least it ought to be a default setting for wellness, like sunlight and sea-level air pressure. Our brains and bodies evolved to have children.
We evolved to have children not to enjoy children. It's not like the vast majority of people, at least not women, for the past million years had much of a choice in reproducing or not. The fact that rich people in every society in history offload as much of the hard work of child-rearing as possible onto servants strikes me as a very strong indicator that most people don't actually enjoy raising kids that much.
On a purely personal and selfish level having to marry a girl and raise seven kids sounds nightmarish and I am endlessly thankful that the technological and social change of the past century means I don't have to do that.
Is it possible to be genuinely religious in the modern secular west?
My dad, as far as I know, was a lifelong atheist. But my mother’s family was pretty religious. Typical American, nondenominational but pretty hardcore Protestantism. My dad worked a lot when I was small and I didn’t see him too much so I was mostly raised by my mother and her side of the family.
We believed Jesus died and rose for you (you, reading this, specifically), Catholics are idolaters who need the gospel, Harry Potter is shady at best, every time someone sneezes in Israel the End gets one day closer, and Daniel’s fourth beast is checks notes the European Union.
Growing up, all this felt very very real. God felt like someone standing right next to me - even if you can’t see him, it would be ridiculous to think he wasn’t there. When I sinned it felt like God’s eyes were burning a hole in the back of my head. Once when I was about four, there was a car wreck outside my house and I rushed to the window to see if the Tribulation had kicked off. Whether I would ever grow up was a doubtful proposition because Jesus was coming back very, very soon to judge the world.
I stopped believing in middle school, partly because my dad was around more and he made no effort to hide his contempt for all this stuff, partly because I started going online and got drafted into the Internet Religion Wars of the 2000s. Long story short, after years of online arguments and reading I’m pretty well satisfied intellectually that Christianity is false (I’m less sure about theism in general), but I still feel it deep down.
I have an instinctive reverence for Christian symbology. I get uncomfortable when I hear jokes about God and Jesus, at least the more blasphemous ones. Sometimes I still feel that presence standing next to me, and it doesn’t seem completely out of the realm of possibility that one day I will find myself the unwilling star of my very own Chick tract.
But the vast majority of my acquaintances these days are secular liberals who were raised secular liberals. Some are nominally Jewish or Catholic but as kids they maybe went to religious services once or twice a year. God was a vague idea at most, they never prayed, whatever morals and beliefs their parents raised them with were totally irreligious ones.
When I tell them yes, I have family members who really believe God literally created all life forms as they are now by speaking them into existence, literal demons rejoice when you sin, and Jesus is literally going to come back on a white horse to destroy the wicked it sounds totally insane to them. It’s like talking about Star Wars. Just totally outside their conception of reality. And sometimes I wonder, if they were somehow began, as some do, to intellectually entertain the possibility that Christianity is true, even then would they feel it? If I read some really good apologetics for Islam (maybe they exist, I’ve never really looked) and started to think, “hey, this could be true” I'm not sure I would viscerally fear the wrath of Allah.
America becomes more and more secular every year, and more and more kids grow up like my friends did, and less and less like me. And yet there seems to be a sort of religious revival going on. It’s not really large-scale, at least not yet. But it’s real. On the left-liberal side of the spectrum, this mostly takes the form of ‘alternative’ spiritualities, astrology, energies, and witchcraft. I feel like everybody my age or younger knows at least one person who calls themselves a witch or a satanist or something. There are huge subreddits and other online communities dedicated to this stuff.
But I don’t think it’s real. I know “you don’t really believe what you say you believe” is one of the most infuriating things to hear, but in some cases I think it’s true. Sorry, not only do I not believe you can cast spells or commune with the great goddess, I don’t believe you believe you can cast spells and commune with the great goddess. Maybe you’re not consciously lying, but deep down I think you know you don’t actually have any magic powers. If you did, I think you would behave differently.
The right-wing equivalent to this is the surge, at least online, of young RW (mostly men) converting to various forms of conservative Christianity, whether it be traditional Catholicism or Orthodoxy or Reformed Protestantism or whatever. And I see it as almost perfectly equivalent to the “witchy art student” case. Sorry, twenty-five-year old guy raised by lapsed Episcopalians in New York who calls himself a “Catholic monarchist” on twitter but is totally considering Orthodoxy after reading Fr. Seraphim Rose, and will be considering sedevacantism by next week, I don’t care how many epic deus vult memes you post, I don’t think you really feel it in your bones that one day you’re going to stand before the creator of the universe and be judged.
In both cases I make allowances for exceptions. Some people, I’m sure, really do believe they have some kind of occult power. Some people, I’m sure, despite totally irreligious upbringings, really do have a Road to Damascus moment and come to deeply believe in Jesus Christ.
But for the majority of people, I think this sort of thing is a fashion statement more than anything. And that makes conversion–whether it’s to Christianity, Islam, or occultism–in the modern west different from revivals of previous eras.
Someone who responded to Jonathan Edwards in the 18th century or Billy Sunday in the early twentieth might not have been a very good Christian, but they were still raised in a Christian society where the existence and power of God were taken for granted. So when they heard a guy shouting, “therefore, repent!” it felt like a real threat. They didn’t have to completely rebuild their worldviews from the ground-up, they just had to be reminded, “oh, that’s right! God is real and he does want me to behave!”
Even if you decided to be a satanist a hundred years ago, you were raised believing that Satan was a real, terrifying being with very real power, so you would be making a serious commitment to serve a mighty god, even if you were choosing the other side. Nowadays someone who calls themselves a satanist probably doesn’t even believe Satan is real, and if they do their point of reference is maybe a TV show or a comic book.
In short, I think to really believe in gods and the supernatural, you have to be raised believing in gods and the supernatural, or at least raised in a culture that takes gods and the supernatural seriously. Even, say, someone who converted to Christianity in the 1st century is in a better position than a modern westerner. He already believed the world was in the hands of the gods, which were real beings of power, and had believed this since he was born. He just had to be told, “hey, this new god, he’s even stronger than Zeus or Ba’al!”
For better or worse, has succeeded in obliterating that fundamental sense that I think people have had for most of history that, “the gods are real, and they’re watching.” I find that pretty fascinating.
To_Mandalay
5mo 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
11mo ago
I'm pretty young, clearly younger than @WhiningCoil and probably younger than most people here. I know like maybe three actual Star Wars fans, as in, are genuinely fans of the series, read fanfiction and expanded universe books, name their pets after characters from the films, not just 'oh yeah I watched it when I was a kid, it's cool', and all of them are girls. There are also tens of thousands of pieces of Star Wars fanfiction on archiveofourown.org and I think probably 80% of it is written by women and girls. I did just make that number up, but it feels right and there's absolutely no way it's less than 50%.
Entirely possible, even likely, that this was not the case a few decades ago.
To_Mandalay
6mo ago
On the other hand we still have subgroups that maintain above replacement fertility, and they tend to not be the ones that leaned into the sexual revolution.
Falling fertility seems to go hand in hand with both technological development and political/social liberalization. It's possible that only one is responsible for the effect, but since they almost never occur independently, it's hard to tell. If we all collectively decided to adopt the material and social circumstances of 19th century Russian peasants maybe we could get fertility rates back up, but this is exactly my problem with the "modernity is terrible because fertility rates are falling" argument. It is apparently the case that pre-modern society was able to reproduce itself, but I and a lot of people think pre-modern society was horrible in just about every respect and not worth reproducing. As far as I'm concerned, we either have to figure out some secret third thing that will solve falling fertility (whether it be artificial wombs or whatever) or resign ourselves to extinction. Either of those are preferable in my eyes to a return to pre-modern existence, though obviously the first would be better.
If they're dropped from all of sociology, we can dismiss them when discussing the sexual revolution as well, but not before.
I don't want to defend all or even most of sociology.
To_Mandalay
10mo ago
I find people who are unable to fathom how an intelligent person could be a Christian have often never engaged with any Christian apologetics, and often don't even really know any Christians in real life. I think Christianity is false, but I don't think you have to be stupid or willfully ignorant to believe in it.
To_Mandalay
1mo ago
Jews died of typhus and starvation en masse near the end of the war, in the same way that 200-400k Germans died of starvation in the final months of the war and the months that followed.
This doesn't work. Most of the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust died in 1942 - '43, well before supply lines began to collapse and starvation set in. The Nazis recorded that by this time, the General Government had been cleared of Jews.
Jewish population figures were actually accurate prior to WWII
There is absolutely no grounds for assuming the governments of Eastern Europe overcounted Jewish population to the extent that would be necessary to explain the complete disappearance of eastern European Jewry post-1945. Revisionists can say that the numbers are "uncertain" or "unreliable" but it isn't true. These are not population estimates of some ill-recorded migration 2000 years ago, this is Europe in the 20th century. The degree of uncertainty required simply does not exist.
Well that’s the thing, in my opinion even the most virulent 20th century European racist would not gas family after family of downtrodden Jews.
Says who? Do you doubt Bolshevik atrocities also?
This is inexplicable when you consider (1) there were no camp whistleblowers, not even a friend or family member of a camp member who was confided in, which is improbable
This is not true. Rumors of what was going in the east were everywhere in Germany. There is a book called The German War by Nicholas Stargardt which has a long chapter going into depth on what the Germans knew about the Final Solution as it unfolded.
(2) the elderly camp guards put on trial in Germany who have entered the “honest old people” phase of dementia more often than not assert that the holocaust didn’t happen.
This is also not true. I've never heard of a old Nazi in Germany denying the Holocaust happened. Moreoever, plenty of Nazis admitted to it when they had no actual motive to admit to it. Adolf Eichmann spoke openly about the physical extermination of the Jews while he was a free man in Argentina. Why do you think he did that?
including declining fertility, declining religious belief, increased alienation of the individual, and increased mental illness
All of these problems exist, and in fact are even worse, in countries like South Korea, Japan, and Russia that are more socially conservative than the US and western Europe on every metric.
To_Mandalay
2mo ago
Churchill was not prime minister when England and France declared war on Germany.
To_Mandalay
10mo ago
Without some larger mission, most men aren't going to be motivated whatsoever. Men need a reason to exist.
For the vast majority of human history the vast majority of men (and women) have been beasts of burden. All this stuff about men needing adventure or heroism elides the fact that only a tiny minority of men have ever been heroes or adventurers. Working as a cashier at Walgreens is not significantly more monotonous or miserable than year-round farmwork.
What has changed significantly in the last century or two for men is that simply surviving childhood and not being a criminal or an imbecile is no longer enough to guarantee a wife and kids. To the extent men used to have any kind of higher “purpose” or “mission” I guess it was that. It’s not like (99% of) premoderns were sitting around philosophizing about Faith and transcendental values. This is not because of feminism or liberalism or atheism (as can be seen by the same issues developing in countries much more conservative than the west) but pretty straightforwardly a consequence of modern industrial civilization, which means individual women no longer have to rely on individual men for economic and physical security. When Jane doesn’t have to choose between starvation and prostitution on the one hand and marrying John on the other, she’s not going to marry John.
Physical and economic security is increasingly provided by ever-smaller groups of ‘specialists’ who keep the lights on and the barbarians out (and who may be mostly men, but are certainly not most men). That goes for all of us of course, which is why nobody knows how to fight or farm anymore.
No amount of social engineering, whether right-wing fantasies of restoring traditional masculinity, or left-wing ideas of building a new positive masculinity or whatever, is going to change that. There’s no cosmic law that says there has to be a solution.
To_Mandalay
2mo ago
Maybe the Bolsheviks would've won in Spain and then later pushed through all of Europe to the Atlantic.
You think if the Republicans had won in Spain this would somehow have led to the Red Army conquering all of Europe Command and Conquer style?
To_Mandalay
7mo ago
Whether they're extremely feminist by historical standards doesn't matter. If feminism (or social liberalism in general) is what causes worse social outcomes, then more feminist/liberal countries should do worse than less feminist/liberal countries now. What are the metrics by which ROK is more feminist than the US or western Europe? Quick googling shows lower female representation in parliament, significantly lower representation in corporate boardrooms and leadership, about equivalent divorce, labor force participation, and college education rates (ROK's are a little lower for all). Abortion was illegal until two years ago.
Your post where you propose to cherry-pick a counter-narrative which makes ROK out to be a feminist hellhole is sourced entirely from reddit comments.
For example, South Korea ranked 10th in the world in the UN's Gender Inequality Index
Also ranked below multiple western European countries, none of which have any of these problems in nearly the same degree as ROK does.
In any case, the OP is about gay marriage, not feminism. Homosexuality remains much less socially accepted in ROK than in the west, and there is no gay marriage.
Russia is a particularly good example since, as you note in this post, Putin's government has made a big show of retvrning to tradition, revitalizing the Orthodox Church, and opposing the degenerate west, and yet he can't keep the fertility rate from continuing to crash or the kids from becoming atheist.
To_Mandalay
2mo ago
In real life, the Soviets only reached even as far as Berlin because of copious American and British assistance. Without that, they might have at best fought the Germans back to Barbarossa start-lines. On their own, they barely beat Finland. The Red Army marching all the way to the Atlantic is ridiculous. "If it wasn't for us, the communists would have taken over!" was a useful bugbear for everybody from Hitler to Mussolini to Franco but Bolshevik conquest of Europe was always a fantasy.
To_Mandalay
4mo 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
10mo ago
I've been talking about Christianity in the past few days a lot more than I have in a while but I saw your comment and it activated my old debate-bro instincts and I couldn't resist.
The actual philosophical question of whether God exists never really interested me that much. I actually don't particularly care whether God exists, unless he inspired a religion with books and prophets that dictates how I should live. Then I care. So for discussions like this, I'm usually happy to grant the existence of God for the sake of argument and move on to discussing Christianity in particular.
his is especially the case since descriptions of what took place were written hundreds of years beforehand—see Isaiah 52:13 through to the end of Isaiah 53.
Leaving aside the long debate over whether the 'suffering servant' is in fact a single messianic figure, a corporate representative, or something else Isaiah 53 is something of a double-edged sword for apologists. On the one hand, a very popular apologetic, popularized especially by NT Wright in recent years (and which I think is bad for other reasons, but I digress), goes like this: "first century Jews had no concept of a dying and rising messiah. So the story of the resurrection is not something the disciples would make up or come to believe in a million years unless they actually experienced it. Therefore, the best explanation for the disciples' belief in the resurrection is that it really took place." On the other hand, Christians want to claim that Isaiah clearly prophesied the death and resurrection of Jesus centuries earlier. But if the scriptures contained a clear and unambiguous prediction of a messiah that would die and be resurrected, then one need not posit a genuine resurrection to account for the belief of the earliest Christians that their teacher, after his brutal execution by the state, was raised from the dead. It's right there in the prophets. If Isaiah says the messiah will die and be raised, and Jesus is the messiah, then Jesus was raised from the dead. QED.
The gospels and epistles are also better than average for ancient historical texts in some other respects—they're written not too long after the death of Jesus, within the lifetime of those who knew him when he was alive.
True. But the synoptics also all plagiarize each other, so they aren't independent sources. Mark and Luke were not eyewitnesses, by tradition. The Gospel of Matthew draws heavily from the gospel of Mark, so genuine Matthean authorship can be discounted, since it makes no sense that a man who walked with Jesus and personally saw him raised from the dead would plagiarize the account of someone who did not (even the call of Matthew itself in gMatthew is cribbed from Mark!). John was also an eyewitness by tradition, but even if he doesn't know the synoptics (and some think he does), then you have at best two independent sources for the most incredible event in all of human history, and both of them from authors who would have every reason to believe this incredible claim, and who clearly have a vested interest in getting you to believe it, and only one of them even potentially from an eyewitness. It's not like there's any hostile testimony to the resurrection.
Paul, at one point, refers to 500 people who witnessed Christ after his death.
I've never understood this apologetic. The appearance to the 500 appears exactly once in the New Testament: right here, in Paul's letter to the Corinthians. There's no elaboration, we're not told who these 500 were, the circumstances of the supposed appearance, or anything at all, either here or anywhere else. It's a single throwaway reference. For all I know Paul made this up. Or the person he got it from did.
Pascal's wager is formidable, for one.
I think Pascal's Wager is defanged by the internal diversity of Christianity. While the old joke about there being tens of thousands of Christian denominations each damning all the others to Hell is an exaggeration, it's directionally correct. Getting a Catholic to admit it nowadays is like pulling teeth, but it remains dogma that there is no salvation outside the church, and while there are carveouts in some cases for invincible ignorance and things like that, few of those caveats would apply to the vast majority of modern protestants, so the teaching of the RCC remains that the great majority of modern protestants are gonna burn. Conversely, a number of Protestant confessions clearly anathematize the RCC, and a number even expressly identify the Papacy as the Antichrist. And there are plenty of low-church baptist types who think catholics are demon-worshipping idolaters. And then there are plenty of protestants that think plenty of other protestants are going to hell. And then there are protestants who don't think anybody is going to hell (either universalist or annihilationist). You could say being a Christian of some kind is still better than being a non-believer, but since there are Christians who don't think non-believers necessarily go to hell, I'm not sure it really increases your chances all that much. Then there's Islam...
My reasons for rejecting the truth of Christianity were not that I think miracles are prima facie impossible, or even necessarily impossible, but boil down mostly to three main points:
- The Hebrew/Christian scriptures teach empirically false things about the world.
- The scriptures are internally inconsistent, both on matters of plain facts and broader theological and philosophical questions.
- The scriptures contain clearly falsified prophesies.
- The scriptures are exactly the scriptures we would expect their authors, as human beings of their time and place, to produce. Positing divine inspiration is unparsimonious and unnecessary.
I can elaborate on any of these, because I do enjoy talking about this stuff, but I won't make this comment any longer.
To_Mandalay
5mo 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.'
To_Mandalay
7mo ago
If there's no correlation between outcomes and degrees of feminism today on the international scale, then there's no reason anyone should take seriously the argument that feminism is responsible for worsening social conditions, because you won't admit to any control. The only control is the world 100+ years ago, and life back then was worse on every metric I can think of.
Countries are feminist in different ways.
What is your definition of feminism?
He made a show but he did not actually do much of anything.
This is like marxists who insist the reason USSR/China/Cuba/etc. failed to create a communist utopia is because they just didn't do communism hard enough. Maybe. But since there appears to be no correlation between communist policy and improved outcomes, there's no reason to believe that. Same here.
To_Mandalay
4mo 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
5mo 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?
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.
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