To_Mandalay
1yr 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
There are lots of jobs where physical strength matters, and they're very gendered male.
There are a lot less than there used to be and will probably be even less going forward.
There's differences that show up in the modern age too. Engineering is predominantly male (though not as male as the trades), despite vast effort made to change that. But do men get credit for this? No, we get rhetorically beat up for it.
Yes, there are other sex differences. But upper body strength, and what flows from it like fighting, killing, other feats of physical strength was for a long time the single most important sex difference. It absolutely dwarfs most others, even if you assume all other sex difference are 100% innate. Its shrinkage as a relevant factor in modern society is hugely impactful and probably couldn't be otherwise.
A huge portion of the seething over women having "fake email jobs" and what have you probably comes down to the fact that a huge portion of men also have "fake email jobs" nowadays. You can say "well the majority of cutting edge research in XYZ field is still done by men" or whatever, but that's a tiny proportion of all men so it doesn't really matter for the average person. It used to be the case that a miner or a steelworker or farm laborer could tell himself he was doing a job only a man could do and that was a source of pride and identity for him, though even by the 19th and early 20th century the anxiety about the softening of manhood was already well-advanced, evidenced by all of those intellectuals who argued that regular warfare was necessary to maintain racial/national virility. But nowadays a guy who works as a cashier at wal mart or does some rote office job understands full-well that a woman could do his job just as easily and it probably grates psychologically.
To_Mandalay
11mo ago
"Basket of deplorables" was such an anodyne remark. Especially since she hedged it by admitting she was being "grossly generalistic" and then went out of her way to clarify Not All Trump Supporters. And then proceeded to backpedal even further almost immediately and apologize for saying even that much. "Some of my opponent's supporters are bad" is probably near the mildest sentiment a politician running for office can express without total rhetorical capitulation.
To_Mandalay
5mo ago
No, but they advertise that if the government is being mean to you, you can go in the booth and press the button next to the name of the guy who says he'll make the government stop being mean to you, and make it be mean to the other guys instead, and if more people press that button then press the other button, the government will stop being mean to you. This is what just happened.
To_Mandalay
1yr 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
11mo ago
Because you have a solely material understanding of what is good.
Why shouldn't I? I don't believe honor, glory, virtue, or tradition exist as real transcendentals beyond the human mind, and I place no value on them. They are only fictions whose persistence is simply because they produce a pleasant (and ultimately, physiological and material) sensation in the bodies of those who cling to them, and because they are useful tools to organize society in a way that also produces pleasant (and again, physiological and material) sensations in those same people. This isn't really an argument against liking those fictions, there's no rational argument why someone shouldn't, but there's no rational argument why someone should either, unless they already do. I believe the same thing about fictions from the opposite side of the aisle like freedom, democracy, equality, and tolerance, but you probably agree with me on that.
This is the only charge against the Enlightenment that sticks, and yes it sticks just as well when Marx says it than when Evola says it
I don't think Marx ever made that charge.
The life created by the unrestrained mercantile impulse is inhuman and torrents of blood have already been unleashed to tamper its excesses or realize its promises.
Inhuman meaning what? "The life" by which I imagine you mean the general state of society over the past several centuries was certainly created by humans, what exactly makes it inhuman? Is it just a personal distaste for it?
When Ted complains that the world is crushing the freedom and actualization of the individual, you can decide to call this right wing and oppose this slander of the industrial system because it's not fair on abstract power structures.
I oppose it because I think talk of freedom and actualization is mostly gobbledygook, like the aforementioned honor and equality and tolerance and glory. What Kaczynski is saying when you strip it all away is just "I don't like industrial society because it makes me upset" which is fine, but it doesn't make me upset, so we've reached an impasse, because I can't imagine any argument which would cause me to privilege what makes Ted Ted Kaczynski upset/not upset over what makes me upset/not upset.
Vico is right. And people who dismiss his insight are behaving like creationists who cling to specific dismissals, attempt to refute specifics individually without considering the whole or grasp at epistemological traps to refuse to acknowledge the plain truth because the big picture shatters their own personal intuitions.
Well I've never read Vico and didn't know who he was before you told me. The "Course of Nations" section of The New Science on internet archive is only about fifty pages; can I get away with reading that or do I have to read the whole thing? What specific insights did he have that have yet to be disproven?
To_Mandalay
11mo ago
I don't believe there was some smaller number she could have used that would have failed to inspire the same reaction her actual comments did. It was just the usage of "Trump supporters" and "deplorables" in the same sentence which made for a great soundbite. About comparable to Mitt Romney's "47%" remark.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Children and especially babies require an immense amount of attention
Children really require much less attention than WEIRDos think they do. Historically you could mostly ignore your babies between feedings. And once they becomes ambulatory you can just let them do whatever pretty much except when they have to do work around the house or in the fields. They'll probably be fine, horrifying as most moderns find the prospect. High child mortality was due to illness which pre-modern mothering was powerless to prevent, no matter how attentive or caring, not due to kids wandering off and getting eaten by bears.
This is still the case in a lot of undeveloped countries, or at least it was a few decades ago. I've talked to people who grew up in Latin America in the 70s but essentially lived pre-modern peasant existences and described parenting as being very hands-off.
Like what does a modern "neglectful" mother do? She probably lets her kid eat whatever, doesn't take him to the doctor, doesn't buy him new clothes, lets him go wherever he wants with whoever he wants whenever he wants. None of these were factors in the pre-modern world (everybody was eating the same thing, nobody was going to the doctor for yearly checkups, everybody wore the same clothes all the time) except for the last one which would only result in death at the margins.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Well basically I either don't care about or actively dislike conservative values and therefore don't want to live according to those values and don't want them to be those according to which society is shaped. I think it's pretty simple. Does that mean I hate conservatives? Not on a personal level.
To_Mandalay
11mo ago
Just paying the guys in that Kamala ad to read a random selection of themotte.org comments out loud with no alterations would have been much more viscerally repulsive normie-scaring than what they actually did.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
It's debatable whether the "sex recession" is even real. Recent data doesn't show the same kind of numbers that made people on the internet freak out in 2018. If it is real, it doesn't appear to be a problem of men in particular, since women report similar, and sometimes higher rates of no-sex. The idea that an increasingly small minority of men are exercising some kind of sexual monopoly appears to have little to no basis in reality.
men have always been the disposable gender
This is an old redpill bromide but not really true. In every society with widespread infanticide (most of them), the gender ratios of surviving infants almost always skew towards boys.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
It's silly for right-wingers to be like "can you BELIEVE these insane leftists saying fitness is a gateway to the far-right?" when "fitness is a gateway to the far-right" is the whole schtick of guys like BAP, and I say this as someone who lifts weights 3-4 times a week. On that note, I haven't noticed myself turning into any sort of right-winger as I get stronger. But for me it's not a hobby, it's a chore that I do purely out of vanity, not because I enjoy the activity itself at all.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Healthy women have deep-seated, base, mammalian urges to reproduce and nourish healthy offspring. It is hardwired in them to feel pleasure through these behaviors. The bond a mother has with her children and how they give great meaning to her life is a story in every culture in existence.
A significant minority of women likely do not have this instinct or have it in a much weakened form. Through human and pre-human history women really haven't had that much of a choice on whether they bear children or not, so selection for enjoying motherhood is probably not as strong as you might think.
Women are forsaking these genetic behaviors for what reason? For whose benefit?
Cuz they don't feel like it, I guess? Really nobody is forcing women not to have kids. It's not a matter of it being too expensive or anything. You can be flat broke in a western country and your kids will have an infinitely more comfortable existence than those of the peasant woman in 1312 who popped out twelve children. If women really want to have kids, they can, it's not hard.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Okay, but it's undeniable (and why would they want to deny it anyway?) that the fitness 'aesthetic' is a very integral part of a certain type of online right-wing politics and fitness influencers/youtubers/etc. tend to lean right.
To_Mandalay
1yr 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
5mo ago
It's hard for me to understand how Yarvin's "true election" is significantly different from "a candidate who prioritizes stuff I prioritize." The reason the Bushes or Reagan didn't do mass deportations or try to dismantle the civil service isn't because they were just powerless puppets while Trump isn't, it's because that's not what they ran on. It's not like Bush said he was going to get rid of birthright citizenship and then said "psych!" as soon as he got into office. They may have been anti-immigration or anti-federal bureaucracy in comparison with their opponents, but they didn't make that their entire platform the way Trump did. When a candidate actually runs on those things, and gets elected...he does them.
As a side note, it's bizarre to me this "FDR was a dictator!" thing Yarvin returns to again and again. In the very "true election" piece under discussion, he notes that FDR's power was significantly circumscribed by the judiciary, and that he couldn't order someone arrested and shot if he wanted to. But he was still a dictator because...he got a lot of stuff done, I guess? Any dictator worth his salt wouldn't have failed to pack the court. FDR didn't even really control congress for the second half of his time in office, the Republicans and the southern Democrats regularly united to thwart his agenda, and it worked. It was hardly a "rubber stamp."
Anyway, if some exceptions are allowed without it disproving the broader point, I don't see why we should dismiss Yarvin wholesale.
It doesn't entirely disprove his whole theory, even though I do think he's wrong. It is a data point against it. He himself admits he's surprised. I threw a jab at Yarvin, but I mostly have in mind actual, concrete predictions that They were so powerful and so well-entrenched, and democracy is such a fraud, that Trump specifically would not be allowed to win.
I have never heard a liberal democracy enjoyer say "we totally do political repression, we're just more subtle about it".
All political systems engage in repression to some degree. But differences of degree are important. Less is better. The repression experienced by the American right over the past several years has been quite mild compared to even the mildest of twentieth century dictatorships, which is why terminology like "the Regime" (obviously chosen to imply an equivalency between liberal democracies and the various states most people imagine when they hear the word "regime," Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, North Korea, and others) is very silly. I expect Trump will exercise some degree of repression against the left over the next four years as he's promised to do, though it won't be particularly severe by historical standards either. And if the GOP loses in 2028 (or even loses badly in the midterms), it will stop.
That's not a promise of liberal democracy specifically, all democracies promise that, including illiberal ones
I don't consider "illiberal democracy" to be a very useful term. All states have some democratic features. Even the Soviet Union in the 1930s did. All states have some non-democratic features. It's also a matter of degrees, and there are edge cases, but that doesn't mean the distinction between non-democracy and democracy is nonexistent, just like there's a distinction between purple and blue despite the seamless blend.
To_Mandalay
5mo ago
That liberal democracies never employ repression against political opponents, or that their doing so immediately falsifies the premises of liberal democracy? I don't think this is really held by anyone. Certainly I think very few defenders of liberal democracy would argue that, though they may argue that liberal democracies tend to pursue political repression less than countries which aren't liberal democracies, or do so less harshly, both of which I believe are true.
Granted that's my fault for glibly talking about "advertisement" as if there's a CEO of liberal democracy. A more important promise of liberal democracy is that if you don't like the current government, including if you think the current government is ineffective, corrupt, or unfair, you can vote it out, and the government you vote in its place will pursue different policies.
To_Mandalay
11mo ago
The conditions of life in say, tsarist Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries to give one example are pretty well recorded, and they were not vastly changed from those in the 18th or 17th centuries. The vanishing of the traditional agricultural lifestyle is quite recent in historical terms, and it still persists to some extent today in certain countries. So we actually do have a pretty good picture of what pre-industrial life was like.
We have actual histories, songs and stories from people a few centuries ago, and even from many centuries ago. They do not demonstrate a life-experience of unending hell-misery, but rather an existence very like our own.
Naturally, they didn't know anything else. If you lock a kid in the basement from infancy and beat him five times every day of the week and only once on Saturday and Sunday, the weekend is gonna look pretty awesome to him, but most people who weren't raised in a basement wouldn't find being locked in a basement and being beaten once a day on weekends very fun.
Their concerns were similar to ours. Their joy and suffering was similar to ours. Nothing fundamental about human nature or the human experience has changed in any way since at least the invention of writing.
You severely underrate how alien these people were. There's pretty good evidence they were practically incapable of abstract thought or logical exercises that would be easy for a small child in the modern United States (this being in reference to the great mass of common people, obviously, not a very small educated elite). You may be familiar with A.M Luria's study of Uzbek peasants as late as the 1920s and 30s as it's made the rounds in rationalist and rationalist adjacent circles. This was not because of any genetic inferiority, but because their world was so founded in the immediate and concrete that a basic "if A then B" syllogism was beyond their grasp. They were also shockingly violent. Besides their regular wanton cruelty to animals for practical reasons as well as for amusement, they were basically always ready to fight and kill each other over the mildest of slights. Sicilian immigrants to the US as late as the 20s, coming from one of the most backwards and least industrialized regions in Europe, had an astronomical murder rate because stabbing somebody in the throat for cheating at cards or hitting on your sister was just totally normal to them.
Yes, our ancestors were "like us" insofar as they loved their friends and families, liked to tell and hear stories, enjoyed food and sex, and feared death, but that's a pretty sparse overlap in my opinion. Outside of a tiny handful of intellectuals and philosophers, you probably wouldn't be able to hold any kind of real or meaningful conversation with a 16th century German even if you could speak his language perfectly, and you wouldn't want to anyway because he might crush your skull.
To_Mandalay
11mo ago
All that stuff is good, but none of it can really replace the visceral knowledge that you are directly responsible for keeping yourself and your family alive, which was reality for the vast majority of men for the vast majority of history, but no longer.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
...Is to obviously discard any information that could be contrary to your assertion.
What information? Do you disagree with the statement that the general opinion of pre-modern thinkers was that women were inferior to men? Can you find any such figures who disagreed? Maybe you can, I'm sure there were a handful, but they're going to be vastly outnumbered by those who held the contrary position. Mary is a goddess*. She is inimitable. The fact that according to Christian mythology she was once a mortal woman is irrelevant to the role she actually occupies in existing religious practice. She should be compared to her fellow divinities, not mortal men, and she is certainly inferior to God the Father and to her own son. Having warrior and scholar goddesses didn't stop the Greeks from pacing such onerous restrictions on their women that it surprised their own contemporaries. The divine and human spheres are different, and the reverence of female divinities says little more about the role of women in actual existing human society than the frequency of incest in stories of the gods says something about the acceptability of incest between actual flesh and blood human beings.
It's the only way the species can continue. I ... I can't think of anything more prestigious.
Necessary doesn't equal prestigious. Actually it often indicates the opposite, since the mundane and commonplace is rarely exalted.
*Yes I know it's not latria it's dulia etc. etc.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
If that were true, we would expect traditional societies to be more willing to allow women to suffer and die in place of men, because they have less value.
Not necessarily. Women are valuable because they can give you sons.
"Female infanticide" is it's own phenomenon deserving of a name but not "male infanticide." The wiki article only gives the examples of India, China, and Pakistan, but gender-skewed infanticide was also not uncommon in pre-modern Europe. Not a lot of men in history were going "awwww man, another son?" when their wife popped out the latest kid.
To_Mandalay
1yr 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.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Horses are better than humans at running but the number of people throughout history who would disagree with the statement "horses are inferior to human beings" is very small.
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.
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