Tree
1yr ago
even the underclass doesn’t want to be “just wombs” professionally for 30 years.
Why not? I would consider it a nice career were it possible. Most middle class jobs are way more dull, burdensome and meaningless than professional womb-woman.
The average modern woman, who holds the future of humanity in its hands, appears overwhelmed by the responsibility; and incapable of reproducing, like the panda. So while various people want to take the responsibility away from her, I just propose to circumvent her. My solution, being entirely voluntary, is far softer than that proposed by “incels” and “trads”.
Tree
1yr ago
Pumping out 20 children would be their career, they’d be comfortable. Just wombs essentially; artificial ones would also work. Our bottleneck is in the production of children, yet paradoxically, in resources, children are not costly, and we are swimming in resources. It should be easy to lift the barriers and ramp up production, provided we do not take an exceedingly sentimental stance on where children come from (“when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much….”) .
Then, if most women would rather have status than children, that’s not the state’s problem. It gets its taxpayers anyway, and children are brought into the world, which I find morally good, while still not forcing anyone.
Tree
1yr ago
There couldn’t be professional rejecters – you’d get 3 rejects and then you’re out, you pay the bachelor-spinster tax. If you do not reject, and are therefore rejected by those who drop out, you keep getting official dates with counterparts. Imagine the creatures who would find each other in the deepest depths of hell, 20-30 one-sided rejections below ground.
Anyway the real problem is not lack of cohabitation/marriage but childnessness. And that power lies entirely in women’s hands, legally. Just give some of it back to men: no abortion or contraceptives unless the husband/boyfriend gives his consent. His DNA, his choice, it takes two to tango, whatever cliché you prefer. Then you put the spinster tax on childless couples.
Or just pay like 10% of the most motherhood-friendly women to produce 20 children and raise them in an orphanage (they can visit of course) , that also works and intrudes less in people's personal lives.
Tree
1yr ago
Aside from how overused that one study is, the other major problem is that the womens’ answer is straight up incorrect, therefore bullshit. Women have the capacity to actually rank men on a respectable bell curve (just like gay men can rank women), they just choose not to because they concentrate on the ‘what will that answer say about me?’ implications. Similar to how straight men will sometimes performatively deny that an attractive man is attractive, or say that they can’t tell because they’re so straight it hurts and blinds.
The big advantage of the dating website rankings is that they greatly reduce Social Desirability Bias by getting both men and women in a “What do you REALLY think?” frame of mind.
It’s the opposite. If they were ranking some strangers as anthropologists, far from the context of their own coupling, they’d give a straight answer, as they usually do in the other studies. But on Okcupid, they think rating merely above average men as above average marks them as easy, low quality, desperate participants in the coupling game.
Tree
1yr ago
mad libs nonsense
a kludge exploiting Guttenberg's error-prone moveable type
This cultural OS produced the illusion of escaping local maxima
Tree
1yr ago
Both put a big chunk of their budget into popularity programs
Do you have numbers on that? Anyway, I heard estimates of cartels making between 11 and 40 B/y total. So a small share of that, at the utmost a few billion, for presents and disaster relief and other telegenic actions. Compared to the mexican state's budget all-in of around 500 B/y. I don't think you can fool the people with a pittance. A few songwriters, perhaps.
Tree
1yr ago
I don’t know the mood in mexico, but why is everyone assuming the mexican people would be on the side of the cartels? Cartels pay off a few politicians and police, but regular people get nothing but plomo. In San Salvador there was no wellspring of popular support for the tattooed freaks.
I’d go for the biggest cartel first (Gulf Cartel perhaps? I’m sorry, Gulf of America Cartel) with the most political connections, so that in case there are no non-corrupt politicians left at all, you can depend on those who have been bought by the other side.
Tree
1yr ago
No, it’s dozens of feeble-minded liberals trawling far right websites to post the worst rebuttals in the world on new accounts one after the other. Of course it’s him.
Tree
1yr ago
This seems entirely dependent on the criminal and the crimes they might commit, not to mention where they live/are incarcerated.
That last part is interesting. This map claims it costs 128k/y to incarcerate someone in california, 23k in arkansas (and 300k in massachussets, wtf). I’d just start by sending all the long-timers down there. Reinvigorate the local economy and save everyone else vast amounts of money.
77% of state prisoners who were released in 2005 were rearrested by 2010. 43% of them ended up back inside prison within the first 12 months.
The thing that strikes me about this statistic is that they must either be committing lots of crimes, or the police is very good at solving crimes. They should stop being so sporting by releasing and re-catching and retrying them, just keep them where they belong longer.
Tree
1yr ago
If I may, you’re giving the 101 argument which many people here already know and have moved past. Wlxd has very likely read that ACX article, and still thinks prison sentences should be increased. I’m a utilitarian and I agree. Forget deterrence, just incapacitate as much and as cheaply as possible. It is more expensive to catch & try more criminals to give them small sentences than to simply increase the sentences on those already processed.
The marginal extra year in prison of violent offenders costs society far less than the crimes they would commit during that time. And that's despite our incapacitation method costing society far more than it should. We should bring back marooning, penal colonies and exile.
Tree
1yr ago
We're talking about sexual attractiveness (or "maximizing hotness"), so yes, kind of. You want your wife to be healthy and active and balanced, which is understandable, but that has little relevance to attractiveness.
ask my wife to change when she wears clashing/unseasonal patterns or colors
This behaviour strikes me as rare, for combining two seemingly incompatible elements: the traditionally male role of leading/commanding, and the traditionally female role of giving attention and care to aesthetic things.
Tree
1yr ago
The critique that the redpill turns men into emotionally annihilated performing monkeys to satisfy women’s dark urges isn’t new (there was some MRA vs PUA drama back in the day), but it’s well made.
Tree
1yr ago
The cost/benefit of those things is far higher, especially for women. Men don't care if women have no style, don't go to the gym, and are (slightly) overweight.
You’re typical minding when you say most people know this. People’s opinions bounce off random shit they hear (eg, lies by men reassuring their wives), they can’t cut through it with a sharp intellect like yours.
Tree
1yr ago
It's fine, you can always annoy us. The lesson of ‘mansplaining’ is that women find correct information threatening.
something rather incongruent with the huge implant industry
Not huge enough, evidently. He probably thinks it should be near-universal, personal interest well considered, given that it’s like 3 points of attractiveness for little effort.
Tree
1yr ago
I’m not sure it’s a paradox. You think rulers reforming is the sole cause of their downfall. I think changes in society (eg, wealth increase, weapons becoming more democratic (eg, guns vs cavalry)), reshuffling the underlying power relationships within society (ie, who would win a civil war), are largely causing both the reforms and the revolution. The ultimate cause of both is that the mugger gets a gun - first he extorts, then he shoots.
Tree
1yr ago
When animals get out-competed by one another we don't seek to introduce these silly moralistic components, I don't see how this should be any different. Machiavelli's foundational contribution to sociology is precisely that these do not matter and what we ought to be concerned with is the world as it is.
I don't disagree. I think brutality can, and often does work, even though it's evil. I just don't think it's a silver bullet.
While a progressive has a tendency to say stuff like 'people revolt when they are too oppressed', as if the just world was punishing rulers for their immorality, the reactionary, as a .... reaction, trying to overcorrect the previous lies, will then say 'people only revolt when they are not oppressed enough', which is also false.
Tree
1yr ago
Yes. Although I admit, the age gap argument is the easiest to make, the one where the centrist will most readily concede. But imo it is fully generalizable to most issues involving women having sex : prostitution, porn, workplace sexual harassment, ‘college party culture’/drunk consent. Here again, the centrist is torn. He says one thing (we must protect women), but can justify another (women have agency). Part of his confusion comes from the fact that, as you mention, feminists/progressives and reactionaries are on the same side (women have no agency), so his usual ideological points of reference are all over the place and useless.
Tree
1yr ago
Your view of a hyperagentic ruling class relies on a one-sided interpretation: was a concession extorted through force, or freely given out of altruism/sentimentality? You see a man get mugged, and you interpret it as an act of charity because he did not fight to the death. He “enabled his nominal enemy.”
Tree
1yr ago
If some 20-year-old throws herself at a 40 year old centrist, he will go for it. Yet if you ask him about someone else, he will spout some “it’s creepy, that poor women” conformist sludge. Yet he is also aware of the knock-down “consenting adults, no harm done, women have agency” liberal argument. So he is unable to justify his middle position either in practice or in theory. It just looks like he’s socially pressured by middle aged women into parroting a feeling he doesn’t share or agree with.
Tree
1yr ago
We can speak here of the influence of physiocrats or his minister's desperate attempts to enact an agenda almost identical to that wanted by the bourgeois dictatorship that would follow.
The pressure to enact those reforms did not come from the ruling elites. They gave in (when they were not convinced) because the opponents (bourgeois and sans-culottes) had more power; more power, in any case, than they (Third Estate) officially had.
Some ruling elites were no doubt convinced by enlightenment ideas. If the government brutally repressed the movement (as you think the king could have), those people would have fought with their resources on the other side, as 'class traitors', greatly increasing the rebellion's chances (thereby changing the calculus of a pre-emptive compromise). It seems to me that by conflating the ruling class together as if they were a single person, you see 'weakness of character', where there is division.
My concern is really how well things are run on the ground, and how much freedom that affords the individual to live their lives outside of politics.
Sure. Theoretically, we’re not that far apart. I have an excellent friend who literally thinks we have solved the best system of government question for all time and western liberal democracy of these last 50 years is it. So naturally, he sees anti-democratic forces and discourse everywhere, even in what I view as good faith criticism. I have a far more pragmatic view, I don’t find e.g. a limited franchise, some monarchical powers, or the roman republic, to be obviously worse. As long as the government is not too oppressive, somewhat competent, and civil wars are avoided, it’s all good enough.
Practically, we probably disagree on the results, how well liberal democracies are governed. For example, if russia was a liberal democracy, I don’t think it would have launched such a war against Ukraine – a war the average russian is unlikely to benefit from, no matter the result. And the examples you cited, Oman belarus cuba morocco, seem worse-run than liberal democracies.
Tree
1yr ago
But when you talk of the weakness of Nicholas II and Louis XVI, you speak of individuals too.
Anyway, if you're not going to disagree with my claims, I'll interpret our differing views thus: You're kind of a disappointed idealist, and you see the flaws of liberal democracies (disproportionate elite influence, messy politics) as disqualifying for that form of government. I don't.
Tree
1yr ago
I mean James II is weak 'physically', his is the weaker party, militarily speaking. He did not give up out of "cowardice", he lost and would have kept losing, no matter how ruthless he got.
You concede then that they are not totalitarians? Or are you going to attempt to stretch the definition of total to include absence?
I don't think modern russia, belarus, or liberal democracies are totalitarian. Nazism, stalinism are. That is the mainstream view/usual definition of totalitarianism.
Tree
1yr ago
If you want to discuss the axiomatic claim of elitism, we can certainly do that: I shall ask you to provide one (1) example of a government without an identifiable elite class.
I don’t dispute the claim that elites exist and have disproportionate power. I make the following claims:
A) The average, non-elite man, has some, non-zero amount of power
B) Ruling elites can lose power, and not only by “weakness of character, insufficient brutality”.
A is why liberal democracies, nazism, communism, care about and attempt to shape what he thinks. Russia or Belarus take a different knack, in that their propaganda seeks to keep the average man apathetic, but that model still recognizes his power.
Given the scale of the October revolution as a whole (around 10M dead)
Yeah, white elites fought and killed millions to hold on to their elite status, and lost.
You'll notice that despite a troublesome interregnum, this did not mark the end of the British absolutism which would eek out three more decades.
So the guy who lost his head somehow won? Classic unbeatable elite move.
The end is typically set to the Glorious Revolution and James II's acceptation of the Bill of Rights and escape to France, which I believe fit the motif of renonciation pretty well.
James II’s army disintegrated. They remembered the whooping his father had gotten in his civil wars and it wasn't going to get any easier with a catholic monarch. He tried again and was defeated at the battle of the boyne. This is not renonciation, it's capitulation of the weak.
He has no say in the matter legally, therefore his opinion is irrelevant and he is blameless.
Besides, let’s go with your hypothesis, say in 40% of couples who could be having more children, the woman holds out – remove her lock, and that’s still a substantial increase in fertility.
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