I. How does straight sex work?
Evolutionary psychology* tells us that women want to reproduce with the most fit man that she can find. This creates a situation where most men are outcompeted for reproduction by fitter men. For simplicity’s sake, from here on out I will refer to any male who is more fit as “alpha” and any less fit male as “beta.”** Non-monogamous societies are nearly always polygynous (one male with multiple wives) rather than polyandrous (one woman with multiple husbands.) Polyandry doesn’t generally happen because women simply choose the most fit male and the other men don’t really want to stick around having dick measuring contests with each other all day. Women are rewarded by going after higher quality mates while men are rewarded by going after a larger quantity of mates.***
Whenever more than one man is present, you can rank each man’s fitness as a sexual partner. The only thing that matters in this hierarchy is physical dominance. When judging the hierarchy between men, imagine them fighting. The one who would likely win in a physical fight is the alpha. To judge this we look at physical characteristics: Height, weight, muscularity, dick size, waist/hip ratio, meanness or neotony of face, baldness, and so on. Traits like intelligence, kindness, virtuosity, and so on, are important in other situations but not in sex. This hierarchy of men is so ingrained that we don’t realize it. When you walk around in crowds, smaller men move to the side for larger men. If you don’t, larger men get irritated at you. Smaller men often subtly bow and fawn to larger men. Once you notice this you won’t stop noticing it.
II. How does gay sex work?
Gay sex is downstream of straight sex. People imagine gay men to have a “female” and a “male” partner but that isn’t really accurate. When two men have sex, they are two men having sex. They are competing for the same roles. Most gay sex acts have a dominant and submissive position: In anal sex the bottom is submissive and the top is dominant, in oral sex the dick sucker is submissive and the oral top is dominant and so on. During gay sex you must sort out who is going to do what. Here are the ways that gay sex can happen, in order from most positive to least positive.
Positive gay sex experiences from your perspective:
- You are both acting as alphas. You may not be perfectly matched on the hierarchy, but you both believe you are strong powerful men who are good choices for sexual mates. You lift each other up, the real alpha feels secure in his position lifting up the lesser alpha who feels like he is able to learn from and enjoy the other alpha’s sex. It is equally positive for both of you.
- You’re the alpha and he’s the beta. You both know that you are a bit better than he is, but he accepts the role. You feel good because your dominance is respected and he helps support your ego.
Neutral gay sex experiences:
- You’re the beta and he’s the alpha. This can be positive as well but is definitely ranked below the first scenario in that category. I rank this as neutral because if you aren’t trying to be the top you will feel on some level slightly melancholic about the experience afterwards, that you should have tried harder to push your desires further during sex. But it can also be positive especially if he is so attractive to you that you don’t mind playing the beta role. Many, many gay men seem stuck in this beta dynamic, it seems very stable but creates problems I’ll describe below.
- You’re both acting as betas. Sometimes no sex will happen at all, it is the most neutral. As an aside, in prison dynamics, alphas will allow their betas to play with each other but not share betas with other alphas. I suspect it’s because the alphas imagine the betas to be having this sort of sex with each other, which is plausible but also may be more of an alpha/beta dynamic between the two betas (but the power dynamic is narrower than between the original prison alpha and beta.)
Negative gay sex experiences:
- You’re the beta and he’s the alpha but you take advantage of him. Controversially, this could include rape or situations where you’re doing something he doesn’t like. This is neutral for you, because you don’t have the satisfaction of knowing you’re his superior which simultaneously makes him look weak and also makes you feel bad for taking advantage of him. I would not rank it as fully negative because you may get some pleasure believing you were his alpha in some way but you can’t fully convince yourself of it.
- You’re the beta and he’s the alpha but he takes advantage of you. Of course no one likes to be raped or forced to do something you don’t want but it is still slightly less bad than if…
- You’re the alpha and he’s the beta and he takes advantage of you. This is the perspective of your partner in scenario 1 under “Negative gay sex experiences” above. This is the worst situation because you will have to live with knowing that you didn’t defend yourself from someone smaller than you and were hurt because of it.
In the positive experiences, the most important aspect is respect, and mutual understanding. You both have to understand where the other person is in the hierarchy. The worst experiences are when one or both of you misjudge the situation and do something to upset the natural order. The best experiences are when you both see each other for who the other is and can have sex together while comforting the insecurities of the other and celebrating the others’ strengths as well. It is similar to a well played game of strategy or wrestling.
III. What makes a man gay?
I don’t know what makes a man gay. It has been shown that statistically a man is more likely to be gay if he has more older brothers. The cause of this is unknown but I wonder if part of it is a socialization, wherein younger boys surrounded by more dominant/aggressive males can not as easily adopt heterosexuality as the more alpha males around them. Speaking personally, I was raised by a rageful father and had a bullying brother and another older brother who was more neutral and an abusive stepfather all while I was young. It’s easy to imagine that these frightening males caused a fawning response in my adolescent brain that developed into homosexuality as I aged. Indeed I see a lot of fawning from gay men, especially younger gay men toward older gay men. I even catch myself fawning at stronger more dominant men though I feel some shade of disgust toward myself when I do this as it triggers memories of earlier years when I felt stuck as only a beta and primarily tried fawning at older men for affection/sex. That said it’s an effective strategy when a beta man fawns to you it’s very attractive but when an alpha fawns at you it’s rather irritating and awkward.
When analyzing why a man is gay we usually focus on the attraction to men but I think just as important is the lack of attraction to women. When I see women I imagine that they won’t love me. I find their ability to discriminate between men irritating and feel that it points to my lack of physical appeal and don’t want to suffer the indignity of not being attractive to them. I strangely have a habit of watching straight porn but I only look at the men who mostly behave confidently as alphas in straight porn, whereas in gay porn there is usually the alpha/beta dynamic and sometimes the real hierarchy is reversed (especially in commercial porn) which I find irritating and unrealistic. Relatedly, I once dated a bisexual man who said that he used to only be interested in women, and imagined that men would never be interested in him. But his male friend confessed his attraction to him, they started having sex and now he’s bisexual. I can imagine situations where if a woman was attracted to me and I really believed it, I could have sex with her, but it is basically not something I want to seek out because my attraction to men is so much greater.
IV. How does culture affect all this?
The Middle East is very interesting to me. Muslim countries have the reputation of being the most homophobic countries on earth. But in my (admittedly very short) experience in the Middle East, my experiences were very different. In fact I was hit on by men there constantly, and I am never hit on anywhere else. Never in the USA, once I was catcalled in Europe but I suspect they were making fun of me, and never in Asia. But in the Middle East I was overtly hit on by men everywhere I went. I don’t know if it’s because they see white men with blue eyes as so beta that they aren’t practically considered male, or that they believe every rich western country person is completely LGBT globohomo, or if they are all really horny all the time with each other and their homophobia is a ruse that they put up to keep everyone else from thinking they’re gay, but I suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The Middle East is the most polygynous culture that I’m aware of- centuries of harems would naturally produce tons of alpha male offspring from relatively few men. In my opinion Middle Eastern men are very masculine, handsome, and alpha, more so than anywhere else in the world.
Speaking of the Middle East, most of the homosexual relationships between men that you’ll find there are intergenerational. It is nearly always an older man with a younger male. Anecdotally I think these are the strongest types of gay relationships that there can be. Increasingly as the older I get, the less I want to be with someone my own age. What would I as a full grown man want to do with another full grown man living in my house? It really doesn’t sound great, even as a homosexual. When I was young, under 25, I dated almost exclusively men in their 40s and 50s. I drew the line at a man who reminded me too much of my grandfather, but otherwise was happy to date men my father’s age. I suspect this also reflects some resentment toward my father which I didn’t recognize until after his passing as well but it’s hard to say.
Now, speaking on East Asia. I have spent at least a few months each in Thailand, South Korea and Japan. From my perspective, these cultures are very hierarchical. These countries are so ethnically homogeneous that everyone seems to be completely aware of their hierarchy and since social order and harmony are valued no one seems to step out of line or be uncomfortable with their place in the hierarchy. In Japan, the gay bathhouses have huge rooms full of mattresses where men sleep naked. Alphas approach betas and betas rarely ever refuse the alpha. I have seen betas sleeping or pretending to sleep be approached by alphas who have anal sex with the beta, all while the beta doesn’t open his eyes or move. This is not done outside of Asia. Men in Japan tend to be bottoms compared to South Korea where they are more conformist and competitive and have a more pressing military threat to the north. South Korean men seem more likely to try to be alphas than Japanese men, though they will still generally fawn to white men.
Gay dating today in America is pretty frustrating because the vast majority of men do not see themselves as alpha. It does not bother me just when American men are my alpha, it bothers me when they are my alpha but see themselves as not an alpha at all. This is really the worst because it puts us in the “neutral” or “negative” sex experience categories above. If you have sex with a man who is your superior but doesn’t act like it, you are either going to come away feeling like you’re taking advantage of him or no sex is going to happen at all. Imagine a younger boy who wants to play a game with a bigger boy, but the bigger boy is depressed or doesn’t feel like playing, either the younger boy irritates the bigger boy or they just don’t play a game at all and both parties are sad. This is what it’s like to try dating among men with low self esteem who don’t realize the position they hold. This is so common in America and Western Europe but so uncommon in the Middle East and Asia where men seem to be much more self aware of their masculine traits and comfortable with it and respect others’ traits as well.
V. Race and sex
So, if all men are judged on their physical characteristics and sexual fitness, how does this extend to race? Basically, some races are more physically dominant than others. If you charted all men, with physically dominant traits on the Y axis and nonphysically positive traits on the X axis, you would have most black men in the upper left and most East Asian men on the bottom right. (For example, black men are generally taller and more muscular and better at sports than other races- see NFL roster stats if you don’t believe me. Asian men are better at certain types of intelligence but are smaller and less physically aggressive than blacks. I realize this is a controversial portion of my thinking and can provide further evidence if needed.) White men would probably be broadly in the middle of the graph, with Latino men and Indian/South Asian men being somewhat closer to the origin of the graph, with Latino men being closer to white/black/ or Asian men depending on their specific admixture of white/black/native blood. (Mexicans/Peruvians are closer to Asians, while Cubans/Dominicans can be closer to whites/blacks etc.) Of course there are countless exceptions to all of this- a black midget would be to the bottom right of an Asian linebacker, and so on.
This graph would be a sort of reversal of the hierarchy of race in society today. Statistically blacks are the poorest and least educated, whites are richer and more educated while Asians are the richest and most educated populations in the USA. In this way I envision mainstream society as a sort of “losers hierarchy” situation wherein the sexual losers become society’s champions in a sort of David & Goliath inversion of base reality.
I should note that age somewhat complicates the entire hierarchy. Older men, up to around age 55, are perceived as more attractive to women and other younger men. It’s not hard to imagine that age can be an indicator of status and fertility among preindustrial societies and we seem to have kept the instinct today.
VI. Conclusions
Am I racist? I am making broad classifications of people based on their physical characteristics and their ancestry so I would probably fit someone’s definition of racist. But I do not see myself as racist. I love traveling abroad and do it every chance I get. I am genuinely repulsed when I see people treating other people poorly based on their race. I am not racist, really what I want is to harbor mutual respect between people, and immutably, race is one aspect of their person that can’t be avoided. When I am in Asia, people see me one way, because of their own experiences and backgrounds. When I am in the Middle East, people see me a totally different way because of their own experiences as well. And I see Asian people differently from Middle Eastern people, because we relate to each other in a different way. We are not all blank slate interchangeable human beings, and we should steer ourselves from thinking that way. Really what I want to propose is mutual respect, seeing each other for who we are as we are, and understanding that about each other. I think so much of modern society is dysfunctional because we are encouraged to ignore the physical characteristics of each other for the sake of social harmony, but it’s impossible because our physical characteristics are so much of who we are.
Relatedly, physical power is essential to understanding relationships between people. As I’ve grown older, my parents have naturally waned in their power over me and among the entire family. Of course when I was a child they were able to make all my decisions, and my independence grew over time. At some time in my early 30s, my father had a health problem, he became quite weak and frail, and I was his caretaker for a few months. He continued to treat me like I was a child, not respecting my adulthood and the power I held in the situation. I put up with it out of respect for him as my father, but at some point it became so degrading that I had to assert my power over him. He didn’t like it but after I stood up for myself he had more of a respect for me that I hadn’t been given previously. I had a similar experience with my mother a few years later. Relationships where someone is abusing the power of a stronger person really are toxic and it is up to the stronger person to assert their power in the situation if both parties want to come out with dignity. Similarly, men need to assert their power and strength, see themselves for who they are, respect themselves in their position in the world and respect those around them for who they are too.
I wanted to start my post with an introduction about who I am (a white American gay male in my mid 30s, average height, a bit overweight, and so on) but it’s rare on themotte and may have felt a bit too identity driven. I dislike identity politics as it’s defined by the left but on some level I find it to have a redeeming quality if it can enable mutual respect between people and understanding of where we fit with each other. I don’t need to be the most powerful strongest hottest person, I am happy being grateful for what power and strength and hotness I do have, and to have the opportunity to see others for the strengths and weaknesses that they have as well.
*Everything I know about evolutionary psychology I learned from Satoshi Kanazawa’s blog [ https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist?page=11 ] and otherwise assumed from my experiences with real people and watching straight porn. Feel free to tell me I’ve got it all wrong.
** I know these are loaded terms and probably carry connotations in the meme world that I’m unaware of but I think it is effective at illustrating my point.
*** Further reading: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200802/the-paradox-of-polygamy-i-why-most-americans-are
Edit: Formatting
aiislove
2mo ago
Anybody down to take an online IQ test? It's not timed but according to the site takes up to 20 minutes to complete.
Feel free to share your scores. I'll go first.
Full Scale: 138
Memory: 136
Verbal: 137
Spatial: 141
I'm not surprised my memory was the lowest of the three, I feel like I've always had a bad memory (and I hate that card game called Memory where you flip over the cards to make pairs.) I always wonder if the synonym thing is really the best way to measure verbal intelligence: I just don't care to memorize obscure words which I feel drags my score down but it just seems like a waste of time to remember words that I never encounter and can simply look up the other 99 percent of the time that I'm not taking an online IQ test. Besides that, if I can imagine that a word means something else, that isn't really valued in this test either, but it would be useful if I was writing poetry or a song or something. (Like if the word is "big" and a syononym option is "ebullient," I know that ebullient doesn't mean big but spiritually, to me, it has the essence of bigness...) But I guess the intelligence to override my imagination is what the test measures. I'd rather be imaginative than book smart though, really. The spatial portion was probably the closest to measuring "imagination" in that you need to imagine the shapes rotated in your mind. I feel like I used to be much faster at this, I found myself rechecking my answers quite a few times (of course the test was untimed so I could do that without penalty.)
aiislove
2mo ago
30 days seems harsh considering they did bother to look at the poll closely enough to notice a relevant fact and then bring it to light for further discussion. I think it’s a valuable comment broadly and got the point across without padding the post with extraneous words. I understand you’d want to discourage low effort posting on average but 30 days for this specifically seems unwarranted in my opinion
aiislove
9mo ago
Are there any blogs or forums or other sources for reading about the Japanese right wing perspective on current events in English? The fall of the yen is striking. The last time I was in Japan in 2022 the country was really starting to show its age- visibly falling behind South Korea in technology and superficial "newness." I haven't been to China but I suspect that even Chinese society is beginning to surpass the vibrancy of Japanese society at least in the sense that the Chinese have seen an explosion of wealth and modernization in the past 50 years while Japan has stagnated since the late 80s. Is the right wing in Japan irritated by American influence in their country and the kneecapping of Japanese financial success by the plaza accord? Is allowing remilitarization of Japan really all that wise on the part of the US when Japan could conceivably become anti-American at some point in the near future (I am no expert on geopolitics in any way so feel free to tell me this is ridiculous and an anti-US Japan would be completely suicidal- though from what I understand Japan has shown suicidal tendencies in the past.) 150 yen to the USD is extremely alarming and I don't see how they aren't going to suffer from terrible inflation if they have to buy oil in USD.
Iranian Agents Plotted to Kill Donald Trump, Justice Department Says (non-paywalled link here)
Curious to know what people think of this. My initial cynical reaction was that the plot seems too convenient and that the US government is just trying to drum up support from the right wing young men who would be tasked with fighting a war against Israel in the future. I also am suspicious of why they would release the information about it so soon after it has been found out. I imagine the justice department could just bury the story or not report on it if they don't want people to know about it but it's headline news on WSJ and the NYT right now.
Why would Iran be more interested in killing Trump than Kamala or Biden? Does Iran see Trump as a massive threat? Is Iran just trying to sow chaos in the US?
aiislove
1mo ago
White people imagining themselves as physically the same as black people is leading to ridiculous situations like this. Asians don’t have this problem they just avoid living around black people. Seems to fundamentally stem from the arrogance of the white mentality and a reticence to admit to weakness even in the face of mountains of evidence of weakness. Black people assaulting whites is hideous because of the power imbalance and white people lack the humility to admit this to themselves, or to people who are willing to exploit this arrogance to their advantage.
The Blind Men and an Elephant
The parable of the blind men and an elephant is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the animal's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the animal based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true. [from wikipedia.]
As someone who travels between cultures frequently, I find myself thinking a lot about this parable. Everywhere I go, different people in different places have developed different views and interpretations of the world, but the underlying fundamentals of reality remain unaffected by mere human perception and interpretation. In other words, the elephant remains the same regardless of the spot we’re poking at, rubbing against or cutting into.
I find myself reorienting what I experience and perceive from the viewpoint of my background and upbringing, shaped to some degree by my current context. When I meet new people, I compare them to people I was raised around, my friends and family back home. When I try new foods I orient them in relation to foods I was raised with and are most used to. When I experience new weather patterns I compare them to the climate of my birth. Inextricably I am linked to the time and place of my upbringing.
I was raised in a chaotic home environment between divorced parents. My mother was very strict and had many rules, while my father was very lax and enforced very few rules. My mother raised me in the Protestant church while I attended Catholic school for two years, then I was switched to public school in third grade. The inconsistency between Protestant, Catholic and secular worldviews left me very disenchanted by competing narratives and viewpoints that each assert their own contradicting universal realities which I remain suspicious of today.
General artificial intelligence could be capable of synthesizing the perspectives and contexts of every place and time into one universal viewpoint. Mapping out the elephant of the world with more objectivity seems more plausible than ever before. The self assuredness of modernity and the arrogance of postmodernity (Fukuyama’s end of history, for example) are likely to be dwarfed by the self assurance of any newly synthesized panopticon of awareness that an AGI could run on.
But would an AGI be capable of synthesizing every view of the elephant into one accurate rendering of reality at all, or would it merely be able to switch from one perspective to another? The Japanese conception of reality works well enough in the Japanese context, and my basic understanding or exposure to it is amusing enough to me as an outsider, but start poking at it a bit and the construction begins to fall apart. We westerners are just as bound by the false or skewed construction of the Western viewpoint, which is difficult for us to perceive the limits and contradictions of.
I wonder if the AGI will be a Tower of Babel of sorts that could give the illusion of unity and progress but that ends up dividing us further than ever before.
Actually, the thought of a universal synthesized view of the world is what is most frightening to me because it is so utterly foreign to anything we’ve ever come up with ourselves. Either we will discover things we never wanted to know about ourselves and the universe, or we will fail to discover those things and create an even more dystopian world that further reinforces the skewed, convenient beliefs that I believe we already build our societies on.
——
Many people on the right believe that right wing thinking is fundamentally the position of believing in the power to change things: The power to make different decisions, free will, and so on. But in my years of reading right wing thought, the concept that feels the most fundamentally grounding in right wing theory is the idea that nature remains constant. That is, that the elephant remains the elephant regardless of our interpretation. This is the most reassuring concept to me in right wing thinking: that I don’t need to make the Sisyphean effort to rewire my reaction to things outside my control, that I can just accept them as immutable forces of nature and move on with my life. I also think this is a more loving, understanding view of the fundamentals of reality compared with the left’s struggle to undermine them.
aiislove
9mo ago
I remember ilforte of all people pushing back on the blacks vs whites argument that I tried putting forward a year or two ago. I don't know how to even respond to it really because in my experience black men are so obviously stronger and more dominant/aggressive than white men that I don't know what kind of evidence I could point to that would change your mind.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1167935/racial-diversity-nfl-players/
The stats are that 53% of NFL players are black while making up 15% of the American public. White men are only 24% of the players. Asians are 0.1% of NFL but 7.3% of the US population. This is all the evidence I need to reassert what anecdotally seems true in my experiences, maybe someone else can chime in.
Besides that I think white men were fine with the enslavement of black men because they perceived black men as physically dominant/superior in some way. They didn't enslave Asians or natives to any significant degree because enslaving someone smaller than you makes you look bad and doesn't jive as well with Christian theology (see David and Goliath, Nietzschean slave morality etc)
aiislove
6mo ago
What is up with the proposed Trump tariffs? I work in ecommerce and everything comes from China. If it wasn't made in China it was made with parts that came from China. Get on temu or aliexpress. Things are so cheap on those sites that you would have to impose tariffs of like 300% before it would be profitable to produce them in the US instead. And reshoring manufacturing is just going to open the flood gates of immigrants (see: Italian villages filled with Chinese workers shipped in from China who pump out goods that say "Made in Italy.")
aiislove
9mo ago
Basically, you have to begin by squaring the physical situation between yourself and the other person. There is fundamentally a difference between any two men that is 100% in the physical world. In a fight between two men, one will win, or there will be a draw. If I met a guy a foot taller than me with fifty pounds more muscle who was super bad at playing Cooking Mama for Nintendo DS and I was super good at it, it doesn't make me his top, it makes me better at a little game than him. If we had sex and I was using my super good abillities at playing Cooking Mama over him to make him suck my dick, it would be humiliating for both of us. If he was using his foot of height and 50 pounds of muscle on me to make me suck his dick, it would not humiliate either of us, I would have respect for his physical state. Later on, if he wants to play Cooking Mama together and I beat him, then it will make me feel good because we are both seeing each other for who we are. He is physically superior to me but I have these other traits that he can admire in me, whether it's being good at Cooking Mama or being smarter or richer or whatever.
Are you saying that in the gay dating world, the physically weak but self-confident and authoritative men should be submissive to anyone who’s physically stronger—that it just comes down to brute strength?
Well, I'm not saying that it "should" be that way as a prescriptive norm or something, I'm saying that basically you have to give credence to the brute strength between the two of you or it isn't going to work.
And so the problem is just that too many physically imposing specimens are too meek for their own good?
Yes, this is one of my frustrations with gay dating, that men who are physically superior to me don't see themselves as such. They compare themselves too much with men they imagine to be bigger or stronger than them and fail to respect themselves for the qualities they possess.
If so, how do you square that with younger men preferring an older partner, given that a 55-year-old is statistically quite likely to be weaker than a 25-year-old? (Also, surely that can’t actually be true, can it? “Older men, up to around age 55, are perceived as more attractive to… other younger men.” I was under the impression that youth is almost always the single most highly-prized characteristic among gay men. I swear I’ve heard that dating is almost impossible after 30 for most gay men, since everyone is always chasing the 20-year-olds.)
This sounds like a sort of dated concept, I do remember hearing this idea back in the early 00's or so but I really haven't heard gay men say this sort of thing in a long time. Anecdotally I am much more popular the older I get. I can imagine if a man wants to be a bottom that he is concerned he is getting too old and would have this perspective, but he really should just man up and be a top for the sake of everyone around him and his own dignity.
Also, with regard to the birth order effect,
That makes sense, it is my understanding as well that it is considered by science to have more of a biological cause but there is also a great bias against socialization related explanations of homosexuality so I wanted to present my theory from my own experiences.
aiislove
9mo ago
But isn't the economic stagnation humiliating to the Japanese? Watching China and South Korea grow in leaps and bounds in the past few decades while their own country ages and declines has to be embarrassing and I can see them easily taking out their aggression on western allies as much as their dreaded local neighbors. I wasn't really imagining a situation where Japan would ally with China but rather one where China's influence in the region increases so much that Japan begins to get irked and go hari kari on both China and their western allies.
Maybe that would be the isolationist/ethnonationalist wing of Japan's desire but probably is unlikely to occur outside of some neo imperial revival and the realistic situation is more likely to be further stagnation/decline in the arms of western allies in an attempt to stave off the Chinese threat like you said.
aiislove
1mo ago
I'm considering selling a bunch of stock tomorrow. The tariffs appear to be real and not going away super soon. Tensions tend to build and reach a fever pitch in the summer and judging by the Karmelo Anthony/Shiloh Hendrix stuff and Trump in the White House I'm expecting this summer to be a mess. My intuition is telling me things are only going down from here. Markets in Asia have already opened way down for Monday. Sell in May sounds like a great idea.
Will definitely dump my share of Amazon. Apple got an exemption from tariffs and I'm sure they make enough of their revenue from non-hardware that I'm thinking of staying with Apple and the rest of the tech companies. Kind of tempted to just dump everything else honestly because I have such a sour outlook on the economy in the short term but I'm also up so much that I don't want to pay a ton in taxes. I might hedge my bets and sell half or less of whatever I'm worried about and then try and buy once markets have crashed. I planned to keep 10% of my portfolio in cash (earning interest) but my 10% has shrunk as the rest of the portfolio has grown around it so I could always use a bit more cash.
I guess my small-scale question is how bad of an idea would it be to liquidate everything I own tomorrow?
aiislove
9mo ago
Imagine a guy with a big dick and then imagine the same guy with a tiny dick. Which does your monkey brain pick as the winner instinctively? (You could say, well the bigger thing gives you more to attack, maybe it's a disadvantage, bla bla) but in this instance I'm purely talking about who in a split second decision is more physically intimidating to the viewer. I personally would give the edge to the bigger dick guy
aiislove
6mo ago
Ok but the Chinese are also better workers than Americans, you just ask factories in China to make you stuff and they make you what you want, redoing entire production runs of faulty product is so cheap in China that they can do this without blinking, they work like slaves and don't even mind, the inefficiencies of the US labor force aren't present in East Asia...
aiislove
9mo ago
No, it's not coercion. Ideally in the situation in your first paragraph, the boy who loses at wrestling is not being forced to pleasure the winner, he is pleasuring the winner because the winner deserves it. I do not want to pleasure a man who would coerce me into having sex, but I would respectfully pleasure him if I felt he deserved it.
In a way sex/rape IS just about power, but between two men you have the chance to respect the power or lack thereof between the two of you.
Presumably most gay men are gay because they enjoy being the receptive partner, leaving a dearth of men who enjoy being the active partner
No no no, well personally I don't find pleasure in being a receptive partner. (Granted, I particularly don't like being an anal bottom because it hurts me physically and feels degrading.) In romantic relationships I've had in the past where I've been the top, the bottom usually isn't that pleased with being a bottom either. He'll go along with it for a while if he really respects the top enough or disrespects himself too much. (This is where the age gap relationships comes into play, most adult men are ready to drop being a bottom in a relationship more quickly than younger men.) Most of my friends I've grown up with who were in long term gay relationships where both partners were in their 20s seem to break up when the bottom gets older and stops wanting to be the bottom.
Besides that, being a top is really more dangerous to the ego than being a bottom. The bottom gets to play a discriminatory role generally, and performing as a top is harder. Porn makes it look really easy but I'd say that topping anally is one of the most difficult things to do in sex- you have to stay hard for a long time, you have to find the hole, you have to do all these things, it's stressful and can be embarrassing. It takes a lot of confidence to feel like you deserve to top another guy. The problem is that today most men never achieve the confidence to top, even in oral sex.
aiislove
1mo ago
Thanks to whoever nominated my post as an AAQC! I appreciate it.
Do all posts that get recommended by anyone get approved as an AAQC or are they selected by mods or something?
aiislove
1mo ago
I'm glad you shared your thoughts regarding Japan, thank you! I know you live there as I've read posts from you before. I don't doubt that you have a more intimate knowledge of the country and culture than I do (myself having spent only about 5 months in the country on three separate trips between 2007 and 2022). I probably came across as more harsh and critical than I meant to. I really like Japan a lot. The kissaten and mah jong parlors are amazing to me too, but undoubtedly signals of stagnation. It's actually deeply respectful and cool in a way- I wish the rust belt city I grew up in kept its own culture alive to with the same affection and attention to detail that Japan is doing.
And on the other hand, I don't actually always have a transcendent experience of France. I mentioned that I've been there more than any other country outside my own which is true but I don't really know why. The social mores are opaque and exhausting to me. Every time I leave the country I feel relief that I don't have to worry about pissing off a shopkeeper without understanding what I did. But all of that is true even while the positive things I said about it are also true.
Glad you enjoyed my post, thanks for engaging!
aiislove
9d ago
moral outlook
Actually I find this to be the most universal piece of the puzzle beyond any more objective measurements. For example half the world drives on the right and half the world drives on the left, but the moral fundamentals beneath which side of the road you personally decide to drive on are universal regardless. You choose depending on whether you want to safely reach your destination or create chaos and accidents around you. The moral goals and is-ought problem leads to the same or similar results whether you choose to drive on the right in america or the left in the uk. That is a simple example for illustration's sake but I believe that most problems follow this pattern as well. Treating people kindly and with love and trust is always the solution to any is-ought problem in any culture I've been to because it absolves yourself of the guilt of having acted unkindly or unlovingly and if someone interprets it incorrectly it is not because your underlying intentions were wrong. Maybe this is too much of a consequentialist view that collapses morality into the mind of the actor too far but again we arrive at the uniqueness of the self's actions apart from any others, which would potentially be overcome in an artificial universal consolidated worldview.
Other than that I agree with everything you said and relate to your experiences as well. I agree that we each individually have an inability to fully describe the capital-T Truth but a general AI with infinite knowledge and sources of data interpreted outside the frame of an individual would either be a step toward a new integrated model of understanding or perhaps just the false appearance of such.
Great reply. This is why the “groomer” discourse* is so wild to me. Modern parents precisely are NOT grooming their children. I imagine that much of tribal and traditional child rearing involves educating children and adolescents into how courting/mating/reproduction operate, and it is at the exact moment that straight parents fail to teach this to their children that they choose to project their failures onto nearby drag queens or trans people. If you don’t do it yourself they’re going to pick it up off the street. Are the parents not possibly creating sexual minorities (which are to some degree sexual dysfunction in my opinion) in their children through the lack of education surrounding courtship ritual?
If you are disturbed to imagine parents providing sexual or courting education (which is a response I might expect from this post) I don’t really disagree with you but it also reinforces my point. I don’t really know how to create an environment more conducive to courtship today but the clinical answer of high school sex ed isn’t very sexy and doesn’t seem to be working.
*Groomer discourse referring to straight people calling trans and/or homosexuals “groomers”
aiislove
2mo ago
I am not a woman, but I think that the same sex parent comparison works as well for women with their mothers as men with their fathers. They probably place very different weights on different categories- men probably care more about their careers and how hot their wives are, and women probably care more about how rich their husbands are, how successful or polite their children are, or how tidy their house is, but I think it still matters.
I don't know if the following refutes or reinforces the point I just tried to make, and I don't know how universal this is, but I have noticed that my mother seems to place a great deal of weight in her life on the opinion of her father- or what she imagines what it would have been even after he died. He was a teacher so she loved school and became a teacher herself, and one of her most emotional confessions to me was when she mentioned something about her dad poking fun at her growing up.
I am getting a lot of pushback on my Japanese section and I am sorry about that. I really do love the country, I've been there 3 times, I grew up a complete Japanophile. I stand by my assertions, and if they sounded harsh, I don't really mean them that way. I just try to maintain a balanced opinion on the country and see it in the context of everywhere I've been, rather than some shining other thing that stands outside the critiques of time and objectivity. I actually am 100% on board with Japan's weird "galapagos syndrome" thing they have going on and basically would be happy if they went full sakoku again for the next 300 years as the rest of the world laps them in some kind of Amish larp and prohibited me and everybody else who isn't Japanese from ever visiting again. I mean I like novelty so why not. But why is Japan not innovating in a Japanese way? Why are they stagnating in a boring stagnant way? Like do it with some flair, I guess. AI is poised to change everything in gaming in a year or two, but Switch 2 has no AI features that I'm aware of. They just rehashed Mario Kart and jacked the price up.
I could write an entire other post about your last paragraph. Japan is stylish. You're not wrong if your point of reference is Western culture. But the spark of energy in the youth culture scene, I would argue, ain't what it used to be.
aiislove
6mo ago
Ok, I understand this reasoning behind the tariffs, but I don't understand how that justifies the massive price increases that will inevitably result from them, which won't be just on the price of knockoff legos and polyester dresses but also everything else because everyone will need more money to buy fewer and fewer goods as the supply will shrink, people won't be switching to domestic goods (especially not right away) they will just switch to no goods at all, leading to a decline in the quality of life with inflation at the same time, and I don't think there's enough American patriotism or anti-Chinese sentiment to go around to keep the economy afloat without seeing blood in the streets
aiislove
9mo ago
In that case, why am I (and I’d imagine, your average American citizen) not familiar with these terrible slave trades and exploitations of labor while I’m reminded of American black slavery nearly every day? If this was football, and your weak team had a miracle one year and beat the strong team in the next county, I imagine you’d be happier to recount the glories of beating the strong team while ignoring the glories of beating all the weaker teams. Similarly white Americans have had a history of making their enemies out to be strong, portraying the native Americans they conquered as powerful because if they portrayed them as weak it would make them look unchristian and evil and sadistic. My historic understanding of the facts in my other comment may have been incorrect but I think the broad philosophy behind it is sound
aiislove
9mo ago
What made you think that the guy you knew from Alabama was really exceptionally intelligent?
aiislove
9mo ago
China doesn’t really have the ability to offer much prosperity
What do you mean? Much of America's prosperity of the past few decades has been thanks to the low cost of labor in China. There are 1.4 billion consumers in China today, surely they have plenty of prosperity to offer in theory. Whether they'd be willing to give it to Japan or whether Japan is interested is another question.
Japans [...] public mood aligns with the USA.
Does it? Japan is an insular, isolationist, pacifist country deeply anxious of foreigners with an extreme respect for tradition (manifesting in everything from shrines that haven't changed in centuries to cafes that haven't changed since the early 60s.) This is so far from the US today that the alignment almost seems incoherent. The influence of Confucianism on Japanese society is so great that they are culturally closer to China than the USA on the global scale of things. Though I suppose it is common throughout history for national neighbors to be similar while hating each other and fawning to foreign allies for sympathy.
I. On Self Esteem, or How Do You Compare with Your Same Sex Parent?
A year or two ago, I watched a video that I found interesting. It said that one of the main factors of self esteem was how we compare ourselves to our same sex parent. (Which is to say, how a man compares himself to his father, or how a woman compares herself to her mother.) If someone is doing much better than their same sex parent, they are much more likely to have positive self esteem than if they are doing worse than their parent. I have thought about this a lot and I found it really insightful when looking at my own self esteem and that of other people I know in my life.
My father passed away at the end of 2021. He was kind, patient, funny, charming, and the sort of person who others are drawn to and liked to talk with. But he had some demons as well. He always hated his parents to a degree that I could never understand. My grandparents were always kind to me. As a child I once accidentally broke a door to one of their cabinets and I was terrified that my grandpa was going to hurt me because I knew my father hated him so much. But my grandfather simply fixed the cabinet door and forgave me. Why did my father hate his father so much? Well, I don’t think I’ll ever really know entirely since they’re both gone, and you can never really know everything about the people closest to you. But I imagine that my father resented the success of my grandfather compared to his own failings. Crucially, my father was the fifth and the last in his line of 5 generations in our family business. My grandfather sold the family business to a corporation in the 1980s. My father, in his anger, left the business at the time, resentful of my grandfather. I think this seriously affected the self esteem of my father and he spent several years not speaking with my grandparents- I did not see my grandparents for probably 6 or 7 years of my life, until my senior year of high school when they reached out to my mom (my parents divorced when I was young) who took me to see them. My father had other problems as well which affected me negatively.
When he died, I had to come to terms with the reality of who he was. I no longer had to lie to myself about the sort of person who he was, I became free to remember fondly the good parts of him and negatively about the bad. Early in the grieving process, when I finally let myself realize the bad parts of him, I was really annoyed with him, irritated that he couldn’t have been a better person and father to me and my brother. But since then I’ve grown to accept him for who he was and really see it as a blessing in disguise: I can always compare myself to him and see that I’m doing better than he was able to do.
II. France
France is the most beautiful place in the world. I have visited France more than any other country outside of my own (The US.) It is easily the most photogenic place: every time I see pictures I have taken of Mt. St. Michel or the chateaus of the Loire Valley I am shocked at how beautiful they are and that I have been there and that they’re still over there, just being gorgeous, as life marches on around them.
But France is also a strange place. All that beauty, but it’s all in the past. Stray a few streets outside any well preserved medieval village, or stunning baroque or rococo era neighborhood or city center, and suddenly you’re surrounded by some of the ugliest architecture in the world. One of the ugliest places I’ve ever been is a roadside hotel in Brittany. The new build exterior is a series of white and gray and fluorescent yellow rectangles with tiny square windows that barely open. The way this architecture stands in stark relief to the class, elegance, and beauty of the past is glaring.
So what went wrong in France? I put the height of French beauty and elegance around the time of Louis XIV, the Sun King. Versailles is an incredible monument to the capability of humans. How could Louis XV and Louis XVI compare to this? These were clearly men standing in the shadows of giants. The 19th century was tumultuous for the French, but they still managed to produce beaux-arts (itself mostly reproductions of baroque and Rococo style, but beautiful nonetheless.) The belle époque, and the art nouveau, of the late 1800s up until World War I was the last gasp of greatness of the French civilization. It would be so convenient for me to place the end of French greatness at the end of the Ancient Régime but really, the decline began decades before, and the French people managed some greatness after that.
But post WWI? There were some moments of glamour in the 1980s, but besides that, France today is living in the shadow of itself.
An aside. I briefly dated a very cute French guy in France. We were looking at the city from afar, and he said he wished he could tear down all the new buildings and just leave the old ones. This is probably a bourgeois and classist sort of opinion to have in France, but really I agree with him. Contrast this with someone I dated in Vienna. He was from Dresden, a city I’ve never visited but suffered greatly from WW2 and apparently is filled with rather utilitarian buildings now. We were visiting some beautiful baroque palace in Vienna, walking the gardens and enjoying all the splendor you’d expect from a baroque palace. Then he points at some medieval support wall, and tells me that he prefers the medieval support structure to the elegance of the palace. Uncharitably, this is the sort of opinion you adopt when you are looking for points for intellect. I preferred the French guy.
III. Japan
Growing up, Japan was the land of the future. Sci fi vistas of skyscrapers and neon lights, hyperfast bullet trains, they were already on Playstation 7 when America just got Playstation 2. It’s still like that today, right?
Sadly, no. Japan’s economy and culture exploded during the early 20th century, culminating finally in the bubble economy of the 1980s. The rapid wealth the Japanese amassed in such a short time is unparalleled to this day. For nearly a century, every Japanese generation greatly improved their standard of living from the one before it. Then the bubble burst and the country has faced stagnation since the 90s. The population is extremely old, and you feel it in the streets. Showa era cafes without a single change since the 60s are strangely common. These are charming, in a very surreal way. Crustless egg salad sandwiches eaten with melon soda floats are delicious but go against every food trend and nutritional guideline of the past 30 years at least. Really I’m glad they exist, and it’s very comforting to know that there’s a place in the world where tradition can be kept alive with such thoughtfulness and attention to detail. But there is also something that feels very wrong about these places.
Being in Japan today feels like witnessing the end of a civilization. It feels like it’s going through what France must have been going through a hundred years ago. Tokyo, only a few decades ago the center of East Asian youth culture, feels like a creaking behemoth. Shinjuku Station, one of the scariest places I’ve ever been, is an exercise in absurdity. Five separate train companies run trains through 53 platforms in the heart of a city of over 14 million people. You can imagine how this gets built in the chaos of the 20th century but it’s patently ridiculous with the technology and capabilities of the 21st century. Everything in the country feels like it was an exciting idea in the 20th century. The youthful energy of the Showa era is gone.
IV. Thailand and South Korea
Chiang Mai, a city of 1.2 million in northern Thailand, feels more vibrant and exciting than Tokyo today. They have 4 modern shopping malls with extremely good, extremely affordable food and shopping options, and countless day and night markets with even cheaper food and shopping. People are optimistic about the future and seem proud of their work and way of life. They still have some catching up to do in terms of health and building standards compared to the rich countries of the old world, but it feels like they’ll get there sooner rather than later. It seems like there’s more opportunity and willingness to hustle among the Thai people than the Japanese. And the highly functional economy of Thailand seems to spur innovation at a much higher degree than today’s Japan, Europe, or the US for that matter.
I am not nearly as well read about Korean history as I am about Japanese history. I have spent about 2 months in Seoul. The main difference that strikes me about South Korea compared with Japan is that South Korea seems to have modernized much more recently than Japan has. In Seoul, you will notice that older people above 50 or so are significantly shorter than younger people. It’s apparent that famine and food insecurity is within living memory for the South Koreans. But South Korea feels like the only country that is truly living in the 21st century. The food is plentiful and nutritious. Young people are healthy and attractive. Technology is cutting edge. Spaces are clean and well designed. People speak really good English. Shopping in Tokyo, you feel suffocated by outdated trends and ancient traditions. In Seoul, shopping feels like you’re touching the future. Apparently the population decline is bad and they have North Korea looming as a constant threat but if anything it gives the culture a fighting spirit that other rich countries have lacked since WWII.
V. The USA
France has already experienced decline. Japan is rapidly declining today. Thailand and South Korea are on their way up. Where does that leave the US? To put it shortly, I don’t know.
As an American it’s difficult to pinpoint where exactly the US is at. I am from a rust belt town in the US. The town I am from peaked with oil money in the Victorian era. There are still glamorous mansions and downtown buildings built around the turn of the century, some of them in great shape, others not so much. Different cities in the rust belt have fared differently since the Victorian era- some of them boomed during the 60s, some of them have just declined, and others have recently been having a bit of a resurgence (especially from people leaving bigger neighboring cities. I suspect there’s been a white flight 2.0 since 2020 but I haven’t been able to find stats backing this up.)
But outside of the rust belt, how is America doing? Let’s look from West to East. Hawaii is beautiful. How sustainable is American power projection in Hawaii? I have been there only for a few weeks, but in that short time I gathered that native Hawaiians are broadly hostile to the American government. Downtown Honolulu was surprisingly sketchy to me (especially Chinatown.) I was there in 2022- huge swaths of tourist industries seem to have shut down around the time of Covid. (I suspect a lot of this was also a victim of the identity politics of the late 2010s- white tourists buying native Hawaiian culture isn’t very woke etc.) Besides that, Hawaii is a very expensive place- the cost disease of the American economy can’t be overlooked. I have broadly the same impression of California from my short time in LA as I do of Hawaii- both are beautiful places with great weather but with a possibly unsustainable culture whose most vital energy is in the past.
I spent a lot of time in New York from around 2010 to 2019. It was the closest megacity to where I grew up so it attracted me as a young and ambitious person. But the city begins to wear on you. It’s really degrading to witness so much filth and extremes of human behavior. It is such an outlier that I hesitate to draw any conclusions about the state of America from the city of New York, but I think the rot is broadly the same across all the major Northeastern cities of the US, from Cleveland and Erie to Baltimore and DC. If I had to put a pin on it, I would say that the Northeast is in decline, but seems to attract enough talent, money and innovation to keep things current.
The South is much more pleasant than the North. If you grew up in the North, you are raised to hate southerners and their culture, but basically this is because the north are haughty and arrogant. People in the south are polite and respectful in a way that the north has not been in decades, if ever.
Speaking of respect, this is the central issue of American culture that I am going to try to tease out. Respect has completely been lost in the realm of public life in the northern, eastern and midwestern US. People constantly interrupt each other. We do not listen to each other. People in the north act confused when I respond to the things they are saying rather than giving a short and flippant response. Being in France taught me the value of listening to others and having patience. There were times when I was in France, when I would go from having a strained but polite interaction, to suddenly having the interaction turn very rude. I didn’t understand what I was doing, but I eventually realized that I was cutting them off, talking over them, which is very rude in French society. In turn I realized that this is very rude in every society, we just get used to it in some cultures. The Northeast is the absolute worst in terms of disrespecting other people and once you have been away from it it is shocking and demoralizing to witness again. Extreme displays of behavior from "Karens" may go viral but they're just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the ambient level of rude interactions all the time in American culture today.
Circling back to the self esteem point I opened with. There are trends on civilizational scales that we can look at. Fortunes go up, people are excited, they create great things. Fortunes go down, people feel worse about themselves, they create fewer great things. Where does the US fall in this? The vibes are telling me we’re in the decline stage. The boomers in my life are poorer and less married and successful than my grandparents’ generation. My grandparents and great aunts and uncles all drove clean elegant cars and kept tidy homes. The generation of my parents and their siblings are still working well into their 60s, dress slovenly or like people much younger than they actually are, and seem to lack the confidence in themselves to rightfully command the respect that they imagine they deserve from those around them. The baby boom generation seems to be the first generation since the 1930s to be doing worse than their parents. Gen X and Millennials seem to be continuing the trend broadly. I anticipate decades of decline based on this trend alone.
More options
Context Copy link