I think /u/Quantumfreakonomics has it right. Despite ostensible public morality being deeply Christianised and emphasising our treatment of others as the polestar of morality, our deeper human concept of virtue is deeply bound up with the concept of personal excellence. A straight man who is failing to be attractive to women is failing in the same way that a slow cheetah or weak oak is failing, namely lacking in the distinctive strengths associated with his nature. Yet because of the deep penetration of Christian and (especially) non-conformist Protestant values into modern Western society — exacerbated by wokeness, a Puritan project in all but name — most people either lack the vocabulary or brazenness to say out loud, “you’re a lousy weak male, and you should be ashamed of yourself.”
Instead, that impulse has to be sublimated into the ethical vocabulary of slave morality, with lack of excellence being converted into lack of morality. The only spaces that call out this male weakness explicitly tend to be those that have explicitly embraced modern master moralities (in however confused a fashion). That’s where you’ll find sexually successful men making fun of incels as weakling feminised soyboy beta cucks etc.. Most other people are thinking that, but lack the self-awareness or honesty to say it.
doglatine
10mo ago
Anyways, shoutouts to this whole debacle for rekindling my fear of women, and quenching my fear of missing out.
This kind of stuff is only really a major problem with a very specific western, educated, secular, metropolitan, young, trendy demographic. Unfortunately, most people here fall into many of those same baskets. However, there’s no reason not to branch out. I’ve been urging people here for years to broaden their dating horizons. Dating across class and education boundaries never worked for me, but I’ve had great romantic relationships with women from Russia, Japan, and Pakistan, and my wife is Filipina.
doglatine
3mo ago
Just FWIW as someone engaged on academic work on these issues, I broadly agree with your take. That said, two quick points of disagreement -
(1) Even supposedly friendly personalisation can be dangerous. Really effective personalised advertised can boost consumption, but if you're anything like me, you should probably be consuming less. You're like a dieter walking through a buffet restaurant filled with dishes perfectly targeted to your palate. By controlling the data held on you by third parties, you can limit how appealing the menu they offer you is. Now, of course, sometimes it will be your cheat day and you can eat to your heart's content, and having an amazing menu offered to you is positively desirable. But most of the time, having this personalised menu is going to be bad for your ability to achieve your reflectively-endorsed goals. Data privacy is one way to protect yourself from having your own most voracious instincts exploited.
(2) Privacy concerns don't seem to me to be male-coded. If anything, more of my female students are very worried about it. More than anything else, I'd say it skews continental European; Germans above anyone else seem obsessed with it. Brits are radically unconcerned about it.
doglatine
6mo ago
Just to add to this — a recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia would be an incredibly significant step towards ending the Arab-Israeli conflict, and with it the hope of an independent Palestine. Consequently, a bloody offensive that keeps the flames of war alive and the Arab street enraged and derails the hope of a detente between Israel and KSA might arguably be judged worth it.
doglatine
8mo ago
if pro-lifers reeeeellly believed it was murder, they'd put the woman in jail, and so if they don't, that means they don't reeeeellly believe it's taking a human life, it's reeeellly about punishing women for exercising their sexuality
I think this is arguably a form of what Scott called the non-central fallacy, aka "the worst argument in the world". There are plenty of instances of taking a life that aren't generally or universally reckoned to be murder (self-defense most obviously, but also killings in war, assisted suicides). Likewise, we understand there to be different moral shades attached to murder; many would choose not to incarcerate a domestic abuse victim who kills her spouse, for example (depending on circumstances). I think it's perfectly consistent to say that abortion is taking a life or even a form of murder without committing to the idea that women or doctors who perform it should be incarcerated.
Part two:
Simple example: I dated a woman who revealed - after we'd been together for several months - that she had serious financial problems and that they were a major source of anxiety for her. If she'd told me this on our first or second date, it would have been a huge red flag for me. As it was, by the time she revealed this to me she'd already demonstrated many really impressive virtues, as well as displaying good sense in realising this was quite a personal piece of information, so it was no longer a deal breaker.
(5) Don't be (too) spontaneous. Romantic comedies play up spontaneity and we associate it with romance. That's why it's important to be able to fake it. Glib one-liners aside, you should try to be prepared for different eventualities so you can embrace spontaneity when it comes. This means simple stuff like ensuring your apartment/house is clean and presentable and doesn't look like the abode of a serial killer (seriously, have some decorative objects/stuff on the walls). It means having a trashcan with a lid in the bathroom (if it's not obvious why this is something you should have if you're expecting female company, think about it). It also involves having options to cover various contingencies. If you meet your date for happy hour drinks and tells you she's getting hungry, you should know a few good restaurants nearby. If the initial bar you picked to meet is crowded and noisy, have some decent alternatives in walking distance. The rule against spontaneity also extends to responding to messages. While the whole 'three day rule' is bullshit, I think it's a good idea not to respond to a date's messages too quickly. It can be super awkward when you write someone a message saying "hey that was fun last night, HMU next week if you want to do it again" and they respond immediately, basically forcing a conversation you weren't prepared for. Give yourself some time to think about your response and don't pressure communication.
(6) Don't be too open with your feelings too quickly. Again, Hollywood has a lot to answer for here. We rarely see romantic leads downplaying their affections, but it can be really important early on in a relationship not to come over too strong. Two simple reasons for this. Firstly, it can again show a lack of judgment. There are lots of emotionally unstable people out there (men and women) who express their undying love for someone after a couple of dates, and most people are aware (if only implicitly) that this kind of behaviour typically bespeaks someone with a cluster of personality disorders. Displaying good judgment means showing that you're a smart cautious person who doesn't rush into things or make themselves vulnerable unless they've had clear indicators of interest from their partner. Second, there is a balance of power issue here. I don't want to overstate this, but thinking back to the investor metaphor, if you're too eager, too soon, it can make you look like a dodgy salesman trying to offload an inferior product as quickly as possible. By being sensibly restrained and responsive to what your new romantic partner says and does, you show that you recognise your own value: you have something important to bring to the table, and you're not going to risk giving it away too quickly to an unsuitable partner. In special conditions - an intense and rapid holiday romance for example - the above advice may be temporarily waived, but again, pay attention to cues and respond appropriately.
(7) Don't expect instant results (and don't get bitter). Finding a lifelong romantic partner is one of the most important and challenging things people do. While some people get lucky and stumble on a suitable partner early on, it's increasingly common for people to have to go on a lot of dates before they find someone they can happily date for a few months, let alone the rest of their life. I suggest leaning into the experience and learning to enjoy the process of dating itself rather than just focusing on outcomes. Dating offers an unparalleled way to hone social skills in an emotionally complex environment, as well as a unique opportunity to meet people from varied backgrounds and learn about them and their lives. This is true even if they don't go home with you at the end of the night. Indeed, you should absolutely expect to be rejected repeatedly. Rejection burns, but it's a little less intense each time, and if you've been on the dating market for a while then it'll probably become incrementally less painful. If you are rejected, try to be gracious and smooth about it, and I'd generally recommend not asking the person why they ended things (or didn't want them to start). While you might get lucky and hear some useful advice, you're far more likely to get a delicate platitude about things just not working out.
In fact, most people have lots of implicit criteria for romantic partners that they may not even be fully aware of themselves. Maybe you weren't tall enough, maybe they didn't like your accent, maybe you reminded them too much of a bad ex. Closure is something we do for ourselves, and if you rely on other people to provide it for you then nine times out of ten you'll be left hanging. Moreover, just because a date doesn't result in romance doesn't mean it's pointless. In addition to providing good life experience, it can provide other opportunities. Two of my best friends today are women I went on dates with where there didn't turn out to be much chemistry. Both of these women subsequently set me up with friends of theirs, complete with a letter of recommendation stating that I was a good and decent guy. Above all, for god's sake don't get bitter and starting coming up with theories about how women are stupid, silly, or evil. Dating is a nightmare for women too, and while the problems they face are often different from those experienced by men, almost no-one has it easy. And on a more practical note, bitterness will not help make your more attractive or enhance your dating prospects - in fact, quite the opposite.
(8) Don't think you're above following the rules. "This is all bullshit. Two of my best friends got together on a first date where they bonded over their love of anime and MT:G and they were immediately open about their kinks and are now married with ten children." There are absolutely people who find love via pathways quite different from those discussed here, and I don't pretend any of the suggestions I'm giving are absolute. However, they represent my considered advice as to how to make dating more productive and less mysterious for straight men, and if you're feeling frustrated or despondent, I think they're a solid starting point. But the internet is full of people giving romantic advice, some of which is quite different from my own, and I don't take myself to be some inspired oracle dispensing eternal truths. Nonetheless, if what you're doing isn't working, or is making you unhappy, you should try something else.
There are plenty of real-world countries that successfully implement the kind of social system I’m endorsing, from Singapore to Denmark to Germany to Japan. What these countries have in common is either (a) a high degree of social conformity, and/or (b), a state willing to get authoritarian on people who don’t toe the line (plus wealth etc., but that's something the US has in spades). Where I’m shifting my priors, especially in relation to the US, is on the critical importance of (b).
doglatine
1mo ago
Given the already high rates of data fabrication inside but especially outside the West, I’d assign very little weight to any data from a paper where the authors, reviewers, and editors don’t even check for howlers like the ones quoted.
More broadly, speaking from the sausage factory floor, I can say that the trend in high-level publishing in the humanities increasingly seems to be towards special issues/special series where all papers are by invitation or commissioned. This creates some problems (harder for outsiders to break in, easier for ideologue editors to maintain a party line), but in general seems like an acceptable stopgap measure for wordcel fields to cover the next 5-10 year interregnum where LLM outputs are good enough to make open submission impossible, but not quite good enough to replace the best human scholars.
doglatine
1mo ago
Fascinating; I seem to see quite a lot of small Ford Focuses, Fiestas, and Mondeos here in the UK.
doglatine
3mo ago
Couldn’t Abbot announce that state law enforcement would prevent federal agents from making arrests of guardsmen in that case? Obviously it would be an escalation but seems like there’s a whole ladder here with progressively more extreme rungs for both players.
doglatine
3mo ago
Before I even clicked, I knew this would either be NileRed or Action Lab 🤣
doglatine
4mo ago
The UK is particularly bad here. At this point I’m no longer shocked by how much American friends make compared to British friends in similar jobs, often 2-3 times as much.
doglatine
5mo ago
Yes, well put. I don’t think the “woke establishment” has a good play here insofar as large swathes of the vanguard progressive movement are actually anti-Semitic by normie standards, while large swathes of the journalistic, financial, and political leadership of the movement are themselves Jewish and many of them feel betrayed by the wider left in the wake of October 7th.
I see two main possible outcomes. Either the leadership reins in the vanguard and has an anti-semitism purge as per Starmer in the UK. The effect of this would be disillusionment in the vanguard and a sense of betrayal. Many of the most passionate and/or psychotic progressives will splinter off. Alternatively, if the leadership is too weak to rein in the vanguard, then a lot of powerful Jewish Americans will splinter from the woke fringe (a la Luciana Berger in the UK), probably mostly flocking to centrist Democrat spaces.
Either way, it’s not a fight that can be brushed under the rug.
doglatine
5mo ago
I'm coming late to this fantastic post, and most things worth saying have been said, but one issue no-one's tackled: how will AI affect all this? That might sound tenuous but I think it's potentially significance. We're on the cusp of -
- Vastly more accessible/effective homeschooling and self-education via AI tutors
- Massive skill equalisation for low- and mid-level white collar work
- Likely evisceration of large parts of the Blue Tribe base
- Easy creation of reasonably smart AI media/propaganda bots
- Emergence of new more salient axes of disagreement splitting society down the middle (e.g. pro-tech/anti-tech)
doglatine
6mo ago
Turkey isn’t going to war with Greece any time soon. The country’s membership of NATO is central to all of its defense plans and pretty important to its national identity. Entirely possible it gets drawn into the next round of Armenia-Azerbaijan though.
doglatine
7mo ago
That’s not an especially hard one for the ancap to resolve; you can just let private medical licensing authorities award medical-qualification ratings based on their preferred criteria and create an accreditation marketplace. If I choose to go to an amateur surgeon despite him having low ratings, that’s up to me.
doglatine
8mo ago
Speaking as someone married to a Filipino woman, I don't see it as a cheap shot. I think it's excellent advice. Modern Western gender relations are deeply confused and toxic at the moment, and the gap between public rhetoric, professional rules, and private preferences all requires a greater-than-usual degree of reading between the lines to successfully navigate. By contrast, the implicit deal in many non-Western societies remains comparatively clear: the husband will provide some combination of social status and financial security, and the wife will create a pleasant home and family environment. Given this, I think choosing a non-Western wife is an extremely good option for many men, especially non-neurotypical men who struggle with the elaborate courtly cognitive dissonance required over here. That said, just because the rules over there are relatively more clear-cut doesn't mean they're totally transparent, so it's not something to blunder into without appropriate contextual knowledge. Otherwise you'll end up in a situation where you're shocked, shocked to find that your Filipino wife expects you to bail out her brother's failing business back home, or your Ukrainian wife expects to be provided with the means to keep up a glamorous wardrobe.
doglatine
10mo ago
I mean we’re on the fifth republic already. It’s not hard to imagine a sixth.
doglatine
11mo ago
I had exactly the opposite take — first book okay, second book good, third book excellent.Liu can’t write characters or plausible motives for shit, but his ideas are absolutely wild. Book 1 is mostly badly written characters doing stuff. Book 2 is badly written characters doing stuff with a great reveal at the end. Book 3 is Liu coming up with insane genius explanations for string theory, matter-antimatter asymmetry, entropy, etc..
doglatine
6d ago
No rhetoric intended — “Mycoprotein” can include regular mushrooms but in the meat replacement context, it’s usually used to mean microfungi like Fusarium venenatum. These are cultivated in big vats in roughly the same way you’d cultivate brewer’s yeast, rather than on more traditional farms like field mushrooms.
I’d be pretty surprised if the issues you raise were a serious problem. We have a huge amount of experience at preventing bacteria or pathogens getting into a whole range of industrial biotech processes, and in this case we can very tightly control the inputs and monitor conditions. Hell, if necessary, you could just include antibiotics as inputs into the process, though I doubt it’d come to that.
doglatine
28d ago
Yeah, I’ve seen some wild liveleak stuff in the past but the scene with the dog was enough to make me decide my brain really doesn’t need this content in it.
doglatine
1mo ago
'defend allies without going on global adventures' I meant taking a stand to defend Taiwan if it were attacked as opposed to isolationism - that wasn't clear in my post though. However, the US has lots of troops all over the world, that huge base in Africa that was recently closed for example.
One of the reasons the US has bases all over the world is so it can quickly deploy forces in defense of allies. For example, the recently-closed based in Niger was helping the government of that country (and neighboring regions) defend against ISIS and Boko Haram. Bases in the Middle East can help defend KSA, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and UAE against Iran, Houthis, etc.. Base in Okinawa and the Philippines protect those countries from China. And so on. While I'm sympathetic to your broad view that the US has overestimated its strength and should be focused on protecting what it has, it's not clear to me that the material means of doing so are radically different. E.g., if a US ally in East Africa is attacked, the solution is sending a carrier group.
It sounds like one very effective way to protect people like A, B, and C in your story would be to more rapidly and permanently incarcerate the genuine bad eggs around them, as well as making opiate drugs less widely available. The state can’t ensure that feckless weak-willed people are exposed to healthy friendship circles or overcome their natural deficits in decision-making. However, it can intervene to ensure that there are fewer bad actors around to exploit them.
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