(cont, part 2)
The third problem is that many assertions about such-and-such country having a "traditional patriarchy" are completely wrong -- these claims are either exaggerations made by agenda-driven activists, or misconceptions of Westerners who only ever hear exceptional stories, and never the stories about how 99% time they are similar to us.
Starting the case of South Korea, we see that the New York Times has signal-boosted a few writers who have called South Korea "patriarchal":
Many men would rather not acknowledge that South Korea is an entrenched patriarchy and that toxic gender relations are taking a toll on society. source
And:
Other trends in South Korea strongly discourage births. They include rising opposition among women to child-rearing expectations by men in what remains a patriarchal society. More women in South Korea, rebelling against the country’s deeply embedded sexism, are foregoing marriage and motherhood in pursuit of education and professional careers.
But is this the true story of South Korea?
I went on a binge of reading articles and forum posts by actual South Koreans. By cherry-picking alternative evidence I can tell an entirely different story:
South Korea in the past decade has gone off the extreme feminist deep-end. Popular online communities for young women, such as WOMAD or Megalia,have been the hosts of campaigns of vitriolic attacks and physical assaults against men -- such as calling men vermin, posting secret nude pics of men up for mockery, wishing for North Korea to invade and kill Korean males. Nor is this not a fringe movement -- the online communities these views thrive on can reach up to a million young female users. While of course the majority of the content on these forums is mundane, when the topic of men comes up, only the radical feminist position is allowed. The Western media, not understanding the nature of South Korean feminism, denounces even a modest backlash against this extreme feminism as being mysoginistic.
At the government level, South Korea is more feminist than the U.S.A. in a number of ways: South Korea elected a woman president in 2013, followed by a male president who campaigned on promises to be a "feminist president." Ministry for Women claims that men are 'potential criminals' and have a 'social responsibility' to prove women that he is 'different from the others.' South korea ranks 10th in the UN's equality index, while America is 46th.
Korean media culture has villainized the domineering mother-in-law of old. The newer generation of mother-in-laws positions themselves as friends and equals of young wives. The rights of Korean women have enormously improved, and women are standing against gender discrimination and injustice. The patriarchy system has disappeared a lot, and daughter-in-law is no longer subordinate to their mother-in-law.
Korean feminism is more selfish than the Western version -- the new trend is to expect guys to be sweet k-drama fantasy men that enthusiastically cook as a hobby. Princess culture cherry picking feminist privilege, not empowerment, has really become an abomination. Korean government is pushing a female quota for police, despite women being held to lower standards and not actually doing anything at the scene of the crime.
Women are now a key part of the work force -- and held to the same standards of long hours as men are held to. Despite stories fed to western news organizations by activists about how South Korea is stuck in the 1950s, that is not true at all. Companies aren't firing women in droves as soon as they get pregnant, instead, they are often asking them how quickly they can come back to work because they cannot afford to lose them for long. There is no baby-making strike, despite what lying activists trick the gullible BBC into saying, all the professoinal working women in Korea are able to go back to work after having children and 50% of homes with children are now dual income. Korean women report that sexual harrassment is actually far greater in Europe and the USA than in in South Korea.
Which portrait of South Korea is more accurate? My own sense based on reading all the original posts and viewing the statistics is that South Korea is more feminist than the U.S. on some dimensions, and less on others. Choosing and weighting the categories in order to add up a total feminist score is an entirely arbitrary exercise. There is a general trend of extreme low-fertility among urbanites in modern cities with high real estate costs, little room for kids to play, and intense job markets. I suspect that South Korea's and Singapore's extra low fertility rates are probably more related to their population being more competitive urbanite than America's. I would guess that South Koreans in Seoul probably have a similar fertility rate to white college educated people living in New York City.
Neither are the Eastern Bloc countries some last hold-outs of patriarchy. Remember that Soviet communism was ultra-feminist for its time-period. The Bolshevik party in the 1920s set up women's departments . Divorce and abortion were available on demand (unlike in the United States at the same time):
In 1923 women's departments existed in most provinces; 35,539 women attended delegate assemblies in cities and towns, and 55,688 more in rural areas....The official message to women was that following the victory of the socialist revolution, women were equal. The Bolsheviks implemented concrete policies designed to equalize the status of women with men, improve their educational level, and involve them in society. ... The main thrust of the rural women's departments was to encourage women to participate in village soviet elections, attend women's assemblies, and promote Komsomol membership. The Bolshevik mission was to enlighten the "backward female masses," overcome their "religious superstition," undermine male domination, and draw them closer to the party. Russia After Lenin: Politics, Culture and Society, 1921 -- 1929.
Now, later on the West experienced second wave feminism while the situation in the Soviet Union was more stagnant. That is probably how the reputation arises for the Eastern Bloc being less feminist. But since the opening up the ex-Soviet bloc to western style TV, these countries are anti-traditional in their own way. Russia for instance, has American inspired reality TV shows glamorizing the "gold diggers" who leave their local towns for wealthy boyfriends in the city. Divorce rates in Russia are insane. Pick-up artists have reported on Poland being especially prime place to pick up women who cheat on their husbands.
As one prominent Russian nationalist recently wrote:
I have to admit that for many years I've been pissed off at our official Duginist rhetoric about the holy war of Russia as the center of world good, tradition and shit, with the bad West and the Euroatlantic civilization. There are two problems with these ideas.
First, it's all a lie. There is no “tradition” in Russia - not in the sense of an historical tradition and canon, but in the sense of a “living” tradition here and now. Russia is the country of total divorce, low birth rates, abandoned old age, an absence of elder men (and thus zero patriarchy), general cynicism, individualism, cult of consumption, extremely weak religiosity (unless we count DIY paganism and DIY esotericism as such), mass (not only elite) aping of any foreign fashions, torn historical and familial memory, indifference to everything national, concrete high-rise construction with no feel of the earth or a feeling of being masters on the land, and most importantly an extreme lack of trust in all social and collective institutions.
USA is an infinitely more “traditional” country than Russia. In USA, almost every other man has read the Bible - and will quote from it. But whatever, the second thing is worse.
In fairness, this is rant likely exaggerates the difference between the USA and Russia in other direction. My general sense is that in the Eastern Bloc both the men and the women are defecting harder than in the West. Outsiders with an agenda look and at this and see how poorly men are behaving and associate that with "toxic masculinity" which codes to them as "traditional patriarchy." In reality there is excessive bad behavior with both sexes and the bad male behavior has little to do with traditional patriarchy.
...on to part 3...
gorge
1yr ago
(cont, part 3)
The elephant in the room
Now that we muddled the situation by discussing all the confounders, unknowables, and conflicting evidence, we should adress the the elephant in the room: Every low-fertility country in the world today -- from South Korea to Sweden to Poland -- is wildly feminist by the standards of history, and by the standards of countries that have had high-fertility.
When we compare basic measures of modern feminism versus traditional partriachy -- % of women enrolling in college educated, % of legislatures women, divorce rate -- we see that contemporary South Korea and Japan are far closer to the modern United States and Sweden than it is to 1950s America.
Fertility Rate | Gross college enrollment rate for women | % national legistlators women | Divorce Rate |
|
America 1820 | 6.42 | 0% | 0.0% | 3% |
America 1890 | 4.39 | 0% | 0.0% | 6% |
Japan 1925 | 5.18 | 0% | 0.0% | 10% |
America 1950 | 3.31 | 5% | 0.1% | 25% |
Saudi Arabia 2020 | 2.28 | 74% | 20.0% | 48% |
Iran 2020 | 2.15 | 57% | 6.0% | 33% |
America 2020 | 1.8 | 102% | 24.0% | 39% |
South Korea 2020 | 0.84 | 88% | 17.0% | 42% |
Japan 2020 | 1.34 | 62% | 10.0% | 35% |
Poland 2020 | 1.38 | 84% | 29.0% | 33% |
Sweden 2020 | 1.8 | 96% | 47.0% | 50% |
Spain 2020 | 1.24 | 102% | 47.0% | 54% |
Finland 2020 | 1.35 | 101% | 45.0% | 56% |
Russia 2020 | 1.5 | 93% | 17.0% | 70% |
Most Americans would probably be surprised by how feminist contemporary Iran and Saudi Arabia are. When these countries entered public consciousness we saw them as ultra-patriarchal, "medieval" and "theocratic" kingdoms. But by 2022, Saudi Arabia now sends 76% of women to college, has a 47% divorce rate, and allows a modest amount of women rpresentation in parliament. Most laws against women living alone or owning property have now been rescinded. Correspondingly, its fertility rate has plummetted from 7.1 in 1980 to 2.2 today.
When we want to determine if low fertility is an inherent part of wealthy modernity or of feminism we have a problem in that we have no control group. Every country in the world post-1945 either came under the dominance of the American hegemony, the Soviet hegemony, or the Chinese hegemony. All three of these empires were explicitly feminist. Feminism has been a core part of the United Nation's declarations and intiatives. America has pushed feminism in every country that matters, whether that be via the hard power of conquering Japan and rewriting their constitution, or the soft power of requiring certain governance and "human rights" intiatives in order to gain aid and favored trade relations.
This does raise a big question of whether wealthy modernity, feminism, and low fertility are all inherently linked together -- maybe it is not just historical accident that there is no control group. Perhaps we will address that in a future post.
gorge
1yr ago
I was listening to a podcast with Michael Bailey, an OG researcher on trans issues and a guy who was at the front-lines of the conflict 20 years ago, long before this was a mainstream flashpoint.
Bailey talked about the autogynephilia model of male-to-female transexuals. I had heard some of it before: that many start off by having a fetish of being aroused by the idea of themselves as a woman. But historically since doctors would not prescribe sex reassignment for a sex fetish, they could only claim that they "were really a girl inside." Even though m-t-f's like McCloskey hit every male brained stereotype.
But then Bailey went to say that over years of cross-dressing to get off on themselves, many create an identity for themselves as a woman, an identity which may come to seem like the "real" them. Hence the eventual desire to transition and really become this character.
This got me thinking that to extent that something like "gender identity" exists in the brain separable from biological sex, I think wonder if it is really the matter of an entire personal identity that gets molded and created over time.
Question: are there documented examples of this kind of thing happening outside of sex/gender? Like an actor who becomes so caught up in role he thinks that role is the "real" him.
(Perhaps some of us can feel this way, our psued life can feel more like the real us...)
gorge
6mo ago
I still tend to have a lot of trust for economists, but that is maybe because I have found economists I actually trust, and I don't read the economists that would ruin my trust.
They were the first class of experts to lose my trust, after 2008. Hmm, actually, maybe the second after Iraq and the GWOT. Of course I never believed the "gender" and "psychology" experts in the first place, so there is that too.
gorge
6mo ago
South Korea, Japan, and Russia that are more socially conservative than the US and western Europe on every metric.
Malarkey. All of these countries are extremely feminist by historical American standards, and by some metrics are more feminist than contemporary America. For example, South Korea ranked 10th in the world in the UN's Gender Inequality Index, which is far higher than where America ranked. I wrote a long effort post on this last year and part 2 and part 3
Agree 100%. In older mass media, "think of the children" was an archetypal motivator in community and political action. But today, living with children in a big American city, it does seem like making the world nice for children is a lower priority than dog parks, dogs relieving themselves on public property, automobiles, allowing crazy vagrants to roam the streets, library worker unions, teacher's unions, squeezing every bit of life expectancy from the gerontocracy, etc. The mandatory masking for children in schools and daycare -- while adults were free to go to work and bars maskless -- was a major black-pill on how society is treating children.
I'm reminded of this old quote from Plutarch:
On seeing certain wealthy foreigners in Rome carrying puppies and young monkeys about in their bosoms and fondling them, Caesar asked, we are told, if the women in their country did not bear children, thus in right princely fashion rebuking those who squander on animals that proneness to love and loving affection which is ours by nature, and which is due only to our fellow-men.
- Plutarch, Pericles. 1st century A.D.
According to William Durant, who I believe, a major underlying cause of the Fall of the Roman Empire was a gradual decline in population, in turn due to people deciding to have fewer children. This started with the elites, but eventually reached the provinces. From his Caesar and Christ:
A serious decline of population appears in the West after Hadrian. It has been questioned, but the mass importation of barbarians into the Empire by Aurelius, Valentinian, Aurelian, Probus, and Constantine leaves little room for doubt.3 Aurelius, to replenish his army, enrolled slaves, gladiators, policemen, criminals; either the crisis was greater, or the free population less, than before; and the slave population had certainly fallen. So many farms had been abandoned, above all in Italy, that Pertinax offered them gratis to anyone who would till them. A law of Septimius Severus speaks of a penuria hominum—a shortage of men.4 In Greece the depopulation had been going on for centuries. In Alexandria, which had boasted of its numbers, Bishop Dionysius calculated that the population had in his time (250) been halved. He mourned to “see the human race diminishing and constantly wasting away.”5 Only the barbarians and the Orientals were increasing, outside the Empire and within.
What had caused this fall in population? Above all, family limitation. Practiced first by the educated classes, it had now seeped down to a proletariat named for its fertility;6 by A.D. 100 it had reached the agricultural classes, as shown by the use of imperial alimenta to encourage rural parentage; by the third century it had overrun the western provinces, and was lowering man power in Gaul.7 Though branded as a crime, infanticide flourished as poverty grew.8 Sexual excesses may have reduced human fertility; the avoidance or deferment of marriage had a like effect, and the making of eunuchs increased as Oriental customs flowed into the West. Plantianus, Praetorian Prefect, had one hundred boys emasculated, and then gave them to his daughter as a wedding gift.
The collapse in Saudi tfr happened well before recent liberalization, and in fact the largest collapse occurred during the most severe period of post-Siege of Mecca religious reactionary conservatism, when Saudi society became much less feminist, the Niqab was mandated, the modern guardianship system was mandated, middle and upper-middle class women were largely removed from the professions, Saudi society became more markedly segregated even among urban elites and so on.
Saudi Arabia was already oil rich by 1980. The World Bank says that female college enrollment in Saudi Arabia has risen steadily and consistently and massively, from a mere 5% in 1980 to 75% in 2020 -- https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.TER.ENRR.FE?locations=SA --, which correlates well with the decline in TFR during that same period. If there is a religious conservative backlash, they seem to have utterly failed at even arresting female empowerment, much less actually rolling it back, or else female college enrollment would have gone down, not up.
Second wave feminism was a necessary reaction to the sexual revolution (which was invented by powerful men for the purpose of basically sexually exploiting women without recompense),
Sex positive feminism and women-should-work feminism was pushed by elite men who wanted easy access to cute young women. Many women liked it too because it is crack for women to be around the highest status men. "MeToo" feminism is bolstered by dads who don't want to see their daughters run through by the football team, husbands who don't like their wives being seduced at the office, beta men who are resentful of alpha men hoarding the pussy, and elites who find metoo incidents as useful way to take down competitors. Many women on board with #metoo because sex-with-no-strings actually left them very hurt. Unfortunately, everyone has misidentified the problem as being one of lack of consent, as opposed to the problem being inherent to fornication and adultery.
gorge
6mo ago
Whether they're extremely feminist by historical standards doesn't matter. If feminism (or social liberalism in general) is what causes worse social outcomes, then more feminist/liberal countries should do worse than less feminist/liberal countries now.
No, because of range restriction. Height matters for basketball, but if you do a correlation between NBA statistical success and height, there is no correlation. That is because everyone has already been selected based on height. Every country today is hyper-feminist, the actual differences between them in amount of feminism is small, so when comparing metrics like fertility rate or mental illness, other factors will matter more.
What are the metrics by which ROK is more feminist than the US or western Europe
Compared to the US, the UN Gender Inequality Index and ROK has actually had a woman president and the US has not. Compared to Western Europe, I suspect that ROK women, particularly single women, work far more hours in the office than American women. I suspect ROK has more of a princess culture, but I don't know how I would prove this to your satisfaction, it's not something that anyone reputable tracks and quantifies. There are many forms of feminism, "princess culture" is one form, Russian style gold-digging is another, girl-boss, strong bad-ass woman type is another. Countries are feminist in different ways.
Russia is a particularly good example since, as you note in this post, Putin's government has made a big show of retvrning to tradition, revitalizing the Orthodox Church, and opposing the degenerate west, and yet he can't keep the fertility rate from continuing to crash or the kids from becoming atheist.
He made a show but he did not actually do much of anything. Russia went full communist in 1918, and had 70 years during which it was way to the left on religious and feminist issues than the USA. It never actually recovered from that.
because you won't admit to any control
Yes, that is what I said very clearly my original post that I linked to. There is no control group.
and life back then was worse on every metric I can think of.
1950s America was massively less feminist than any white or east asian country today, and was a pretty nice place to live, a better place by many metrics. And to the extent things are better in 2023, it is mostly because of technological development, but the pace of technological development was greater in the 1950s, the nice things we have in 2023 are built on the groundwork of things discovered in earlier times, I do not think you can give feminism any credit for the nicer technological things we have in 2023 than we had in 1950.
This is like marxists who insist the reason USSR/China/Cuba/etc. failed to create a communist utopia is because they just didn't do communism hard enough. Maybe.
AFACIT, Putin did not substantially change policy at all. Did he enact something like the Hayes code for all TV and movies in Russia? Did he restrict women from going to college? Did he ban no fault divorce? Did he restrict single women from living alone? Did he add "honor and obey" to all legal marriage vows? How much money did he actually allocate toward pro-traditional Christian values media? Did he make being a member of a church in good standing a prerequisite for elite positions? Did he ban abortion? Did he ban birth control? These are things that were the norm in America 70-120 years ago, such policy changes are what it would actually mean to roll-back feminism.
"Racism" is an anti-concept. It is a word of activist power. It groups a whole bunch of unlike phenomena together, and then the people who can use the word can equivocate on the definition in order to target the people they want to target for shaming and cancellation.
An example of the game plan is:
- Create an association in the public between the word "racist" and images of white people throwing stones at black children and calling them horrible names.
- Include in the definition of a racist "a person who believes in the superiority of one racial group, such as a group being more intelligent"
- Then using that definition, call people like Charles Murray or Steve Sailer "racists" since he arguably fits definition 2) even though they are the farthest thing from definition 1).
- Cancel Charles Murray and Steve Sailer, since their ideas are a huge threat to the $2 trillion dolllar education-industrial complex.
Another way of saying this is that "racism" is any idea that opposes the current left/center-left establishment ethnogensis or ethno-preservation projects. So if you are against busing ethnic Polish and Irish white kids to black neighborhood schools, you are against a certain ethnogensis project, and therefore racist. If you are against historically black universities, or against a law making certain hair styles a protected characteristic, you are against a certain ethnology-preservation project and therefore racist. If an asian-American mom wants her daughter to marry an Asian guy, that is irrelevant to any establishment plans, so the establishment does not care and does not consider the mom a racist.
gorge
11mo ago
I think it's illuminating to see how many people on TheMotte both loathe mentally ill homeless people so much and are so authoritarian that their desired solution to the mentally ill homeless problem is to kill them all.
How many people on the TheMotte believe this? Cite me the actual comment where someone said "that their desired solution to the mentally ill homeless problem is to kill them all" and let us look at how many upvotes it got.
gorge
8mo ago
can anyone provide me with a count of how many of the fake electors' votes were mistakenly recorded in the Senate?
I think the idea is that they were in a conspiracy to commit fraud, one is still guilty even if one fails. But more importantly, the fraud laws I have seen always require deception. In what way were these "fake" electors trying to deceive anyone?
gorge
1yr ago
Peak woke would be when people who push woke too far actually get punished. It's not enough for people leading cancellation mobs to sometimes fail. The leaders themselves need to be punished for harassment. It's not enough for some college administrator pushing a crazy new DEI initiative to fail at it. They need to get punished for being stupid or for being racist against white people. When people who wish to push woke more to the left are afraid of getting punished for overreach as those those who want to push back things to the right are afraid of getting punished, then we will be at equilibrium.
That woke movement sometimes fails is meaningless. Lot's of cancellation attempts have failed and will fail, lot's of trial balloons will get popped (like that latest outrage from Stanford over inclusive language). But as long as there is no consequence for the attempt, there will be more attempts, some will succeed, and we will continue to ratchet leftward.
Learning about Shakespeare and studying themes in classic novels, while not completely useless, is less useful than learning about real historical events.
Kids do something like 6,000 hours of school-time and schoolwork over the four years of high school, there is plenty of time to do both. Storm of Steel should of course be required reading. I think it would be cool if elite students read the Shakespeare historical plays, watched multiple play versions, and then read the actual primary source history and the secondary source history. You learn the literature, you learn the history, you learn about propaganda and how the magic of storytelling works, you break out of the present and immerse yourself in a world very different than ours.
IMO, it's important to read primary sources and the classics. First, multiple generations have concluded that these sources were edifying, whereas a new book is much more likely to be of low quality that will soon be forgotten (the Lindy effect0. Second, classic sources help you eliminate "presentism" and build a basic common sense and historical grounding for how the world works. It's easy to read a history book in 2023 and have also sorts of current ideologies imposed on the past, you may read about how terrible the patriarchy was and how everyone was secretly gay, etc, but if you actually immerse yourself in primary sources I think you come to a much more complex, interesting, and realistic view about the past. Even if the play itself is fiction, all the assumptions built into the background of the play tell you a lot about the people who created such a play and the people who watched it.
But when talking about reforming high school, the elephant in the room is that most kids should not be in high school, at least not until age 18. If your IQ is around 105, you probably should be done with school once you can write a business letter and know enough math to do some carpentry or double-entry book-keeping for your business. If your IQ is 95, you should be done with school once you can do basic reading and know enough math to make change. Sticking the majority of kids on an academic-heavy track is not doing anybody, any good.
gorge
3mo ago
If you care about the things that Trump's base cares about (immigration, America first, bringing industry back, stopping the 'woke' agenda, curbing the establishment/Cathedral-state, etc. ) , then for all of Trump's faults, the other options may be even less unappealing:
Haley -- do I need to even explain why she is bad? She is an awful combination of 1) having the worst of neocon foreign policy 2) being an authoritarian on free speech issues 3) being weak against the woke agenda 4) being cynical 5) being dumb as bricks. Desantis -- naive boy scout who is going to be eaten alive. He simply doesn't have the charisma or the guts to take on the establishment. Ramaswamy -- I think he has a lot of trouble overcoming the "who is this guy" problem. Both in the sense of having low name recognition and no history of being a public figure, but also in the sense of how did this Harvard/Yale/Goldman Sachs guy come to be giving Trumpist talking points -- is he sincere or does he think there is a market to be tapped?
The bet with Trump is that maybe he learned from his mistakes and won't staff his administration with GOP establishment types who wanted to cave in on issues and stab Trump in the back.
Is it likely that Trump can learn from his mistakes at age 77 and be a better president this time around? Is it likely that he can overcome is own personal history of not having the back of the people who supported him or worked form him? Very doubtful.
The basic reality is that right now all the presidential options are terrible.
gorge
6mo ago
He may not have put through every trad dream policy,
He hasn't done anything close to what was required. If we were ranking societies on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the most feminist society in history, 10 being the patriarchy of 5th century Rome, I'd put the Ango-America in the 1700s as a 9, America circa 1900 as a 6, America in the 1950s as a 4, and Russia and the U.S. in 2023 as around a 1. Whether Russia is 1.3 and America is 1.1 and Sweden is 1.0 isn't a big difference. Maybe Putin moved the needle for Russia from 1.3 to 1.4. Maybe he didn't move the needle at all, his actions did not even do enough to arrest entropy decay and the continual allure of American hegemonic culture, and so Russia still went from a 1.5 to 1.3 during is reign.
So why should anyone take seriously the thesis that feminism is responsible for X bad thing in modern society, if there's no way to test it?
For the same reason anyone takes any argument about social or historical trends convincing -- they find some combination of imperfect statistical correlations, personal life experiences, historical testimonies, circumstantial evidence, reasoned arguments, etc. etc. to be convincing.
120 years ago, in 1900, the American birthrate had already been halved since 1800. Was that also feminism's fault?
It probably did have a major impact. America became substantially more feminist during the 1800s -- coverture was ended, the first states had already granted woman's suffrage. By 1918 Mencken was already complaining in his In Defense of Women that women had legally seized the upper-hand. Robert Dabney wrote in 1871 about northern conservatives caving on womens rights. In 1886, Henry Adams was satirizing feminism in Boston. You can play Wikipedia game and note how few children the notable 1800s feminists bore. Here is an interesting article making the argument that birth rates dropped earliest in the regions that were first hit by englightenment/feminist values, notably: France and New England.
gorge
1yr ago
No, "past peak woke" would be when the people pushing woke innovations are getting punished, and the people reversing established woke innovations are not getting punished and sometimes succeeding.
"Peak woke" -- or better, "woke plateau" -- would be when someone pushing a woke innovation or trying to make new offense cancellable is as likely to get punished as someone who is calling out and trying to cancel out existing woke norms is likely to get canceled.
gorge
1yr ago
For any given level of income/wealth, fame seems like a significant, net negative. That is, I would rather make $20 million from secretly winning the lottery than to get $20 million from having a runaway number one hit music album that made me famous. You have the downsides of stalkers, harassers, gold-diggers, cheats, etc. For every person with newfound respect for you, there are others trying to take you down a peg. And there isn't really any benefit. A person can reach peak happiness from being high status within his own family and social group. If you get so famous that you are awkward with your original social groups, and are in new higher status groups, then you haven't made yourself any better off.
Now, fame can be translated into money. So is it better to broke and waiting tables in Hollywood, or to get a huge break and become a famous actor? That is harder to say, but generally it seems to me that most modern social circles of the famous are very toxic and should be avoided.
returning half the human species to the status of property to restore?
It is my observation and studied opinion that:
- Women have enormous natural power because they have the power to make men immortal.
- Men inherently do not like to see the women they live like unhappy. It is my experience, my observation, and I don't have it on hand, but I remember seeing some study that a husband's happiness was very correlated with his wife's happiness, but not vice-versa. Or going back to the patriarchal age or Biblical proverbs: "It is better to live in a corner of the housetop, than in a house shared with a contentious woman."
- Women, like children, do not have the capability, physical or psychological, to be fully sovereign over themselves.
- Women, like children, actually like to be owned by a father/husband.
Feminists say that feminism "is the radical idea that women are human." Well it's more like feminism is the radical idea that women are men, that is, they thrive in having the same social and legal situation as men do (1). And that is not true -- it is fantasy-based argument that does tremendous harm to men and women alike. Women are their own thing, not men, not children.
So even if women, have little legal power, they retain tremendous power to bend men to their will, and to extract the means of a happy and fulfilling life.
And since women can never be self-sovereign, they are either wards of their fathers, wards of their family, wards of their husband, wards of the state bureacracy, or temporary wards of a rotating array of characters (their boss, their boyfriend). eg. I believe that only fathers and husbands have the knowledge and alignment of interest to actually take care of women in the best possible way.
(1) Actually, feminism is more like calvinball where women alternatively get treated as men, sometimes indeed as super-men, or sometimes as agency-free, angelic, children (eg, when they argue women shouldn't be made to publicly testify in college sexual assault cases, they should just be believed)
gorge
1yr ago
Even without FTL travel, there is enough energy and material being produced in our current solar system to support an unimaginable number of humans. The Dyson sphere gets built incrementally. You just keep building new permanent space habitations ( each could support 50,000 to 1 million people) that get sent into close orbit around the sun, with an array of solar panels running at 100X the efficiency you get running solar panels on earth. Each of the habitations would have enough energy to both make its world a utopian human experience and allow for building new habitations for the colony's children. In the far future, human life will be primarily non-terrestrial, and visitors from the habitations will come on vacation to Earth and marvel at how people put up with blizzards and mosquitos and rain and other hazards of planetary life. What happens when the Dyson sphere is complete and the solar system has reached capacity of quadrillions people? We'll cross that bridge when we come to it...
Also, there is not reason you couldn't send out colonies to other solar systems even without FTL travel. The colony ships would just need to be self-sustaining habitations that would house many generations of people.
gorge
1yr ago
A few weeks ago I wrote about a post about the link between feminism and declining fertility rates, I used Saudi Arabia as an example. Since 1980 Saudi Arabia has gradually loosened many of its old restrictions on women, women have become more "empowered", and correspondingly fertility rates have dropped from a sky-high 7+ to just over 2 (replacement level).
User /u/2rafa objected to my claim, saying:
The collapse in Saudi tfr happened well before recent liberalization, and in fact the largest collapse occurred during the most severe period of post-Siege of Mecca religious reactionary conservatism, when Saudi society became much less feminist, the Niqab was mandated, the modern guardianship system was mandated, middle and upper-middle class women were largely removed from the professions, Saudi society became more markedly segregated even among urban elites and so on. If anything, Saudi declines in TFR match much more cleanly the rapid enrichment of much of the population with oil money.
I decided to go down a rabbit-hole tracing the history of patriarchy and liberalization in Saudi Arabia.
The first thing I found is that there is a lot of lying going on. For instance the current young prince of Saudi Arabia says:
In an interview in March 2018, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, said that before 1979, "We were living a normal life like the rest of the Gulf countries, women were driving cars, there were movie theatres in Saudi Arabia."
This is apparently just false. Religious police patrolling the streets for vice was a practice going back centuries. Saudi Arabia Women were banned from driving in 1957.
An Jamal Khashoggi (later assassinated, allegedly by Prince Salman) wrote in the Washington Post in response to the Prince:
I was a teenager in the 1970s and grew up in Medina, Saudi Arabia. My memories of those years before the twin disasters of 1979 — the siege of the Grand Mosque of Mecca and the Iranian Revolution — are quite different from the narrative that the 32-year old crown prince (known as MBS for short) advances to Western audiences. Women weren’t driving cars. I didn’t see a woman drive until I visited my sister and brother-in-law in Tempe, Ariz., in 1976. The movie theaters we had were makeshift, like American drive-ins except much more informal. The movie was beamed on a big wall. You would pay 5 or 10 riyals (then approximately $1.50-$2) to the organizer, who would then give a warning when the religious police approached. To avoid being arrested, a friend of mine broke his leg jumping off a wall. In the 1970s, the only places on the Arabian Peninsula where women were working outside the home or school were Kuwait and Bahrain.
The first rule that affected Saudi women’s rights was not the result of a campaign by Wahhabi religious authorities or a fatwa. Many Saudis remember the sad story of a 19-year-old Saudi princess who tried to flee the country with her lover. They were both executed in 1977; the episode was the subject of a 1980 British documentary drama “Death of a Princess.” The reaction of the government to the princess’s elopement was swift: The segregation of women became more severe, and no woman could travel without the consent of a male relative.
We can also corroborate this from articles at the time. Here is a NY Times article from 1975:
Princess Hussa, a slim, attractive woman of 26, is married to a senior Government official. They have one child. Like many other young women of Kuwait, she insists on a life of her own. The Princess, who speaks several languages, studies English literature at the University of Kuwait and, when she so chooses, goes out unescorted to tour the art galleries, shop for her designer clothes or visit her friends.
Such freedom for women is unknown in Saudi Arabia where women are forbidden to drive cars or hold office jobs. They may work only as teachers in girls’ schools, aides to social workers or as doctors. Women may not mingle with men other than their husbands or relatives in any public place. Even the zoo is open on separate days for men and women.
On the street and in the market places of the cities and villages, women pass by as dark shadows, veiled in black from head to foot. The veil may not be lowered even for a passport photo and photographers are forbidden to take pictures of Saudi women on the street.
In Saudi Arabia, if a Saudi woman dares to venture out without the traditional garb, the matow'ah, who are the religious police, are empowered to spray her legs with black paint. Not many years ago women could be whipped for what the matow'ah considered excessive exposure and those charged with adultery might be stoned to death.
Such attitudes toward women are colliding, however, with the efforts of the Saudi Government to modernize swiftly and, with its billions of dollars in oil revenues, to develop the structure of the society. The Government is under pressure to enlarge the role of women simply because many of its ambitious programs are being frustrated by a critical shortage of manpower.
For Saudi women, this has meant seclusion, no political rights, and, until King Faisal intervened, no schooling.
King Faisal, who mounted the throne in 1964, is a Moslem fundamentalist and the chief protector of the Islam faith in the Arab world. When he sought to introduce education for women, he was bitterly opposed by religious conservatives. He finally declared there was no law in the Koran barring such education and opened schools for girls. In some areas, he had to back up his decree with a show of military force. Today, there are as many schools for girls as for boys —but coed.
At the University of Riyadh in the capital of Saudi Arabia, Dr. S. A. Melibaky, the secretary general, said in an interview that about 20 per cent of the enrolment of 5,200 are women. They are registered as extension students in the departments of arts and commerce.
Women are accepted as full‐time students in the College of Medicine, but there are no coed classes. Women receive instruction in special ectures, some through closedircuit television, and they ake separate examinations. Drily in the final years of heir graduate studies are vomen medical students pernitted to work alongside of men in the hospitals.
It's unclear what the "conservative backlash" after the 1979 uprising amounted to. The only clear policy change I can find is banning women from roles on TV. However, this may have been more of bone thrown to the conservatives, while as a whole society continued to slowly march leftward and more feminist. Overall, seems the country gradually became more feminist as the birth rates gradually declined:
| Year | Fertility Rate | Gross female college enrollment rate |
|---|---|---|
| 1970 | 7.3 | 0% |
| 1980 | 7.2 | 4% |
| 1990 | 5.9 | 11% |
| 2000 | 4 | 25% |
| 2010 | 3 | 39% |
| 2020 | 2.2 | 74% |
(I use college attendance as a key metric of feminist advancement because it is one of the only metrics that is easy to quanitify and it is one of the most important institutions for tipping the scales from patriarchy to "women's liberation": 1) it takes women away from the oversight and tutelage of her father and family 2) it represents a big investment in skills unrelated to being a wife or mother 3) it immerses her in messaging from the universe that these job and academic skills are super important 4) university and the years preparing for university are extremely central to life.
(...part 2, in which we travel through time via newspaper articles, to be continued as a reply...)
The Catholic Church has always maintained:
- same-sex marriage is an impossibility
- same-sex sexual/erotic relationships are disordered, immoral and sinful.
- Priests should not bless sin
- Priests have wide discretion to give blessings to anyone and everyone, for mundane things and important things, even and especially to sinners. Eg you have the priest bless your pet or your hunting rifle or many other things. It would be possible to ask for a blessing in a business partnership or a promise of livelong brotherly love and friendship.
- Priests should not give blessings to same-sex unions, or give any blessings to same sex couples in a way that would be scandalous (ie make it seem it is giving approval to sinful behavior) or that would create confusion with a sacramental marriage or confusion about church doctrine.
The recently released document reiterates all those points. The ABC headline is simply false
However, the thing that the liberals in the church are excited about is the changing emphasis in terms of pastoral care:
Paragraph 12. One must also avoid the risk of reducing the meaning of blessings to this point of view alone, for it would lead us to expect the same moral conditions for a simple blessing that are called for in the reception of the sacraments. Such a risk requires that we broaden this perspective further. Indeed, there is the danger that a pastoral gesture that is so beloved and widespread will be subjected to too many moral prerequisites, which, under the claim of control, could overshadow the unconditional power of God’s love that forms the basis for the gesture of blessing.
Paragraph 13. Precisely in this regard, Pope Francis urged us not to “lose pastoral charity, which should permeate all our decisions and attitudes” and to avoid being “judges who only deny, reject, and exclude.”[11] Let us then respond to the Holy Father’s proposal by developing a broader understanding of blessings.
So previously maybe two gay men walk into the church and ask the priest, "Can you bless our dedication of life-long love to each other?" The priest is wary and says, "Wait ... love 'amore' or love 'caritas'?" So the priest asks some questions, figures out they are asking him to bless a marriage-like relationship, a sexual relationship, and the priest would refuse it because such a blessing would be scandalous.
After this document, a liberal priest now has a winking approval from a Vatican that he is allowed to play ignorant and not "subject the couple to moral prerequisites" and avoid "being a judge who rejects." So instead of asking about the nature of their relationship or telling them to go and sin no more, he may give a blessing like, "may all that is true, good, and humanly valid in their lives and their relationships be enriched, healed, and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit."
In the dissident circles I travel in, I've seen the phrase "sex positive traditionalist" as an alternative to both progressive sexual attitudes and to sex-negative conservative attitudes. The sex-positive-traditionalist would rather men and women not be promiscuous, we would rather see people only have sex in marriage and to have children. However, this view differs from the "purity culture" conservatives of the 00's. That culture -- especially the more wordly moderately conservative Christians and the more worldy Catholics -- told teens to wait until marriage but then put their kids on the college->grad school->career track at the expense of the marriage track. They would also encourage very long engagements. Following such a plan forced adherents to either be very sex negative, they would have to wait for a long time to get married and have sex, or, more likely, the kids would get tired of waiting and drop the religion. Whereas a "sex positive traditionalist" would prioritize early marriage over going to college.
Specifically in terms of Catholic pastoral care, "sex positive traditionalism" would mean giving long-dating or cohabitating couples a shotgun marriage and telling them to go forth and make babies, rather than telling them to move out of the same apartment and live chastely for a year as they go through a lengthy "pre-cana" process.
The sex-positive-traditionalist is also very pro sex within marriage, believing in that there is moral an obligation to perform the "marital act", even when one spouse perhaps has not been feeling it for a few days. Whereas the contemporary progressive is horrified at the idea that a married woman be pressured into sex or have some obligation to give sex.
Back in September a commenter here on the TheMotte posted an argument about fertility trends claiming that among rich countries fertility actually increases with feminism. I did not have time to respond at the time, but this is something that I have heard many times, so I wanted to make an effort post explaining why I don't believe the claim. Here are some examples of prestige outlets making the same claim, from a New York Times op-ed:
And here is the United Nations Population Fund:
The original TheMotte commenter wrote:
I will address three big problems with the argument, and then I want to talk about the elephant in the room.
The first problem is that this is cherry-picking examples. We could just as easily cherry-pick other countries that show a reversed trend: Spain has a parliament that is 50% women but a fertility rate of merely 1.3. Finland ranks number one on female empowerment, sharing many of the same policies as Sweden, but has a a very low fertility rate of 1.3. In Ireland, where men only do 43% of the housework (which is low for Europe), women have a fertility rate of 1.6.
You might think we could get around the problem of cherry-picking by running regressions against a broader dataset. But turns out there are still too many researcher degrees of freedom. In playing with the data myself, and in reading about others who have played with the data, I could get anything from a massively negative impact of female empowerment on fertility, to no impact, to modestly positive. Here are some charts I made:
Gender Inequality Index versus Fertility for all countries in the world -- massive correlation between less gender inequality and less fertility -- https://i.postimg.cc/8PngCpQM/gender-inequality-index-versus-fertility-all-countries.png
Gender Inequality Index versus Fertility for rich countries (>$15k GDP, as rich as Poland or Uruguay) -- small correlation of less gender inequality, lower fertility. No correlation after removing the petro-states. Big range restriction problem (more on this later) -- https://i.postimg.cc/JnWLWpwF/paid-leave-versus-fertility-oecd.png
Weeks of Paid Parental Leave versus Fertility, OECD countries (neglibile negative correlation, more paid leave, less fertility) -- https://i.postimg.cc/JnWLWpwF/paid-leave-versus-fertility-oecd.png
Net childcare costs (after government subsidies) versus Fertility, OECD countries (no correlation) -- https://i.postimg.cc/nV4LMQ07/net-childcare-costs-versus-fertility.png
That parental leave or subsized childcare has no correlation with fertility rates should dispense with any notion that these are the magic policies that will fix fertility while reconciling child bearing with women pursuing careerist paths.
The second problem is that fertility rate itself is confounded by sub-cultures within a country. The poster children for feminist family polices with high birth rates are Sweden and France. However, their fertility stats are hopelessly confounded by the fertility of more patriarchal subcultures -- that of non-European immigrants. Unfortunately, it is fiendishly hard to find accurate statistics on how much this impacts the numbers.
France, for instance, bans collecting statistics by race. But this report showed 38% of new births in the cities were considered high-risk for sickle cell anemia -- meaning the parents are of Arab or African origin. That's a huge number.
In the United States, fertility is boosted by less feminist groups, such as recent immigrants, Amish, Mormons, and evangelical Christians. Israel's fertility is boosted by ultra-Orthodox Jews who have a fertility rate three times that of secular Israelis.
(continued in the replies due to excess word count)
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