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
6mo ago
It was literally the standard common book of prayer up until 1928. And "wife has a duty to obey" was the standard Christian, Hewbrew, and Roman teaching, so that is a span from 700BC to AD 1928. So which viewpoint is bizarre? OK, but we have cool modern technology now! We have indoor toilets now! Why should we take the norms of the past seriously? On the other hand ... technology was progressing from 700BC to AD 1928. Are things progressing now? At the same rate? The same second derivative?
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.
”The world still does not know it, but everyone is invited to the supper of the wedding of the Lamb (Re 19:9). To be admitted to the feast all that is required is the wedding garment of faith which comes from the hearing of his Word (cf. Ro 10:17).”
The charitable interpretation of is that "wearing the wedding garment of faith" of course entails the things that faith in Christ and faith in the Catholic Church entails, that it entails righteous deeds, following Church discipline, purification, repentance, etc. It seems silly to require the Pope to explicitly say everything that faith entails every single time he talks of the importance of faith. Certainly Saint Paul did not so do. And yes, a bishop is required to interpret fellow Catholics charitably and only make accusations of heresy as a last recourse.
Now, in context, is this statement easy to misinterpret? Yes. Did Pope Francis purposely state things in an ambiguous way to try to nudge bishops into being less strict about denying communion? Perhaps. But as a bishop, Strickland needs to interpret the letter charitably and limit is criticism to warning about possible misinterpretations of the letter -- he should not straight accuse the Pope of teaching heresy. If you care, you can listen to a more thorough analysis of these letters from Michael Lofton.
gorge
6mo ago
What do you mean by "fully sovereign" in this context? In what sense are the current generation of men "sovereign?"
Most modern men are slaves by historical standards. A "sovereign man" or perhaps more accurately a "free man" is able to both obtain the means of sustenance by building and trading and interacting with society, and physically can protect what he has from predation. Remember, the idea that police are the frontline protection against predation is very new. In older times, a free man was much more responsible for physically protecting his own liberty and property.
What to you mean by "owned" in this context? Do you have any anectotes about this?
A book could be written on this. The term "owned" isn't quite right, the husband-wife relationship is sui genersis so inherently it needs its own word. But for one example -- women will boundary test (like children) (also known in PUA as shit test or fitness test), all women will boundary test, and they like it if you pass the test and are deeply uncomfortable if they fail. An wife ultimately wants to rely on you as her rock, and as part of that is having enough of a sense of command to do what is good for her, not always what she says she wants at the time.
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
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
1mo ago
I'm pro-life and believe life begins at conception, not just as a Christian, but much more importantly because I consider it the cleanest and most sane policy from a secular perspective.
I don't think there is a perfectly clean policy here.
There are many evils in the world which due to prudence may not be made illegal, either because the state is not the correct level at which to deal with the problem; or because the state simply lacks the capacity to enforce the law; or because the state lacks the legitimacy to enforce such a law.
I believe that life begins at conception, but I think that the parents have sovereignty over the child while it is in the womb. Murder is evil, but there is no international law or federal law against murder, because we believe that the state government has sovereignty over murder committed within a single state. If the state does not want to punish someone, or wrongfully punishes someone, there is no recourse to a higher sovereign. Analogously, I think that the parents have sovereignty over the unborn child. To kill the child is evil, but they answer to God for that evil, not to the state. However, I am ok with regulating what doctor's can do, since they are already regulated by the state in every aspect. So I think it would be reasonable to rescind the medical license of doctor's who perform D&E's for women with non-medical reasons for wanting an abortion. Doctors have their license to heal, not to kill. But I don't think it would be prudent to pass a law mandating life-in-prison for women who take an abortion pill.
The problem with legally treating the unborn child the same as a two-year-old child is that it opens up a whole can of worms of "child protective services" over-reach. It's not crazy to image a a world where a mother who is on a carnivore diet, or doing something else medically controversial and unconventional gets prosecuted for negligent homicide if she has a miscarriage. Or we could imagine the state simply micromanaging what pregnant women do and eat, the same way the state micromanages what kinds of cribs and baby formula and cars-seats you can buy. (Did you know its basically impossible in America to buy baby formula with animal fat instead of seed oil fat in it, due to government regulation?). There are also some more far out philosophical and legal questions -- for instance imagine a woman who's uterus simply cannot support a baby so all fertilized eggs fail to attach and are passed out of system. Is she committing crimes by having sex since it will result in fertilized eggs that are certain to just die? Catholic morality has some well-developed answers here, but the government bureaucracy does not run on Catholic morality.
Once you start introducing 'exceptions,' you're just immediately back to condoning all abortion. "My health is at risk because if I'm not permitted to abort I might harm myself" is a free at-will golden ticket as long as you're able to memorize and repeat a sentence of that length.
I think it is better to be prudent and play the long game. I think it would be better to have more lose laws that minimize the chances of cases that produce really bad PR. Cases that produce really bad PR are going to undermine support the law and ultimately produce more abortion. There is only so much you can do to prevent evils that happen in private.
gorge
5mo ago
What's the number of kids who are put on puberty blocking or cross-sex hormones?
In comparison, gender-affirming surgeries on cis minors are about 20 times more common.
Do these surgeries prevent the child from ever becoming a breast-feeding mother?
gorge
6mo ago
Out of curiosity, are you married?
Yes. To a girl I met in college, who was an NPR liberal, who did not vow to obey me. But, she does accept my lead and gets deeply uncomfortable if I do not lead like a traditional male, if I do not act as a rock upon which my family relies. As an infamous crimethinker once said (paraphrasing since I can't find the exact quote: "Every successful modern marriage is secretly imitating a 17th century trad marriage" He exaggerates ... slightly.
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.
gorge
1yr ago
And how does the segment deal with the tapes, especially the "smoking gun" tape, in which Nixon is heard endorsing the coverup.
I was listening to a podcast with Geoff Shepard and reading some of his book. Shepard was a very young, junior staffer in the Nixon White House who in the past years has done a great deal of archival research and released a revisionist book on Watergate in 2021. He is also the one who originally internally transcribed the "smoking gun" tape and coined that phrase when he listened to it, even though he was so junior he didn't actually know at the time what it was referring to. After doing his most recent research he says that the tape has been grossly misunderstood. What people think the "smoking gun" statement means is that Nixon knew about the break-in and was trying to order government officials to stop the investigation. What it actually was, was that the FBI was going to interview two specific people were linked with soliciting campaign donations from prominent Democrats, and Nixon and his staff were trying to protect the secrecy of those donations (because a Democrat would be bad for the Democrats reputation if it was known they had donated to Nixon). The two people ended up getting interviewed anyways two weeks later and were not found to have any criminally involvement. The "smoking gun" does not show that Nixon knew about Watergate or that he was trying to stop the entire investigation.
and exposed themselves to criminal liability (all served time, and the lawyers among them were disbarred), for the purpose of what, exactly?
Shepard's take is that some of those who were actually more responsible for the break-in decided to side with the prosecutors and media establishment in taking down Nixon in order to get a better deal/reduced sentence.
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
6mo ago
No, the unpopularity of sin/policing rhetoric isn’t due to fear of cancellation. It derives from the general loss in status of religion.
That's...the same thing.
gorge
8mo ago
If you are in a conversation with an anon here on TheMotte or in a blog comment thread, you should assume good faith, because otherwise, why are you even talking to them? Mutual recriminations of the other person acting in bad faith just make the debate unreadable for everyone else.
On the other hand, if you are trying to figure out why some public intellectual or institution or political figure or political party platform or prominent activist says what they say, you should not assume good faith by default. You should distrust by default, and only believe they are honest if they have proved it over a long time.
gorge
9mo ago
I'm sort of in the same boat. I live downtown in a big American city, and I know I should probably get out before it is too late ...
gorge
10mo ago
I'd like to see you try to pass an Intellectual Turing Test for arguing why the Civil Rights movement was bad.
I don’t think it’s accurate to call Hispanic immigration a product of Boomer anti racism, either. More a corporate/laissez faire policy.
Por que no los dos? Almost all policies have a Bootleggers and Baptists aspect to them -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists
gorge
6mo ago
I definitely wouldn't argue that it was a breach of fiduciary duty - under the circumstances in the Fedex story that argument would be a loser in both England and Delaware that would definitely lose in court because of the business judgement rule.
I assume, though, that the gambling was done under his own name? If he lost the money in gambling, he might have a tough time proving to a jury that he intended to give the winnings back to the company. He would have to prove that he really was gambling on behalf of the company, rather than embezzling the money to himself and gambling it on behalf of himself, that might be tough to do.
gorge
1yr ago
I think pet of the issue here is that the prior on Joe Biden being corrupt is low
Biden seems to say whatever is most convenient at the time, whether that be flip-flopping on policies or just making up stories about his own life. My prior is that Biden can't stay bought. So some interest might funnel him some money and get a meeting, but as soon as they are out of the room Biden will be playing to whoever is in front of him next. It's also just generally difficult for a President to have that much discretionary power to personally significantly damage the realm by selling out to some pecuniary interest. The worst things his administration has done seems to involve selling out the realm to some activist/ideological interest. Although if Ukrainian money getting to Joe Biden is the reason USG is involving itself in the Ukraine war, that would be big deal and potentially catastrophically bad. But I'm not sure that is the case, Biden might actually be more of a voice of sanity in his own administration, with the meddling in the Ukraine really being driven by the overall Zeitgeist.
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
1yr ago
LEDs ended up just being simply superior to both in every way. Progress ended the culture war.
I still find the light quality and dimming ability of LEDs to be significantly worse, so I buy mostly incandescent bulbs for my home. I was puzzled by talk about the "ban" because I can still buy incandescent. But wait ... now that I look it up there is a new rule going to effect in August 2023 that does effectively ban most remaining incandescent bulbs -- https://insights.regencylighting.com/was-there-actually-an-incandescent-light-bulb-ban That is bad -- why isn't there more outrage about this new rule? Maybe I am weird and most people are happy with LED's, or maybe the government has just done a "good" job at boiling the frog slowly enough that the defense got worn away. First you pass the law that allows for the ban but doesn't actually implement ban, so the incandescent fans are assuaged. Then you gradually ramp up the ban through arcane bureaucratic process and rule-making that is very hard for populist politics to defend against.
gorge
1yr ago
then the entire idea of separation of church and state is nonsensical to members of the Church of American Democracy.
Yes. I believe that the "no establishment" clause has failed and no longer makes any sense. If it ever made sense, it was only in a historical context coming out of the post-reformation wars of religion, where a general truce between sects was desired. It made sense in an era where Christian or at least Abrahamic belief was assumed, the federal government had little role in education or ideology, and thus the First Amendment was merely the government not taking sides among Abrahamic sects. Ever since the rise of communism, fascism, liberalism, American civic liberalism, etc, and the main faultlines and fighting lines were among things that no longer coded as "religions" the First Amendment no longer makes sense.
Honestly I do somewhat agree with you, but I think it doesn't resolve the ambiguity of where "church" ends and "state" begins. I certainly don't see an obvious line of delineation despite wanting one to better define policy.
Back in 2007 Moldbug bit the bullet and said that to really make a delineation that makes sense, you would need complete separation of state (ie, the organization with monopoly on force) and information -- https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/06/separation-of-information-and-security/ He later changed his mind in the opposite direction and basically accepted that control of information/ideology/religion is simply a fundamental property of sovereignty and cannot be split off. I have made the same intellectual journey myself and come to the same conclusion.
gorge
1yr ago
I did add as a quick edit to my comment "Many women liked it too because it is crack for women to be around the highest status men."
In general, fault-lines of policy interest don't actually split men against women. Feminism is the work of one faction of men and women, and anti-feminism has also been the work of one faction of men and women. Feminism was not some victory of women over the opposition of men. It was a victory of certain women done with the support of certain men, often powerful men.
Prior to then, women in the work force were more likely to be involved in manufacturing jobs (such as in the garment industry).
Doubt. I think they were by far most likely to be domestics. I would be curious what percent of unmarried young women in the U.S. worked in manufacturing at its non-war peak -- I would be surprised if it was higher than 15%. I think you are right there was an increase in demand for clerical work between 1920 and 1970 -- but I suspect true need for clerical work has actually decreased since then. But instead we have seen a rise of "pink color" jobs in the hypertrophied healthcare, education and non-profit sector. IMO, these are mostly vanity jobs doled out by the government as sugar daddy instead of a husband. Feminism has created the jobs, not the need for the work created feminism.
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