kky
1d ago
Speaking briefly on ultimata.
The primary purpose of an ultimatum is to force the listener to accept the form of the argument: A or B. The argument then splits out along lines of A-support, B-support, A-opposition, B-opposition... etc. It begs the question on whether A and B are in fact linked.
Take your PATRIOT example. The post-9/11 question is: how can we protect ourselves from future attacks? Supporters of the PATRIOT Act alleged that the only effective method was curtailing the rights of Americans. But this is not obviously the only way to protect ourselves from these kinds of attacks. Suicide terror attacks are, and were, overwhelmingly favored by a certain type of extreme Muslim on the world stage. Governments and mafia (i.e. small governments) don't really like them, as they expend valuable trained human resources on frankly trivial strategic goals. (Unless they can convince a third-party stooge to do it, like Iran.) The only time people favor suicide terror attacks is when they kinda want to die (or have their people killed) as a side effect. Consider Japan's suicide bombers. They were very clearly a statement more than a strategy. So, taking this all into account, you could theoretically solve the problem by tightening the visas you give to foreign Arabs substantially, or some other form of discrimination against the highest-risk group. In practice, I think this is what we did. There were lots of racism complaints during the Bush admin. But as far as the PATRIOT debate went, it was about the ability to spy. It's not obvious that this had any bearing on the real problem, and was instead about the ability to spy itself. Call me cynical, but I think that if there were more guys in the White House with strong prejudices against Islam, we'd have been having a different Constitutional debate, one about outlawing a certain religion.
OK. Taking a look at the feminism/fertility debate, or the environmentalism/survival debate, and so on, I believe the not-so-subtle move is that the two are necessarily linked and we must "choose." I call bullshit. Around the world, patriarchal societies still have cratering birthrates. This is easy to find information. Similarly, a ruined environment has explicit costs to human survival, as we undermine our own productive capacity through poisoning ourselves, wrecking good farmland, denuding the seas, etc etc. The existence of those binaries can only be understood as a deliberate attempt to link these unrelated topics for the purpose of controlling the debate, steering it towards one's desired outcomes.
For feminism/fertility, I think the real move is getting attention off of fertility itself. Lots and lots of women want to have kids, and yet they don't, or put it off until the numbers just go down. Why? The feminist (or anti-feminist) answer is to hide it behind the "right to choose," but it's pretty obvious in context that it's only a (colloquially) feminist choice in one direction. (Not all feminists believe this, but it's what dominates the conversation.) I suspect the real reason is a confluence of factors, mostly cultural (lower respect or understanding for the importance of reproduction) and partially material (increased life expectancy screwing with wealth movement and life stages relative to fertile windows). But as long as it's about feminism, which everyone has already made up their minds on as a matter of principle, we don't have to think about maybe changing our individual values and cultural practices to reflect this new reality. Almost the same description can be applied to environmentalism with some mad-libs substitutions.
That's why I'm so skeptical of simply accepting the frame on these things. OP, for his part, didn't actually frame any of this as an ultimatum. He was actually just negating the antecedent, showing that (for him) the presented argument was insufficient. Sure, I happen to disagree with his stance quite fervently, but reading him closely - he doesn't say that he values certain things above the survival of the species, he says he does not value the survival of the species at all, one way or another. There's no ultimatum there, Therefore, one had to be provided for him.
(As far as the OP is concerned, all I can make is a value statement: that it is ugly and sad to have nothing to recommend one's time on Earth to posterity, be one's contributions ever so humble. We are all destined to die, and pleasures are fleeting, and the march of old age makes the immediate world increasingly bitter, it behooves one to seek value in something a little more distant and external. Say, the future in which one is invested. People who do this seem in my experience to die more comfortably.)
kky
14d ago
I’m not sold by your argument. It sounds like you’re begging the question by substituting the definition of “guy who reads porn about a busty 15-year-old” and “guy who is actually attracted to 15-year-olds.” The most obvious difference is words are just words, you can write whatever number you want down, reality isn’t keeping track. So the guy is attracted to the symbol which is 15, and the signs of an actually voluptuous woman. But then you have a different class which is actually interested in minors, and that tends to be for pretty nasty reasons.
OK, leave the latter group out. The former group is interested in a symbol. Almost always this is because the symbol itself has become a fetish that substitutes for something real so as to deprive it of its reality, to make it easier to digest. How nice are her tits is a complicated question, you have to really experience them to know, there are a lot of details and maybe not all of them are as attractive as the gestalt, and it takes serious concentration to focus on the gestalt and not get distracted, especially if you don’t have much experience actually enjoying tits. How big are they is safer, and you can put a number to it. Now you can enjoy yourself.
So what about age? It could be a symbol for a lot of things. Innocence, transgression, duh. But not a carefree sexual nature. That can be easily written onto a character of any age, and indeed is, in porn. It’s sufficient in itself, it doesn’t need to be laundered through a symbol, the whole point of it is how digestible and convenient it is. (Real sex with a real woman who isn’t infinitely carefree and convenient is great, but can’t really be condensed into a marketable fantasy.) No, what I think age is a symbol for is the reader’s own early feelings about sex. When he was 15 the girls were 15, and nothing can really compare to what they made him feel. Now he’s older and doesn’t really feel the same things, and even thinking about the feelings as themselves is a little much, so he wraps it all up in a symbol that he can find arousing instead. There’s no need to consider why the unmoored sexual energy of his teens has failed to find a mooring, or what that would even mean to him, so long as he has a symbol of his own desire to focus on. 15 means bottomless libidinous desire, to him. And to the people who don’t feel the same way, they can skip to the sections about how voluptuous she is and enjoy all the same.
kky
14d ago
As far as I can tell, the major art movements of the past 50ish years are Apple minimalism and anime. I’ll openly confess that it’s not too inspiring, but both have very definite ideas about the form and purpose of art which have insinuated themselves into the overall cultural moment.
Insofar as I don’t recall many people writing on these as art movements I suppose they could be interesting.
kky
16d ago
Yeah, I think we've seen this coming down the pipe for quite some time. The main limiting factor of the tech is that it relies on IVF, which is pretty unpleasant to use (from what I've heard) compared to the natural process, and is additionally quite expensive. For that reason I expect this particular enterprise to be a very slow burn. Perhaps costs come down over time, but I suspect that reduced costs will march right along with reduced quality, and the inevitable lawsuits for implanting the wrong couple's child are going to be very culture-warry.
That said, I'm of two minds on the overall concept of human genetic manipulation, or rather of one slightly more subtle mind that doesn't take a simple yes/no.
The great advantage of genetic manipulation is that it allows us to clean out bad mutations in the absolute gentlest way possible. For instance, Jews are absolutely loaded down with genetic disease, and currently have to do pre-mating genetic testing to find out if they're at risk. Nature's tender way of keeping the rates of the most serious disorders down is to kill the child, typically in a fairly slow and painful fashion. I would understand anyone who had a recessive gene for those disorders paying to make sure that their children carried none at all, to spare them the heartbreak of having to worry about their own children. To make it more personal, my own eyes are extremely bad and I am currently slowly going blind, although surgery should ameliorate the worst of it. If I could, with a wave of my hand, ensure that my eyes die with me and do not burden my children, then I would. Who would want to saddle their children with such burdens, save that they are (as of right now) unavoidable? Natural selection is a powerful force, but it is not a kind one, and one of man's duties is to rise above the worst of nature.
(For anyone personally opposed to IVF specifically on pro-life grounds, imagine that we develop superb gene-editing technology such that it's possible to replace selected genes in a naturally implanted embryo. Very sci-fi, I know, but I hope the thought experiment explains the above sentiment.)
On the other hand, what I expect the technology to be used for is stupid, arrogant decisions about who the child shall be. This seems to be what Nucleus is trying to offer: height, weight, and even down to eye color. These traits are obviously superficial, and reflect the desire of a parent for a "better" child while only looking at the very vague surface of what that means. But, as anyone here is likely to know, random traits are randomly distributed (often on a Gaussian scale), and the more you filter your results on one axis the more you'll have to tolerate imperfections on the others. So if you filter the child on height, BMI, eye color, you'll have to make some compromises on ADHD and IQ, most likely. Compounding this is the problem that extreme outliers in a given trait are increasingly likely to be compromised in other traits (as the height starts to undermine bodily integrity, say), and so anyone who just picks out the max IQ baby is likely to have some unfortunate genetic weaknesses. Personally, I also have my money on our understanding of many of these traits being much weaker than we think, and whatever we think we're getting is not going to be what we actually want, but that's a different argument.
My central objection to this kind of picking and choosing, however, is that much of the power of natural selection comes from its inherent randomness. Without prejudice (okay, maybe with a little prejudice in sexual selection and some genetic integrity mechanisms), a candidate is randomly assembled and evaluated. Their success is purely on the merits; there is no intelligent force with an axe to grind, there is no finger on the scales. Regardless of what anyone thinks, a given set of traits and genes does or does not work, and the next generation codifies that. When we step in, we are assuming knowledge over the entire enterprise. The feedback loop gets limited to what we think we want, not what works or doesn't. You see this time and time again in any situation where human guidance is put over some kind of development or evolution without external validation, where the decisions made get increasingly fashionable and decreasingly connected with real results. The classic example is military developments during peacetime, where illusions about (say) the efficacy of the bayonet charge or static artillery or the battleship get built up year over year until the actual test of war comes and shatters them. I suspect that human self-selection of traits is going to enter this same internal cycle of arrogance. The feedback cycle for success or failure is so slow that it exceeds the lives of the people responsible for the earlier decisions, and worse yet, the evaluative capacity of later generations is going to be shaped by those earlier generations. Don't get me wrong, feedback WILL come, nature WILL reassert herself, just as she will inevitably do for our current fertility crisis, but the longer the illusions hold the uglier it's going to get for everyone. And what's at the core of it, I believe, is the human intuition that we have reduced to a science a domain that is frankly beyond our analysis. We must be humble, and recognize that the best we have is heuristics, and that going further than that is arrogant and foolish.
This problem is, of course, only compounded by the fact that doctors will be regarded as the experts on human trait selection, when in fact they are only experts on identifying gene clusters and giving vague approximations of what they do. I hope people will not confuse the two, but based on how we confuse doctors' technical expertise for moral or strategic guidance already, I don't have high hopes for the future on that count.
kky
18d ago
I mean, the obvious confounder is that the kind of person who gets involved with a serious relationship as soon as able, progresses it aggressively, and takes responsibility for the natural consequences is different from the kind of person who doesn’t. In Rome those people were required to do their military service. Now they aren’t. But I think what’s actually at the heart of what you’re asking of people is not to make different decisions, but to be different people. Failing to recognize that is the source of most unhelpful advice. If a guy who is not really in the mindset of growing up, devoting energy, and so on has a kid, he will find it very unpleasant no matter his age. An older one might enjoy it regardless.
For your points… yep, childcare matters, and I preempted your point on women. The third point seems like a personal problem more than systemic. Happy parents, from what I see, just take it easy. I sympathize with point four similarly to point one (although the younger parents I know seem to spend an awful lot of time working…), and for point 5… I mean, I hate modernity as much as the next guy, but reading through some older memoirs or cultural histories I’m struck from time to time at how familiar the life of the mind can be. If anything is different, it’s a sense of personal responsibility. Those who blame their circumstances on external forces seem to have a hard time with acting, and boy do we have a lot of explanations for external forces these days.
My own experience is a little different from yours. I’ve got one kid, and am around 30, and am very happy with the situation and want more. If there’s anything I regret, it’s that my circumstances are NOT like my (then) 40-year-old father, who was financially better-established than I am and could spend much more time and energy doing cool things with me over working. But I hope to be in a more secure situation some years from now, and at that point, who knows? Could be a pretty comfortable circumstance. On the other hand, if I’m being frank, having a kid at 20 would likely have been a disaster, most importantly for the kid. I’ve changed a lot in the past decade. Would having a kid a couple years earlier than I did have worked? Sure, but there’s definitely a limit there, as far as my own self is concerned. It was only around 25ish that I really started to become the kind of person who could enjoy being a good father.
Of course, it’s your call whether you trust a word I’m saying. I don’t blame you if not.
kky
18d ago
A lot, and I mean a lot, of men had their first child around thirty, historically speaking. Bret Devereaux:
marriage-ages for men vary quite a lot, from societies where men’s age at first marriage is in the early 20s to societies like Roman and Greece where it is in the late 20s to mid-thirties.
This did not apparently prevent those fathers raising sons who conquered the Mediterranean. Concerns about women aside, this is pretty weak sauce to serve in arguing that men must have children young.
I’m not arguing that men SHOULD have children older. But history does not support your allegations of dire consequences, and that should give you serious pause about your whole line of reasoning.
kky
19d ago
The argument from @Gaashk stands, I think. We didn’t need slaves in the northern states since the founding, in the west since the early 19th, and the south since the mid-19th. Suddenly in the late 20th we discover slavery to be a necessary institution for agricultural work that was heretofore done even by so cushy an ethnicity as the English. Construction, same deal. What has changed? Does nobody sense something wrong in the fact that the Land of the Free is suddenly regressing so far as to demand a permanent underclass? This is why I don’t trust any of the economic statements on this matter. The whole argument has no sense of history to it.
kky
19d ago
Oh, is Asahi Select an actual thing? Whoops, my mistake. The point was that an actual market share would encourage actual importing.
Anyway, I’m not sure how the “completely different” clause is expected to fly. PDO works by obsessively dividing products that are actually quite similar, such that only a few dry sparkling whites are champagne. Something on the same level of granularity would be factory-by-factory, which to be honest would be fairly interesting to have printed on every product, although I suspect that this would be ignored by most consumers if there’s anything more recognizable. Substantive difference, on the other hand, sounds like a 10-year court case with expensive expert witnesses and piddling awards. I’m not sure there’s a convenient bright line there.
Your second point, about brand raiding, I would say is more about the modern high-liquidity stock market rewarding various pump-and-dump schemes. At that point I’d wonder whether allowing shareholders to sue executives for fraud following one of these events would move the needle any, or whether you need different financing plans altogether.
kky
20d ago
How would you accomplish this, per legality? Are trademarks only to be licensed to a single point of production? Otherwise how do you tell the difference between a knock-off factory and a simple expansion of the business?
The way a trademark is supposed to work is by tying a company’s reputation to a product. If the product doesn’t meet standards, the consumer learns to distrust the trademark. In this case it sounds like Asahi made the assumption that American audiences would be satisfied with Peroni and, present company excluded, were right on the mark. If people like you become a meaningful market share, then expect Asahi Select (or whatever name) to find its way from a Pacific tanker onto your grocery store at a significant mark-up from the regular.
kky
20d ago
I wound up using the golden halberd for my entire playthrough because there simply wasn’t anything better along strength/faith lines, except possibly magma sword. To be honest, it wasn’t the most pleasant experience, especially since I got the halberd immediately on starting the game. There was no real progression from then on, outside of some buffs. So I’m not sure I’d recommend it, even though it can certainly carry you through. Jumping heavy attacks are the key, fwiw. They knock the target down fast and give you free hits. I tried a couple of ranged options but never really liked them - the damage really wasn’t there compared to melee, especially considering that you have to drain your healing for the privilege.
If you’re really having trouble, use summons. I used them for the two bosses you mentioned, then tabooed them for myself because I got both of them on the first try and felt like I was missing out, then brought them back for a couple of the later bosses when I found I wasn’t particularly enjoying the game any longer and just wanted to hit the full clear.
kky
21d ago
All of them are within about 15 miles. The farm is regular produce for bourgeois consumption.
kky
22d ago
To college degree requirements? Presumably focused assessment with demonstrable applicability to the job at hand, relatively low-level starting positions with very rapid advancement, and so on.
I’ve worked at a place like that. It was nice.
kky
22d ago
You absolutely are supposed to be stopped for a red, though, aren’t you? That’s the whole point of the yellow. It gives you time to safely stop. Under what circumstances could a light turn red without warning you? Are we positing a small-town setup with a red light camera set up to fleece outsiders with an unacceptably short yellow? I’m pretty confident that “I was going too fast/braked too late to stop at the red” would not win anyone’s favor, and “it’s illegal to enter an intersection on a red” is simply true (outside of right on red, which has nothing to do with the case at hand).
I don’t think this is nitpicking. First you’re saying yellows are a hard requirement to stop, then you’re saying reds aren’t. This is completely the opposite of my experience and understanding of the law and is utterly baffling to me. And it’s pretty germane to the top-level post here, so it’s far from isolated, it’s the whole point of your post!
What? It’s very obviously not illegal to enter an intersection with a yellow light. The light changes from green to yellow with no warning. There are situations where it is physically impossible to brake that fast. I assume you mean “when safe?” But that gives a lot of cover to the defendant.
I’m personally more familiar with the implicit law, which is that yellows are timed such that they stay on long enough for drivers going a reasonable speed to come to a complete stop while braking comfortably before it goes red. So when the light changes, you either don’t have enough time to brake comfortably and smoothly pass the yellow before it turns, have enough time to stop and do so, or break the law by either running a red or jam on the gas to get through - which is, of course, both speeding and reckless driving.
Reading the opinion, Russell was driving above the 55mph speed limit. I’ll allow that his speed was more like 70 than it was 60. He was apparently 200ish feet from the intersection when he noticed the yellow. If so, that’s on the order of 2 seconds to come to a complete stop, unless I’m doing my math wrong. 55 gives you another half second. That’s a slam on the brakes situation, not a reasonable halt. At that point, it seems like either Russell was derelict in not watching for the light until too late, or else he could not stop safely even at the posted limit when the light turned and was totally in his rights to proceed. I’m surprised this doesn’t show up in the opinion. Were they expecting him to burn rubber because it flicked yellow?
@ToaKraka ‘s summary is outright incorrect in one place, in fact, and the truth makes the situation even more redeeming for Russell. The summary says that Jasmine was stopping at the red. The opinion says that SHE WAS ENTERING THE INTERSECTION BECAUSE SHE DID NOT BELIEVE SHE COULD STOP SAFELY, and at time of the crash, was ABOUT TO ENTER THE INTERSECTION (presumably yellow at the time). So why is Russell more at fault here for entering an intersection which the plaintiff was herself entering even later? Reading the opinion, they keep talking about the plaintiff being a young mother and go into great detail on the injuries. I suspect that’s the reason, and perhaps also that they didn’t expect the ex-con who actually caused the crash to be able to pay a cent.
If I were on this jury I’d probably hang it. This looks a hell of a lot like a miscarriage of justice to me. The appeal court, I judge less strongly. They’re right to defer heavily to the jury. But putting 60% on Russell seems crazy. Splitting in reverse would make more sense. But given that the appellate opinion states that the decision hinges in part on the fact that Russell did not testify mitigating factors like whether he considered whether he could stop safely, I wonder whether this whole mess is just the product of a lawyer gap between the parties.
EDIT: spent a minute looking at car crash videos to try and gauge how fast Russell might have been traveling in order to absolutely crush the woman’s car. Assuming he was traveling at 70 and lost half of his momentum hitting the truck, he and she would have collided at a combined speed of 80mph. 55mph crashes with a stationary object are enough to start compromising the cabin. 80 is, as far as I can tell, kill you dead territory. Bringing this down to 70 would probably still be enough. So I’m not sure that the prosecution’s assertion that he must have been driving in safely holds water. But of course that’s right back to the question of whether the lawyers brought proper receipts on the basic math here. Messy stuff, honestly makes highway driving sound a lot less appealing.
kky
26d ago
Good post. Interesting to see how your perspective intersects with the other critics of LLMs, like Gary Marcus’ consistently effective methods for getting the systems to spit out absurd output.
In my own experience, the actual current value of neural network systems (and thus LLMs) is fuzzy UIs or APIs. Traditional software relies on static algorithms that expect consistent and limited data which can be transformed in highly predictable ways. They don’t handle rougher data very well. LLMs, however, can make a stab at analyzing arbitrary human input and matching it to statistically likely output. It’s thus useful for querying for things where you don’t already know the keywords - like, say, asking which combination of shell utilities will perform as you desire. As people get more used to LLMs, I predict we will see them tuned more to specialized use cases in UI and less to “general” text, and suddenly become quite profitable for a focused little industry.
LLMs will be useful as a sort of image recognition for text. Image recognition is useful! But it is not especially intelligent.
kky
1mo ago
Did he say that, really? Innocents Abroad is a very funny monologue of an American studiously refining his bigotry and moving his judices from pre- to post- as a factor of travel. The French have terrible barbers, the Catholics are Mary-idolators, the Turks are subhuman, and the Arabs are sub-Turk - is the very clear sentiment arising from that book. And, of course, that Americans (especially the Evangelicals) are greedy, pompous, idiot looters, but at least they’re civilized.
What an unexpected thing for him of all people to say, excepting of course that he may have been saying it with his trademark irony…
kky
1mo ago
This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
Is the argument here that you should ape the wealthy regardless of your own norms and values, or that striver Asians are universally living good lives? If it's the latter, color me surprised, a lot of them are IME quite angry about the whole situation and hate/fetishize whites to a pretty uncanny degree. Is that the aim here?
But if he's well adjusted, does well in school, and has lots of friends, there's no reason to make him work manual labor because someone conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway."
Going further, it's bad to raise your kids in some way or another because someone else told you to. On the other hand, it's good to raise them in that way because you personally believe it to be a good thing.
There's not a lot of meat on this bone. You very briefly mention the kinds of reasons why people might want their kids to try their hand at working before leaving the nest. You do not engage with them in any depth, and your refutation stops at saying "this is stupid." OK, in that case, what is the good life that these parents should aspire to providing for their children? You got something, right? The only thing I'm hearing is "genetic confounding" which, when I plug it into ChatGPT, comes out as "do nothing and trust the plan." Otherwise, this post is effectively just "explain to me why you'd want your kids to go working" with a lot of unearned snark.
kky
1mo ago
I appreciate talking specifics here!
For the first part: $70k is well within the target range. The numbers I picked up said it was actually a little high. However - point being - while the average 1bed costs somewhere in the $1,600-$1,700 range, that means that half of them are BELOW that in cost, matching the roughly 50% of workers occupying that income range. So, in fact, you can get below the average and still meet the concrete requirements that he sets. Here's a link out to some cities with REALLY cheap rent. When you're talking $1k/mo or less, you could practically get away with minimum wage. Not saying you necessarily want to live there, but considering that the cities he has top of mind are NYC and SF rather than Des Moines and Madison, you should expect the number to be skewed.
And that's my point! He gives an estimate that is highly specific to the kind of coastal city he's used to (the guy's from Portland, OR), and the only reason to index that estimate highly is if you're trying to live in a similar city. (He's actually pretty far off even for Portland - median rent there is $1,380, which puts target income at around $50,000 - median income is just shy of that at $47,000, making it within reason for a single guy and well within budget if it helps you land a girl to help pay rent.) So the number is not what matters. He even caveats the number as "probably." I'd certainly caveat it as "probably," given that it's the wrong number, but I'm not here to beat up on the guy over the math he did or did not do before his fingers hit the upper row of his keyboard. I'm here to say that the meat of that paragraph is this sentence, edited down to exclude all bait:
It’s a job that pays you enough to afford your own apartment, own a car, and pay for an adult lifestyle.
Now we hit the real point of contention. Can the average American afford their own apartment, own a car, and pay for an adult lifestyle? When you consider that the costs of these things scale based on place and class, the answer seems to be a pretty confident yes, most men have the potential to do it, even assuming a relatively luxurious (but not frivolous) American adult lifestyle. If we're looking at the type of person who he is trying to advise, the kind of person who has even heard of Substack or who is willing to hire a dating counselor, I'd estimate that the number approaches 100%.
Let's go back to what you said in the beginning.
Although much of the post is the standard dress better, be fit, be more interesting shtick, one thing that really rubbed me the wrong way was Get Better Soon's insistence that you had to be making at least $70k to be thinking about having a girlfriend, as well as living by yourself and preferably owning your own house/car. Now the median income in the US in $60k, and even controlling for the fact that men out-earn women, Get Better Soon is effectively saying here that more than 50% of men in the US are undateable.
I've highlighted the two assertions that seem totally unsupportable to me after reading the guy's actual post. He doesn't insist on $70k, he spitball estimates it, and he's wrong. Oops. As for the second, here's what he actually says:
The good news however, is that nearly all men can clear the bar if they’re willing to work on themselves...
This is why I'm accusing you of reading what you want out of the piece rather than what's actually there. If you told this guy "hey, I read a Substack post the other day that said you need to make more than the national average income to have a chance at scoring a woman," and then revealed to him it was his post, I bet he'd be shocked at the twist reveal. Call him innumerate, sure, but actually talk about what he wants to talk about. Are those fair standards for a job? Can nearly all men live up to them? I think so, on both counts. But, if we're being honest, assuming that there's a substantial contingent of men who CAN'T meet that bar is actually more about the job market and the housing market than the dating market.
So, for your big point, and here I'll do exactly what you're asking and respond to you personally:
I am not saying self-improvement is bad, nor that it won't increase your odds of success, I am saying that it is insufficient to deal with social decline, which is manifested in this issue and the others that I mention.
I couldn't disagree more. It's necessary to deal with social decline.
Draw back. What is a society if not the totality and product of its constituents? What is the quality of a society if not the quality of its constituents? What could cause a society to decline if not a decline in the quality of its material?
When you talk about societal decline, you say:
Yes individuals did great things, but they were only able to do those things because of the presence of continually enforced social norms surrounding gender roles and expectations. The farmer and factory worker of the 1880s worked hard to provide for his family. We were able to win the civil war and the first and second world wars because we had competent social systems (at the family level and beyond) that have since vanished.
We're not talking specifics here, so I don't know how much I agree with you on the details, but what you're describing here is coherent. So: how were these social norms continually enforced? Was it done by God, by the laws of nature, or by the individual members of American communities on the back of their own character? When we talk about competent social systems, aren't we talking about the competence of these old Americans? You say: "The system is broken and pretending that individual actions can fix it is, frankly, delusional." OK, then who's supposed to fix it? "Us" "communally?" Come on, we all know how value-props that start as "we should really..." wind up going. "We" means "nobody," unless there's someone in the room who hears "we" and thinks "me."
That kind of thinking is, very specifically, the poison in America right now. It's the thought that you, personally do not have responsibility to fix a given problem, that it doesn't rest on your shoulders, that it's communal guilt. Say what you like about Christ, but he was big on personal guilt, that it's not enough to say that everyone else is doing it, that you personally must repent and uphold standards. He was even willing to make that his own cross to bear. He took on our sins, and died for them. Our Lord took on our communal guilt - so we could no longer have the excuse.
At my current stage in life, the biggest thing on my mind is my family. In particular, it's the future of it. My parents were not especially good at keeping the fabric of the family together. I love them dearly, they have much to commend them, but that was not one of their strengths. I want to keep mine together. I want my children to have faith, to have me and my wife, to have their eventual spouses and children. I want them to have honor. I don't see any way for them to get this if I do not act faithfully and honorably. I don't see how they can be faithful and honorable to their friends or even to strangers if they can't be that way within their family. I don't see how their family can be that way if I am not that way. I don't expect these actions to magically change the entire world, but I do hope that they will change my family, and that we can be fruitful and multiply, that we can be a bedrock for our communities wherever they may be. And I believe that individuals making these decisions, over and over again individually, is what will create the new great American society.
Obviously I am still a poor sinner, no matter what I aspire to, you need no help picking that particular out. But I believe that the things I do matter for the people around me. My family is, right now, living in a better society than it was when I was a feckless adolescent because of the actions I have taken. It is a small society, but it is theirs, and I am proud of what I've done for them, no matter how small. That is what I believe in.
kky
1mo ago
I did. Everything I wrote was about what you wrote, starting from how you plucked a single word out of context as a launching point for your own hobbyhorse. I oppose that. It’s a sign that the real has been subsumed into the symbol. You know the “everything I see reminds me of her” meme? It’s like that, but with theory, and it’s poison to discourse. You would have written the same post if he’d cited minimum wage numbers.
kky
1mo ago
Oh, you mean proper roommates, like bunk bed? No idea, I’ve not lived like that since college and can’t think of anyone who does. Maybe it’s workable, but sex seems like a real drag.
kky
1mo ago
Sorry buddy, Rambo rules apply, you drew first blood. Your whole post was spurred by a single dollar estimate taken totally out of context from that poor guy’s Substack, and what he was saying has zero bearing on anything you said. In reality, he could have said anything at all, it didn’t matter what, you would have read whatever you wanted out of it. That’s why it’s all about you. You don’t need to make it about yourself explicitly; your post is saturated with yourself. You couldn’t even keep it down enough to read what the guy wrote! No protesting, I brought receipts.
If you want to complain about Society, do it on your own. Don’t twist other people’s words into it.
kky
1mo ago
Jesus, one of the things I hate about this discourse is that everyone just takes a half-baked detail and… runs with it.
Here’s the actual quote:
What is a good job? It’s a job that pays you enough to afford your own apartment, own a car (unless you live in a place like NYC or SF where it’s impractical), and pay for an adult lifestyle—probably $70K at the low end, depending on the city. If you can afford your own place, congrats, you’re an adult man...until you can do this, you’re a boy. Men, as a rule, don’t have roommates.
$70k is a location-specific estimate for a set of far more concrete guidelines. The guy is saying: you should own a car and pay for your own place. (Small note, IME the roommate thing is not a particular dealbreaker provided your roommate is cool and you have space which is obviously yours.)
He then benchmarks: in the average CITY, he reckons this at around $70k. (Again, IME this is a little conservative, a lot of second-tier cities will run you fine for $60k or less.) NB: cities are more expensive than the country.
OK, let’s drill down on his raw expectations. What percentage of Americans have cars? Over 90% of households, according to a quick Google search. Pretty attainable by that metric. How about the rough cost of renting a 1bed? Average of $1650, which if you follow the “1/3 of your paycheck” rule, is around $60k average, regardless of location - so the average American can rent a small apartment affordably. And in places where the pay is lower, the rent should be lower too, so this should be a large average of people who can live this way.
So our entire discussion got arbitrarily pegged to the $70k figure, plucked out of the context of WHY he thinks that, in an article that already assumes the context of by-college-educated, for-college-educated. I mean, for Chrissake, he barely gets across the page fold before linking out to his favorite books list. This guy’s a nerd! $70k is pretty damn attainable in his class - it just shows you’re at least trying!
So, reading his article, I can comfortably say that this is correct and attainable advice for any man in the larger class of college-educated, intelligent, but not a true natural with the ladies. If I’m being perfectly honest I’ve seen too many chicks spring for a fella who didn’t have what he’s slinging to take it too seriously; the big thing is actually just to interact with women regularly, turns out they go for whoever shows up! But working on yourself gives you some major advantages with women you’re meeting for the first time, so they want to interact with you a little more regularly. And having a car and your own place DEFINITELY lowers barriers to sex. The rest of this, the “systemic” talk - yeah, obviously things are happening on a larger scale, but come the fuck on man, why are you already talking about yourself like you’re a statistic? Don’t you have any self-respect? Or is it just other people you treat this way?
Flip it around. Here’s a strong pronouncement for you: the thing that let our society do great things in the past is the same one that let people get married, and it is PERSONAL initiative and responsibility, not collective. If someone has to be “empowered” to do something, what does that say about where the power really lies?
kky
1mo ago
Small note on persuasion. You’ve presented a single anecdote in support of your point - actually fine, to be honest, concrete examples illustrate broader trends powerfully. But you didn’t deliver the goods! What was his life in that family like, at what ages? Ditto the schools? (I’m not sure what it’s like where you are, but where I am the private schools often are for the children of the wealthy who are FAILING in public schools, rather than being too good for them.) Did he have any connections back to the hood?
Then following up: how has he tormented his family? How did they react? How has this relationship developed over what I understand to be the decade of his childhood, and where is it going now?
The lack of detail means that other people paint their own stories on your blank canvas. People who agree with you will of course say: the parents did all they could, he was just a little hellion… but those who don’t will see a tribe of racist middle Americans trying to shoulder the White Man’s Burden and reacting with hostility when a traumatized and isolated little boy does not show proper servility in front of Massa. If you want to convince them (and this forum is about that, no?) you need to bring the goods, without prejudice (i.e. you should not bring your holistic judgment of the individual into your analysis of all isolated events, ESPECIALLY early ones), building up your case slowly and inexorably. Otherwise, the best you’re getting is scaring people off with your obvious if vague malice.
kky
1mo ago
Right now the primary obstacle is that it costs $300 a month to run.
Subtle, but important, difference: they CHARGE you $300/mo for it. But almost all AI features right now are sold at a substantial loss. The real cost is probably somewhere around 10x that for what a highly motivated teen boy’s libido will demand.
I’m not especially worried about the current crop for that reason. The costs are just wildly out of budget for the youth, who last I checked were willing to pay approximately $0.00 for porn. I remember being that age; why would things change?
(Entry level devs, on the other hand… but the vtubers have already hit them. Not sure what more damage can be done.)
Often AI deals require a promise to spend X tokens over Y time period. It’s like promises to spend a certain amount of money on a company’s services without specifying the services to be bought. So if the buyer is under the spend count, they encourage people to use more tokens.
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