urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
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User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8mo ago
I agree with this.
Even relatively feminine men will absolutely roast each other in male-only spaces. Playful teasing, joking boundary-pushing, and obviously your momma jokes are everywhere, when you get men together in a space that doesn't include women.
This is why Trump's "it was just locker room talk" defense for the pussy tape in 2016 seemed to work for him: that kind of horny bravado is just what men get up to with each other.
But when women come into the space, everything changes. Women very much seem to hate the idea that men alter their behavior when they come around. But they do. And the reason why men chill out when women come in isn't because they are ashamed of their behavior, or are trying to hide something. It's a mark of respect: they acknowledge that women aren't into it and find it discomfiting, and respect this preference by choosing not to engage in it around them. It's sort of like how I might use profanity while talking to my friends, but would never do so when visiting my mom.
I'm a big defender of male-only spaces and organizations, because we very much need for men to have an outlet to bond over this stuff. Bottling it up or refusing to give men the ability to bond with other men doesn't help -- in fact, it makes it more likely that guys will try to use it to bond with women.
And bonding with women over this stuff sometimes works! 'Negging', as a complaint, gets a lot of airtime. But there's a great deal of the phenomenon that's simply a part of how people flirt. Contrary to the popular interpretation, playful negging isn't about trying to genuinely hurt someone's self-esteem. What it does is create a sense of intimacy, by making statements that would be totally uncalled-for if made by a total stranger, and playfully dancing around the contradiction that the people are strangers. And it in fact presents a theoretical possibility of threat! But the point that's being made is that the man is so unwilling to pose a threat to the woman that the idea of him posing a threat to her is a big joke. He playfully insults because he's profoundly not interested in really insulting or threatening, and if it really is playful and there's chemistry, healthy, well-adjusted women enjoy the game. I have flirting level -100, so I'll refrain from giving an example.
This is fundamentally what men are doing with each other when they bond like this: they're accentuating the intimacy they feel for each other by demonstrating that they're so close and their bond is so tight, they can insult each other and engage in dominance behavior without any real threat. It's an indication that these men are so utterly far from threatening each other that even the concept of threatening each other is a massive joke that people find hilarious because of its implausibility. (This is the same reason why straight men engage in boundary-pushing claims of homosexuality -- they're so straight that even the concept of having sex with each other is an implausible joke. I presume this is one of those things that would really annoy a gay man if he happened to be present.)
The phrase I've seen to describe the differences between male and female bonding is that "men will insult your mother and have your back, women will tell you that you're beautiful and stab you in it." 'Toxic positivity', insofar as it exists, is mostly a phenomenon of female bonding styles being applied to broader social environments. 'Toxic masculinity', particularly the old complaints about angry gamer boys making puerile jokes, comes from these forms of male bonding being taken too far, and applied by skill-less idiots to environments of actual competition, or brought out in mixed company.
That's not to say that men can't engage in very positive, productive conversations with a lot of affection -- or that women can't be openly insulting. But there are differences in communication styles that reflect how men are theoretically threats to each other and to women for social power or attention, and this conceptual threat must be managed and minimized by close friends to the point of humor. The big problem is when this humor escapes the male-only and flirting contexts where it's effective, or is received poorly by people who don't want it or find it alienating.
If you think I lack for evidence for this just-so story, go look at the youtube comments for a male-oriented video and witness the "bro really took this too far," "least addicted gamer," "it's not that deep" comments, and then go look at a female-oriented video and witness the "OH MY GOD YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL," "Dr. So-and-so is so warm and helpful with such a great bedside manner ," "awwwwwww Butter the cat is such a cutie" comments.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11mo ago
Women mostly have no clue what sexually interests them and don't have the language to describe it other than vibes ("I just didn't feel a spark, you know?") and so you should assume that any time they give romantic advice to men they're just saying something they'd find useful or pro-social without being able to consider whether that's something that would really interest them in a man. I'm rarely one to make sweeping generalizations about the dating world, but even women I really like and respect for their thoughtfulness and honesty in other areas of their life seem totally incapable of describing their real romantic interests. It's the closest thing to a universal I've found.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1yr ago
I think a lot of people are confused why the sex recession could be concerning to socialcons, so I thought I'd chime in and give my take.
First of all, in an "only Nixon could go to China" sense, I'm a strong opponent of casual sex. I think it's bad. And I've thought it's bad since I first formed opinions about sex, and continue to believe it. I think it's damaging to the individual and to society, and I think it cheapens something that is of great significance.
So my problem with the sex recession is not that I think promiscuity is great and I lament its decline, it's that the problem with the sex recession isn't actually about sex at all -- it's an underlying intimate relationship recession and a loneliness crisis.
What's happening isn't that a bunch of people are getting into intimate dating relationships and keeping it in their pants until marriage, or at least until their relationship is solid and long-term oriented. What's happening is straight people aren't talking to the opposite sex at all. And, if they are, they find no interest in dating any of them, because they have unrealistic expectations, or they don't understand the appeal of a relationship, or they are so neurotic that they're unable to form a stable intimate connection with another person.
That a whole bunch of young people are so atomized and neurotic that they're unable to form intimate relationships is actually more damaging, in my view, than casual sex is per se. So I'm concerned about the sex recession in much the same way as a socialist might have been concerned about the Great Depression.
"Ah, but!" you say, "the Great Depression was all about the banks and the capitalists losing their money in the stock market crash!"
"Well, that was what started it," the socialist replies, "but the real problem was what happened to the workers, who became unemployed and unemployable, who were forced to stand in breadlines for food and travel the country in search of work."
The Great Depression was bad for the capitalists, just as the sex recession is bad for people who want casual sex. But it is also very, very bad for people who want intimate relationships in general, even socialcons who want to settle down with a nice girl and have a family. Because, as it turns out, many of the skills and capacities necessary for people to have casual sex are also necessary for people to have long-term intimate relationships. And if the social environment -- as sex-positive and gung-ho about casual sex as it is -- cannot get people to have sex, well, it probably can't get them to settle down, either.
So the sex recession serves as a sign of the times, a statistical revelation of a deeper problem. There's a reason the news reports on the stock market, and it's not just because many Americans have investments -- it's because what happens on the market ends up affecting the economy as a whole. And so it is with sex.
I hold that a big part of the ultimate problem is a lack of strong, conservative institutions, including marriage, but of course I believe that.
However, just as a socialist would insist that the ultimate causes of the Great Depression were the flaws of capitalism and the lack of worker control over the means of production, I would insist the ultimate causes of the sex recession are the flaws of the sexual revolution and the lack of willingness to sacrifice in order to make relationships work. While, of course, lamenting the loneliness and the emptiness and the suffering that the sex recession engenders.
And just as the socialist would say that the Depression necessitated a revolution, I too say that the sex recession necessitates a serious reevaluation of the "sex system" we've established. This is a system which insists on the greatness of sex while utterly dismantling the insitutions that helped most people safely and meaningfully have it. And I suppose, like the reddit-tier socialists insisting we live in "late-stage capitalism" while expecting the revolution any day now, I hope and pray we are in "late-stage sexual libertinism" where the contradictions and the failures of the casual sex system become apparent to the masses.
All of this comes as people's ability to form platonic friendships is damaged as well. It's a totally generalized loneliness crisis. And it's a massive problem for our society: I think it threatens to tear the social fabric apart. My suspicion is that this will happen less as a bang (pun not intended, but appreciated) and more as a slow, methodical, sorrowful loss of social support and increased low-level suffering. I think this has already been happening for a while now, with the results evident in real life and online.
I hold that many of the problems of wokeness -- the obsessiveness about identity markers, the dogpiling on opponents, the extremely online bickering, all of that -- form but another cluster of symptoms of the same problem: a neurotic, atomized, empty, soulless, lonely society. People are desperate for something to give them an identity and a purpose, because their family and their society and their friends and their (at times non-existent) partners have utterly failed in the basic social function of giving them that.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11mo ago
The anger story brought to mind a conversation I had with my partner.
Like apparently all women nowadays, my girlfriend is fascinated by true crime. She studied biochemistry and works in a lab, so she's especially interested in the forensic side of criminal investigation, particularly genetic genaeology which has certain similarities to the genetics work she does. I'm always hearing about the new cases Othram solved that week. Her parents think she should go into forensic science and they're dead right.
I've actually come to enjoy watching true crime documentaries with her, though I prefer ones that focus on the process of investigation (mystery plots are the most universally popular type of story).
But I have to confess I find them hard to watch sometimes. Not because I find the crimes too gruesome, but because inevitably hearing about the depravity and cruelty of some of the most evil criminals -- brutal rapists, killers of elderly people, child murderers, torturers, serial killers -- fills me with intense and uncontrollable rage and a desire to get medieval on some asses.
I wonder sometimes if the reason women are so interested in true crime, and men aren't as much, isn't something to do with women, but something to do with men. Perhaps for one segment of men, true crime is simply too real, too close to their own lives of organized crime or petty violence, to be an enjoyable escape. And then, for another group -- and I include myself in this one -- it is so morally outrageous to consider the gravity of the kind of lurid crimes that get discussed in the true crime community that they're filled not with curiosity but with rage. Women get to see crime as something foreign, not something they'd ever get involved in, and perhaps are spared the sort of great vengeance and furious anger that characterizes the male response to horrific acts. Perhaps this also goes to explain the gender difference in support for the death penalty.
It happened that we finished watching one of these documentaries, and I found it particularly enraging (a man abducted a woman at gunpoint and forced her to pretend to enjoy being raped by him on camera) and we were discussing the particulars of the case and how the police investigated the abduction. I mentioned that one of the big differences between feminists and conservatives on the issue of rape doesn't concern whether it's wrong or not (they both condemn it) but what society should do about it. Feminists are often focused on the needs of the victim -- believe all women, we need more social support, we need to reduce stigma, we need police to be more receptive to rape victims -- while conservatives who comment on the issue of rape often discuss it in terms of what needs to be done to punish the perpetrators: death penalty for forcible rape, longer prison sentences, harsher punishments.
And we realized at that moment why there was such a big disagreement between men and women about criminal justice. Women are concerned about victims, men about perpetrators. It's not that men lack compassion for victims of horrific crimes or that women lack a desire for penal justice, but rather that the emotional reactions of men and women and their subsequent actions reflect different priorities. And both, you might note, reflect the traditional social roles of men and women: men protecting the tribe from physical violence, women ensuring that all members of the tribe have their needs met.
Adding your thoughts about male anger into the mix offers a compelling explanation of how that process works, and perhaps why men experience such a strong emotional desire to exact punishment that women often don't seem to understand.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
10mo ago
· Edited 10mo ago
When I met my girlfriend in college, she told me in no uncertain terms that she never wanted to have biological children -- but she might consider adoption. Her reasoning was that she was deathly afraid of pregnancy, and never wanted to go through it.
Of course, I was a 20 year old guy, I didn't know what I wanted, and I certainly wasn't thinking about having children at the time. So I just kind of shrugged.
Oh, how times change.
It was gradual, but I do think she hit 24 or something like that and immediately developed an irresistable urge to bear children. Whenever we go to a store and we happen to walk by the baby clothes, she can't help herself but wander over to them and point out the cutest ones, and then look at me with those puppy dog eyes that look suspiciously like fuck-me eyes. She tells me frequently that I'm going to have to put a baby in her soon. And our theoretical children who haven't even been theoretically conceived yet already have names: first, middle, and last.
(We both independently had the same idea for our son's name long before we met each other, she liked the name so much that in high school she named her dog with it. So my heir is going to have the name of my girlfriend's literal dog. "You were named after the goodest dog I ever knew.")
When I bring up that she once disavowed the idea of ever bearing a child, she says just exactly what everyone here is saying: not only her mother but her mother's mother's mother's mother did it, some of them several times, and if they could do it under social and medical conditions much worse than we have now, she can do it too. But also she just really wants a child, and she wants them to be her own.
I do wonder if what's happening is that Pope Francis had a rare moment of being unfathomly based and some women are redirecting all of their maternal instincts and desires towards animals, leading to the "Dog mom" effect.
No, Susan, your corgi is not your son, and you're doing a disservice to both yourself and your dog if you treat them like a member of a species that they're not. I'm especially satisfied with this claim because the author of the original post describes herself by saying her favorite things are her "fam & pets", because heaven forbid her human companions get more letters to describe them than the animals who don't understand a damn word she's ever said to them.
But also, my interpretation of the past hundred years of human history is that disagreeable women (I'm using this not as a term of abuse but purely descriptively, to describe women low in OCEAN-trait-agreeableness), who for various personality-based reasons are much less likely to find satisfaction and enjoyment from caring for children, have taken the reins of what describes womanhood and shifted it massively in their favor. The Wikipedia article for trait Agreeableness literally has as its illustration a painting of a woman with her daughter entitled "Agreeable Burden," and I find this so unbelievably apropos that I'm afraid I'm on a hidden-camera show.
The author of the original piece has another post where she describes her belief that "masculinity is real, but femininity is invented" -- this is a sure indication to me that this is a disagreeable woman, someone who doesn't statistically "fit" in her sex, which averages higher than men in agreeableness. I believe women like the original poster commit the typical mind fallacy, and believe that because they are a woman with the personality they have, that women who naturally do have a strong inclination towards sacrificing for others and putting the needs of their children first are simply disagreeable women being suppressed by The Patriarchy. It's sort of like the Western conception that people all across the world are simply liberals being repressed.
I mean, we really absolutely hate that we have to be feminine for you, and you guys just don’t understand this. You think that’s just the awful feminists. The cunty man-haters. It’s why you want a nice trad wife who just LOOOVES being feminine. Guess what? She doesn’t. It’s all bullshit. No woman likes it. She’s just putting more chips on betting she can get more out of you, faster, with less effort.
The above is an actual quotation from that other post, and I edited it in after the fact. Frankly, I'm not convinced this woman isn't an actual psychopath, with that kind of deranged and zero-sum take. And why would I listen to what a psychopath has to say about companionship or self-sacrifice?
Sorry, Kate, but you haven't met my mom, and you probably wouldn't like her if you did. But she's the greatest and most wonderful human being of either sex I've ever known, and I respect her a great deal, because she always respects and considers the needs of others. I frequently tell her that she's the best mother in the world, and I mean that literally. If anyone deserves a "Medal of Honor" for motherhood it's her, and it's precisely because she'd never ask for one that she deserves it. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.
Only the fittest will survive the coming population decline, and we can only hope that people (either male or female) so disagreeable and self-oriented that they'd begin their post on childbearing with a Barbie-movie meme that insinuates parents waiting for their children to get out of school are chumps, won't make it. Blessed are the agreeable, for they shall inherit the earth.
I didn't intend this to be a personal attack, but I believe it's more fruitful to describe these things in terms of personality differences than to make it about the cost-benefit analysis of childbearing, and the more I dug into this author the more intensely I realized how utterly spot-on all of my asssumptions about her personality were. If your children are the result of a cost-benefit analysis to you, then you shouldn't have them, and I wish people like Kate well in their free choice -- I mean that.
The current paradigm is "women's bodies are defective male bodies, men's brains are defective women's brains." That's not an explicit viewpoint or something that anyone intends directly, it's the outcome of the slow process of commoditizing human beings and molding them into good little workers and subjects who are obedient, pliant, and don't rock the boat. Anything that stops them from doing this is a flaw which the powers that be seek to destroy -- signal-boosting any ideology that seems likely to accomplish it. Once again, this isn't a conspiracy; it's a prospiracy, a side effect of powerful institutions doing what powerful institutions do, and of humans in powerful positions doing what humans do: endorsing ideologies that subconsciously go along with their pre-existing goals. This is the origin of "woke capital."
Women are more likely to uphold institutions and, as girls, to sit still for long periods of time (like you say), and are less likely to shout loudly about the emperor having no clothes. Men are less likely to do things that remove them from the workplace for a period of time (especially bear children), and more likely to slave away at work for hours on end while abandoning their families at home.
Institutions, especially corporations, want their employees to be male in the ways that benefit them and female in the ways that benefit them. They don't want people, they want androgynous commoditized worker bees. They want cattle and not pets, human docker containers cloned and scaled at will from the amorphous "cloud" of the "workforce." The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings. You will own nothing and you will be happy, and your storage will be separated from your compute and kept in trust by Amazon.
My girlfriend has gotten explicit advice that she should never get pregnant, it will "hurt her career." She detests these people who have established a system that expects her to sacrifice her biological and spiritual drive to bear and raise beloved children in the name of economic productivity and ruthless inhuman competition. This system sees bearing and raising the next generation of human beings, the most fundamental purpose of society, as a distraction from the more worthy goal of creating wealth for Wall Street. It asks this of men too, but because of the unchangable realities of being a sexually-dimorphic mammalian species, this requirement hurts women more than men. The entrance of women into the workforce on the same terms as men is the true systemic oppression of women. The left used to know this, like when Elizabeth Warren wrote The Two Income Trap. But it has forgotten it as its funding has shifted to corporations "woke" to their own interests, who are more likely to fund the striking of a child in the womb than to pay for the care of that which is born. And the abortionist feminists celebrate them for their avarice like good little girls.
The goal isn't to turn men into women or women into men. That's an ideological side effect, like "Communism" in Stalinist Russia. The goal of Stalin was to empower himself. And so it is with woke capitalism. (Perhaps real woke has never been tried?)
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
I apologize for my irritated tone, I just hate when there are such beneficial policies that have been tried and tested in lots of other places, that get shot down for stupid reasons in the US because they threaten our precious, innocent, angelic cars that have never hurt anybody and never would, how dare you.
I agree with you that, in a vaccum, limited cars in cities would be fantastic. I love the way European villages work. I think, as an ideal, cities with strong public transportation and limited congestion are a great place to live. In theory, I'm rah-rah urbanism.
But no discussion of transportation and suburbanization in the US can happen without a co-equal discussion about crime and safety.
The reason Americans cling to their cars and their commutes is simple: the cities are not safe. I personally know people who lived the urbanist dream, living downtown in a city, and then fled to the suburbs because they watched a man die from a gunshot out their window. I've ridden the train and had to make decisions about how to deal with a clearly psychotic man with no understanding of reality, and thus posed a real danger to himself and the people around him. I've seen and walked by the tent cities. I've seen, with my own eyes, the fentanyl zombies whose presence in our greatest cities can be described only as seriously-discomfiting, as human urban blight, as the broken windows of man that reveals and invites immense public disorder and ugliness. I've read the crime stats.
The right perceives this danger profoundly and seriously, and it shapes many of their political priorities, from gun rights to car rights. They want the ability to live without fear, while still being able to have access to the centers of economic activity that are our cities. Having a car means having a physical, metal, lockable bubble that separates you from exterior threats, while being able to easily and autonomously navigate yourself out of the urban center without having to share a means of transportation with people who may mean you harm.
Your post seems to reveal that your concerns about cars are the mirror image of conservative concerns about crime: you see them as dangerous to public safety, and ugly. And you're not wrong! I have serious and real concerns about the size of our vehicles and the number and behavior of them in cities.
But the American right has judged that the danger to them from automobiles -- which indeed is massive, grave, and serious -- is less important to them than the massive, grave, and serious risk posed to them by urban crime and disorder. They would rather be hurt accidentially by a driver than intentionally by a robber. You can find this wrong, or seriously misguided, or silly, but nevertheless it means that their political views on the issue are shaped by actual concerns about the world rather than "advanced car-brain virus." It means that you might have to engage with their concerns realistically, and maybe make concessions, rather than accusing them of harboring a mental parasite. It's much easier to just handwave them away, just as it's much easier for the right to say that anyone with concerns about the Trump administration has a terminal case of TDS.
The urban problems in the US are mostly US-specific, shaped by US concerns. For that reason, your opponents reject that these are beneficial policies based on being tried and tested in other places. The US is not other places, and has unique problems. The US is not Europe, as my liberal friends delight in reminding me.
Left-wingers want to get the cars out of the city, and right-wingers want to get the crime out of the cities. Both have their ebb and flow, as one side of the argument gains more power, but the Democratic strongholds in most US cities ensures that things flow mostly in one direction.
For that reason, Republicans will cling to their cars as a fundamental part of their identity, because it's the only thing that secures them the ability to participate in the economic activity of society while permitting them and their families to live in the suburbs, where they can have greater security for their possessions and families. And where they can offer to their children a chance at an education in a school where bullies and criminals are disciplined, and children aren't smoking weed in the bathrooms -- a real set of concerns expressed by a family who left Oregon to move to the rural, delapidated town in flyover country where my girlfriend grew up. We're actually at the point where it's safer and better for your children to live in bumfuck nowhere than in our most prominent states.
If liberals want conservatives to be hands-off and support restrictions on car culture, the first thing to do is to clean up the cities and make them temples of safety, security, and prosperity. What is needed is to support policies that arrest, convict, and incarcerate (for long periods) drug addicts, criminals, and other beacons of public disorder. In other words, to stop opposing policies that "threaten our precious, innocent, angelic cars criminals that have never hurt anybody and never would, how dare you." Once we keep people who intentionally do harm out of our cities, then we can talk about keeping machines that accidentially do harm out of them.
But until that day: "haha car go vroom vroom."
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Hey, you don't have to call me out like that!
I do often feel like an odd man out on the motte sometimes in terms of my low-brow-ness; with the exception of video games, the motte seems quite opposed to geekery. (And I don't even like video games very much!)
I can certainly see the detraction of people who seem to eat up whatever they're fed by corporations with the mouth-wide-open meme face, but this just doesn't describe the fan communities I've participated in, particularly those that include a decent helping of straight men. If anything, fan communities of pop culture are more critical of bland, soulless corporate output than outsiders! If you don't believe me, go find a not-woke straight man into Dungeons and Dragons, comic books, or yes, anything owned by Disney, and ask him what he thinks about how things are going.
This is also true about theme parks. To use an SAT analogy, if you want to see the thing that is to the Disney-theme-parks what the motte's wellness wednesday thread is to dating apps, you should take a look at the WDWMagic rumors forum and bask in the straight male annoyance.
In fact, old-school Disney World fan communities have a term for people who uncritically accept every change, believe every new ride is the greatest thing ever made, worship Disney the company instead of appreciating the product for what it is -- they call them "pixie dusters." And they imbue the term with every ounce of contempt with which you use the phrase "Disney adult." (I think you both are talking about the same people!)
(And if you want to see what data nerds get up to when they like theme parks, you should look up Len Testa, who has made a ton of money selling subscriptions to his model of Disney World crowding.)
I guess I've never understood the contempt the Disney company seems to generate -- yeah, the classic movies are fairy stories, and yeah, they're watered down folklore, and yeah, that's not a real castle, and I get it, no real country looks like how it's represented in EPCOT, and absolutely, small towns don't really look like Main Street. But they're all idealized, with the goal of delighting and inspiring; they're mythical, in the positive use of the word. And we (used to) have a term for idealized depictions of things created to delight and inspire: we called it "art."
This whole line of thinking reminds me a lot of the recent discussion about McMansions -- I don't exactly find the 'mcmansion style' great, or anything, and definitely find them excessively and cheaply ornamented. But I don't know, I can't find it in my heart to get angry or contemptuous about the styles in which people build their houses. Eh, I guess, is my response.
My view is that highbrow culture abandoned normies, not the other way around -- before some fuzzy time in the 1900s, much of the literature people read were enjoyed by both the high and the low. Shakespeare once drew crowds of everyone from the groundlings to the Queen, and wrote everything from profound monologues about the human condition to sex jokes. Do you think I meant country matters? (That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.) Charles Dickens drew crowds with each chapter, yet remains studied by scholars to this day. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Bible, which (whatever your views on its divine inspiration or literary quality), has inspired intellectual reflection and interpretation by everyone from uneducated slaves to legendary philosophers.
But at some point things changed, poetry became irrelevant, literature became self-referential and obtuse, high fashion became crazy, and anyone uninterested in participating in the intense status competition of the highbrow world retreated to pop culture, because it was the only thing left that didn't have status hierarchies and impenetrable entrance requirements that make reddit gatekeeping look welcoming.
In fact, reddit gatekeeping-like things are important in this conversation: what's happened in our culture, IMO, isn't that everything's gotten so lowbrow because the people became awful, though some element of that is real. What's happened is that the middlebrow, and the on-ramps to highbrow, collapsed. If you want to start on fashion, or literature, or culture of any kind, your choices are now fast fashion/pop culture, or chasing the elusive and always-changing status hierarchies optimized for status signalling and not for human flouirishing. Your options are DeviantArt or photographed urinals; your options are Marvel or French films with no plot. There are no more coffee pots: there are Keurigs or there are artisanal espresso machines. Which way, western man?
(MaiqTheTrue had a good post on a similar topic a while back; people feel like there's no option other than perfection or avoidance, and so avoid being mediocre at things that might give them meaning. The internet and mass media has a lot of blame for this.)
Your point on things like cooking at home, healthy diets, and work attire is well-taken. But critically, these are matters of health and professional culture, not personal eccentricity or hobby. People should cook at home because it's more economically efficient and better tasting, in a sense that could gain ubiquitous agreement. People should eat a healthy diet because obesity and metabolic disease leads to a great many health problems. People should dress professionally at work because it psychologically leads to a higher regard for oneself and one's colleagues, in an environment where personal eccentricity and interest not only is but should be less important.
But I just can't make the mental leap from this to placing a great deal of moral importance on what people do in their garages or basements. Sometimes people just have interests that are obsessive or low-status -- they aren't harmful, they aren't impure, they aren't violating the law or the commandments, they're just doing their silly things at home with their spare cash. I'll agree readily that doing things like taking out a mortgage to follow Taylor Swift on tour is a bad expense, and there are more productive things that people might do with that kind of money. But ultimately, people need their weird hobbies -- even in the old days, rich people did odd things like selectively breed and arbitrarily evaluate various kinds of dogs on standards that have nothing to do with actual canine health or capability. Hobbies are odd sometimes, and that's just how it is. I suppose this is the "just let people enjoy things" argument, but... just let people enjoy things, I guess?
Most of what Freddy seems to care about doesn't strike me as central parts of social permissiveness -- in fact I would argue he focuses on the cultural elements he does because he agrees with the broader sense of permissiveness that's causing problems in society. Scratch the surface of any of his posts, and you see that he's not only not a conservative, he's an all-in progressive, with some areas of strategic disagreement with progressive politics. I would argue that, like many things, this is Mr.-Intellectual-Marxist Freddy DeBoer arguing against things that average people like to signal his great intellectualness and refined taste.
There are absolutely areas where our society has become so obsessed with non-judgment that we've permitted people to fall into deep holes from which we don't know how to rescue them. But I don't know... there's just so many things of moral relevance to critique out in the world, I don't know that pop culture hobbies that are somewhat childish or obsessive would hit my radar even if I did consider them immoral.
But that's enough on that, I have to go finish a LEGO set.
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Many mothers believe that becoming and being a mother is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to them.
I think you're making the mistake of thinking about bearing, breastfeeding, and raising a child as a "bare biological function" rather than something that is, yes, biological, but also deeply tied in to people's social, emotional, and spiritual sense of who they are -- in other words, to the elements of life that lead to eudaemonia.
"Eating food" is a bare biological function, but it's loaded with social and spiritual meaning -- think about "who sits at what table" in High School, about dinner dates, about feasts and holidays, about Thanksgiving dinner, about gourmonds who learn to savor every bite, and even think about many ancient religions (including Christianity) where "having a meal with the gods" is the fundamental principle of sacrifice.
Sex, too, is a bare biological function, but think about how many ways in which it has emotional meaning for people: not just as a reinforcement of status (which men experience intensely, and thus see sexlessness as utterly wounding to their value as human beings), but as reinforcement of connection, as a means of bonding, as a means of play, as something more than the sum of its parts.
And into this I have to assert: bearing, feeding, and nuturing a child is about more than biology. It is social, emotional, and spiritual. And many -- though certainly not all -- mothers experience it in just this way. Not as a denial of eudaemonia, but as true eudaemonia, flourishing so flourished that it nutures another being's flourishing. Hail, full of grace!
Fathers experience this too, though to a lesser degree. My girlfriend likes to visit old churches to appreciate the architecture, and a common feature of old churches is the church graveyard. What I have often noted to her is that, on almost all of the graves of men, what it reads is not "high-powered lawyer," or "statesman," or "had a bunch of money," but rather: "Husband and FATHER." The greatest legacy of almost every man and every woman, the great evidence of their flourishing to the world, is not what their career looked like or how aggressively they "chased their dreams," but the children they brought into the world, and the way they nurtured them. Your children, not your coworkers, will tend your grave.
I think maybe this is an agreeableness problem -- your argument here is essentially that women are too agreeable and too neurotic. Sure, neuroticism is always a danger, and both men and women with neuroticism struggle a lot. And women are statistically higher in it. But agreeableness is a strength of women, not a weakness: men's great honor is low neuroticism, but women's great honor is high agreeableness.
It can be hard to see on the motte, where disagreeableness is common, but agreeableness is necessary for the maintanence of society. Not only because it is the necessary lens through which to nurture a child, but because it is the necessary lens through which to care for anyone who needs caring for, and to build systems of social harmony that tie people together, that build and maintain social bonds. We could not live in a society were it not for the social bonds maintained by agreeable women.
Some studies have suggested that, in the general population, people maintain stronger connections with their maternal grandparents than their paternal grandparents. Researchers sometimes argue that this can be attributed to the social bonds maintained by mothers.
I speak from experience here: that rings very true to me. In fact, not only am I closer to my maternal family than my paternal family, but my mother is closer to my paternal family than my father is!
Maintaining social bonds is extremely important; this is how social capital is maintained. Societies where these bonds are not maintained are impoverished by it. As we are, in these days of atomization and rootlessness.
So your lens strikes me as incredibly limited: you're saying that 99% of what's important for the maintanence of society is done by men, while not even fully noting the importance of things that women do. You're asking for what would make women valuable without even acknowledging the value they do have.
While you apologized, the fact that you posted this on mother's day without realizing it was mother's day says quite a lot. Did you not speak to your mother yesterday? Did you spend any time with her? Send her flowers?
Because, for what it's worth, that's what maintaining social bonds looks like. And you devalue it to your own peril.
Watching Biden during the innaguration, I felt bad for him. He looks terrible.
There's no way this man has been running the country. I'm just glad he's out -- for his sake -- so his wife and his son and his handlers can no longer pour piss on his reputation in his name. Watching him leave the ceremony, I just wanted to give him a hug. May God have mercy on him, and may his sickness and his humiliation in public life be unto him a participation in cross of Christ, a call to repentance that leads to eternal life.
Oddly, I had a dream last night: that in his final speech Biden closed by saying something like I "resign myself," or I "recuse myself" or I "deny myself" or something like that. The man was a senator forever, and the VP to a president popular with his party and a large segment of the country; now his reputation will forever be that of a sick old man pushed out by his own party and his own president.
He could have retired after Obama, and just coasted on the reputation his association with Obama gave him. But politicians are like TV shows: they run until they're cancelled, not until they're finished. He who lives by the sword will die by the sword, and he who lives seeking power will be destroyed by power.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1yr ago
This is too bad, but I understand the decision.
I do wish we had more representation for the sort of old-school Reagan/Bush conservatism he embodied. In his advocacy for colorblindness and a sort of common-sense anti-wokeness (rather than a more complex philosophical anti-wokeness) he represented the mainstream strain of conservatism that retains a great deal of power within the West and especially in the US. Of all the posters here, he's the one whose words sounded the most like the conservatives I know in person. In an (admittedly distant) second place is hydroacetylene. Probably FarNearEverywhere is in there somewhere, despite not even being from the same country as me. On the other side of the aisle is resident liberal netstack.
Heck, even his bugbears about all his enemies being the same people sounds a lot like the conservatives I know in person, who would probably be keen to make claims about Democrats being secret HBD-pushing racists. So there's a weird way that, even in his failures, he represented a constituency in our political sphere.
I'll miss his crotchety conservatism. I think the elder realism of posters like him is necessary at times to counteract the philosophical idealism and youthful exuberance that permeate this space. We need more dad energy. And Hlynka had it in spades.
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moldbug and why reactionaries must be purged from the community
When I first read about neoreaction, I thought it was really interesting that Bay Area computer scientists were getting into monarchism and treating it seriously. Then I read more deeply into it, and realized it was this bizarre monarchical system where kingdoms compete like corporations under a CEO and the fittest survive, like somehow social darwinism but worse, a capitalist abomination of monarchism. They make no reference to the actual historical reasons people support(ed) monarchies, like divine right of kings, providing a social ideal, which are just cooler and more passionate reasons someone might like monarchism. As it stands the neoreaction people offer nothing to the heart, belying its engineering origins. I regard it as what happens when libertarians who read Hacker News and Ayn Rand stop believing in liberty.
With respect to our rationalist posters, I think of the broader rationalist sphere as a bunch of very crazy people, most of whom have bad ideas that rarely diverge from their social mileu. People will disagree with me on this, but Scott is the singular exception, and the only one I respect: he seems like a basically normal, if very intelligent, guy who got caught up with the wrong kinda smart people and let them rot his prodigious knack for observation and empathy.
I agreed with you yesterday on needing to have more compassion towards anti-vaxxers (despite disagreeing with them). And I'm going to disagree with you today about needing more compassion for people who are lonely or anxious about politics.
Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help! Organisms that are supposed to reproduce, will. Defective organisms that are unable to reproduce will weed themselves out, and rightfully so.
I'm not worried about people who don't want kids not having them. More power to them.
I am exceptionally worried about people who are lacklove and lonely becoming depressed, atomized, and suicidal, because I care about human flourishing and I couldn't give one iota of a damn about what what "evolution thinks" should happen to them.
There's an intense sneering involved in what you're saying there that I find, well, inhuman. Maybe even evil. I'm going to be honest with you: what you've said strikes me as the sort of thing I'd expect a rogue AI or alien or demonic creature trying to maximize suffering would say.
Because it just so happens that some who walk the earth with us are one of these organisms that are "unable to reproduce... and rightly so." I'm not just talking about the young men who will remain lonely if this movement takes off, but about the young women themselves, people who are clearly neurotic and anxious and scared and desperately need someone to tell them that it's going to be ok, and hatred and resentment will just drive them deeper into loneliness and sorrow. There is nothing "right" about people being lonely, depressed, and terrified because their social environment has distorted their view of reality.
It's rather odd that you'd write:
Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright.
just as we're discussing people who desperately need to hear that exact message. If you can make a difference in people's minds by saying this with regards to one worry, it stands to reason you can make a difference in the minds of the people under discussion -- and therefore perhaps there is something "you could have done as an individual to make a difference either way."
I'm reminded a little about that famous quote from Alexander Pope: "Whatever is, is right," that Leibnitzian saying that we live in the best of all possible worlds. And I'm going to counter you with the view that not only the 4B people but the Christian people and the Muslim people and the new Atheist people and the progressive people and the conservative people disagree with you, and they disagree with you profoundly, at the core of their being. This world is fallen, less than it could be. And I take hope in the fact that, despite our disagreements, many people believe that we are not beholden to the origin of our nature or the vicissitudes of evolution as to the outcome of our existence.
Despite strenuous claims that anti-Zionism != anti-Semitism (which can technically be true), I imagine that even some committed progressives struggle with the cognitive dissonance of claiming to care about Jewish well-being while simultaneously advocating for the massacring of 50% of their remaining global population.
I don't think what most anti-Zionists want is for Israeli Jews to be massacred. The more moderate wing presumably wants a single state with equal rights and no privileged status for Jews (i.e. no right of return, citizenship based on presence on the land, etc) while the more extreme wing wants to send Israeli Jews packing; there are of course people who want Israeli Jews to die as an end goal, but despite some high-profile demonstrations I believe those people are the minority.
I rarely speak up on the Israel-Palestine issue here or in person because it never changes, and will never change, and yet is totally radioactive, so it's almost useless to express an individual opinion. But I personally don't really like anyone involved in the conflict; as far as I'm concerned there are no winners, there are only losers. I can absolutely see the left's point that Zionism was rather colonialist -- the Jews who moved to Israel during the Zionist migration hadn't been in the region for many generations, and thereafter took over governance direct from the British -- as well as essentially religious: the claim of sovereignty over the territory was based, however many epicycles of irony and rabbinical reinterpretation Zionists wanted to invoke, essentially on the belief that God had promised the region to Jews in perpetuity. And so it's really easy for me to see why progressives, who loathe colonialism and hate religion, would see this as fundamentally incompatible with the "rules based international order" that predominated after WWII, and therefore perceive Israel/Palestine as an active non-self-governing territory.
Given that a few generations of Israeli Jews have made their lives there, it certainly seems like ethnic cleansing to say they have to leave now, and I think people who directly call for that are triggering people's Holocaust detectors for good reason. At the same time, I also just don't particularly like that the West straight-up endorsed the foundation of an ethnostate in the 1940s on territory that had just been involved in an active ethnic civil war. There were a lot of good reasons many Jews felt the foundation of a Jewish state was a moral imperative, but with the benefit of hindsight, it seems likely to me that Jews would live in greater peace and security, and lost fewer lives, had European Jewry stuck around in Western Europe, or fled to America. The Israelis can do whatever they want, but I'm just not at all convinced that the ethnoreligious passion of Zionism could ever justify the immense suffering that civil war has brought to both Jews and Palestinians in the region.
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