burkeboi
1d ago
I can totally believe that 10% of men have wildly disproportionate sex partners. Note that that is not the same as wildly disproportionate amount of sex; by the sex partner metric, a one night stand counts just as much as a 50 year sexual relationship. I think men having a lop sided partner-count distribution isn't indicative of most men not having sex.
burkeboi
1d ago
White cisheteropatriarchy is murdering them via other Black Bodies.
The above sentence is unironically the critical theory position on this matter; it is not a weak man.
burkeboi
1d ago
People want to make their lives easier, and obtain greater creature comforts for less toil; if they can't shift their workload onto machines, they will seek to dump it on to people weaker than themselves.
That is very good insight. I think the clearest case today are hard manual laborer jobs in the first world; you either get coercion in the form of parolees and/or prisoners doing them, or third world immigrants often of dubious legal status doing them. I don't think there is a way around this except growth and automation to the point where robots do those jobs instead, which is another example of your point.
burkeboi
1d ago
I don't think anyone is bringing back chattel slavery, since the economic conditions that made it useful no longer exist. The closest thing we have to modern chattel slavery, human trafficking, is mostly same race people victimizing each other. I don't think any US race is interested in enslaving any other race; it follows that the relative population of whites vs blacks is irrelevant to slavery in modern terms.
burkeboi
1d ago
Even pre-industrialization Medieval/Early Modern Western Europe and Medieval China, while having forms of coerced labor, did not have Chattel Slavery. While I'm not 100% percent certain about a grand theory of 'where do societies have chattel slavery', industrialization seems to be a sufficient, but not necessary, ingredient of a society that doesn't have chattel slavery.
burkeboi
1d ago
The US will be increasingly black, and it's not as if black people will choose to enslave their own tribe
The transatlantic slave trade was largely Africans enslaving other Africans then selling those slaves to Europeans for transport.
burkeboi
3d ago
Cynically, there is already a good chance that a distressed woman texting her boyfriend late at night getting emphatic, engaging answers will be reading LLM responses. If she cuts out the middle man, the LLM will at least not cheat on her and give her STIs.
This is why I always add in a racial slur or two when comforting my wife. I want her to know she's talking to me and not some clanker.
burkeboi
4d ago
This article makes me think of of the bubbles we each live in; while my social group certainly has its flaws, it does not contain many people who have behaviors associate with Cluster B disorders. Generic you would have a very different view of the world and of people if your circle is filled with Ortegas vs. other types of people. By reading someone's content, you let them into your brain and in some ways it can feel like the writer is in your social circle. I found very large changes in my mood, worldview, and even ideology once I curated both friends and the content I consume. Reading Ortega's article made me feel like someone took my brain out and licked it after eating candy.
burkeboi
5d ago
I genuinely believe that the suppression of the derogatory terms "gay" and "retarded" is part of what allowed Wokism to flourish so much. Those two terms were easy ways to shut down a lot of the arguments and psychological impulses behind the movement. They play a similar role to how the derogatory term "simp" shuts down decent but of feminist arguments and actions at a social level. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is up to your preferences.
(I dislike both movements, so I am in favor of these terms being used.)
burkeboi
5d ago
Which is why I support checks and balances to parental authority, just as with any other form of government.
I'm quote fond of checks and balances myself. The relative weight of each authority depends on the situation on the ground, though. In general, I think parents should be given a lot of deference since the state, even well run ones, tend to protects kids worse than their parents. The sky high rates of abuse in the foster care system is an example.
That would give neither parents nor the State authority over children. A child should not be thought of starting as a piece of property, with some protections from abuse tacked on as epicycles; rather, a child should be thought of starting as a human being, equal in every way, and then whatever power and responsibility we give parents are the epicycles. The burden of proof ought to lie not on 'anyone interfering with how a parent raises their children' so much as 'anyone overriding the child's preferences'. Forbidding a carnal relationship between a five-year-old and a fifty-year-old, or forbidding adolescents from practising the unspeakable vice of the Serbians, are examples of things which overcome this burden; forbidding a child from seeing any depiction of the values of the tribe opposite their parents' does not.
I think the issue with no one having authority over children is that they are not capable of acting in their interests and effectively advocating for themselves. You can debate the age of majority and how much authority teenagers should have, but the central case of a small child needs someone to protect them and advocate for them. I think rather than parents being the owner of their children, a better metaphor is that the children are trustees an the parents are trustors. Due to the track record of the state being a bad trustor, I defer to the parents decisions in most, but not all, cases.
The latter case applies both to a child of Red Tribe parents seeing depictions of LGBTQWERTYUIOP+ living fulfilling lives, and a child of Blue Tribe parents learning examples of Western Cultures having the moral high ground over People Of Colour (e. g. the abolition of widow-burning by the British Raj).
While I personally think that having a child be exposed to a lot of perspectives, with an ideally worldly and fair parent giving their own commentary on them, I think the state is too blunt an instrument to effectively administer this type of complex acculturation. My view is that if they are unable/unwilling to protect children in their custody from abuse, they have not demonstrated the competency to administer this type of acculturation.
burkeboi
6d ago
absolutely. I think Isreal can be run by Jews and have leaders elected by popular vote. You could also absolutely have an ethnostate that has a democracy. I don't think "universal suffrage" is required for democracy, although it is preferable.
I'm not FCfromSSC, but a common belief, I'd argue a defining belief, of modern progressivism, and even most of the center left, is that democracy is invalid when people either vote for specific positions or vote for leaders who espouse specific positions.* Witness how, and this it not just in the US, the terms 'democratic' and 'populist' are very much separate terms with 'populism' being argued to be anti-democratic since its policy go against what is considered valid in a democracy by the mainstream progressive left. You can even see this outside of the US: if you read El País (rough Spanish equivalent to the NYT) they describe pretty much every figure on the right as an 'Ultra' and talk about how they are all dangerous to democracy.
Almost all left wingers, especially those described as 'woke', consider ethno-nationalism to be illiberal enough that it's just not a valid/democratic platform to have. This is both openly stated by most left wingers, and it is even the law in many European countries that explicit arguments for an ethnostate are hate speech. If you apply woke standards to Israel, the entire project is considered illegitimate because the nation is literally founded on the "undemocratic" principle of ethnonationalism. Some center left figures ideologically argue that Israel deserves a carveout or the above viewpoint shouldn't be applied everywhere, but the straightforward application of 'wokism', or even the center left viewpoint on ethnonationalism, is that the political system of Israel is founded on undemocratic principles and is thus illegitimate.
- Most right wingers also believe that certain rights need to be beyond democracy, so this isn't a sneer at the left.
burkeboi
6d ago
How can society better support the men who sincerely look up to Clav as role model? Is there a way to become as viral as Clav by doing pro-social things (so offering a viable competing worldview)?
Probably not. I went from being a virgin to sleeping with 15 women in a year to getting married through reading, then attempting to implement, PUA. That's the thing though; it worked, I never post about it, and the stuff I followed were really boring and uninteresting like 'here is how to dress/present yourself' and 'here is how to lead a date to do whatever'. Most of what I did was doing, rather than consuming content. Actually succeeding at dating, be it wither maximizing in the modern atomized marketplace or joining a conservative subculture and going through the marriage process there, involves way more action than consumption. And beyond that, the consumption is not flashy/interesting/binge-able.
The way to get virality is to do wacky shit that doesn't work.
burkeboi
6d ago
Your proposal has two flaws: the first is that it puts children at a greater risk of hermeneutical injustice at the hands of their parents. Imagine the ideology of your outgroup, the worldview you find most odious; do you really want a parent who holds that ideology to have absolute power over whether their child is aware that some people, fully endowed with reason and conscience, disagree with it?
It seems that we have a tradeoff here: the more tightly you enforce central planning and limitations over how parents raise their kids, the more you reduce odious practices. At the same time if the central authority wishes to enforce an odious practice on all kids they have the power to enforce that in this hypothetical. At the same time, giving parents unlimited authority means you have no way to stop child abuse.
It seems to me that this is a question of marginal tradeoffs. I'm in favor of giving the state the ability to stop child abuse, defined as what the consensus of people consider child abuse, but I'm unwilling to go much further than that. I disagree a lot with how many people raise their kids, but I accept the need to let them raise their kids as they wish since I don't want them getting a vote on how I raise my kid. I'd be willing to support the state having more power if there was more of a consensus of values where I live, but since there isn't I default to general libertarianism as the local maxima.
burkeboi
6d ago
To support your point, It seems overall that the more 'tribalist' a culture is the more they are happy to abuse their fellow tribesmen and the less 'nationalist' they are. As an example, the European states with the strongest buy-in for mass nationalism a century ago, largely Northwestern European nations, are also the ones most onboard with 'globohomo' right now. The states where universalism is weakest now, such as Italy or Russia, also had the least popular buy in for nationalism historically. While Germans and Frenchmen where enthusiastically lining up to fight for La Patria, Russians and Southern Italians had to be coerced into fighting (to simplify the picture).
It seems worldwide the cultural divide is less 'universalist/individualists WEIRDos vs. nationalist/tribalist foreigners who united to mess with WEIRDOs' and more 'ideologically minded/high trust cultures vs. clannish cultures', and those clannish cultures abuse each other just as much as they abuse outsiders.
burkeboi
6d ago
Reading the replies, that does seem to be the case. Every society contains some degree of coercion, taxes can't be optional after all, but the difference between a modern westerner vs. a gulag inmate or a St. Domingue field slave seems to be in the particulars of treatment rather than some sort of a priori philosophical divide.
burkeboi
6d ago
Then ask what, after you defeat any of these raiders in a battle to defend your stuff, do you do with your defeated foe?
Investigate the root causes of their raiding.
More seriously, your hypothetical does give an interesting conclusion; if you wish to maintain a 'Jeffersonian' society and are unwilling to resort to slavery, you kind of just have to kill the invaders. That being said, the 13th amendment does exclude coerced labor as a consequence of legal punishment from the abolition and coercing prisoners to do labor is more or less common in even rich nations, so I'm not sure using the defeated raiders for coerced labor is de-facto condemned even now.
burkeboi
7d ago
Interesting links. It seems coercive labor, even if it's not "slavery" per se, crops up almost everywhere you have civilization.
burkeboi
7d ago
Have people looked into how necessary slavery was in historical civilizations? While industrialization seems to have ended the necessity of chattel slavery, though not necessarily all coerced and semi-coerced labor, in a country it seems the past required more coercion. An example is that sugar farming is so horrific once Haiti/St Domingue ended slavery, it basically stopped since no one was willing to do it without being forced to. I'm curious how much more economically diversified empires like the Romans and Chinese required slavery.
burkeboi
8d ago
Turkey’s is due to the uniquely strong tradition of secular, Westernized institutions, enforced by regularly-scheduled military coups whenever the backwater Islamist yokels start getting uppity.
While I agree Islam is less conducive to wellbeing than Catholicism, you could make the same argument that the unique cultural and historical conditions of France/Belgium was why they kept up with NW Europe while the rest of the Catholic countries were varying degrees of poor relative to Protestant Europe.
burkeboi
9d ago
Have there been any studies on if transwomen/trans-identifying-males who are into women vs men vs both are statistically more violent? I have encountered many trans people in my life. I've even seen an african american male chad have a harem of white transwomen he kept as his 'slaves'. Anecdotally, it seems transwomen who are into women are more interested in violence, as well as traditionally masculine activities, in general. I bet it's an even smaller subset of transwomen where the group of school shooters are drawn.
burkeboi
9d ago
I think the 'more women have more negative experiences with men' and "women's empowerment" factors are often correlated in modern society. One thing that women's empowerment, both the active ideology and industrialization reducing sex rules, results in is men and women directly competing. In the past, they generally had different spheres while today they interact, both as cooperators and competitors, in far more domains. Women's empowerment, both from issues with the sexual revolution and from directly competing with men, causes more calls for even more women's empowerment as a result of direct competition and negative experiences with men. It's less 'women have it better/worse' and more 'there is more surface area now for women to conflict with men than in the past'.
burkeboi
9d ago
And it all leaves the fundamental, core problem. Men have no stake in the continued maintenance of their future if they don't expect to be able to form a family. Why would they throw in their lot with their home country at that point? What's their buy-in?
It seems to me that modern society, and this goes beyond just issues of sex, works by honestly demanding very little of people. I hate taxes as much as the next guy, but I'm a pampered tech worker who works in a climate controlled office. When it comes down to it, I live a very comfy life even if I'm taxed a lot and culturally disparaged. The closest thing I've done to sacrificing my comfortable life is having a kid, and even then I still either work in a climate controlled office or live in a climate controlled house. I'm still comfy. The men and women who become NEETs are in a similar boat. The middle class too. Not much is demanded of most people.
It remains to be seen how modern western society would function in a crisis that does demand broad sacrifice from its people. We are not currently in that state.
burkeboi
10d ago
If you look at a lot of historical feminists, especially the ones further out from the overton window of the time, you often see them abused either by a male partner or a relative. If more women feel maltreated either by male family members or by the romantic/sexual partners, then I think that would drive them to more radical pro-woman identity politics. Given the correlation of divorce and sexual abuse as well as the numerous points women make about the, generally sub-abuse but often criminal, harms they suffer in hookup culture I can very well see a case where women now have more meaningful negative experiences with men than they did in the past.
Writing this, I think it's also important to note that women aren't a monolith and, generally mediated by class, they will have different experiences with men. Underclass women have always had a horrible time almost by definition. I suspect a difference now is that working class on up to even PMC women have a lot more negative experiences with men than in the past, especially if you look at sub-criminal stuff like many hookup culture complaints. If women's collective experience with men is worse than it was in the past, it makes sense they would be more pro-female anti-male.
All this being said, it's a question of margins. I'm Gen Z, and my wife and I voted Trump. There is always a diversity of views and experiences.
burkeboi
10d ago
The dominant strategy for almost any politician, or really any social movement, is to criticize a lot but do nothing so as to avoid accountability. Even if the US gets its strategic goals, which is not a given, all the average American feels is the immediate economic disruption so it'll feel like a loss. Especially if that hypothetical American consumes news hostile to Trump. Actually stopping or hindering Trump gives the republicans a dolchstosslegende they can use to marginally gain back some voters. In terms of pure politics, and even if your goal is maximum blue tribe policies, not interfering with the Iran war is dominant strategy for now.
I don't think that this is an extraordinary claim. I will say that most critical theory don't consider people to be puppets, so they won't say "we are only automatons" and thus the individual murderer bears some blame. At the same time, the consensus belief in critical theory is that the negative outcomes that African Americans have is as a result of discrimination/injustice from the system. It follows that this individual outcome, the murder rate which is committed mostly by other African Americans, is downstream of discrimination. Hence, my above quote.
It may be a bit of a spicy framing, and there are tweaks around the edges a professor would make, but I still think my above framing is pretty accurate to the critical theory framing of black-on-black crime.
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