This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Occasionally we are told that there is an epidemic of "male loneliness" or "male sexlessness" - an increasing number of young men are going long stretches of time with few or no sexual partners. But why is this a problem? Why should anyone care except for the sexless males themselves?
Evolutionarily, men have always been the disposable gender - the average male was historically much less likely to produce any offspring than the average female. In fact, depending on which estimate you go with, the average male is still significantly more likely to reproduce in a first world Western country today than he would have been historically. So why is there such concern over this particular dip in fertility?
You might say that a high number of sexless males is more likely to lead to violence and social instability - but plainly, that hasn't happened so far, certainly not on any appreciable scale. It's never been harder to imagine actual widespread social unrest occurring in the modern West, given how thoroughly people have been anesthetized with material abundance and cheap entertainment. (This question has been raised a few times recently, about the possibility of the culture war "going hot" over the Trump verdict or the border crisis or whatever - I am of the opinion that no, it won't "go hot", and such a development is essentially unthinkable at this point). Plus, certain MENA societies provide a case study in how you can have a resilient social order where the majority of women disappear into the harems of rich men and the majority of men are left sexless - these may not be pleasant places to live, but the society is capable of reproducing itself all the same.
It matters because married men work harder and follow society’s rules. And that matters a lot; the vast majority of the productive labor to sustain our prosperity is gendered male. When they do less of it, it’s bad for everyone.
Or to put it more starkly but still perfectly accurately: You are free not to care about these men. And they are free not to care that you would prefer that they didn't engage in mass shootings, serial killings, and rapings against the people you care about.
@Primaprimaprima, do you feel comfortable expressing this argument when there's a lone wolf mass shooting (that is, not gang-related), which are almost exclusively committed by maladjusted and love-challenged men? Not asking as a gotcha, just genuinely curious. Are they just the acceptable and not particularly appreciable collateral damage of male disposability to you and not worth the general outpouring of rage and emotion that generally accompanies them? Have you expressed this opinion to any "normies", and how did they respond?
This is the kind of LARPing I was talking about.
"These men" by and large are not going to do shit. The vast majority of lovelorn men will do nothing but masturbate and seethe; they are not some sort of existential threat whose wrath anyone needs to fear. As for the tiny number who do go on a killing spree, I find it very unlikely that society could have done anything to help them - they'd probably have been the sort of person who goes feral even in a healthier society.
That said, we should care about people who need help, though I'd classify them as similar to drug addicts; they need to want help and recognize the degree to which their own choices have put them in this situation.
By and large, probably yes. But some of them provably do (and I dispute that they would have done it anyway in a healthier society). And when they do, it's often treated by most as something that should be prevented even in the singular case.
It seems like this site is different from average people in this regard though and doesn't see it as particularly relevant if the occasional Sandy Hook is part of the price of the issue. So I guess I won't be seeing too many condolences on this site the next time something similar happens, or at least that's what I'll expect if motivated reasoning isn't afoot.
Some men provably go on killing sprees for lots of reasons. We clearly cannot stop every unbalanced person unhappy with life who decides to go out violently.
But I was not talking about the occasional loner who snaps, I was talking about the premise that lonely men in Western society pose a threat to social order because there are so many of them they will turn into a disrupting force. I don't think there are that many of them, I think very few of them will ever actually "do" anything, and I stand by my claim that those who do, were probably mentally unbalanced in the first place (and not just because they couldn't get laid).
This is incredibly simplistic, reductive logic, sloppy thinking that would not even remotely pass in regards to any other issue.
"Some cars provably crash for lots of reasons. We clearly cannot stop every vehicular incident that ends violently."
"Some kids provably drown in bodies of water for lots of reasons."
"Some buildings provably collapse."
I'm sure you get the point. No, you probably can't realistically entirely eliminate men who have a grudge against society and are unattached enough to any of its benefits (which probably does involve some degree of mental imbalance, as history shows it is probably the normative human response to be placated enough by bread and circuses regardless of anything else) to choose violence. But obviously you can ameliorate the issue with changes to society, same as any other.
This again is just sloppy logic. Let's take Adam Lanza. Now let's put him in whatever his version of a dream world would be, the perfect society that absolutely caters to him (other than that shooting children is still illegal and life-ruining, if he'd actually still want to do that). You think he still shoots up Sandy Hook in that world? I doubt it. You don't think that if he lived in a world that was 10% closer to his dream world, his probability of committing the shooting wouldn't be lowered by at least 1% or so? So obviously there's a gradient here.
Of course there's a clear counterargument to this that someone might make, at least in regards to preventing his conduct: "I think Adam Lanza is nuts/evil/etc. and don't want to live in his dream world or any world that's even 1% closer to it." But I doubt this is true, what with the old saying about stopped clocks and all.
Unless you completely agree with the state of modern gender relations, or want them to be even more like the OnlyFans world they've become, where the traditional marriages that built modern prosperity are becoming increasingly less common and more antiquated (particularly among youths) than old grandfather clocks that a mouse might be running up in a nursery rhyme, then you inevitably almost certainly agree with guys like Lanza, Elliot Rodger, etc. to some degree on some things.
Are you aware of the 2023 Pew Research survey that found 63% of young men aged 18-29 to be single?
I am normally somebody who advocates for careful skepticism of Reddit-style "Source sweaty?" link-mining, but the fact that even a single survey from a relatively reputable organization was able to derive this result is objectively insane and I believe likely automatically renders false your assertion that there aren't that many lonely men these days.
Now in fact I unfortunately must agree with you on one thing here. I think the demoralization is too complete and the panopticon is so strong that we're unfortunately unlikely to see an uprising of dissatisfied men. The best case scenario for them is probably a mass exodus to AI-powered waifubots, VR, etc. (which is already happening, though not much yet as the technology is still primitive), a boycott that may eventually leave biological women in general in an actually far worse position than if they had just accepted the trad revolt (but far more gradually).
With that being said, when you have an issue that affects almost 2/3rds of young men of prime fighting age and at the peak of their virility, I don't think you can say anything for sure. If they decided they were sick of the issue and going to band together to fix it by any means necessary as soon as possible, I doubt anybody could stop them for long. Unfortunately though I also think the system is well aware of this and going to work very hard to make sure they don't get to that "if" (as it already is with the onslaught of feminist subversion and other various divide and conquer tactics). I think it will probably succeed.
I just don't think you can make any absolute statements about something that negatively impacts so many people. Complete societal-wide revolutions have been started before by far smaller cohorts (with many of the contributors to these also being relatively listless in their prior society, since after all if they had already been living such great, successful, and dynamic lives of fulfilling their ambitions and fully satisfying their hierarchy of needs they'd have had little desire to change much). To completely dismiss the capacity for violence and change of so many people with shared incentives is what I would call arrogant, cavalier, reckless, and just plain bad civilizational reasoning.
Using lots of adjectives does not add authority to what was essentially an empty assertion on your part. You are asserting that incel killing sprees are either a thing, or something we should be worried about. My assertion is that they are rare, isolated phenomena and that sexless men are of no greater risk factor in this respect than any other social malady, in terms of turning a few unstable people into killers. Your car analogy is more like "Sometimes car crashes happen because someone was transporting ducks in their car and the ducks got loose and caused the driver to lose control of the car; therefore, ducks are a threat to traffic safety."
I've already said we should should try to ameliorate the issue, because I genuinely do feel sorry for sexless men living lonely, miserable lives, and not because I am afraid of them becoming mass murderers. My point is that what you are posting is incel LARP. And also that you seem to put 100% of the blame on "society" for not providing pussy to every man who wants it.
I did not assert that there aren't many lonely men these days. I asserted that they are not a threat, or really, something we should be concerned about threatening society in a major way.
Read more carefully.
The men with a capacity for violence and change are mostly not in the category of "can't get laid."
Yeah, kind of. There have been societies in the past where men without wives were a rounding error (and often were true lunatics, though with even many true lunatics still having wives too), so it's not impossible. If a future society had significantly less availability of information technology, I would also put the blame on that society for not being capable of providing something that is ubiquitous nowadays (unless they were capable of it and not providing it was some deliberate and well-informed philosophical choice about how they wanted people to live).
Sure, but you also seem to be paradoxically reluctant to grant that this might also reduce to any degree the propensity to violence of people who are already affected by it. And I don't see why.
???
In literally your last post on the subject in response to me you wrote:
So again: ???
Yes, perhaps you should read your own posts before making them.
Alright. If 63% of men between 18-29 not being a possible threat at all is what you want to hang your civizational and historical reasoning credibility on, then so be it. I simply happen to disagree.
I think pretty much any man has a capacity for violence and change. You don't have to be appealing to women to operate a gun, bomb, etc. You don't have to be appealing to women to have a high IQ (and often the opposite is true). You don't have to be appealing to women to have strength in the numbers (as the 63%) number proves. I mean, as the classic OKCupid survey shows, most men aren't particularly appealing to women. But if they still didn't have a capacity for violence and change, history would look vastly different.
Would you consider that you're within the realm of claiming that the only men with the capacity for violence and change are those who are already considered desirable by society (and thus again have very little reason to want to change it)? Would you consider why history makes this obviously wrong?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link