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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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It is good if young people figure out how to spot lies, especially spotting the cases where people are lying to themselves.

Older women in the dating game have a clear reason for being bitter. Nature really screws them over. Their physical looks / attractiveness to men peaks in their late teens or early 20's. They age out of safely having kids in their early 40's. There goes two of the main reasons for dating/marriage: (sexual) fun and raising kids. I feel bad for them.

The comments section reflects lots of copium being thrown out. I see sexual frustration (which to me seems like a problem with partner selection). I see abrasive personalities (men don't need to feel smarter, but talking down to them like a kid becomes tiring for them to listen to). I see people buried in the culture war losing grounding with reality (most violence is committed by young testosterone fueled men. It nearly ceases to be a real concern later in life.)

I don't think this will heavily impact younger generations. I doubt younger generations are even willing to listen to older generations. They'll figure out sex and love on their own. Or they won't figure it out because of other more important trends.

Sex and committed relationships are something that I think people realize has value because of peer effects. I remember highschool: some girl in the class was the first normalish girl to have sex in a relationship, and then many other girls in school took it as their cue that it was ok to start having sex, and many boys took it as their cue that it was ok to start asking for sex. There was also a wave of breakups because of college separation.

Exactly. People should always have the infamous "bear vs man in a forest" question on their minds when reading anything women declare in public. There is great deal of GSR - gossiping, shaming and rallying as tools of relational warfare in any such situation. This is no different, just bunch of old hags trying to use the old tricks of how all women are wonderful and how all men are such pigs, possibly with some juicy story to make themselves look interesting. These diatribes are almost without factual value outside of some meta level anthropological evidence of this behavior.

Nature really screws them over.

As opposed to what?

As opposed to men, whose desirability to the opposite sex tends to increase between their early twenties and early forties, and who are able to conceive a child for a far longer proportion of their lifespan.

True, but that doesn't mean men have it better overall.

Time is really, really a much better friend to men than to women. Experience, money, confidence. All things that come with time. And most features that make men attractive don't degrade as quickly as the features that make women attractive.

Experience, money, confidence. All things that come with time.

Not necessarily, to be sure.

Of course not, but on the narrow metrics of "desirability over time" and "fertility over time" I think it's fair to say men have it better than women and thus "women get shafted by nature" is a reasonable characterisation.

Perhaps if you're comparing the derivative, but it seems that the actual value matters more than the direction. If Elon Musk loses a million dollars, he's still better off than me if I got a 2 million dollar windfall.