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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25060 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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Huh, still empty?

The European Parliaments elections happened. The European Parliaments elect 720 members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from the member countries to represent the legislative assembly (one of the three main institutions) of the European Union. While the European Parliament is often castigated for weakness compared to the executives - the European Council and the European Commission - it still has a fair bit of power when it comes to, for instance, the various regulations of the European Union. The elections also act as an ideological barometer for political developments in Europe, though since the turnout is low, this factor is by necessity diminished.

Anyway, the theme for this election was the feared/desired rise of nationalist groups and the possibility that EPP, the center-right of the European Parliament (consisting of various center-right parties from member states - people still vote for their old domestic parties in the European elections, not the Europarties like EPP or the center-left S&D, its main partner), would start cooperating with the nationalists, like center-right parties do in many member countries. The rise did indeed took place, though in a milder form than expected, with nationalists making big gains in countries like France and Germany but getting beaten back in the Nordic countries.

There's still a high chance their influence will grow in the coming parliament, at least for the "moderate" ones (ie. the ones that do not challenge the basic idea of the European Union or the general Western thrust of foreign and security policy, like support for the war in Ukraine.) Some of the results (Irish ones, since the Irish election happen through STV and counting them takes a long time) are still waited for and there's a fair bit that depends on how the groupings inside the parliament get reformed. There's little chance that the new parliament will be much improvement compared to the previous ones in terms of getting Europe out of its deepset economic funk.

One particular result of interest, perhaps more consequential than the European Parliament elections, was the onslaught of Marine le Pen's RN and some other nationalist parties in France leading to Macron calling for new parliamentary elections. While they wouldn't lead to Macron himself getting thrown out, if RN and the other groups do well or even get a majority, France might get gridlocked for at least three years.

The rise did indeed took place, though in a milder form than expected, with nationalists making big gains in countries like France and Germany but getting beaten back in the Nordic countries.

Regarding the mediocre performance of the SwedenDemocrats (Sweden's far-right party) in particular, my guess is that a lot of people who vote for them domestically aren't particularly Eurosceptic, but sick of MENA immigration and perceived softness on crime. There's probably therefore less motivation for to vote in an election that they're likely to feel has less direct influence on these issues.

There are also the numerous recent scandals...

But yes, I agree motivation pays a very important role in the results of the EU elections given the low turnout. Which I feel is an underdiscussed part of these elections.

That's probably a large reason.

In Finland, the Finns Party crashed, getting one of their worst results in well over a decade. Probably the main reasons are:

  • They're in a government that's doing (by Finnish scale) hard austerity and anti-union policies, which their supporters don't like, and anti-migrant measures, which their supporters do like - but getting the center-right to cosign those only makes it easier for their educated wealthier voters who have voted the Finns to cut immigration but consider them too redneck and embarrassing to return back to the center-right.

  • They ran a very underwhelming campaign concentrating on things like the new EU regulation mandating bottlecaps that stick to the bottle after opening - mildly annoying and might cause dribbling when using some packs, but hardly the sort of an issue that would get the masses really moving and made them look piddling. In general, since EU membership is more popular than ever, they're in a bind - moving to the centre pisses of the remaining hardcore Euroskeptic base while doing the sort of "EU is pretty lame, Finland has no influence" spiel just evidently makes their supporters think there's no point in voting and stay home.

The Finnish Left got a huge surprise result, but this is probably mostly due to the vast personal popularity of the party leader who was running as the main candidate, and partly probably a protest vote against the government.

Has the right wing rhetoric gotten more dramatic or stayed the same? I've noticed how Farage in the UK with his Reform party has been talking about deportations and net zero immigration. Something no one would say a few years ago. A lot of that is huff and puff on the campaign trail, but its still a very clear tonal shift.

Probably about the same. The biggest current category of receng immigrants being the Ukrainians might have moderated it a bit.

Promising deportations and a reduction of net migration to the tens of thousands has been in every winning party manifesto for the past 25 years.

Maybe in the US, it has always been a big no-no in Europe, as far as I know.

I remember politically fringe people like Sargon of Akkad bemoaning the idea when talking to Richard Spencer back in 2016 or so. Now there is talk of directly deporting people in the UK and Germany by the biggest hard right parties in politics. That's a big shift.

I'm talking about the UK.

Any ideas what the probable coalitions look like in the European Parliament? I presume the greens are locked out of power.

Coalitions in the EP tend to be a bit more shifting and informal than in "real" parliaments, but the standard coalition is EPP, S&D and (recently) Renew, Macron's group. Greens, Left and the less euroskeptic right have at least some influence, the more euroskeptic right tends to shut itself out of power.

So with EPP being the largest faction still, this sounds like a right-weighted version of basically the same thing?

this sounds like a right-weighted version of basically the same thing?

I'm hardly an expert on Europe, but I did just read a piece on the topic which makes an argument that this will indeed change little. From Thomas Fazi at UnHerd: "Europe’s insurgent Right won’t change anything"

Depending on where you stand politically, you might view the Right-populist surge in the European Parliament as either a grave threat to democracy, or as a striking victory for it — and a major step forward in “taking back control” from the Brussels oligarchy. But both positions would be wrong. The truth is, despite yesterday’s hysteria, compounded by Macron’s decision to dissolve parliament and call an election, the impact of these elections won’t be as significant as people fear or hope.

Consider the victors: the ECR and ID groups, who made significant gains. Both blocs are made up of various Right-populist parties who are deeply divided on several crucial strategic issues: social and economic matters, European enlargement, China, EU-US relations and, most important, Ukraine. This means that, even if they succeed in pushing the European Commission to the Right, they will struggle to turn their electoral success into political influence; on Europe’s most important challenges, it seems unlikely they will vote as a bloc. But on a more fundamental level, to assume these elections will radically alter the course of the EU’s policymaking agenda, or even threaten democracy itself, implies that the EU is a functioning parliamentary democracy. It is not.

Despite the fanfare that surrounds every European election — each one tediously described as “the most important elections in the history of the European Union” — the reality is that the European Parliament isn’t a parliament in the conventional sense of the word. That would imply the ability to initiate legislation, a power the European Parliament does not wield. This is reserved exclusively for the EU’s “executive” arm, the European Commission — the closest thing to a European “government” — which promises “neither to seek nor to take instructions from any government or from any other institution, body, office or entity”.

…

There’s also another to point to be considered. On the one hand, the fact that the European Parliament, the only democratically elected institution in the EU, exercises some oversight over the Commission’s policies, might be seen as a positive development. In this sense, the bigger presence of the Right-populist parties will certainly have an impact of the legislative process, especially on highly polarising issues such as the European Green Deal and immigration.

But on the other, this doesn’t change the fact that the European Parliament remains politically toothless. The entire legislative process — which takes places through a system of informal tripartite meetings on legislative proposals between representatives of the Parliament, the Commission, the Council — is opaque to say the least. This, as the Italian researchers Lorenzo Del Savio and Matteo Mameli have written, is exacerbated by the fact that European Parliament is “physically, psychologically and linguistically more distant from ordinary people than national ones are”, which in turn makes it more susceptible to the pressure of lobbyists and well-organised vested interests. As a result, even the most well-meaning politicians, once they get to Brussels, tend to get sucked into its bubble.

…

All this means that, while we may expect a change of direction on some issues, these elections are unlikely to solve the pressing economic, political and geopolitical problems afflicting the EU: stagnation, poverty, internal divergences, democratic disenfranchisement and, perhaps most crucially for the continent’s future, the bloc’s aggressive Nato-isation and militarisation in the context of escalating tensions with Russia. In this sense, it’s hardly surprising that around half of Europeans didn’t even bother to vote. Ultimately, the EU was built precisely to resist populist insurgencies such as this one. The sooner populists come to terms with it, the better.

So consider this a data point in favor of "basically the same thing."

Imho; Nothing will ever change and nothing will ever happen. EPP is way more ideologically similar to the Greens than the other right wing groups, it will signal to the Left that maybe they will cooperate with the Right to acquire a bit more influence in the coalition, than it will form another big tent coalition and we will have for other 5 years to follow the policies of the Greens and the Socialists.

The big tent coalitions haven't formally included the Greens thus far.

Nevertheless, it's looking like now that the great coalition - EPP, S&D, Renew, will continue. It's familiar to them, and it still bears remembering how much most the EPP considers the maintenance and expansion of the European integration project to override all other concepts, barring cooperation with more hardline euroskeptics and making it uncomfortable with even the more moderate ones.

Indeed. What often people do not understand is that the Great Coalition, or at least the EPP-PSE alliance, is the mainstay of the EP and of the European Union. It will never falter because it is not supposed to fell.

Oregon Goes To The Purge

The court reaffirmed its provisional class certification of the Custody Class and expanded it statewide. The court then found that Petitioners were likely to succeed on the merits of their Sixth Amendment and due process claims and subsequently “order[ed] that counsel must be provided within seven days of the initial appearance, or within seven days of the withdrawal [of] previously appointed counsel,” and “[f]ailing this, defendants must be released from custody, subject to reasonable conditions imposed by [Oregon] Circuit Court judges.”

Some quick background: the Eight Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees a right "to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence" in some criminal trials at certain stages of the trial. There's a whole lot of complexity of where and how that applies, but for those who can't afford a lawyer of their own, for covered crimes, the state eventually evaluates whether the defendant is indigent, and if so appoints a public defender, eg @ymeshkout. But this is neither glamorous, fun, well-paying, or even particularly safe work, so there is seldom a glut of people jumping up and down to do that job.

In 2019, a group called the Sixth Amendment Center was commissioned by Oregon state to review the public defence office, and their final report was highly critical, highlighting heavy workloads and huge pressures to close cases with as few hours as possible. Public defenders in Oregon began (or more cynically, were, given the 6AC report) lobbying for changes to their maximum caseloads and reimbursements, and while it's not accidental that their solution would have involved getting more pay for less work, this eventually did get a cap on maximum cases and some additional funding, targeting an estimated 30ish full-time employees added to 400 then-present. During COVID, a combination of increased juggling of cases due to the slower pace of concluding trials, varying treatments of different classes of crime, (and interpersonal issues) only added to the matter; case backlogs became the norm, instead of a rare exception.

In this case, the jailed plaintiffs argued that they were facing the court without competent counsel, or being held indefinitely before trial, due to the lack of indigent defense available. In several cases, they were arraigned and/or had bail hearings without having seen a defense lawyer.

And as a result, the federal judiciary will be letting them loose on the streets, with a pinky promise to arrest them harder should they reoffend.

That title isn't entirely fair. While the original district court injunction required jails to free anyone who'd been jailed seven days without an attorney, the order was later revised to exclude those "charged with murder and aggravated murder", or who have their release revoked, or who fired their own attorney. And at least theoretically, non-jail custody is still on the table, such as GPS monitoring or probation check-ins, though the majority opinion's logic about their effectiveness ("The dissent does not explain why any of these standard measures would fail") is not the most compelling.

But with the class certification, this applies to all jailed defendants within the state of Oregon and the court not-so-subtly invites further such preliminary injunctions from other states in the 9th Circuit ("The State of Washington is facing similar problems and consequences"). While the initial class claims 'only' a little over a hundred defendants presently jailed, the injunction itself is prospective, binding all future criminal prosecutions, with the corresponding impact on any police or prosecutor interest in bringing such charges.

  • There's some obvious system failure/'sleepwalking into disaster' problems, here: the opinion jabs at the dissent near its end with "Consistent with the Sixth Amendment, Oregon could solve this problem overnight simply by paying appointed counsel a better wage. It is Oregon, and not the district court, that created this crisis." The dissent points out in turn that yes, Oregon could pay appointed counsel more, and if that would solve things overnight, why not order that instead?

  • ((Because the current plan involves increasing pay and additional hiring of almost five hundred new public defenders over the next 6 years, which would double the public defender full-time staff, while absolutely no one retires, moves away, or leaves public defense. Hilariously optimistic and too late!))

  • But this genuinely is the sorta thing that can be solved, but probably not in any magic wand sorta way. Six years is a pretty unrealistically optimistic pace for the hiring of five hundred public defenders, but if they'd started in 2019 and then put a stricter limit on caseloads, we'd at least be a lot closer to an actual fix, and even recognizing the benefit of hindsight looking back and seeing 'public defense bill with strong bipartisan support derailed over climate change bill that did nothing' is kinda morbid. It's hard to get good numbers on how many public defenders work different classes of cases, or even what classes of cases fall under each category, but it's also hard to believe that there's been a great focus on optimal allocation of present public defense resources.

  • I guess this is someone's idea of solving it? Which points, perhaps, to a more critical problem than even the "sleepwalking into disaster" bit: even if someone else does respond, you might not like their response.

  • There's a little bit to quibble about on the logic of the decision itself, most notably as to whether the delays so far were unreasonable enough to require, or that the court hearings so far 'matter' in a way that the Eight Amendment counts -- it's very far from clear that bail hearings would have looked that different with counsel present, given the defendants. There's a lot to be said about motivations: no small number of the actors here are pretty hard on the 'eliminate cash bail' train, and a few want that as part of "limiting the reliance on the formal criminal justice system for low-level, non-violent offense". I can't find direct calls to Defund the Police by the less reputable orgs involved, but I also haven't exactly gone searching.

  • On the other hand, just because they're bad in other ways, doesn't mean that they're wrong here. There's little to recommend the phrase "The court required Mr. Owens to waive counsel at that hearing in order for the court to consider releasing him". While many of the plaintiffs face potential sentences exceeding their likely time in jail before trial, the mere possibility of pre-trial time served exceeding a sentence -- of 'sentence first, verdict afterwards' -- makes an absolute mockery of the justice system.

  • Even if we were to presume the majority of these jailed plaintiffs guilty (which we're not supposed to do, and there's a slim chance may even be incorrect), there's a bigger problem where thousands of indigent defendants who were released on various bails or supervisory custody already, for court cases that will happen whenever the state gets around to actually having two sides, which means a sizable fraction of those cases probably won't happen. Witnesses will age out or become unavailable or their memories unreliable, doubt increases, chain of custody for physical evidence becomes increasingly tangled, so on. There is actually a federal statutory public interest in a speedy trial, and it's there for a reason.

  • There are even some dumb culture war matters. People following the Trump trial in New York were trying to game theory out timelines approaches for federal appeals and kept getting stuck on Younger abstention. Here, definitionally, all jailed plaintiffs were in the first stages of a state prosecution and thus unable to get relief in a federal court, but the Ninth Circuit has given a delightfully fast answer to that: Younger is already screwed when it's Important, "even assuming all four factors set forth... are met".

I have essentially no sympathy for the government. This is a problem of their own creation. "Yes your honor, we failed our constitutional obligation to ensure criminal defendants have adequate representation but the correct remedy is we can hold these people in jail forever until we get around to fulfilling that obligation."

the correct remedy is we can hold these people in jail forever

Not without having them parade through the US Capitol building first.

I don’t get it. What’s the connection, here?

don’t get it. What’s the connection, here?

He's suggesting they'd be in prison if they were right-wing protesters rather than random criminals.

Maybe.

Alternately, the problem is that civilization is unravelling. The systems in place that work when incidents of crime similar are to Japan break down quickly when the incidents of crime approach that of Haiti. You can't scale a system of public defenders in response to exponential increases in criminality.

I looked up the county I grew up in old FBI statistics. There were 0 to 1 murders a year. These days it's over 100. Per capita it probably hasn't changed as much as that might imply as the population grew a lot. Even so, it began having some serious issues with crime that didn't come out in the wash of "per capita" hand waving.

It would be nice if we got a Bukele that would re-civilize our cities, but I'm pretty sure the felon, aspiring felon, and felon sympathetic demographic has just grown too strong. Can't think of any other reason so many cities have adopted policies of "decriminalizing" theft and lesser assaults.

It would be nice if we got a Bukele that would re-civilize our cities

Many of our criminals aren't so dumb as to tattoo their criminal status on their skin.

A whole lot of them are dumb enough to make their membership in criminal gangs public in other ways, like social media posts and rap songs.

But we can't even criminalize gang loitering, see Chicago v. Morales. Mere membership is likely going to be a protected First Amendment right to association. Bukele doesn't have this problem.

Can't think of any other reason so many cities have adopted policies of "decriminalizing" theft and lesser assaults.

Welfare state + ageing population -> reduced resources for anything else, including law & order and defence (ironically, what a classical liberal would regard as close to the entire purposes of the state).

I looked up the county I grew up in old FBI statistics. There were 0 to 1 murders a year. These days it's over 100. Per capita it probably hasn't changed as much as that might imply as the population grew a lot.

I don't understand the problem. If your population grows by a factor of 100, you will need to raise the number of policemen and lawyers also by a factor of 100, which you should be able to do because the number of taxpayers also increased by a factor of 100.

The population did not grow by a factor of 100.

Also, the pipeline of qualified candidates to maintain civilization does not grow as fast as unchecked 3rd world immigration, even if the bureaucracy could grow at that pace. 3rd world behavior fills the gaps.

the Eight Amendment of the United States Constitution

Sixth. The eighth is cruel and unusual punishment. The sixth amendment provides the right to "have the assistance of counsel for [ ] defense."

The dissent points out in turn that yes, Oregon could pay appointed counsel more, and if that would solve things overnight, why not order that instead?

In general, I think there is some respect for both Federalism and separation of powers more broadly that would prevent a Federal Court from mandating such a thing, not least because it would be unclear what would fund it.

From a reach perspective, telling Oregon that it cannot jail people except consistent with (their view, I disagree, obviously) of the Constitution is the most clean judicial remedy. This is much like the prison-conditions litigation in other States -- the courts cannot build and administer more prisons, so the only thing they can do for overcrowding is give the State a cap. (Strained analogy, but you get my point).

the Ninth Circuit has given a delightfully fast answer to that: Younger is already screwed when it's Important, "even assuming all four factors set forth... are met".

This might be the plaintiffs' downfall. This Court absolutely loves procedural rulings.

It seems like a widespread problem in the US that public defenders get paid like shit, even though most of them have huge loans from law school. Or more generally: the people who need a lawyer the most are also the people least able to afford one.

It's too bad reading the law isn't a more popular option for people to enter into the legal profession. Would provide both a huge boost in manpower available to assist with high time things like public defense and eventually create a larger pool of attorneys with more relevant experience to make a trial system work.

A federal government program that pays off law school after 10 years as a full-time public defender (and covers most interest in the meantime) seems reasonable. Or just a scholarship for people with high LSAT scores that covers full tuition in exchange for x years of service, with clawback provisions.

Some similar programs exist in many states and federal law, albeit with a few additional requirements. They have downsides -- they unavoidably attract younger lawyers with less trial experience -- but they're better than not having the programs.

There are increasing efforts to increase pay (eg, see the costs analysis assumptions for the Oregon bulk expansion).

But the money is only one side of the problem: public defense remains extremely unglamorous, unfun, unpleasant, and often unsafe work. Ymeskhout can point to clients who've stalked their public defenders, and it goes up pretty quickly from there.

A federal government program that pays off law school after 10 years as a full-time public defender (and covers most interest in the meantime) seems reasonable.

As gattsuru mentioned - this program does exist on the federal level. The problem with it is that (A) there is a question of whether it will still exist in 10 years when you need all your debt forgiven, and (B) the $150-250,000 it ends up forgiving is frankly peanuts compared to the $225,000 starting annual salary BigLaw firms are offering. So, you could go work as a Public Defender for $70,000 a year and by year ten maybe break six figures in exchange for what can be called a single lump sum payment of $250,000 - or you could go work at Dewey Screwem and Howe for $225,000 a year and in a decade be making half a million a year.

So while Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) does attract people to prosecutor and public defender's offices, it will struggle to attract the highest qualified law students who graduated from the top law schools. BigLaw slots are generally limited to the top 20% or so of all law students in the country, so it's not drawing away everyone, but it is drawing away the vast majority of the classes at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, and the top 10% of everyone in the top 50 law schools in the country.

I think the costs on society for a criminal trial are likely high:

  • You need police officers to investigate
  • You need forensic experts
  • You need a prosecutor
  • You need a judge and possibly a full jury
  • You need a public defender
  • In the case of a guilty verdict, you need to pay for incarceration

I find the system to pressure defendants into guilty pleas by threatening them with much longer sentences if they insist on their constitutional right to trial by jury abominable. Giving them a discount of 10% of their sentence if the case is clear-cut as a cost saving measure might be reasonable, but any more than that seems silly. If your suspect is guilty of a crime which will earn them ten years, don't offer them a plea deal for three years, just drag them in front of a jury. And if you have reasonable doubts that they are guilty of the ten year offense, don't threaten them with it.

I would be surprised if the public defenders cost more than a third of the expected total costs of a criminal trial. (In fact, I think that there is an argument to be made that the prosecutor and the defender should receive roughly equal compensation -- both are experts which will require a similar amount of time to familiarize themselves with the case, and paying one side more than the other will skew the results.)

If a state can't afford a separate prosecutor and judge, it can't afford a justice system.

If a state can't afford a defender, it can't afford a justice system.

If your suspect is guilty of a crime which will earn them ten years, don't offer them a plea deal for three years, just drag them in front of a jury.

I've got a copy of Stuntz's The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, so one big issue immediately comes to mind. The problem is that however good this might sound, and however abominable threatening longer sentences for exercising one's right to a jury trial may be, we're just not able to do this.

It's hard to get exact numbers, because most the data is on plea bargains as a fraction of convictions rather than of defendants, so you need to find the overall conviction rates — and thus acquittal rates — to compute that, and it's somewhat harder to find (and varies from state to state). But for the Federal government, you've got plea bargains at 98% of convictions, combined with a (2012) 93% overall conviction rate, to give something like 91% of all Federal criminal defendants pleading guilty. For the states, these numbers are a bit lower, something like 95% of convictions; which, for example, Texas, with an 84% average conviction rate (higher for misdemeanors than felonies), gives approximately 80% of all criminal defendants pleading out.

Thus, if something like one out of every nine Federal defendants who would currently take a plea deal insisted on a trial, you'd double the number of trials. If half of them did so, the number of trials would increase sixfold. (Similarly, one quarter of Texas plea-takers choosing trial to double trials, and half choosing juries would triple the court cases.)

Our systems already strained, overloaded, and prone to long delays with just the load it has now. I can't see any path to the vast expansion that would be necessary if any significant fraction more insisted on their day in court.

Now, the usual answer many people give to this issue is that we need to find a way to reduce the load by charging fewer things as crimes. While you might get some traction there at the Federal level, the problem is then that there isn't really all that much of the "Three Felonies a Day"-type offenses. Even the "mere drug possession"* cases make up a much smaller fraction of convictions than many people think. The bulk of felonies remain things like murder, assault, theft, rape, etc. that pretty much every society criminalizes. In this very example, we're already seeing many offenders of this sort being "let loose on the streets" — can we really picture even more "legalizing crime" than we already have?

If a state can't afford a separate prosecutor and judge, it can't afford a justice system.

If a state can't afford a defender, it can't afford a justice system.

Yes, that's exactly the point — with the crime rates of the current American population, we really can't afford a traditional Anglo-American justice system.

This is a point I've been talking about online for years. When you look at things like police per capita, police funding, prisoners per capita, and then set them against violent crime per capita, and compare internationally, the US winds up an unusual outlier — because we, pretty much uniquely, combine the police force of a wealthy "first world" nation… and the crime rates of a "third word" one. On the prisoner/crime ratio, we come out as locking up less of our criminals than many European nations… it's just that we have a crime rate many times higher. On Wikipedia's list of intentional homicide rate per 100,000 people (a proxy for violent crime in general), the United States sits right between Zimbabwe** and Yemen. It's four times higher than in France, over five times higher than that of the UK or Finland, eight times that of Germany, and thirty-two times that of Japan.

To change our current situation, we're looking at radically reforming and vastly expanding our entire justice system (and associated expenditure), or else the population either turning to non-state methods of addressing crime.

* It's my understanding that in many cases where an individual is convicted and sentenced for just illegal drug or gun possession, it's because they were also charged with other, more violent offenses and pled down to those — the plea bargain going in that direction because crimes of possession are the easiest, relatively, to prove in court — thus making the odds of losing in court the highest, and the value for the defendant of pursuing a jury trial the lowest — while the other charges would likely involve attempting to elicit testimony from victims and witnesses who live in communities where "snitches get stitches" and such.

** Where, recently, police were reportedly driven from a police station by goblins.

I mean, letting them loose kind of is the legal thing to do under the circumstances.

I think this kind of situation probably calls for a declaration of emergency, though, or failing that opening the floodgates on gun control and self-defence so that robbery becomes a "die horribly the third time you try it" proposition. If you re-enact the Wild West you'll re-enact vigilance committees, and if you can't avoid that the best option for governmental legitimacy is to get the hell out of their way.

Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait

Part II: The Strip District

Early development in Pittsburgh didn’t radiate evenly from the Point but was focused along the rivers. The most obvious location for initial expansion, then, was in the area known, aptly, as the Strip District. Its boundaries are well-defined and uncontroversial. The southern boundary is at 11th St. at the Convention Center, and the northern boundary is at 34th St. near Doughboy Square. Between these points, it occupies the narrow strip of land between the Allegheny River and a hillside so steep there are no road connections from there to the neighborhood on top (though there used to be an incline). The Strip began as a typical industrial/residential/commercial working-class area like any other river district in the days before zoning. No other neighborhood was more important to Pittsburgh’s early industrial history: This was the neighborhood where the bullets for the War of 1812 were cast in the nation’s first iron foundries, the neighborhood where George Westinghouse started producing airbrakes, the neighborhood Charles Martin Hall of what was then known as the Pittsburgh Reduction Company started producing aluminum. James Parton was looking down on the Strip from that aforementioned hill in 1868 when he famously described Pittsburgh as “Hell with the lid off”.

In 1906, the city removed freight tracks that continued Downtown along Liberty Ave. With the railroad now terminating in a yard at Smallman St., the area became a prime location for wholesalers to set up warehouse operations. The Strip had industrialized in the days before people like Andrew Carnegie could build mega-mills on virgin land, so the parcels were of a much smaller size. As the original industries left due to lack of scale, more and more of the area became occupied by warehouses. As the 20th Century wore on, the warehouses expanded and residential areas were demolished; the neighborhood’s population, over 17,000 in the early decades, was below 5,000 in 1940. As the wholesale trade diminished in the 1950s, merchants began opening retail outlets to supplement their existing wholesale business, focused on the Penn Ave. corridor, and by the 1970s the Strip had a reputation as a place where you could find fresher meat and produce than you can get in a grocery store, as well as hard to find oddities. But the rest of the district was an assortment of warehouses, light industrial concerns, parking lots, and storage yards. By 2000, the residential population had dwindled to a mere 266.

The Strip had an abortive resurgence in the 90s as part of an attempt to make it a nightlife district, but the story of the modern strip begins in 2006, when the former Armstrong Cork & Seal factory was converted into loft apartments. Since then, construction has been more or less constant. The semi-abandoned industrial areas have been replaced by high-end condominiums and office blocks, but there’s still enough industry left to give the area a raffish feel. The current population stands at about 3,200 and is expected to double in the immediate future just based on what’s under construction or ready to build. But the real draw is the shopping. Those wholesalers I mentioned earlier? They never left. When the rest of the neighborhood was run down and industrial, Penn Avenue had an almost carnival-like atmosphere, especially on weekends. Younger people don’t seem to appreciate this, but in the ‘80s and ‘90s there was no “foodie culture” or whatever other horrible phrase you want to use. Supermarkets carried stuff that everyone bought, and even things we take for granted now like prosciutto and avocados were hard to come by. Some specialty stores sold this stuff, but most supermarkets didn’t, and unless you knew about these places you were out of luck. But everyone knew about the Strip. If you wanted some oddity, it was common practice to assume you could get it there; even if you didn’t know where you were going you could just walk into a random store and ask and if they didn’t sell it they’d direct you toward who did. The atmosphere has gotten even better in recent years, as the commercial district has expanded from Penn and spilled onto neighboring streets. The big regional chain now sells specialty stuff, and even Aldi’s carries things you couldn’t find 30 years ago, but if you want to buy pheasant, or raw oysters, or even just olive oil in bulk at a reasonable price, the Strip is the place to get it. Hell, I can get fresher fish at Wholey’s than I can at any beach town in North Carolina I’ve ever been to.

With all the change, there are some contrarians out there who think that all this construction is a bad thing. They bemoan how they’re turning a historic working-class neighborhood into a place for yuppies and tech bros. The thing is, there was really nothing there to miss. I don’t think these people are truly nostalgic for tow yards, mid-century warehouses, and lots where they store pipe and electrical transformers. Most of these places were just sitting idle anyway. Consider: Everything in this shot is new construction. It may not win any architectural awards, but it doesn’t exactly look like a suburban office park. Now consider what the area looked like in 2008. Feeling nostalgic? If people are going to complain about losing the old neighborhood, the time to complain was well before they were born. The “old neighborhood” was mostly gone before the War, when the construction of the big mills drew jobs out of the neighborhood and the smaller industries that remained couldn’t support the old population on their own. Sure, it would be nice if the old housing stock remained, and some of it still does, but I’d rather build for the future than bemoan the past.

But these people are wrong in a more fundamental way; the heart of the Strip is, and will always be, Penn Avenue. As much as people may want to complain about gentrification (more accurately yuppification, since there were no existing residents to displace), the entire commercial district is local. There are few national chains horning in on the neighborhood. The more well-known businesses here are institutions; something like 20% have existed for more than a century. And the newer businesses have the feel of places that intend on becoming institutions; there’s very little corporate feel. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Pirmanti’s. Yes, it’s more of a local gimmick like the Philly Cheese Steak than fine dining. Yes, it’s overrated in the media. Yes, it’s still delicious. No, the original doesn’t taste any better than the innumerable franchise locations that are popping up everywhere. That being said, there is something to be said for innumerable franchise locations ruining the mystique of a special place. It used to be that you’d eat at Pirmanti’s when you went to the Strip because you heard about it but never got the chance to try it because the Strip was out of the way for most people. It used to be open 24 hours and was a popular place to get a late night snack during the Strip’s old club days. Now every suburb and exurb has one and I think they opened one in Florida, and they expanded the menu to include pizza and wings and a bunch of other stuff that wasn’t the classic sandwich, and these days, to most Pittsburghers, it’s just another restaurant.

That being said, there is a bit of anxiety among current residents that the big chains will see the massive population increase push out the local merchants who made the neighborhood attractive to them in the first place. While this is a possibility, I’d say it’s a slim one. The old commercial corridor on Penn Ave really only runs between 17th and 23rd streets. The area closer to Downtown is more sparsely developed and has a lot of parking lots. After 23rd street development becomes spotty and increasingly industrial until you’re in a sort of no-man’s-land until you get to Lawrenceville. The streets off of Penn toward the river are seeing the most development but aren’t as historically prized and don’t contain many of the classic strip businesses. Most telling, though, is that developers keep opening new retail space, and so far, little of it has gone to chains. The old produce terminal on Smallman St. was sitting abandoned for years after wholesale distribution moved to a larger modern building on the river. The recent redevelopment of the retail portion has been mostly local. Even if a significant chain store presence does materialize, I doubt that it will affect the existing, “classic” retail element too much. This stuff existed long before the Strip had any significant office space or residential development, and the chains that have moved in seemed geared toward meeting the demands of residents and office workers more than those of the weekend tourist crowd. Maybe some clueless suburban shoppers will grab lunch at Chipotle rather than Pamela’s or the cafeteria at Wholey’s, but a neighborhood needs unglamorous, functional places to work as a neighborhood. There’s been recent discussion of a Trader Joe’s moving into the part of the Strip closer to Downtown, and this hasn’t attracted much criticism. Downtown residents don’t really have anywhere to buy groceries, and while the wholesale outlets are fine for some things, they aren’t really places where you can do all of your shopping. There’s something odd about a neighborhood where you can get 759 different varieties of olives but not toothpaste. So I suspect this fear is largely unfounded.

Neighborhood Grade: Upper Middle Class. As I said earlier, it’s not really gentrified because there was no existing residential population of any substance, and the housing is all new construction. Parts of it were seedy, but it was never dangerous and has always been a draw for outsiders. There were never any rehabs for sale, no one ever felt like an urban pioneer moving here, it was just that one day someone built luxury apartment and the next thing you knew there were a lot of luxury apartments. It was never a hip neighborhood for artists or bohemian types. Urbanists need to take note because it doesn’t follow the standard playbook, and I’m honestly surprised that it even exists.

Now every suburb and exurb has one and I think they opened one [Primanti Brothers] in Florida

At least two. One a regular pizza place, one (the older one) an absolute dive pizza place selling slices on the beach, which seems to have a high minimum tattoo coverage and piercing minimum to work there.

At first I thought you were confused when you described these as pizza places (i.e. they just happen to be owned by someone named Pirmanti) but I checked the website and they are "official" locations, even if they bear no actual resemblance to a normal location. For the record, Pirmanti's isn't known as a pizza place, and I don't think the smaller urban locations even serve pizza. It looks like the Florida locations were existing pizza places that got a franchise to use the name and sell the sandwiches, with no effort made to resemble the ones in Pittsburgh. Apparently the actual company doesn't care that much about consistent stores. That being said, I normally wouldn't go to a Pirmanti's while on vacation because I can get that here whenever I want to. But since it's evidently a bastardized bizarro version, I'm intrigued.

I don’t think younger people understand how hard it was to get product back in the day. The strip was a real gem for Pittsburgh then. And for the region the chain grocery stores do suck.

It’s been a few years since I got primantis outside of the strip but the quality did seem different. Maybe other areas have improved. It makes sense that you could replicate the quality in the region but it did seem to be different before.

Posts like these are why I still come back here, thanks for writing this.

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.

I've thought about this occasionally. I'm a member of the "haves" in this scenario, and as more men opt out of the sexual market or become women, in theory that would be great for my prospective harem.

The problem is that I'm monogamously married and am able to raise children with sufficient male attention. The "Alphas" taking advantage of the evolving sexual market (and sometimes breeding) right now are anti-social, absent fathers, creating more candidates for the underclass that will eventually victimize my children. Maybe directly, maybe through voting.

I'd need the social ability to have a harem and rely on a group of beta males to produce enough wealth to support the family (and give me enough bandwidth to effectively father). We're a bit far away from that.

Access to sex is a major incentive for being economically productive for men. If the distribution of sex becomes more unequal, the marginal utility from additional work or career growth will decrease for men for those under the xth percentile (imagine the derivative of the Lorenz curve; depending on the starting and ending Gini indices, that break even point is around the 65th percentile). Those men will put less effort into moving up the curve through dedicated everyday effort and self-improvement and instead focus on consumption of other goods (video games, porn) and wild unproductive bets that would move them far up the curve in a single fortuitous event (gambling, speculative crypto, GME).

Which means a poorer, less dynamic society. Which is definitely a society that can survive, but I'd prefer a different one.

I'll support your position as soon as the society adopts the same indifferent view of problems and lesser discomforts that women face.

Wasn't that already the case? Incel as a popular phrase was coined in the 90s by some lesbian, do you remember hearing any panic or concern about it in the 90s or 00s before it became an issue for some men?

If you're going to go full кто кого and decide that since you can forcibly suppress a group enough, you don't have to care about their problems, why start with sexless men rather than homeless addicts, criminals, "the poor", etc?

Those latter groups can easily be ignored and shuffled off to other physical areas for other people to deal with, on a day to day basis. Sexless men seem to sprout up everywhere and are encountered everywhere on the Internet, so they're harder to avoid and need a more forceful hand.

ETA: tongue in cheek

It is hard for me to take seriously the claim that incels are more in need of a "forceful hand" than homeless addicts.

Maybe for you, homeless people occupying physical spaces are easier to avoid/ignore than sexless men on the Internet, but that is not my experience.

It was tongue in cheek (not obviously enough so, apparently).

Is any action necessary to suppress them? I didn't read the OP as saying "let's do x, y, and z to stamp out complaints of incels" but "by revealed preferences they are content to stew in porn and video games so why stress about them?"

I don't agree with OP because I am not content to just write off huge chunks of the population which could be leading fulfilling lives and useful to other people, but your objection seems like a non sequitur.

Sexless men fall into the Oppressor side of the Oppressed/Oppressor dichotomy for reasons I cannot fathom. Criminals, depending upon their ethnicity or upbringing, usually receive some form sympathy along the lines of it not being their fault or that society caused them to behave as they do.

I mean it isn't their fault, if you were them down to their genome and environment then you would be a criminal too.

“There but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford”

Some people get the doubt of a difficult upbringing, others get told to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

you know about the bootstrap thing, right?

ITYM Sexless men fall into the Oppressor (bad) side of the dichotomy.

If you were making a statement about the woke framework, where oppression is commonly used, then I think you meant to say that sexless men (like all men without redeeming features like being part of a minority) are considered oppressors.

I think the reason for that is that woke narratives are generally very simple monochrome narratives. If women are the good guys, then men have to be the bad guys.

Of course, just like the near east conflict is more complex than "evil Israelis are oppressing the Palestinians", the relationship between men and women in a society is also more complex than just one side oppressing the other side. It is more likely an inadequate equilibrium far away from the Pareto frontier.

Sexless men fall into the Oppressor side of the Oppressed/Oppressor dichotomy for reasons I cannot fathom.

Well, not with mistake theory, you can't.

Beyond the obvious reason, dealing with the problems sexless men cause means having to give men-at-large concessions to motivate them to deal with that problem (that women aren't magically entitled to male labor is merely a specific example of what "oppression" means in conflict theory). Thus, even though they might not be oppressing women directly, their second-order effects cause women to be oppressed- because if they fail to motivate men-at-large to defend them then they'll quickly find themselves paying the sexless men with sex: either way, the paying, the obligation to, is the oppression.

Criminals, depending upon their ethnicity or upbringing, usually receive some form sympathy along the lines of it not being their fault

I think this is called "choosing the bear".

Oh no, I am fully aware that conflict theory is real and this is all motivated by an subconcious or actively concious belief that Men Bad, I just want these people to explain their logic.

the average male was historically much less likely to produce any offspring than the average female

Is this true specifically because of the age-old practice of "killing all the men and keeping all the women," though? My understanding is that that is at least one of the explanations for the genetic footprint we currently have today. Possibly the "80% of women reproduced but only 40% of men" says more about war than about love.

Assuming the trend is real, we should care on an abstract level because we'd prefer to maximize human happiness and fulfillment and it's sad to see so many people being lonely.

On a social level, there probably is a disadvantage to having a large number of men feeling useless and lonely, which probably leads to them not being very productive.

Should we actually worry about violence and social unrest? Probably not - I think the notion of sexually frustrated males turning into an army and causing widespread civil disorder is mostly an incel vengeance fantasy. (I have largely the same opinion of every scenario that is supposedly going to "go hot" and cause American Civil War II.)

But it would be more productive to ask "What can we do to help these guys?" than "Why should we care about lonely guys jerking it to hentai in their basements while they imagine they're Rorschach?" For the same reason that any trend of widespread dissatisfaction would be better addressed with some grace and compassion than saying "Fuck those losers."

I don't really like the MENA comparison, because we have lots of historical examples that were, by objective measures, awful places to live for 95% of the population but were still "capable of reproducing themselves."

which probably leads to them not being very productive.

Given mass immigration and increasing automation, how much of a concern is this, really?

What happens once the immigrants can't fuck either?

What happens once the immigrants can't fuck either?

They go back to their home country with the wealth they've accumulated working in the US, which being far more than they could have earned there, greatly improves their marriage prospects?

It's debatable whether the "sex recession" is even real. Recent data doesn't show the same kind of numbers that made people on the internet freak out in 2018. If it is real, it doesn't appear to be a problem of men in particular, since women report similar, and sometimes higher rates of no-sex. The idea that an increasingly small minority of men are exercising some kind of sexual monopoly appears to have little to no basis in reality.

men have always been the disposable gender

This is an old redpill bromide but not really true. In every society with widespread infanticide (most of them), the gender ratios of surviving infants almost always skew towards boys.

In every society with widespread infanticide (most of them), the gender ratios of surviving infants almost always skew towards boys.

Indeed, and we might add that in historic times of famine food is often reserved for (male) warriors, but almost never for (non elite) women, and women often miscarry or cannot conceive during famines so this has appreciable effects on communal strength. Women are just as disposable as men, it merely doesn’t make sense for them to be warriors given basic biological differences. That doesn’t really make women ‘advantaged’ in any significant way.

Hm. Does it make sense to say that society may advantage either men or women depending in part on economic conditions? In that case, it might still be the case that women are currently advantaged - and unless we expect starvation/subsistence conditions to reoccur in the west, may be sustainably advantaged.

In every society with widespread infanticide (most of them), the gender ratios of surviving infants almost always skew towards boys.

[In Japan] Farmers would often kill their second or third sons. Daughters were usually spared, as they could be married off, sold off as servants or prostitutes, or sent off to become geishas.

I said "almost"

Is there any real counter evidence to the argument that infanticide both historically and today is mostly, in most societies, of female children? That is the way it is in modernity from rural South Africa to one child policy China.

In the US today: depending on what you consider infanticide, when IVF is used sex-selectively, it's usually to select for a girl. And when children are being adopted, adoptive parents have a strong preference for girls.

For infanticide itself, according to the CDC, boys are more likely to be victims of it than girls, both in absolute terms and proportionately (8 boys per 100k person years vs 6.2 girls per 100k person years): https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6939a1.htm#T1_down

I couldn't find concrete statistics on sex-selective abortion in the USA, but I'd expect it to follow the same trend.

Post-birth infanticide in the USA is extremely rare and shouldn't be used as evidence of anything. Sex selective abortion is harder to track, but isn't it mostly confined to specific subcultures/ethnic groups that may well have different values?

I don't think male infants being more likely to be victims of infanticide is a strong argument about gender bias one way or another. It is a strong argument against the idea that today, in most societies, female children are more likely to be a victim of it than male children: the contemporary US is a society that exists today that has some relevance.

And, yes, there are strong ethnic trends contributing to it.

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.

Can you point to the specific examples of the MENA societies you are referring to? What you are saying sounds like a gross exaggeration for contemporary MENA societies. Even in Saudi Arabia, polygamy is somewhat rare and marriage rate is high relatively, although the first website cites a misleading stat. The more relevant one is:

Within the age category where women traditionally got married in Muslim majority countries, 25-34, the rate of unmarried females reached 43 percent while for men it was almost half that at 23 per cent.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200810-66-of-young-saudis-are-single/, https://saudigazette.com.sa/article/165994

So funnily enough the site claiming 66% young saudis including 15 years to 34 years old to are single also claims that from 25-34 year old men only 23% are unmarried.

Islamic societies are mostly monogamous societies. I am not aware of any example of a society were most women disappear into the harems of rich men and the majority of men are left sexless.

It is a transparently bad idea that is both bad for the people involved and not sustainable. MENA societies with all the things one could criticize them aren't that bad. This is more of a fantasy dystopia.

It is problematic because sex is important to a healthy organism. You should care only insofar as you care about the health of others in different ways (obesity, autism rates, alcoholism, whatever).

Evolutionarily, men have always been the disposable gender

Evolutionarily men would also capture foreign war brides. I’m not sure where evolution factors in unless we are considering rallying up Afghani and Ukrainian women as eligible war brides.

the average male was historically much less likely to produce any offspring than the average female

Do you mean prehistory? In civilizational history, I would be suspicious of this once you account for war, venereal disease from prostitutes, priesthood

the average male is still significantly more likely to reproduce in a first world Western country today than he would have been historically

Not sure if this is true once war and veneral disease is accounted for

why is there such concern over this particular dip in fertility?

If the domestic population of Western nations do not have children they will be replaced by foreigners which, evolutionarily and historically, is a fate worse than individual death. Didn’t like, 20% of Russian men die to prevent German rule on their soil?

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

I think this is incorrect. MENA societies are historically a case study in fractiousness. They have calmed down in recent decades because polygamy is on the decline. In addition to polygamy on the decline, MENA has been sending their rebellious men to Iraq / Afghanistan / Libya etc where they fight to the death in some hellish geopolitical colosseum battle. However they also get war brides and that’s pretty cool.

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.

follow society's rules

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.

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.

@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?

Columbine was a tragic love story between two men. It didn't have anything to do with being love challenged.

Mass shootings (non-gang related), serial killers, and stranger rape all of have one other thing in common: they're extraordinarily rare. Most incels just descend into listless stagnation; they're not going to be agents that fundamentally change society.

While I am not @Primaprimaprima, my perspective on lone wolf shootings is that most of them are done by a specific sort of maladjusted man that isn't really that hard to notice and that the vast majority of these could be prevented pretty easily by returning to a much broader regime of involuntary commitment for dangerous lunatics. The kids at Sandy Hook died because our society values the freedom of lunatics more than the safety of innocents. The problem with the approach to Adam Lanza isn't that he was treated with too much disposability, but that he wasn't treated as more disposable.

Though Adam Lanza had received mental health treatment, apparently (going based off of Wikipedia here) he'd stopped any contact with mental health providers by 2006 to never return, and his most dramatic documented mental health issue before anyway was clean freak-esque OCD. It doesn't seem like he was on the radar of law enforcement at all before the shooting either (and wouldn't have even had a gun to his name if they ran the records, as they were all owned by his mom).

So what makes you think Sandy Hook had anything to do with society openly valuing the "freedom of 'dangerous lunatics'"? It doesn't seem like Lanza was known to anybody before the event as a "dangerous lunatic", not even his mom (who certainly must have known he was an eccentric recluse, but given that he killed her too presumably she would have taken better measures to protect herself from him had she thought he was actually dangerous).

If you were to cast a net on "dangerous lunatics" wide enough to include people like pre-Sandy Hook Lanza, not only would everyone on this site almost certainly end up in it, while you might solve perhaps the problem of lone wolf shootings, you would have the much bigger problem of an open "incel" insurgency to deal with. After all, if you're going to jail them anyway for potential mass shootings that most posters in this subthread admit that most of them statistically-speaking won't even commit...

Here's the rundown:

When he was 13, Lanza was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome by a psychiatrist, Paul Fox.[155] When he was 14, his parents took him to Yale University's Child Study Center, where he was also diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). He frequently washed his hands and changed his socks 20 times a day, to the point where his mother did three loads of laundry a day.[166] He also sometimes went through a box of tissues in a day because he could not touch a doorknob with his bare hand.[167]

Lanza was treated by Robert King, who recommended extensive support be put in place, and King's colleague Kathleen Koenig at the Yale Child Study Center prescribed the antidepressant Celexa.[168] Lanza took the medication for three days. His mother Nancy reported: "On the third morning he complained of dizziness. By that afternoon he was disoriented, his speech was disjointed, he couldn't even figure out how to open his cereal box. He was sweating profusely ... it was actually dripping off his hands. He said he couldn't think ... He was practically vegetative."[155] He never took the medication again.[168] A report from the Office of the Child Advocate found that "Yale's recommendations for extensive special education supports, ongoing expert consultation, and rigorous therapeutic supports embedded into (Lanza's) daily life went largely unheeded."[163]

In a 2013 interview, Peter Lanza (Adam's father) said he suspected his son might have also had undiagnosed schizophrenia in addition to his other conditions. Lanza said that family members might have missed signs of the onset of schizophrenia and psychotic behavior during his son's adolescence because they mistakenly attributed his odd behavior and increasing isolation to Asperger syndrome.[155][162][169][170][171]

I don't buy the claim that this is such an ordinary history that the dragnet would catch Motte shitposters. I suppose it is true that his utterly amoral parents protected their precious psychotic baby as he devolved from merely being an isolated lunatic into a murderous lunatic and that there might not have been much anyone could have done about it after they elected to do so. In any case, there is simply nothing anyone could have done to make this guy less of an unloveable incel.

Sounds like a great way to make sure no one ever voluntarily visits a psychiatrist ever again.

IIRC there are a few polities in the US that will revoke (or are at least empowered to revoke; I believe Washington is among these) your self-defense rights, and seize that property, if you do this and answer the psychiatrist's questions honestly incorrectly.

Safety culture is inherently not capable of dealing with "unsafe tendencies" in a constructive or well-reasoned manner because the only thing it can respond with is violence.

New Jersey's even better -- if you've ever seen a mental health professional at any time since birth, you have to tell the state their name and hospital affiliation to even apply to be able to buy a gun. Don't know it? No gun for you.

It's especially odd to suggest this given that recently society doesn't even have the capacity to keep incarcerated the people who are provably guilty of actual histories of real violence. Plenty of "mini-Lanzas" (that is, post-shooting) have been released on to the streets (mostly if they're black).

The original /r/cringe thread on Elliot Rodger is legendary for a reason.

There are much lonelier societies with more sexless men and they have close to zero lone wolf mass shootings. We just make the tools of mass shootings very easily accessible.

Have you expressed this opinion to any "normies", and how did they respond?

I guarantee you that if you threaten normies with visions of dark brooding virgins rising up they will (1) laugh, and (2) support further repression of said virgins. If you want a rule that says you can't get a gun unless you bring your girlfriend to say you aren't a threat (not a bad idea IMO), stories like this one are how you get it.

If you want a rule that says you can't get a gun unless you bring your girlfriend to say you aren't a threat (not a bad idea IMO), stories like this one are how you get it.

If you think that sounds implausible it's the law in some countries right now. I believe at least Canada's gun licensing regime- one of the more liberal ones, globally- requires an interview with an intimate partner, although it's aimed at domestic violence prevention. I would be surprised if it was the only such example.

There are much lonelier societies with more sexless men and they have close to zero lone wolf mass shootings. We just make the tools of mass shootings very easily accessible.

That's true. It's good that America has the 2A so its men who have been failed by society have a more productive and direct way (at least compared to suicide) to address their grievances that is capable of somewhat effectively targeting society (though of course as pointed out far too few still take advantage of this opportunity or especially target people higher up on the totem pole who are truly more responsible for their issues).

I guarantee you that if you threaten normies with visions of dark brooding virgins rising up they will (1) laugh, and (2) support further repression of said virgins.

And then they will still cry like fools at the next Sandy Hook and demand to know how anybody could do such a thing. They're not exactly imposing given their constant buffoonish contradictions and contextual flip-flopping.

If you want a rule that says you can't get a gun unless you bring your girlfriend to say you aren't a threat

Escorts would love the business this results in.

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.

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.

"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.

Cigarette smoking, by and large, does not do shit. The vast majority of smokers will not develop lung cancer; cigarettes are not some sort of existential threat whose danger anyone needs to fear.

When you are consistently creating the sort of circumstances that lead vulnerable/damaged men to snap, go berserk and then go on killing sprees, "Most of them just go masturbate instead" does not even reach the level of being wrong. Yes, the majority of these men will just waste away living lives of quiet desperation you are free to not care about, but as that population grows the minority who do in fact snap and go crazy will grow as well.

Cigarette smoking, by and large, does not do shit. The vast majority of smokers will not develop lung cancer; cigarettes are not some sort of existential threat whose danger anyone needs to fear.

what are the stats on this? Im' curious...

EDIT: looked it up, and wow yeah it's a 7.7% chance if you smoke 1-5 cigarettes a day. That's WAY lower than I'd imagined, and maybe the stats there are even cooked since anti cigarette is now the culturally accepted stance.

This ignores increased risk of heart attack and stroke. There's a reason it's the first question insurance companies ask.

Though it is undoubtedly exaggerated, and there is a puritan hatred for any nicotine product as a result.

Cigarette smoking, by and large, does not do shit. The vast majority of smokers will not develop lung cancer; cigarettes are not some sort of existential threat whose danger anyone needs to fear.

I have yet to see any causal link between whatever it is that society is supposedly doing to prevent sad men from getting laid, and spree shootings. If an incel goes on a rampage and says society made him do it, should we believe him?

I have yet to see any causal link between whatever it is that society is supposedly doing to prevent sad men from getting laid, and spree shootings.

And I don't know what that causal link is. My theory is that society is no longer properly socialising young men in healthy ways, and while some men can handle this just fine, some cannot. For a slim minority, this leads to them acting out in incredibly nasty ways.

To use a metaphor, if I fill a house with flammable rags soaked in gasoline, there's no direct causal link between that and the fire (it was the lit match thrown in the window)... but there's very clearly a relationship between the creation of those conditions and a massive conflagration, even if it wasn't the direct cause.

"These men" by and large are not going to do shit.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

were probably mentally unbalanced in the first place

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.

I don't think there are that many of them

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.

This is incredibly simplistic, reductive logic, sloppy thinking that would not even remotely pass in regards to any other issue.

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."

But obviously you can ameliorate the issue with changes to society, same as any other.

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 believe likely automatically renders false your assertion that there aren't that many lonely men these days.

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.

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.

The men with a capacity for violence and change are mostly not in the category of "can't get laid."

And also that you seem to put 100% of the blame on "society" for not providing pussy to every man who wants it.

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).

I've already said we should should try to ameliorate the issue

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.

I did not assert that there aren't many lonely men these days.

???

In literally your last post on the subject in response to me you wrote:

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

So again: ???

Read more carefully.

Yes, perhaps you should read your own posts before making them.

I asserted that they are not a threat, or really, something we should be concerned about threatening society in a major way.

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.

The men with a capacity for violence and change are mostly not in the category of "can't get laid."

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 comments

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.

They run amok because they think they've got nothing left to lose, so all deterrents are void. Ensure that people have something worth living for and they won't run amok.

Citations: WP, some guy on the Internet, and my memories of the time I ran amok as a teenager (thankfully with a body count of 0). And yes, it was at the tail-end of a depressive episode.

I don't think rambling on about mass shootings or serial killings is the big issue.

I think slacker men is the big issue. Men do the vast majority of productive labor that generates and sustains our society's prosperity- that prosperity which keeps us from living in primitive savagery- and efforts to get women to do it have failed. Marriage incentivizes men to actually go do that labor instead of playing videogames and masturbating all day.

In a primitive society, you can motivate people by the threat of starvation instead, but ours is far too prosperous for starvation or even extreme boredom to be a credible threat. Getting men to do the unpleasant work that needs doing- which women mostly won't do- to run a complex society when they can fuck off to watch netflix is an important problem to solve, and 'your woman and kids depend on you' is the best way to solve it.

That’s just one aspect of it. Whenever this subject comes up here, a bunch of posters are always eager to point out that A) young, aggressive, unattached men are the sole threat to any social order but B) demographic implosion means that this group is relatively much smaller than in earlier times. Which is basically true. But the reality is that social stability doesn’t just stem from the absence of destabilizing factors and an aging population. It’s not only that men in general need to be productive for society to prosper, it’s that they need to be invested in society’s future to the extent that they’re willing to take up arms to defend it, as members of the army, the police, a militia, a vigilante group, a posse etc. In a demographically imploding society, it’s true that there are relatively few people threating the existing order, but there’ll also be few people willing to uphold it, so the demographic effects cancel each other out. And anti-social, unattached men, by definition, will not be invested in upholding the existing social structure.

The fraction of total utility lost to mass shootings and the like is very small indeed. Anyone not caring about lonely men should also be fine not caring if one in every 100k of them commits a mass shooting.

I think the problem is more that having a lack of buy-in into society from a significant fraction of the population is a risk factor for all sorts of things. After all, these men can still vote, for one thing.

Yes, I agree in general with you (particularly that the subtle effects of men lacking investment in society are likely to be what corrodes it far more than the dramatic eruptions of frustration). But it's worth pointing out that while yours is the general opinion expressed in this subthread, it's a minority opinion overall in society. Whether they're just virtue signaling or not, a significant percentage, if not the majority, of people who express a lack of concern or disdain for lonely men also express severe apparent anguish at even singular instances of mass shootings and indicate that they would support quite significant societal changes to stop them from ever happening.

but plainly, that hasn't happened so far, certainly not on any appreciable scale

I don't think this is generally accepted---certainly not to the point of "plainly". There's a very prevalent narrative that the rise of the alt right in Europe/US is exactly the widespread social instability you would see because of this---for example see here:

"One in three young men in Germany has never had a girlfriend. Are you one of them?" Krah asks and continues with advice: "Don't watch porn, don't vote green, go outside into the fresh air. Be confident. And above all don't believe you need to be nice and soft. Real men stand on the far right. Real men are patriots. That's the way to find a girlfriend!"

Don't watch porn, don't vote green, go outside into the fresh air. Be confident.

All smart and sensible.

And above all don't believe you need to be nice and soft.

Eh, there's a lot you can get done by being nice and soft if you're good at social manipulation. I'd say from experience it's easier to leverage nice+soft into getting what you want than disagreeable+hard.

Real men stand on the far right. Real men are patriots.

And now you've completely veered off into the deep end.

Well, this is Krah from the far right AfD we are talking about.

"Come to the far right, we have pussy" sounds factually incorrect, mostly. If you think girls are finding you icky, wait how icky they find you if they know you vote Nazi.

I mean, the steel-man of that argument would be "we are in a situation in which too many men compete over too few woman interested in a relationship. The historically successful solution to that dilemma has been large scale conventional war which decimated the population of men."

Of course, most people don't really fancy to bleed to their death in some trench, so this would be a hard sell.

Far right women in Europe are shacked up or male-coded lesbians, not singles eager to repopulate the master race. Even conservative women find most far right people distasteful, if only for legitimate concerns about stupidity permeating the wide umbrella of rightists. Having said that, finding a 'far right' young woman can be incredibly fun. Theres something tantalisingly subversive about a young blonde woman quietly admitting that she is looking for any group that is willing to advocate for a nation to prioritize its own people. I get that from mothers, but every time these young women pop up in my orbit I try to get my guys to get to know them. Unfortunately map-painting CK2 autists don't pass the sniff test of conversational competence, so my efforts are continually frustrated. These guys will eventually find some asian woman to shack up with, but I dont know how to help the girls.

Unless the girls are complete recluses they’ll just end up with the guy who they’d have shacked up with anyway (depending on looks, class, social circle and personality) and then either keep their politics to themselves or slowly drift towards their man’s politics in time.

Normie women are capable of dating men and not have either of their lives consumed entirely by osmotically dictated political preferences? How can you be aware of this and be on this forum at the same time, interloper!

Theres something tantalisingly subversive about a young blonde woman quietly admitting that she is looking for any group that is willing to advocate for a nation to prioritize its own people.

It’s sad that this is tantalisingly subversive rather than the default. Life is hollow without a Riikka-maxxing qt3.14 girlfriend/wife.

The question also is what percent of men are choosing to not have sex or staying single vs. not out of choice. In the US, a more powerful legal system generally incentivizes singleness for men, as these institutions tend to work against men and favor women. I think this is how 'the right' works against its own interests of promoting fertility. The 'law and order' and 'rule of law' the right values so highly at the same time lessens the power of average men or tips it in favor or women. Outside of the US, these systems tend to be weaker, relatively speaking, compared to men, hence higher fertility rates. In the US, courts, agents, and police have tons of power, whereas military, politicians, and citizens have less. Ex-US, military, politicians, and businessmen have more power but police and courts are weaker and easily bribed or otherwise evaded.

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.

FWIW, for my personal life I have concluded that relationships are mostly not worth the effort.

When I was 18, I did not worry about finding a girlfriend at all, just assumed that it would be something which would happen on its own eventually. When I was 25, I noticed I was wrong about that, became depressed and so on. From 30 to 40 I had a relationship which felt like net negative at least in the last years, in retrospect. About a year on, my feeling about relationships is "been there, done that".

I mean, both getting laid a lot and being in a good relationship would be net positive in an abstract way. Having a helicopter pilot license would also be a nice thing to have, I guess. But just like I don't have any big dream of becoming a pilot, I also don't have a big dream of becoming a sexual successful man or starting a family. Getting to either of these three goals would take perhaps a few years of work, with the helicopter thing being way more deterministic.

I mean, if I got stuck in the 18th century, I might conclude that cleaning up my act enough to attract a partner would be the best way towards happiness. But today, I have the whole internet at my fingertips. Video games, netflix, porn, whatever. Yes, all of that is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but I would argue that everything a human does is irrelevant in the great scheme of things.

And it should be explicitly noted that the cause of the loneliness epidemic is in large part the internet: the destruction of in-person interaction, and a turn to interractions oriented in ways other than centered on people, whether that be consuming content, or interacting with individuals about a topic as we are right now.

I personally think the causality goes the other way on that — Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone in 2000, based on a 1995 essay, and the forces of atomization were already incredibly strong by that point. In some ways, the internet has actually mollified some of the trends against human connection, even as its algorithmization of connection has made the quality much worse. I think people resort to the internet because of the atomization that has already occurred.

Before the internet, people were still disconnected and lonely, they were just disconnected and lonely watching TV or reading books instead of binging YouTube and reading tweets. If anything, I think the great gender disconnection that would lead to our present was well in place by the 90s. I Love Raymond was not exactly a positive depiction of marriage.

Yeah, I've seen people in this general sphere argue that early helicopter parenting and Stranger-Danger paranoia killed a lot of outdoors socialization, combined with the isolation of suburbia and the decline of latchkey kids. The Internet and video games, as much as people might malign them when the topic of the modern Battle-of-the-Sexes comes up, at least provide some sort of alternative to "literally nothing."

I have noticed recently that the conversation from progressives has shifted to prevented boys and young men from falling down the loser rabbit hole, particularly given the rise of Andrew Tate and things like Tiktok. This is equally amusing/depressing to me given that it was progressive policy (lockdowns) that brought us to this point.

I think if you'll take a closer look, the means they propose will do the opposite of "prevent[ing] boys and young men from falling down the loser rabbit hole".

It may affect more people than you think. In many cases, it affects men who later go on to have active sex lives, but this delay means they don't make the most of their youths.

But why is this a problem? Why should anyone care except for the sexless males themselves?

Kinda proves too much. Almost everyone has some aspect of their life they're dissatisfied with, and would be possible to improve their contentment with life or enjoyment of life if they could coordinate with OTHER people enough to address that area. Or at least coordinate enough to mitigate whatever particular behavior was leading to to the negative outcome. Why should anyone care about grinding unhappiness in anyone but themselves? Why should anyone look around and see if there are potential ways to move towards a better space on the payoff matrix with a little coordination?

We could go the route of extreme atomisation where every person is solely responsible for their own hedonic state but that seems likely to result in everyone sabotaging themselves and others in ways they can't identify without having a bare minimum amount of empathy or at least realizing "hey, this thing that is making me unhappy is also making these other people unhappy, is it possible we could do something about it?

But a society where nobody puts ANY stake in their fellow citizen's wellbeing is (probably) going to be far worse off than one where people are at least willing to communicate their dissatisfaction and others are willing to hear and consider their complaints.

Some problems are mostly intractable, serious mental illness and hardcore drug addiction are often treatment resistant. So the solutions will involve, putting it bluntly, working around the sufferers and not with them so much, to get them in safe housing with consistent supervision where they are less dangerous to others and themselves, and they aren't spitting off externalities just by their existence.

But I do think that the 'problem' of socially inept, sexless, loveless, despairing males can be wrangled with and improved with the cooperation of said males. If only people would give a fuck.

I'm in a position where I'm not sexless and generally don't have trouble interacting with women, but have had an absolute bear of a time finding a woman both worthy of and willing to reciprocate true commitment, so I do count myself among the ranks of the unhappily single. And the more I grasp the severity and nature of the problem, the more I realize that those poor unfortunate souls who haven't made it past first base (if that) are stuck in a loop that is approximately equal parts their own ineptitude but also the forces of social consensus have them in a spiral where each day that passes without finding love makes them appear less worthy of it, and renders their crusade to find a partner ever more hopeless, which saps their motivation to even try to escape.

And, on the flip side, the alpha males who are aware of their advantages in the sexual marketplace are often spitting off externalities of their own, leaving behind broken hearts and 'ruined' women who will end up lonely and unhappy. Because those men, as you say, DO NOT really care about others' wellbeing and thus act in a way that ignores any second order effects they may be causing on other people. I won't go so far as to say they're 'defecting' from social norms, because those social norms were eroded before they arrived, but they are not doing anything to improve the norms.

Over the years, I have watched with intense frustration as many generally intelligent, put-together, 'eligible' women who could have formed a loving family with the right guy get entangled with those sociopathic type of men that are extremely good at getting what they want out of the opposite sex and giving very little in return, and thus these ladies end up with a kid, with STDs, with regrettable tattoos, and/or possibly a warped idea of what relationships should look like. Or at best sucks up a few years of her life where she has the best odds of finding a long-term partner and 'wasting' them on a selfish fling.

And I feel some measure of 'responsibility' for failing to step in and avert these inevitable outcomes. Not a LOT of responsibility, mind, but I feel like I do have some stake in the outcome, realizing how every female ruined by an 'alpha' now shrinks the pool that is available to the good guys who actually 'deserve' the affection.

So basically, I see many, many hapless males who genuinely crave affection, companionship, and yes, sex, and are literally 'unable' to acquire it under current social circumstances (and worse have no available resources to learn how to GIT GUD and maybe have a shot), and I see many hapless females who genuinely crave affection, companionship, and yes, sex who fall for the wrong type of guy and are unable to secure his long-term support after he plays with them (and worse the trauma or regret they experience makes it harder for them to form secure attachments in the future) and they're all OBVIOUSLY unhappy with their decisions and the way their lives have played out.

And I think, SURELY, if only we could get these two groups to interact under the right conditions, we could achieve MUTUAL GAIN FROM TRADE or something. If only someone(s) would put in the work to organize such an exchange.

And "if not me, then whom?"

That is perhaps the question worth asking. Who will take the hard steps necessary to make the collective marginally better off if they are only worried about their own internal state?

Why should anyone care except for the [unhappy, unmotivated] males themselves?

Because when the enemy comes the women need the men to defend them.

And if the enemy has more to offer the men than the domestic women, this happens, and the end result is that one way or another the women's power will be diminished (either because they need to suck it up and accept the domestic man, or will be forced to do so at the point of the foreign man's guns).

Thus the balance women in that society have to strike now is one between making it as unpleasant/oppressive/offensive to male dignity possible without the enemy of their society being able to offer them a better deal if only they don't go to war no matter how many white feathers the women force upon them.

It is on these grounds that "incel" is recognized by women to be a legitimate threat to their power- because there's a possibility (however slim in the West, of course) that should incels organize they'll be forced to renegotiate with the men of their society and have to give up some of their social power for protection from incels, just as they had to in times gone by (though granted, women being subordinate to men was still kind of the room temperature in the West when the West still actually fought wars).

Society already does not care about low value men. The only reason it pays any attention at to incels et al is out of a misguided fear that they pose or will pose meaningful physical harm to ordinary members of society. Given the continuined re-occurrence of things like the Bear-Man-Woods conversation and its complete disregard of statistics and reality, this trend will continue. I suppose the alternative is worse, in that loser men just get stepped on/around/over in the same way that homeless people do.

What if the incel problem is downstream from the problem of marriage and therefore relationships being unattractive arrangements for both men and women, but especially men? This just came to me, but I used to be a loner guy. Pretty much the entirety of my 20's was spent alone. Tragic from a certain perspective, but I'm not crying over it. Now that I've had girlfriends I'm struggling with the idea of actually staying with one long term. Not because I'm emotionally, intellectually, or otherwise incompatible with the women available to me, but I just don't see the point. I take on all this risk and responsibility... for what? They take on a dependent role and have children (probably unattractive for them) for what? The answer can't just be sex. I feel like everything that once made marriage an attractive or necessary arrangement for both parties has been totally eroded and now we're just running on the fumes of the fuel that once made marriage desirable.

The implicit point of this analysis isn't that men have become especially unattractive and this is what's fueling the loneliness epidemic, but that the clear obsolescence of marriage has taken away any motivation for men to become attractive to women and to actually try.

Women probably feel the same thing and aren't trying to be "marriageable" in the way they once might have, but their role as the selector makes the problems that result from this societal issue seem less serious, though obviously they are feeling the effects as well. I think most women want to be married with kid(s) eventually, but invisibly, imperceptibly, their opportunity for accomplishing this passes them by, and they either have to settle for a man they otherwise wouldn't have if they knew what the deal actually was in their youth, or they go it alone.

You should have kids. It’s incredibly, unbelievably rewarding. Unless you’re literally on track to be the next Lincoln, having kids will be by far the most meaningful and impactful thing you do. And kids need a stable family life, so you should get married first.

I'm begging the people who push this line (which is true on its face) to actually run some calculations and estimate for the class how many actually marriageable women are available in the pool.

How many are single, heterosexual, haven't had kids already, are not grossly overweight, are not riddled with mental disorders, don't have a huge bodycount or any Onlyfans, and are actually interested in having and raising kids in a committed, monogamous relationship.

Otherwise you're basically telling guys to go bobbing for apples in a tub full of acid.

Have you done it? Anecdotally in my locality (SF) basically every late-20s/early-30s woman I know fits the bill. I have a bunch of female friends like this actively searching.

I've run numbers in the aggregate. I'm not standing by them as anything other than a starting point:

About 40% are obese. We've already thinned things out (heh) significantly right there. Maybe Ozempic will save the day.

19% are single moms in the U.S. and Canada. Although I imagine that changes drastically based on race, because I wouldn't have believed that number on first glance.

Around 5-7% are LGBT... although that's much higher for Gen Z women.

Somewhere around 25-27% have had mental illness diagnoses (not counting the severity). Might be 30%+ for the 18-35 year olds that we're talking about)

Around 50%(!) have had 5 or more sex partners. 5 is an arbitrary cutoff, and I CATEGORICALLY DO NOT BELIEVE THE NUMBERS on this type of survey, but again, not an encouraging sign. Difficult to find hard data on how many have been strippers, or prostitutes, or sugar babies, or had Onlyfans pages.

If you want more reliable data take a look at STD rates by gender. Or don't. Its not a fun read. (This one IS hugely disparate based on race, to be fair).

EDIT: to add on, women have more student debt on average, and are less likely to pay it back. So now these women are adding financial burdens to any man who takes them.

And finally, drumroll please, somewhere around 40% of young women are left/democrat leaning. That's before you examine unmarried women specifically. Something close to 70% of single women are probably on the left, politically. Go ahead young man, take a swim in that pond, I'm sure it'll be fine. “Plenty of fish in the sea,” but barely any that are safe to eat.

So we're likely looking at a scarily small % of single women who are relatively chaste, mentally stable, straight, and politically 'moderate', AND also not grossly overweight. And this is what any guy trying to intentionally date and find a relationship is encountering: slim pickings.

And that's before we get into a guy trying to find a match in looks or intelligence.

And as I said in a different comment, women just aren't bringing much to the table to counter the risks, when divorce is still prevalent and doesn't favor the males.

I haven't done the analysis to figure out how these various stats interact (i.e. obviously there will be crossover, so you can't just treat all of these like independent factors), but my gut feeling is it won't help.

And keep in mind, almost by definition the most marriageable ones will get picked up early and removed from the pool and stay out of the pool (people capable of maintaining stable relationships tend to stay in stable relationships. Surprise!). So selection effects would suggest that you're far more likely to encounter the dregs when you're actively searching.

And what makes it particularly bleak is running the numbers on the number of single males in the U.S., and consider how they're ALL chasing the same pool of women, almost regardless of the guy's age. A 50 year old can still have a fling with a 25 year old.

I would guess that what is actually GEOGRAPHICALLY AVAILABLE to a given man will vary too. SF may be a particularly unique circumstance compared to anywhere else. But the type of male you're competing against will also probably be top 1% too.

So yeah, MY read on the situation inevitably leads to the blackpill.

I want people to get married and have kids, but I feel like I can't, in good faith, tell guys to just bite the bullet and marry someone as quickly as possible when there's a veritable minefield out there.

Some of these are legit (like fertility) but if you’re giving up on having kids because your potential wife slept with 6 guys before you or is liberal, it’s an incredible self-own and you’re shutting yourself out of the most joyous thing you will ever experience in life over really tiny details. Obviously nobody is forcing you to compromise but I really hope you and others reading this don’t sacrifice your happiness on the alter of weird twitter dating discourse.

They're all just risk factors that should be considered.

You want to make the case that guys should marry and have kids, show them the odds they're facing.

or is liberal

The problem is that "is liberal" tends to be an effective proxy for "is a gynosupremacist".

That's intensely corrosive to relationships for what should be obvious reasons, since someone whose axiom is "always take for I am better, never give for you are lesser" simply can't function in an environment of give and take (i.e. a healthy relationship).

And the reasoning is the same as the [steelman for the] virginity argument- "if she had any brains or working emotional regulation, she wouldn't have been given to man-hating in the first place", and being someone who could be vulnerable to social pressure/irrational hatred like that is a liability (corresponding copypasta: "if she's still a feminist, you aren't the one"). Will she fall back on blaming you just for being a man if and when things go bad? Will she take it out on your sons, resulting anywhere from simple quiet quitting to "I'm divorcing you because you won't gender-affirm the new daughter I would have rather had"?

I say this as someone who thinks "a lack of virginity means she's sex-obsessed with all men everywhere" is the spear counterpart of the above, and just as serious a problem, for the same reasons- as this is a clear symptom that the man has problems with his brain or emotional regulation, gives away a bit of underlying androsupremacy, and might take it out on you or his daughters if the relationship hits a rough spot (corresponding copypasta: "raising daughters is the ultimate cuck").

Partners just aren't bringing much to the table to counter the risks

Every new video game or porno-tech (though I repeat myself) produced simply makes the definition of "much to the table" that much stricter. And I think this is relatively equal across genders- the amount of inherent boorishness/laziness in the average man, or inherent entitlement/screaming harpy in the average woman, that can sustain a relationship... is far lower than it was 100 years ago. Personality types that don't measure up are now much less likely to make it out of the gene pool (and that's even before getting to "is he stable?/is she attractive?") and will also be inherently more loudly resentful of this fact.

The problem is that "is liberal" tends to be an effective proxy for "is a gynosupremacist".

Almost no women IRL are like this. I’ve been on hundreds of dates in big liberal cities and I don’t think I ever met someone who meets this description. It’s a type of woman that exists basically only online and perhaps in some weird pockets you’ll never encounter in person anyway.

As for the virginity thing, I dunno, sleep with a virgin to get it out of your system. It’s just not important.

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but I really hope you and others reading this don’t sacrifice your happiness on the alter of weird twitter dating discourse.

Please don't minimize like this. I didn't report the comment because I believe in addressing things like this head on instead of running to the Mods.

This isn't "weird Twitter dating discourse" this is, as the kids say, "lived experience."

I spent part of my 20s trying to find Mrs. Tollbooth in order to settle down. I kept an "open mind" the way mainstream culture told me to and didn't care about past promiscuity, political incompatibility, their status as a child of divorce and/or poor relationship with father.

Each one of these relationships failed catastrophically for what I recognize now as very significant character and personality failures. I'll admit that I probably didn't do enough to highlight and try to correct bad behavior (again, I was trying to be accepting) and, in at least one case, sort of gave up but kept having sex because sex is fun (I view this now as personal weakness. I wonder what your average sex positive person would say).

So correlation is not causation, right? That these women had "questionable" backgrounds doesn't mean that those background caused these bad situations, right? Bullshit. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. These women had failed to demonstrate a high-trust and durable relationship with any man in their life up to that point (one was even openly, frequently, and hostile-y critical of her very mild mannered and milquetoast brother). Why in the hell would I take all of the available data and throw it out because "don't believe what you read on Twitter"

I should've been fishing in other streams. I realize that now and that's what I do now. I've also cleaned my own act up over the course of several years. My fear is that what @2rafa said in another comment somewhere in this thread is true - I missed the boat on good pair-bonding in my 20s and now will have to "settle" for a woman who did the same in her 20s, but likely has the same view as I do now. Is that really settling and will I quietly resent her for life? Probably not, that's stupid. The fear remains.

But @faceh isn't being some sort of Twitter edgelord when he crunches them numbers and comes up with "welp, blackpill might be on the menu." He's reflecting the reality of thousands of younger unmarried men. And that reality is now manifesting in meaningful ways

Yep. I fell for a few girls who had classic red flags (grew up without father. Claimed to be molested when younger. And/or were on various psych meds, for instance) and I BENT OVER BACKWARDS to be accommodating.

My efforts were not recognized or appreciated or reciprocated, and ultimately the relationships failed in EXACTLY the way you would expect given the stereotypes. The lady blows it up with some irrational, out-of-pocket behavior which completely ignores the actual history of the relationship. Total waste of time and effort to achieve a predictable result.

Eventually you get sick of ignoring your gut and taking chances on the hope that you found a diamond in the rough.

As far as I know, the ex who dumped me prior to our wedding hasn't found another long term partner in the 3 years since.

Suggests it wasn't a me problem.

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How many are single, heterosexual, haven't had kids already, are not grossly overweight, are not riddled with mental disorders, don't have a huge bodycount or any Onlyfans, and are actually interested in having and raising kids in a committed, monogamous relationship.

If you’re middle class, live in the downtown core (rather than fat suburbs) of a major coastal city and are under 30 and dating under 30 year old women then…yeah, there are a pretty large number of these women, tens or hundreds of thousands of them depending on where you are. Certainly enough not to ‘give up’.

If you're living in a city the number of male suitors is going to be large as well.

So it seems likely that the males are going to be in a state of hypercompetition until they get lucky enough to pull an eligible woman. And many, many won't get so lucky.

And the harder the males compete, the less worthwhile the actual reward is, which will lead some to "drop out."

The stats on males without relationships seem to bear this out.

Why is the number of eligible men higher than the number of eligible women? 5’6 Salvadoran construction workers and 6’ software engineers and guys in the hood with records aren’t competing for the same women.

Multiple reasons. At least partially because of stuff like this:

https://nypost.com/2024/06/14/sports/bill-belichick-72-is-dating-24-year-old-former-cheerleader/

A 70 year old man can date a 24 year old.

https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a45069426/who-is-leonardo-dicaprio-girlfriend-vittoria-ceretti/

A 50 year old can date a 25 year old.

https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/05/us/billy-joel-marries-girlfriend-alexis-roderick/index.html

A 66 year old can marry a 33 year old and pop out two kids with her.

Literally any heterosexual male aged 20-80 can try to compete for the same pool of desireable 18-30 year old females.

And social norms aren't pressuring against this. No, this isn't limited to celebrities, those are just the ones that get attention.

Every single 20-something woman taken off the market by an older man is one less available for the young men. Which by definition will decrease their chances of finding one.

Stats bear out that women are significantly more likely to be dating or married to a "much" older man than a man is a much older woman.

And young men can see these headlines and realize what it means for them.

Then of course there's my point that women are using corporations as a substitute for husbands

So men have to compete with megacorps, too.

Marriage is very important to Mormons and Gays. That is an anti-signal to normies. Sorry but Internet Atheism and the fight for gay marriage has poisoned the concept for at least a generation.

I've recently (in the last year, I think) started to get a sinking feeling that there's been pretty significant shift in the payoff matrix for marriage or even long-term relationships. A combination of men needing to work harder than ever to actually attract a decent mate, and conversely women having to do less and less to be considered 'marriage material'.

In a sense, EVERY woman in the dating scene is just a milder version of Natasha Aponte where they can make all the interested men jump through hoops to compete for her attention while she sits back and judges their performance. And isn't even obligated to pick one at the end. Far as I can tell that lady is still single.

So it becomes pretty reasonable for a guy to look at all the effort and money he'd have to spend to locate a mate and outcompete the other males in the population for her attention, compare that to what he's getting if wins (that is, a companion he can hopefully have regular sex with but who won't cook, clean, may not even give him kids, and will be generally insufferable to deal with half the time) and decide he should just focus on grinding out more wealth for himself and try again later when his relative status improves.

The girlfriends that I've had (including the one I actually proposed to, and then got dumped by prior to the wedding), in retrospect, brought virtually NOTHING to the table that I couldn't have gotten with a male roommate. They weren't good cooks, generally didn't contribute much to household upkeep (despite contributing plenty to the mess), spent copious amounts of time on insta/tiktok/netflix, and had the emotional regulation ability of a teenager at best. The girls I've dated in recent years are not much better, where the one thing they could actually sell themselves with (willingness to bear and raise kids!) seems to be the last thing on their mind.

So getting a GF means you can have sex, yes. But we've all heard the stories of bedrooms going dead after you've tied the knot.

Yeah, if you find a decent one it will contribute a lot to financial stability, that's a strong benefit. But if she ever divorces you it will be the most financially crippling event that could happen short of a chronic gambling addiction.

So on balance a male roommate could still win out.

I'm half considering making that a qualifying question I ask of women I date. "What do you have to offer that I couldn't get from some random guy I met through Craiglist."

I think most women want to be married with kid(s) eventually, but invisibly, imperceptibly, their opportunity for accomplishing this passes them by, and they either have to settle for a man they otherwise wouldn't have if they knew what the deal actually was in their youth, or they go it alone.

Ties into my point that corporate jobs are a substitute for a husband for a woman in her 20's. And there are very few warnings being given to women that "hey, if you put off family formation until your late twenties or even thirties, you are making it SUBSANTIALLY harder on yourself to ever achieve it."

So the current zeitgeist is leading to an outcome where women 'unknowingly' burn their most important years in ways that aren't conducive to their long term happiness.

AND YET, people are still getting married and holding on to (seemingly) happy marriages, kids and all.

AND YET, people are still getting married and holding on to (seemingly) happy marriages, kids and all.

Much fewer people are doing this if a certain graph can be believed.

I believe the graph, but there's still those managing to do achieve something like the traditional life trajectory.

My younger brother got married last year, and is expecting a kid in about a month. He doesn't own a home yet but he has got everything else going for him.

I'm half considering making that a qualifying question I ask of women I date. "What do you have to offer that I couldn't get from some random guy I met through Craiglist."

Another point for random guy: In the event of a home invader, having a male roommate instead of a girlfriend/wife means the fight will be 2-on-1 instead of 1v1.

That could be a good “Man vs. Bear”-type question for Twitter and TikTok seethe. “For the men out there with wives or live-in girlfriends, who would you rather live with? Your wife/girlfriend but no more sex or blowjobs, or a random guy you can pick from Craigslist?”

Random guy could himself be a threat. Better a female roommate that can be bullied into at least doing her chores, than dumbfuck larry who spit shines his plate before nuking another hot pocket.

For the most part though, the problem is that women on dating apps have an extremely limited window of Compatibility before they are removed. Good women shack up fast and are taken off the market, or get spammed by shitty dudes and shut down the app, or go on a series of unfulfilling situatkonships and shut down the app. Those who remain are women who like drama, or are undateable for any other reason.

It is quite commonly seen on this board and others that the most viable population for mildly asocial professional westerners is asian women, since they tend to despise asian men and are not fat enough or crazy enough to be disqualifying candidates for dateability. There is the pretty severe risk that an asian woman on dating apps TURNS INTO her white sisters and falls into shrewdom, but thats her fate to bear. Optimal strategy for women should be to date up and secure the bag asap, not fight in the thunderdome to be Chad Thundercocks leavings.

Sure, but Asian women also tend to receive As and Bs unusually frequently, which mean that parts of their bodies those letters suggest are a given size are larger and smaller than the average man wants, at the same time.

Plenty of perverts raised on anime love Delicious Flat Chest. Between fat and booby/butty versus slim and flat, slim and flat usually wins. That is also of course influenced by scarcity, but thats a different dynamic to examine.

The confounding factor is that most of those DFC-loving perverts are probably also ped—ah, sorry, lolicons.

Go on anime-styled erotic art websites and you’ll find heaps of drawings of girls with massively oversized chests (and somewhat less universally, legs and posteriors). Of course, the dichotomy you proposed was “flat and thin versus round and fat”; if that’s the case, then flat would probably win simply because fat is so repulsive. But for reasonable values of the thickness coefficient, I wager that curviness wins out.

This assessment is largely based on my own lived experience (although does looking at 2D porn really count as living?), but I remember one guy (who roleplays as an Orientalist slave trader—weird shtick) who did a more thorough analysis of popular tags on these sites and came to a similar conclusion.

Waist-Hip Ratio is a better overall guide than cup size or bodyweight. A flat chested girl will have no problems if she's skinny, a slightly softer girl will have no problems if she's well endowed. It's the flat fat girls that need to worry. Everything else is matters of taste.

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Yeah.

There's not nearly enough pressure on women on the apps to just HURRY UP AND PICK SOMEONE or go look elsewhere. The ones who stick around, even if they're not crazy, are basically grazing like herd animals, wandering from one patch of grass to another and eschewing any real decision.

Your complaints can also apply to guys, mind. If a guy has been on the apps for a long time, gone on dates, and is still swiping, there's gotta be something about him that is keeping him from successfully entering a relationship.

But yeah, seems like getting 'lucky' on the apps is just that. Luck. You have to manage to catch a lady who is inexperienced and naively entering the arena, hasn't been picked up by a Chad, hasn't been scared off by the waves of creeps, and hasn't gotten mild PTSD from a series of bad outcomes.

And most guys are lowkey aware of this, so they're all on the lookout for the fresh faces to jump on ASAP before they're spoiled. Which ultimately worsens the "overwhelming wave of creeps" issue.

Hell of a collective action problem to solve. Not that the appmakers want anyone to solve it.

When my galpals whine about not finding men to stick with them, I ask them to consider women. Apparently this is autistic to verbalize, because for all their claims that sexuality is a spectrum most insist on liking cock, preferably attached to a 6/6/6 who can 'banter'.

This of course happens because my friends are older women who are comfortable explicating their preferences to Wrongthink William, and when younger these women gaslit themselves on what they actually wanted. Having wasted years of their lives hating themselves for fucking Chad and then displacing their self hate onto Chad, who then rightfully concludes these women aren't serious, the rapidly diminishing physical value these women command has turned the deluge into a shower. At least in the deluge there was the chance of finding a gem in the flow, but in this state they find their pickings increasingly unsatisfying.

The funniest thing is that for the women that do say 'sure lets see what the carpetmuncher crowd is like', its STILL full of dudes! Shitloads of creeps just say they are women or nonbinary and put their full 100% shitty male profile picture and details there. One girl claims she had her account banned for transphobic abuse when she matched with one of these fakers to berate him for abusing the system. I mock them all for the chickens coming home to roost for them, but I still feel for them and wish they can find happiness. Alas the cat-per-woman average is reaching 2 for these girls, and I think thats tipping point but I dont' know why I think that.

*Treason in Canada

Background:

  • CSIS (intelligence agency) whistleblower leaks that hostile foreign governments have substantial influence in Canada, including influence over MPs, and no one is doing anything about it.
  • An inquiry was eventually triggered. The secret report was recently released to certain parties. The report states that multiple MPs willingly assisted hostile foreign governments in actions against the interest of Canadians. The full text of the report is not public and the names of those MPs are not publically known.
  • Trudeau is the PM, and his office controls security clearances and classification. CSIS doesn’t have prosecutorial or police power. RCMP (federal law enforcement) has investigative power, but reports directly to the PM. Moreover, much of the info in the report was gained from CSIS intelligence or five-eyes intelligence, which makes the conversion from intelligence to legally admissible evidence very difficult. Regardless, there appears to be no ongoing RCMP investigation.
  • The question of whether the facts in the report can become legally admissible evidence in a particular trial are largely irrelevant to the political problem of treasonous MPs.
  • It is widely assumed that MPs from multiple parties are involved, but that Liberal MPs likely make up a majority. Everyone expects China to have the most influence, followed by India.
  • The other major parties, CPC and NDP, have called for the names to be released.
  • Trudeau’s party, the Liberals, refuse to make any of the MPs names public. In one parliamentary exchange over making the issue, a liberal MP said “Boo Hoo! Get over it!”
  • Prior to this, Trudeau and the Liberals have been tanking in the polls, and a new election is expected in 2025; a landslide Conservative victory is expected. Now, Canadians are going into an election where they will have to vote for MPs without knowing which MPs are literal traitors.

--

This seems to be a legit constitutional crisis (for lack of a better term) for Canada. If nothing happens and the names don’t get released, I would expect substantial ramifications for Canadian society. I would expect foreign influence to sky rocket and for corruption in the Canadian parliament to become an open market. If the government is willing protect treasonous MPs, even when they are all but publically outed, why would hostile parties not just openly buy as many MPs as possible?

I would also expect this situation to cause faith in the government to plummet and for separatist sentiment in Quebec and the Prairies to increase. Trudeau has publically opposed the concept of Canadian nationhood/sovereignty. For example, he said that there is no such thing as a Canadian identity and that he views Canada is the world’s first “postnational state.” He has also presided over an aggressive immigration policy which has put incredible pressure on the social fabric, on the housing market, and on health care. Now, on top of all this, is an openly treasonous government.

Will this be the straw that breaks the camel’s back? I'm surprised there isn't more news and discussion about this. @KulakRevolt can we get a QRD from the inside?

*As is true of the US, I’m sure there is a technical definition of treason in Canadian law. Whether the actions of any particular MP rise to that level does not change the political implications.

Of course China and India are corrupting Canada: the Chinese and Indians have been given free reign to immigrate, for the former in their stronghold of Vancouver, the latter more concentrated in Ontario. Neither group treats democracy the way whites do, voting for policy, but instead use it as an ethnic tally, and in particular the more you see these races immigrate and vote, the more you see the representatives allowing them to continue immigrating. Both countries are increidbly populous and have grown relatively wealthy over the last two decades, and that wealth is now being used to control places like Canada.

There is the issue regarding Chinese immigration that the PRC government is notoriously willing to take emigrants' families hostage to force them to do what the PRC wants. As such, the majority of Chinese immigrants are effectively sleeper agents, which doesn't matter right up until you want to pursue foreign policy that Beijing doesn't like and then it really, really does. We've been dealing with this in Australia for the last couple of decades.

I’m curious if there’s anything to be done about it when liberals, to whom the majority of the corrupt MP’s probably belong if for no other reason than they hold a majority, don’t want to.

If the NDP at any point grows a pair (probably requires turfing Jagmeet, which would also be a good idea, for them) you could see a majority-backed confidence motion on this which would get either information or an election in short order.

For example, he said that there is no such thing as a Canadian identity and that he views Canada is the world’s first “postnational state.”

I've been trying to put into words why I'm against open borders and I think this is the piece I needed to understand my inherent distrust. A post-national state does not have a people, it has a territory. Other - real - nations can exploit that territory without regard for the people. The government of a nation is elected by the people to put their common good first.

Trudeau sees himself as some sort of steward of Canada's natural resources and land. His "postnational state" denies the existence of a category called "Canadian people." There is the land of Canada, and the people currently inhabiting it which he has jurisdiction over. But without having a category of Canadian people to even reference, his decisions are not sourced in what is the well-being of the Canadian people and their decedents.

A post-national state does not have a people, it has a territory.

A post-national state is usually known as an "empire".

And Canada has always been, to a point, an empire; if you don't live in the Triangle between Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal, your vote and your interests don't matter in the slightest when it comes to federal politics. This is slightly less true for the provinces east of that area, and provinces do have some overlap (and it's worth noting that, because the Triangle is not its own province, it can be overruled in Provincial politics especially when that Triangle has made those provinces their enemy... which, naturally, they have).

Thus that Triangle, for all intents and purposes, is Canada, and the rest is just territory that it has empire/dominion over (the "provinces" are more sub-administrative units in the ancient Roman sense; they are not "states"). Quebec's culture is more reactive/resistant to this state of affairs; the West, not as much, but the West has more in common (culturally, legally, linguistically) with the Triangle than Quebec does.

The "post-national" rhetoric is a Moldbug-ian call for Triangle residents to be more explicit in their supremacy (and an acknowledgement that the "post-national" government will put Triangle interests first) and stop thinking Canada is/should be like the US, with its checks and balances between states- which happen to prevent SoCal and the NY-DC corridor from exercising Imperial control over the rest of the nation to which they feel entitled (because the "I win" button in democracy is simply "have more voters than the other guy"; that's why the US [nominally] has laws to limit how much power that can ultimately yield, why most of the "it should be purely population that decides everything" rhetoric comes out of those places, and why each side has the immigration policies that they do- and this is generally seen as legitimate in the mind of the average resident, even those opposed to the Triangle, the most major effect being that this is why Quebec-minus-Montreal isn't its own nation right now).

It's worth noting that #notAllTriangleResidents, of course- even in the Triangle, Canada is still generally seen through the US lens of a collection of polities working together to accomplish some common goal, with a common-ish culture, with some differences (otherwise there would be no need to have Triangle residents see their empire for what it truly is). This is an even more popular view in the West, which is why when the West (and to a point, its elites) comes to protest the Triangle and its people -> policies they wave Canadian flags, not separatist ones.

I think that for [the idea, and "nation", of] Canada to be stable going forward the rest of the nation needs some much-needed checks and balances against the Triangle; that is what the Senate is nominally for (and, very revealingly, it was initially set up so that Ontario + Quebec alone could veto any legislation, though that's not what it does in practice). Of course, usually when this happens, a pan-dominion government can be elected in the Triangle and imposes on the Triangle elite anyway (which, naturally, deflates separatist movements); that happened post-Trudeau once, and perhaps it'll happen again.

And Canada has always been, to a point, an empire; if you don't live in the Triangle between Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal, your vote and your interests don't matter in the slightest when it comes to federal politics. This is slightly less true for the provinces east of that area, and provinces do have some overlap (and it's worth noting that, because the Triangle is not its own province, it can be overruled in Provincial politics especially when that Triangle has made those provinces their enemy... which, naturally, they have).

Thus that Triangle, for all intents and purposes, is Canada, and the rest is just territory that it has empire/dominion over (the "provinces" are more sub-administrative units in the ancient Roman sense; they are not "states"). Quebec's culture is more reactive/resistant to this state of affairs; the West, not as much, but the West has more in common (culturally, legally, linguistically) with the Triangle than Quebec does.

This seems off given the history of the current edition of the Conservative Party of Canada. Stephen Harper is an Albertan, and he built his political career in a party which was initially founded with the explicit goal of providing better representation of Western interests (Reform), and gradually evolved into a generic right-populist anti-Triangle elites party (Canadian Alliance) before doing a reverse takeover of the moribund Progressive Conservative party. Poilievre represents a riding in the Ottawa suburbs, but he grew up in Alberta, was a member of Reform/Canadian Alliance before the merger, started his political career in Albertan student politics, and only moved to Ottawa because he co-founded a lobbying firm with a man who would go on to be Attorney-General of Alberta. I think it is clearly fair to describe Poilievre as Albertan as well.

Even back in the PC era, Brian Mulroney (the last PC prime minister to serve a full term) grew up in (non-Triangle) eastern Quebec and represented a riding in eastern Quebec, although he did have a non-political career in Montreal in between.

The Triangle only dominates Canadian politics when the Liberals are in government and, despite what the Liberals want you to think, that isn't all the time. The Canadian party system in 2024 absolutely represents the interests of Western-Canada-outside-metro-Vancouver - probably beyond the level of representation the population out there merits.

A post-national state does not have a people, it has a territory.

Strictly speaking, a post-national state need only lack a people defined by common birth or shared ancestry, and can have one defined in other ways. One can argue that nation-states are a superior form of social organization to those other ways, but they are neither untried nor historically novel (e.g. Rome, Islam).

I'm not sure ancient Rome is the correct analogy here. Rome was quite stingy with offering citizenship. It did happen, but it took hundreds of years. Even as late as 100 BC, when Rome was already master of the Mediterranean Sea, many cities and towns within 100 miles of Rome were merely "allies" and not citizens. This caused the Social War (91–87 BC) in which Rome was forced to offer citizenship to some "allies" in order to suppress the others.

It wasn't until three hundreds years later, (212 AD) under the reign of the notorious tyrant Caracalla, that the citizenship was extended to all free men in the Empire. By then, many people didn't actually want it, and the reason it was granted was to extract more tax revenues.

Rome was ascendant when it was a nation state composed of Romans. When it offered citizenship to others, it was generally from a position of weakness. I will concede that the Romans held out for a long time.

Rome was quite stingy with offering citizenship.

While they were in most respects stingy by modern standards, the fact that they had any form of naturalization at all was a radical break from all of their Mediterranean neighbors e.g. Athens where only people with two citizen parents were citizens themselves or Sparta with its permanent helot underclass, and this contributed to Roman military dominance as they were able to radically increase their available manpower over time. I also think the sort of mass granting of citizenship to allies as a reward for military service that Rome engaged in would be seen as radical even today, something akin to the US giving all inhabitants of Sonora citizenship in exchange for them suppressing the cartels (the closest modern equivalent might be the French Foreign Legion, which is relatively small).

Rome was ascendant when it was a nation state composed of Romans.

If we're going by the standard chronology, where the zenith of Roman power is the death of Trajan in 117 AD, then I don't see how this is true. 2 of the 5 Good Emperors were Iberians and no one seems to have cared, not to mention the long string of Illyrian emperors who ended the third century crises and founded one, if not the greatest of Roman cities i.e. Constantinople. On that note, the fact that a bunch of Greeks went around for a thousand years calling themselves Romans seems evidence enough of the assimilatory power of Roman institutions (interestingly enough these Romans functioned more and more like a nation as they lost territory and became weaker, but it certainly wasn't the same as the original nation).

Good points all around. My person take is that Rome reached its zenith with the fall of Carthage. The territorial gains for the next 200 years were just the inevitable consolidation. But I recognize this might be a minority view.

And you are right to mention Sparta which largely died out because of sub replacement level fertility.

Sparta’s actual fertility rate is unknown; citizen oliganthropia in Sparta was caused by runaway inequality driving citizens below the property requirements for citizenship.

Assimilating elites and the masses are different things and changes in politics and technology matter here.

I don't think most Britons are worried about Asians who went to Harrow, which I suppose would be the equivalent to Greek and Gallic nobles fully buying into Rome.

If "Comintern" was still in the public parlance, you wouldn't have needed to search for such a term. Trudeau clearly sees himself as the General Secretary of the Canadian Union in its temporary position as a state, during its transition to an indivisible part of Communism.

The saddest thing, is if I took a poll, i would bet that more canadians know that Trump was convicted than know that literal sitting MPs willingly assisted foreign governments.

Canada's in close cultural proximity to the USA but doesn't have Borderers and is creeped out by them. One side of US politics is largely composed of Borderers. Hence, they identify with the other.

I sometimes think that in the vacuum of having any national identity (which is bad, patriotism is generally bad as many here would say), the national identity has just become some kind of "feel superior to the americans". It happens at political levels when Dobbs was passed and Trudeau made a big thing about abortion and contracepton. It happens with healthcare, we accept mediocrity because "at least we aren't the USA" and i think we do it with immigration too.

I have frequently quipped that "the [only significant] difference between American culture and Canadian culture is that Americans are very proud of being American, while Canadians are very proud of not being American."

I grant that, with the emergence of Trumpism, it seems increasingly clear that there are in fact aspects of US culture to which we have no good answer–but you are correct that I am much happier with mediocre but universal healthcare (in Canada or my adopted homeland of Britain) and would not trade it for the America alternative.

Amazon Go checkouts being manually tagged by an Indian farm

That was misreported. The system mostly worked, but in cases in which it has low confidence the tapes are manually reviewed and labeled. Which is how you train the system. It wasn't really Actually Indians.

At what point do the rapid destabilizing demographics shifts and apparent deep corruption by foreign powers turn Canada into a national security problem for America? If things go south up north, are we going to have all those "new Canadians" hopping the border to the U.S. and bringing Canada's social ills with them? Is anyone in the U.S. govt thinking about this?

Unlikely any time soon. Canada has a better immigrant profile than the U.S.

If things go south up north, are we going to have all those "new Canadians" hopping the border to the U.S. and bringing Canada's social ills with them?

The US-Canada border is actually really defensible, all things considered; the bodies of water one would have to cross are significantly larger than the Rio Grande (the US would lose a war in 1812 partly for this reason). Sure, it's possible to trivially cross the border provided you can get over the St. Lawrence, but because most of the "new Canadians" live in Toronto they'd have to spend a non-trivial amount of money to do that.

The only other city that has a large population of immigrants is Vancouver, which is right on the border; a fence long enough to be more than a few days' walk would be enough to prevent those crossings (as you get into "in the middle of nowhere" territory pretty quick outside of that, and Washington State isn't exactly the most habitable place either).

If getting out of Canada became important enough, I guarantee you they would drive to the middle of nowhere and cross over into Minnesota or North Dakota.

If anyone knows of real politic assessments of the US-CAN relationship, please send them my way/post them here. I hope that there are at least some plans for dealing with a rump/decrepit/hostile/defunct/failed Canada within US Govt. and policy circles. The increasing importance of the Arctic should increase demand for such thinking, along with the pivot to Asia/China, and a few other factors.

I don't think it's too difficult to come up with even armchair strategic assessments considering most of the facts on the ground haven't changed since the days of War Plan Red/Defense Scheme No. 1 and 2 (for the US and Canada, respectively, though the US plan focused more on Canada in the context of taking on the entire British Empire).

Canada is one of the easiest countries to cut completely in two: there's one road that separates East and West, and jack shit for 2000 miles between Toronto and Winnipeg (Thunder Bay exists mainly because it was the way to get from East to West before the car was invented). And no, tanks aren't getting through there either; the only way to do it is by air, sea (into Hudson's Bay), or on foot. And Canada doesn't have that many aircraft capable of transporting armor, much less armor itself (most of their tanks aren't even operable).

After that, the inevitable blockade would do most of the work. If that part of Canada is separated from its food and energy supply (yes, the hydro power is unlimited at current burn rates, but the oil and industrial inputs sure aren't and those come from the part of the nation that its army has no chance of reasonably defending) it's not going to last very long. Then all the US has to do is make sure the shanty migrant ships aren't making it, which is pretty easy to do so long as you're willing to actually stop them (and in this kind of situation, they would be). Yes, the border is very long, but that doesn't make much difference if the average Canadian cannot get to a section you don't control, and by and large they can't.

On that note, it's deceptively easy to isolate the most populated part of Canada from the US: destroy the bridges. All Ontario border crossings are over water (almost like the border is where it is for that reason), and demolition of those bridges from either side means that reinforcing an incursion on either side would become difficult very quickly. Those bodies of water are not fordable. Same thing for Quebec; Montreal and Quebec city are on the north side of the St. Lawrence, both excellent defensive positions (and have been used as such a few times, too). These nations are an ocean apart should they choose to be; for the west, destroying the bridges and road is going to have the same effect.

As far as strategic industries go, Canada doesn't have any that can't be trivially attacked by conventional rocket artillery (or standard artillery, for the communities on the St. Lawrence, as destroying those bridges means the Maritime provinces aren't going to put up much of a fight) from the US side. The same is true of all its major cities, especially Vancouver. This doesn't hold true for the US; assuming equal-capability equipment the only major US city in Canadian artillery range is Detroit (if it even qualifies as "major" any more, lol).

As far as commerce goes, Canada depends heavily on other countries to refine the products of its resource extraction (which affects the West more than the East); a collapse in the ability to trade with the US (each provinces' largest trading partner) would be catastrophic to the economy.

This is, I think, why the Defense Schemes focus more on rapid attack being the only feasible way to resist an American invasion, because the country really can't be held. Sure, a friendly Europe could resupply Upper/Lower Canada, but I think unrestricted submarine warfare (this time by the US) would likely rout those merchant marines, and the American navy is currently peerless, so the only time you have to do damage is while you still have the element of surprise.

I agree that America could annex Canada with little to no military effort. I'm more curious about the details of when, how, and under what circumstances that would happen. What are the politics and sentiments of the people? What considerations would the US have to weigh before making such a call? What are the alternatives, and what interests do those alternatives serve? Etc.

Any in depth sources on those matters would be much appreciated.

I agree that America could annex Canada with little to no military effort.

The best defense Canada has against getting annexed by the US is to import an extra 20 million South Asians (even better: an extra 40 million). The magnitude of the poison pill the US would have to swallow to get the land for itself would make even the staunchest American imperialist balk and puke.

In fact a large portion of these 40 million people will want the US to annex Canada because it means they get full access to the US jobs market!

I thought you were gonna go with the prospect of dealing with the French lol. Or more liberal states being added.

A ton of the migrants came in the recent COVID influx and don't have citizenship and can likely be deported or have visas and PR cancelled before unification.

When has Trudeau opposed Canadian sovereignty?

He has done so in the link provided, unless you believe Trudeau is himself sovereign. Trudeau's statement that 'Canada is a postnational state' is indistinguishable from the denial of Canadian sovereignty and is in fact a naked argument for Comintern.

Is this rhetoric surprising? It shouldn't be. Its Trudeau, the literal communist heir. And not just any type of communist, the type of international communist who believes that nationhood is a moral evil and that sovereignty and moral righteousness lies only in global communism.

Why?

If Canadian sovereignty has any reference to the people of Canada, discounting any non-integrated individuals, then it must be the case that Trudeau's statement denies Canadian sovereignty.

Why?

What would "postnational" mean without reference to some non-arbitrary, non-"I'm-not-touching-you" definition of Canadians? Who or what is sovereign on Trudeau's definition? Trudeau?

Apparently not Canadians. Trudeau's vision of Canada is "post" all such concerns. Thus, the concept of Canadian sovereignty, on his thinking, is "post" the fact of or concerns of the people who inhabit Canada's borders. If that which is sovereign is "post" Canada, then sovereignty doesn't lie in Canada in any meaningful respect. Therefore, Trudeau's claim that Canada is a postnational state is a denial of Canadian sovereignty.

Trudeau being Trudeau, and not any other person, its clear that his declaration of a "postnational" Canada is little more than an argument for Comintern.

Trudeau's statement that 'Canada is a postnational state' is indistinguishable from the denial of Canadian sovereignty and is in fact a naked argument for Comintern.

That is a ridiculously huge leap.

If Canadian sovereignty has any reference to the people of Canada, discounting any non-integrated individuals, then it must be the case that Trudeau's statement denies Canadian sovereignty.

Canadian sovereignty doesn't have any reference to the people and even if it did, that wouldn't mean his statement denies Canadian sovereignty.

Thus, the concept of Canadian sovereignty, on his thinking, is "post" the fact of or concerns of the people who inhabit Canada's borders.

This is a clearly incorrect interpretation of his meaning, which is about a lack of mainstream culture, not the lack of concern for the people. He states this explicitly.

What would "postnational" mean without reference to some non-arbitrary, non-"I'm-not-touching-you" definition of Canadians? Who or what is sovereign on Trudeau's definition? Trudeau?

Presumably Canadian citizens, the rules for becoming one which are determined by the elected representatives of the current citizenry. Could such rules be considered arbitrary? Sure, but I think you need more than that to claim that they are illegitimate e.g. you can argue that the representatives were not enacting the will of the citizens, you can argue against democracy as a process for deciding questions of citizenship, etc. Also, if Canada had really ever been a single nation they would be speaking English in Quebec.

That’s absurd. Sovereignty is obviously not the same thing as nationhood. Governments do all sorts of pedestrian tasks, like issuing passports or regulating products, which don’t require a national character. A post-national state, then, would happily implement those even as it opens the gates to immigrants.

You’re committing the mirror-version of appealing to Hitler. It is possible to have patriotism, aggressive foreign policy, and even a racial identity without trying to start a Fourth Reich. Likewise, preferring the boring bureaucratic parts of state sovereignty does not make one into Daddy Stalin.

I think there is a spectrum of behaviors going from "bad optics" to "corrupt" to "treason".

If you are accepting campaign donations or gifts from some foreign, state-sponsored NGO that is mostly bad optics (unless your constituents are on board with that). (Depending on local laws, INAL, don't accept bags of money based on something you read on the internet.)

If you do the above, but with a clear understanding that you intend to influence policy towards your money-giver, that would be corruption. If done correctly, this can be hard to prove. Did you vote for that trade agreement with the country sponsoring you because you were bought, or just because you genuinely believed that to be a good thing?

I would use the word treason in cases in which you also violate vital interests of your home country. Passing on secret military information, unsuccessfully participating in a coup and the like.

Over here in Europe, getting gifts from foreign nations (such as Azerbaijan) is not unheard of. More recently, Krah (AfD) and some of the people working for him have been accused of taking money from Russia and China, respectively. Typically, the worst offenders get prosecuted, but it is not like the voters really care.

I think this situation can be more fairly characterized as a crisis for the current government and balance of power in Parliament than a full-blown constitutional crisis, unless we are speculating about the second- and third-order effects for trust in institutions, separatist sentiments, or populist sentiments on the left/right.

What should hopefully come to pass is that the facts will come out, names will be named, and it will become clear that the Liberals have their hands dirtiest all the way up to the level of the PMO (side remark: the PM himself may not be directly implicated, since if you have been listening to him lately, he doesn’t read his briefs or keep close tabs on anything his advisors are up to). Once that happens, we would hope for a criminal investigation and a swift vote of non-confidence, not necessarily in that order, leading to a change in the party in power.

The real confounder here is how much the Tories and especially the NDP have their hands dirty as well. If the other parties are as complicit as the Liberals, they might be able to keep the current balance of power in place for another year through collusion, at enormous cost to the relationship between the Canadian People and our most hallowed institution of “Good Government”. But that would only postpone the inevitable electoral judgement day.

A preview of the next 6-18 months.


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