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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29566 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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Jeanne Kuang for CalMatters, "Abundance meets resistance: Are Democrats finally ready to go all in on building housing?". (Part of an ongoing series on housing, mostly in California. Now also at TheSchism.)

Those of you who have followed this series may remember the sad history of attempting to upzone around transit in California. It's a straightforward idea: transit infrastructure is expensive to build, more people will ride it if more people live near the stations, and it's a bad idea for cities to enforce apartment bans in those areas. California has made two major attempts in the last decade to fix this, and is embarking on a third.

First, 2018's SB 827, which didn't even make it out of committee. Then, 2019's SB 50, which was delayed until 2020 and then failed to pass the Senate. Since then, there have been some significant reforms; see 2021, 2022, and 2023. But the YIMBYs haven't taken another big swing since 2020, and they're doing that and more this year.

  • SB 79 (CA YIMBY): allow increased height and density limits within a quarter to a half mile of transit stations in three tiers depending on the frequency of service.
  • AB 609 (CA YIMBY): actually exempt infill housing from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
  • SB 607 (Press release): greatly reduces the ability to use CEQA to indefinitely delay projects.

The latter two bills have been absorbed into the budget process, which is the Governor's way of pushing them forward. The former has not.

The politics are interesting. The SB 79 Housing committee hearing is worth watching; the chair, Aisha Wahab, was opposed to the bill, but it passed by a single vote. (This is called "rolling the chair", and it's a big lift.) And then it happened again, in the Local Government committee, the chair, Maria Elena Durazo, opposed the bill, and it again passed by a single vote; it's headed to the Senate floor for a likely vote in early June.

The stunning thing here is that, despite the years that have passed since 2018, the discourse among the bill's opponents hasn't changed. Because this is California, and most of them are Democrats, they oppose it from the left, and seemingly sincerely; Wahab talks about how "affordable" (i.e., subsidized) housing would be preferable, but there's no mention of how to pay for that, so in practice, the alternative is what we've been doing for the last couple decades, i.e., nothing. The Building Trades representative talks about any bill which doesn't mandate union labor as being tantamount to murder because the working conditions and the produced buildings will be unsafe. And there's generally an idea that market rate housing is bad, but affordable housing is good, and somehow if we outlaw the former, the latter will prosper. This has clearly not happened.

This rhymes with the current Abundance discourse, which has been extensive. (I can't do it full justice, but the basic idea is that we've regulated the government into an inability to accomplish anything, and we should stop doing that. It's most dire in housing, but the same idea applies elsewhere.) Reactions on a national scale oddly mirror the left-NIMBY discourse in California, ranging from Zephyr Teachout describing zoning reform as "relatively small-bore" to Robert Jensen suggesting that maybe poverty and death would be better for the environment instead. (As a treat, enjoy Sam Seder beclowning himself in front of Ezra Klein.)

My theory of this, developed over a series of infuriatingly circular conversations, is that there's a faction which is very attached to the idea that every problem is caused by a failure to write big enough checks or a failure to sufficiently tax (or if you're edgy, guillotine) the wealthy. So, if housing is unaffordable, it must be because we haven't sufficiently subsidized below-market-rate housing, or down payment assistance, or because rich people are hoarding homes and leaving them empty, and if you think otherwise, you must be simping for billionaires. This view is incompatible with understanding the details; for example, in that Sam Seder interview, Seder would talk about the corrupting power of money, Klein would talk about cartels of homeowners, Seder would say that that's just more corrupting power of money, but Seder's approach is very specifically to target oligarchs and corporations, not homeowners.

And this is the kind of equivocation I see in the best-regarded left critique of Abundance I could find, from Sandeep Vaheesan at The Boston Review. He gets the details wrong--he points to the government's support of nuclear power via liability limitation and ignores ALARA; he claims that upzoning doesn't actually produce more housing (so why do the NIMBYs fight so hard?); he defends the exorbitant rents in San Francisco by saying that it's a "superstar" city unlike Houston (is San Jose?)--but at its core, he wishes the book had clear villains like Thomas Piketty's "clear portrait of patrimonial capitalists and lavishly compensated executives thriving at the expense of everyone else". His proposed solutions are, naturally, to break up large corporations and to write bigger checks to bureaucrats so they can do more paperwork.

At each point, Vaheesan equivocates: about "deregulation" (if you want to end apartment bans, you must want poor people to live on Superfund sites!), about "democracy" (if you don't want to hand out veto points like candy, you must love oligarchs), and about the efficacy of reforms (upzoning and streamlining are simultaneously ineffective and giveaways to the wealthy).

"The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed." This sounds like a promise, but in California's case, it's a warning. The problems, contradictions, and failures of blue governance are at their sharpest here, and if there's a way forward, it'll be here as well.

A joy to see another grendel-khan California housing update. As an excuse to reply, I present another Noah Smith blog anti-anti-Abundance post. Located via Hanania dunk. At the end, Smith presents some polling results:

But a recent poll suggests that although there’s lots of interest in the abundance idea, the message is still less appealing than populist red meat. Although you might think a poll by some pressure group calling itself “Demand Progress” might be biased toward populist causes, I found the wording in the questions the wording in the questions to be reasonably fair

If we take Demand Progress at face value (probably shouldn't), then the results suggest the largest plurality of Dems make the policy as presented a net negative for electoral reasons. I don't think this justifies Hanania dunk farming but the second result via Smith's blog might. If lefty progressives can successfully frame a false dichotomy that presents Dems a choice between Abundance and the moral clarity of anti-corporate sentiment, then the winner should be clear. There's a whole lot of equity in anti-greed memes even among moderate Dems.

The worse stuff gets the less sensitive people are going to be to this kind of framing. Which already seems to be the growing reality. However, Republican coding the policies is not an empty threat to the movement. I'm not sure what it's like in the local politics, but* does seem that's why so much of the discourse online remains focused on meta questions about the discourse. Popularity and electoral risk will determine how diluted the agenda gets before making it into policy and how much of the dysfunctional machine can be protected. An unthinkable, unlikely, but most entertaining outcome of this conflict would be Abundance Dems giving up on the party. Instead, we'll get the more likely, boring outcome of progressive pouting.

The discussion surrounding this is a never ending source of amusement. Ezra says "please just let the government build shit and stop getting in the way", and then leftists say "what do you mean? I'm not getting in the way? but also, did you stop to consider... [words words words]" It's beyond parody. I'm impressed they don't ever see the irony.

If there's one thing the leftists get right, it's that this is a political nonstarter. The whole reason they're in this mess in the first place is that populists are fundamentally opposed to progress. Populists want handouts and they want their enemies destroyed. Higher principles are of no particular interest. And the Dem coalition is only getting more and more populist in the wake of Biden's presidency, despite its legislative successes, failing to build anything or deliver real results for the poor and stupid and over-socialized -- a case that Ezra made quite well in his book. Leftists look at Trump and don't think there's anything particularly wrong with having a retarded president (and why would they? they tried non-retards and got no handouts and no enemies destroyed), they just wish it was their retard.

Can we really blame the average left-leaning voter for feeling this way? It wasn't given a name until recently, but this whole "housing theory of everything" idea has been floating around in wonky circles for at least 15 years now and totally ignored by Dem lawmakers. People have been griping about the cost of housing since the Occupy protests. Obama could have, in the popular imagination, been the president who builds instead of the president who bailed out wall street, if he were so inclined and better advised, but it wasn't on his radar in the slightest. In what sense do Dems deserve the mantle of technocrats when they're so behind the game? Being right in this case doesn't really matter when the median voter can barely read.

The Discourse around Abundance has truly been something to behold. It's hard not to nutpick about this stuff. On the plus side, some politicians really are taking it seriously, not by saying "Abundance!" really loudly, but by trying to refocus on outcomes over process; see Buffy Wicks' permitting reform report; among other things, it's behind some of the CEQA streamlining that's been taken up by the governor.

I agree that running on permitting reform and streamlining and bottlenecks isn't a political winner; voters aren't nerds, if anything, they're the opposite. But voters notice when nothing works, when CAHSR doesn't ever happen, when housing just gets more expensive, when medical costs keep rising, when college is stupidly expensive and even if you don't want to go now everyone's whining that they want you to pay back their loans.

So, the left is very happy to point out that populist red meat sells better than wonkish problem-fixing. But as that essay I linked at the bottom of the original post says, "Criticism is all well and good, but at some point you have to build something." My theory of the 2024 election is (a) everyone hated high prices and blamed the incumbent parties for them, and (b) the Democrats tried to tack to the center, but the disengaged voters who decided the election didn't believe them. Demonstratively yelling about taxing the rich and guillotining the oligarchs isn't going to fix that.

If I may indulge, I note that a "suggested article" linked to from the above is "A Different 'Abundance Agenda': Avoiding Delusions and Diversions", from Robert Jensen, previously famous for other far-left things.

If there is to be a decent human future—perhaps if there is to be any human future—it will be fewer people consuming less energy and creating less stuff.

The text of the article is detailed about "less", but is coyly silent about "fewer". Like many critics, he seems not to have read the book beyond the title, but he does propose an alternative.

Instead of the promise of endless material abundance, which has never been consistent with a truly sustainable future, let’s invest in what we know produces human flourishing—collective activity in community based on shared needs and reduced wants. For me, living in rural New Mexico, that means being one of the older folks who are helping younger folks get a small-scale farm off the ground. It means being an active participant in our local acequia irrigation system. It means staying home instead of vacationing. It means being satisfied with the abundant pleasures of this place and these people without buying much beyond essentials.

A cheap shot suggests itself. ("You know, somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are going to be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.") Horseshoe Theory is real.

But on a serious note, when I see this kind of thing, I hear my ancestors screaming from beneath pails of water and bales of hay and endless subsistence-farming toil, and I wonder to what degree the women of the Hill Country, pre-electrification, would agree with Jensen.

Sometimes these women told me something that was so sad I never forgot it. I heard it many times, but I’ll never forget the first woman who said it to me. She was a very old woman who lived on a very remote and isolated ranch—I had to drive hours just to get out there—up in the Hill Country near Burnet. She said, “Do you see how round-shouldered I am?” Well, indeed, I had noticed, without really seeing the significance, that many of these women, who were in their sixties or seventies, were much more stooped and bent than women, even elderly women, in New York. And she said: “I’m round-shouldered from hauling the water. I was round-shouldered like this well before my time, when I was still a young woman. My back got bent from hauling the water, and it got bent while I was still young.” Another woman said to me, “You know, I swore I would never be bent like my mother, and then I got married, and the first time I had to do the wash I knew I was going to look exactly like her by the time I was middle-aged.”

right wing housing theorem of theory sounds a bit like high housing prices suppress TFR and this leads to an increase in immigration in order to maintain high housing prices. not sure if the data is consistent with that. i guess left wing housing theory of everything wouldn't include immigration but include inequality and some other left wing focused issues.

Honestly, it’s a species of hyper normalization. We know they can’t fix it, they know that we know they can’t fix it, but what’s the alternative? Vodka I suppose. And it does go beyond housing. It’s education— billions spent, and English majors struggling to read book. It’s health— where obesity is normal, and any hospital stay requires a GoFundMe.

Solutions are out there. One I think might make a difference is to forbid corporations from buying houses, and limit how many houses an individual can own. This would at least prevent Blackrock from buying up SFHs the minute they go on the market to turn into a rental property.

The thing about housing is that, except for the interests of existing homeowners (about the only thing that gets negative publicity), nearly everything blocking it is supported more by the Democrats or has been for most of its existence. Zoning and building codes, unions and labor laws, urban growth boundaries, environmental considerations, affordable housing mandates, etc. This makes it very hard for Democrats to build housing because the only problem they can see is "existing homeowners".

You're being too charitable; consider Sam Seder, who isn't that far to the left, being constitutionally incapable of blaming anything other than corporations and billionaires for high housing costs. This is how you get left-NIMBYs tying themselves into weird knots, like blaming Blackrock (which owns something like 0.1% of single-family homes) or asserting that we don't need more supply, because there are fewer homeless people than vacancies, or because all of those houses are secretly being kept empty by "speculators".

Vaheesan:

Diminishing public power over land use decisions means greater private control, which in turn means more deference to the whims of the market and more discretion for corporate executives and financiers—in short, more oligarchy.

This is the kind of equivocation I was talking about. ("Public power" in this case doesn't mean elected officials doing things, but rather the power of individuals to block the entire process.) When the only tools you have are taxing the rich and breaking up big companies, every problem looks like oligarchs and monopolies.

Yep, Abundance holds up a mirror to Democrats and many don't like what they see. A lot of their assumptions about governance and economics has be thrown out to accept its thesis. That's why there's so much nitpicking about political strategy and messaging efficacy and never any criticism of its actual prescriptions. Moreover, the existing homeowners (the much maligned NIMBY liberal) are usually moderate Democrats, so they make a good villain for leftists to blame. Meanwhile, The Groups are mostly leftist sinecures and axe grinders, making a good villain for technocrats to blame. Cue internecine conflict.

I think if COVID lockdowns had not tanked the credibility of technocrats everywhere, there would be enough trust that this agenda could get motion. Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. It's almost absurd we live in this reality where we have such boundless wealth and nothing but frivolities to spend it on, where "We need more houses? OK, let's build more houses" and "We need more energy? OK, let's build more solar/wind farms" faces such extreme and multi-pronged resistance, but so it is. Put another trillion into NVIDIA. Perhaps God can save us from ourselves.

The reason is that it's not actually wealth, it's all debt. It's all people running away from debasement and trying to get decent interest to avoid value being destroyed.

So collapsing the ridiculous real estate prices by making them real is out of the question. And everyone, including the government, is locked in the line-go-up suicide pact because if you stop, you get a singularity where anything might happen. So we just manage decline and plug the holes with anything that is at hand.

God's coming alright, but he tends to take his sweet time, and you're not going to like the hangover when he does. Nobody will.

My rather unpopular opinion is that if housing wasn’t an investment most of these problems would solve themselves.

Nobody really wants more housing supply because it means that the one asset most middle class people can aspire to have — a house — at best stagnates in value and at worst declines in value. No politician want to be the person who made housing values fall. They’d have a hard time getting elected dog catcher if they approve enough new development to lower the cost of housing. Heck, people might not be happy if their house doesn’t increase in value. As such you have a problem that pits the owners of homes against the renters who want to own homes. You have to pick one.

The other issue with everyone trying to buy single family houses is that it’s acre for acre about the worst possible way to build housing. Condos are probably better for housing a lot of families in less space, apartments are cheaper but probably better suited for single people. If you want housing, it’s probably better to build for density and put more people in less acreage.

Housing needs to be expensive to be useful though, because there's no other way to keep out the undesirables.

there's no other way to keep out the undesirables

Oh there are a bunch of other ways, actually. They're just all impolitic in the West is all.

See this is a problem with markets. Markets just aim for profits, that's what they're for and all they do. If you want anything more than profits (increasingly often highly short-termist profits), you need a non-market solution. We want deep, long-term investment and expansion of housing stock. That's good for the economy in the longterm, enables population growth, mobility, agglomeration effects. But you can't get there by just naively relying on markets to do their thing, that's how you get rentierism and ridiculously high property prices.

Naive state interventions aren't great either, regulation is much of the problem. Imagine a big state-owned corporation with the economies of scale and long-term planning to build housing en masse, build whole new cities. No stakeholder engagement, no endless procedural crap, no quotas for pregnant women or criminals, no building substandard housing and then shutting down the company when the cracks show to rinse and repeat later. No expensive consultants who charge by the hour running rings around bureaucrats who have no idea what they're doing, do everything in-house.

State-owned corporations are unfairly maligned by mainstream economics, they do plenty of excellent work. Nobody in the private sector, nobody on the planet can challenge China State Shipbuilding Corporation. Housing is simple, easy to build just like commercial shipping. Build in a factory, assemble on site. It's a perfect sector for a huge state-backed capital investment. Plus government has natural abilities regarding land, it's a match made in heaven. All that's needed is rigour and discipline.

No expensive consultants who charge by the hour running rings around bureaucrats who have no idea what they're doing

If California made such a state-owned housing corporation, this is just what would happen. They'd make housing as quickly and as cheaply as they are making that bullet train. Endless quantities of taxpayer money would be set aflame in the furnace of consultant payments.

They'd in-house the cost disease.

That's farcical. If California made a state-owned housing corporation, they would build zero houses. The state is precisely the obstacle to house building. The reason we don't have houses is because if you try to build a house, they'll put you in jail.

What's farcical? You guys are agreeing:

They'd make housing as quickly and as cheaply as they are making that bullet train.

Oops! I managed to miss the irony

The sad thing is that there is a way around this, you can actually build things if you have political will and funding. All you need to do is have the politicians eliminate all the regulation that stands in the way of the thing you want built, and have the actual building be done by the private sector, ideally with private funding.

A good contemporary example of this is the renovation of Notre Dame after the fire: the French parliament passed a law exempting the project from all legal compliance, one experienced and trustworthy man was given full power to do the thing and he hired specialist contractors with money obtained from private donations. And lo an behold, a construction project delivered itself in time for once.

People will perhaps rightfully say you can't do that for every project, but if you're not willing to do so for something, do you really want that thing?

See this is a problem with markets. Markets just aim for profits, that's what they're for and all they do. If you want anything more than profits (increasingly often highly short-termist profits), you need a non-market solution. We want deep, long-term investment and expansion of housing stock. That's good for the economy in the longterm, enables population growth, mobility, agglomeration effects. But you can't get there by just naively relying on markets to do their thing, that's how you get rentierism and ridiculously high property prices.

...no, you literally just have to remove the zoning restrictions on building housing and the market will trip over itself to build more housing until the price of rent collapses. Then you simply remove prohibitions on racial discrimination so that people don't have to use unaffordability as a way to keep out the underclass.

This whole mess is caused by the government refusing to let markets solve the problem.

There aren't significant problems with race in Australia such that urban centres are very unsafe. But property here is even more expensive than in much of America, compared to income.

Productivity in the construction industry has been falling in Australia. It's been falling in America too. Regulations are partly to blame but the whole thing needs a reboot. There's an entire genre on tiktok showcasing the poor quality of new-build American houses, all this wonky or leaky, shoddy construction work. There are problems with price, quality and quantity.

Housing is the sort of industry where it makes sense for big companies to do it, not tiny little shrimps. Learning-by-doing is clearly needed and not happening. There has to be close coordination with government anyway to build out the infrastructure needed, dams, water, power... It should be managed by the state but in a capable, effective fashion. I realise that last sentence sounds retardedly naive but it is possible in principle.

When in doubt, copy Singapore. It's run with heavy state involvement there, 80% of the housing stock is public housing, they have construction productivity that actually goes up and housing is actually affordable. Per Claude:

Singapore HDB flats rated as most affordable housing in major Asian cities, better than Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing

Singapore's affordability ratio is 4.5-4.7 for public housing vs 13.7 for private property

Key Success Factors

Government Control: Single agency (HDB) controls entire process from land acquisition to completion

Standardization: Standardized methods and designs enable prefabrication and economies of scale

Technology Investment: Continuous R&D and early adoption of automation/robotics

Integrated Approach: Total approach covering planning, design, land assembly, and construction as seamless whole

Economies of Scale: Mass production approach with consistent demand

Singapore also has ethnic quotas in their public housing. https://www.hdb.gov.sg/cs/infoweb/residential/buying-a-flat/buying-procedure-for-resale-flats/plan-source-and-contract/planning-considerations/eip-spr-quota

When in doubt, copy Singapore

They are 100% urban and 76% ethnic Chinese.

69% of Americans choose to live in suburbs. Ultra-urban state planning (even if competent!) won't work on us. It isn't relevant to our wants and inclinations.

This is like people who say America should be more like Japan because of their great health outcomes. On one hand, yes. On the other hand, we just aren't Japanese and a bunch of fat white people severely underperform them on health outcomes. There's no path from us to them.

If Western, white countries are unable to replicate the successes of Asian countries then we may as well give up on politics and civilization generally.

The Chinese didn't go 'oh well they're white and we're yellow, we'd better just accept inferiority, mediocrity and humiliation - we'll just be coolies working for pennies'. They copied what they liked about our civilization and discarded what they didn't want. Lee Quan Yew did exactly that, he went to London and America and brought back good ideas to try.

Low-crime isn't impossible because we're not Asian. Clean public transport isn't impossible because we're not Asian. Crime used to be low. Public transport used to be clean. It still is in many places. If the demographics are bad, adjust tactics to keep them in line or change the demographics. Send criminals to prison or blow their heads off - capital punishment has a long history in the West. You can just do things.

Americans should definitely stop eating chemical slop and eat more Japanese food - rice and fish. It tastes good and is good. Or they could eat excellent European cuisine. Nothing about being white condemns a country to substandard outcomes.

They are 100% urban and 76% ethnic Chinese.

Europeans (the supermajority population in most American suburbs) have lived in dense urban towns and cities for thousands of years too.

The American preference for suburbs also is less organic than many conservatives online suggest. Zoning laws effectively prevent mid-density inner suburbs of the European or even traditional American kind.

Not dense like modern Asian cities, or even modern European ones. I'm right now in a "city" in Europe that's less dense than the suburb (of NYC) I live in at home. For being a city it's surprisingly civilized; just not having so many damned people is a major advantage.

mid-density inner suburbs

Yes, pre-car America had dense walkable 'streetcar suburbs'. Not a modern lower density SFH car-based suburb, but a proper extension of the city. Some small houses mixed in with big apartment buildings. Just hop on the trolley to go to work.

Anyone with financial means fled them like they were radioactive as soon as it was feasible to do so. They transformed into crime-ridden slums with horrible public schools. Exactly the sorts of places I pay to not live in. We were in the New Urbanist Garden of Eden and voluntarily left with great haste.

Google tells me Europe was 5-10% urban circa 1700. And that's really straining the definition of 'urban' to include towns of a few thousand people. I don't think that special Chinese-only DNA makes Singapore function. But they have a certain set of social norms and types of people we don't much have in the US. Their ways aren't and won't be ours. Given the wildly different situations (ethnically Chinese ruled modern city-state vs much more pluralistic continent-spanning world power), I'd even say shouldn't.

Exactly the sorts of places I pay to not live in. We were in the New Urbanist Garden of Eden and voluntarily left with great haste.

Not exactly voluntarily; there was some ethnic cleansing.

More comments

Anyone with financial means fled them like they were radioactive as soon as it was feasible to do so. They transformed into crime-ridden slums with horrible public schools.

That didn’t happen because of the invention of the suburbs. Dense inner suburbs in New York City like Brooklyn Heights have some of America’s most desirable and expensive real estate even though their residents could easily afford huge McMansions further out into the (20th century) suburbs. In Paris and London they likewise remain extremely expensive and desirable real estate even though - again - their residents could easily move out to the modern suburbs and live in much larger houses with big gardens etc.

The factors that turned the inner suburbs of Baltimore and Philadelphia into shitholes have nothing to do with some inherent issues with that urban housing layout. There were indeed intractable problems with dense urban and particularly tenement housing until the mid-19th century but modern sewage, plumbing, hygiene and other innovations mean they were no longer relevant a century ago, let alone today.

Condos are probably better for housing a lot of families in less space, apartments are cheaper but probably better suited for single people.

Condo + strata fees = single family home mortgage payment, so they're not actually cheaper.

The reason detached single-family units are important is because they deliver the ability to personally develop. With a condo you're not actually doing anything; you're not doing maintenance on your mechanical devices (unless you're fortunate enough to have a garage or driveway, of course), you're not really able to store anything, you can't do anything loud (no instruments, etc.), it's more difficult to entertain people, etc. The same thing applies to townhouses to a lesser degree.

You don't get Apple Computer (to name a particularly famous example) without a garage to work in, and condos don't usually have those.

No politician want to be the person who made housing values fall.

Sure, but (and as "bullets instead of dollars" downthread mentions) that's also balanced against solutions that might be less than democratic (if the dominant voting bloc is smart enough to understand the issue they can avoid that, but they seldom are). Gerontocracies tend to be relatively bad at defending themselves simply because the average 70 year old tends to be an inferior soldier no matter how high up they believe their elbows might go.

The reason detached single-family units are important is because they deliver the ability to personally develop. With a condo you're not actually doing anything; you're not doing maintenance on your mechanical devices (unless you're fortunate enough to have a garage or driveway, of course), you're not really able to store anything, you can't do anything loud (no instruments, etc.), it's more difficult to entertain people, etc. The same thing applies to townhouses to a lesser degree.

This led me down an interesting rabbit hole - I am aware of the importance of the myth of the garage startup in Silicon Valley, but also that the main lines of mentor-mentee and exited founder-investor-founder genealogy run back to Fairchild Semiconductor via companies that were not founded in garages or, mostly, by garage tinkerers. A quick fact-check finds Wozniak denying that Apple was actually founded in the garage (the tinkering that led to the Apple I happened inside the house - it sounds like the garage was just used to store inventory), that pictures of Jeff Bezos founding Amazon in his garage show a room that had not been used to store motor vehicles for a very long time, and that the Google garage was commercially rented space which happened to be a converted garage. It looks like the last significant tech company founded in a space which was primarily designed to store motor vehicles was HP in 1939. Nvidia is often referred to as founded in a garage, but it was actually founded in a spare room in Curtis Priem's townhouse.

In other words, the point of the Silicon Valley garage isn't the idea of the garage as marginal space - it is that it was normal for middle-class Americans to have more square footage than they actually needed, giving space to work in. A spare room, something it is perfectly possible to have in a townhouse, or even in a condo if you live like middle-class Continental Europeans or super-rich New Yorkers do, works better as a home office/workshop than an unconverted garage. And the surplus of square footage is something that you don't get by insisting on sprawl zoning in a place as rich as Silicon Valley - nobody thinks that the next generation of Silicon Valley founders can afford SFHs with garages in the Valley, and it is notable that the only reason that the Apple founders had access to the garage in the first place was because Job's parents had bought the house it was attached to before Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley.

The even more important point is absence (or, in the case of California, lax enforcement) of laws against running businesses out of private homes. The canonical place to found a 21st century startup is a Stanford dorm room. Under UK charity law, that is illegal in a Cambridge College room.

I’m not suggesting doing away with SF housing entirely, but I think it’s important to increase urban density if you want to solve the housing crisis. It’s not meant to be for everyone, but to provide enough housing stock that it’s reasonably affordable to live in the city within a reasonable commute of your job. For most people, that’s fine.

I think that there are two distinct groups which value high house prices.

One group are investors. At the end of the day, they profit from the fact that land is in limited supply, and people have been moving towards cities for centuries, thus steadily increasing demand. The proper way to fix this is a Georgian land value tax. If any value you gain from owning land is 100% taxed in perpetuity, then the intrinsic value of the land for its owner becomes zero. (Realistically, one would impose taxes which would increase towards 100% over a few decades, so present-day investors might still reap 20 years worth of rent or so. This is certainly more than the kind of people who invest in goods with perfect supply inelasticity deserve.)

The other group are home owners who would prefer to stay apart from less wealthy people for good or bad reasons, the (home-) NIMBYs. While I am not very sympathetic to the NIMBYs, I can sort-of see their point. If you bought a house situated a quarter of an hour drive from the city half a lifetime ago, you have every reason not to be happy if the urban sprawl swallows your neighborhood and your suburban home gets surrounded by high-rises. Still, as Jesus said, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."

I think that the dynamic between these two groups is not always the same. To complicate things further, landowners generally also own the buildings on their lots, and depending on the type of building their rent could increase or decrease with further urbanization. If you own a hotel building, you will likely be more enthusiastic about urban development than if you own single-family homes you rent to wealthy people.

Still, as Jesus said, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."

That's Spock. And Star Trek 3 and 4 completely (and explicitly) undermine that idea

That was the joke, surely?

I don't think the writers intended Spock to be the sole voice of wisdom in the series. If anything, he's used to show that pure rationality, while probably at least functional, isn't the best most human way to make decisions.

Housing is a natural investment vehicle for two reasons:

  1. It's an asset that is likely to hold its value over a long time, and
  2. As an investment asset, it provides you housing for "free".

In other words, while property is not a completely safe investment, it's a relatively safe one (if you're smart about it), and unlike other relatively safe investments like index funds and treasury bonds, you can live in it. Notably, it doesn't need to greatly increase in value for this dynamic to be controlling. That's just a quirk of certain spots becoming much more highly desirable.

Honestly most people don't give a darn. They just want a place to live without yearly rent increases and an annoying landlord. Sure, SF boomers are gonna get a huge payout when they retire to move to a cheaper area, but for people moving for work or personal reasons, most of them are actually moving from low COL to high COL, and most of them also don't have a huge equity in their houses either. Of course being underwater sucks as af, but very few people in a trendy neighborhood that is getting upzoned actually believe that upzoning will nuke their property values, and if they do believe it then they're just retarded.

Speaking as a nimby myself, I don't want (American) transit because it's a huge drain on taxes due to graft and incompetence, and it also brings in undesirables. I also don't want density because brings traffic, makes people talk about transit, and brings in the libs too.

The ideal situation would be for time to forget my neighborhood for a decade so property taxes go down, then maybe for property values to spike through the roof the month before I sell. But time forgetting my neighborhood is about the best I can ask for. So anyways, fuck off, we're full.

it also brings in undesirables

This is a weird one that, while I'm generally YIMBY, I can see that if houses in my neighborhood were $20, the calibre of my neighbors (who are generally great folks) would drop precipitously. Price discrimination is in practice keeping the meth addicts living under bridges downtown out of my neighborhood.

It's the one part of the circle that "abundance" doesn't square for me. But marginal supply seems generally good and reduces prices in a mostly-stable fashion.

Land is perhaps the ur-investment, the one thing guaranteed that God (and perhaps the Dutch) aren't making more of. Even in societies where the government owns all the land, like in China, and merely hands out leases you have crazy real estate bubbles.

There is fundamentally no way to uncouple housing from investment because houses are expensive and take a lot of time and effort to build. There will always be fewer houses then there are people willing to buy them.

Austin, Texas empirically shows that it is possible for rent prices to go down as long as you build enough housing. Whether people are still treating land as an investment or not is academic at that point. The important thing is to lower the value of houses.

Whether it is an investment is beyond our ability to change. Whether it's promoted and protected as an investment is more malleable.

As an example, Canada's new housing minister said that prices don't need to come down. He is promoting housing as an investment instead of as shelter, and it doesn't need to be that way. He could've just as easily said "Prices need to come down because houses are for living in. To those who had planned on downsizing and using the extra money for retirement other purposes, it sucks to be you, but too bad. we'll help you make a different plan. To the foreign investors who bought properties here, I'd like to say lol, thanks for the cash, suckers that this will help us ensure sustainable growth that we can all benefit from."

I live in Canada.

There's no amount of propaganda that can make land or housing an unattractive investment. If people want to live somewhere badly enough, it increases the subjective value. It is fundamentally a doomed proposition unless you adapt a communist system where the government decides where and how you live. Land is such a powerful store of wealth that the primary goal of wars - not just in human societies, but in apes, and all sorts of creatures who fight over territory - is its acquisition.

Even if you say: 'all land is no longer an speculative investment vehicle' - it will not change the essence of the fact that people will start exchanging property rights with bullets instead of dollars. Because that was the status quo, before the market.

bullets instead of dollars

I always liked the pithy Spanish "plata o plomo". Finally an equivalent English bon mot.

There's no amount of propaganda that can make land or housing an unattractive investment.

Okay. But it's clearly impossible for housing to be a good investment in real terms and for it to be affordable at the same time. So the options that I can see are:

  1. Gerontocracy. Buy now or be priced out forever. Housing to the moon. If you're too young or poor to get on the property ladder now, too bad - hopefully you're the eldest/an only child and your parents will leave you the house when they kick the bucket, unless the bills they rack up at the end of their lives consume the equity of course. And if you aren't too poor yet, don't worry: you will be.

  2. Housing supply is allowed to increase and the price is allowed to decrease.

  3. The Japanese method. Housing demand is forced to decrease so that the price decreases. Either cramming more people per household (intergenerational housing?) or expelling people from the country/area. I hear Canada has a lot of unpopular Indians, but note that this still involves prices going down and therefore housing being a bad investment.

Curious if I'm missing a fourth option here.

Economic growth faster than housing price growth

Any operational definition of "economic growth" in this context that results in it not getting harder to buy housing over time means that housing is not a good investment.

It means it isn’t a relatively good investment. The goal is to make housing affordable without decreasing eh value of housing. If wages grew 5% pa, housing prices grew 3% pa, and inflation 2% pa, then housing would become relatively cheaper without eliminating the equity in homes.

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The other issue with everyone trying to buy single family houses is that it’s acre for acre about the worst possible way to build housing.

For ants and sardines. For people, they're great, despite taking up more acreage per unit.

I understand that you have a visceral distaste for living in a city, and would rather have a lawn and a driveway and plenty of air between your walls and your neighbors'. These are all nice things! But people also seem to dislike having to drive to get anywhere, to enjoy the economic benefits of agglomeration, and the various other benefits of living in cities.

Ideally, people who like cities can live in cities, and people who like cars and driveways can live in suburbs. But nearly every place in the country is designed for cars and driveways. Maybe a little of the residential land could be set aside for city living? (Because right now, in cities, almost none of it is.)

And we can all agree not to dehumanize the people who want to live differently?

I mean people in other countries live in pretty dense urban environments without too much trouble.

Apartments are literally built different in America compared to Europe.

All the urban issues most cities have come down to onerous requirements. You want European urban centers? Then start using European regulations.

Which is the city with high density, high per capita GDP, and high TFR?

Yes, and their lifestyles are inferior to mine. Yet another indication of their enormous poverty relative to a professional American.

At each point, Vaheesan equivocates: about "deregulation" (if you want to end apartment bans, you must want poor people to live on Superfund sites!), about "democracy" (if you don't want to hand out veto points like candy, you must love oligarchs), and about the efficacy of reforms (upzoning and streamlining are simultaneously ineffective and giveaways to the wealthy).

If you look at the general progressive mindset as religious, this behavior starts to make a lot more sense. Government bureaucrats are a protected priestly class, similar to but lower status than academics.

Therefore all blame must be shifted away from them, towards the hated enemy: billionaires, conservatives, or whoever the outgroup happens to be at the moment. I don't say this as a sneer at progressives, conservatives do the exact same thing as well.

But as @coffee_enjoyer and others here have pointed out, there's no getting away from religion. Using the religious worldview to model politics has opened my eyes and explained quite a lot of this seemingly incomprehensible behavior.

It's not religion, it's politics.

Bureaucrats are friends of the left and enemies of the right. Which at once decides their loyalties and who wants to lower or increase their numbers and power. There's little else to it.

Religion is probably inescapable too, but what you're looking at here is merely the friend enemy distinction.

If you want to get political ends, such as actually building enough dwellings to lower the price thereof, you need to get enough people who actually hold the levers of that stuff on one coalition against the remainder. This is how anything is decided in human society.

Now lefties are not going to get any of that stuff done because there is a rift in their coalition on this issue, where some people want cheap housing and others want things that make this impossible (and they have more power). So the only way for the coalition to remain and people to save face is for everyone to pretend this is the work of some real or imagined enemy and look to something else they agree on. Therefore, it's all because of wreckers.

Right wingers do this too of course, much easier to pretend the dissolution of morals isn't aided and abetted by capital or that that the army isn't weak because of procurement being rife with embezzlement if we can all agree that it's the fault of degenerates and perverts.

The real dark truth here is admitting that this mechanism is necessary, because without this nonsense you can't actually maintain a coalition to do anything, let alone what has to be done.

This seems like just partisan politics, nothing religious about it.

Their team bad.

Our team good.

There is an issue? Obviously their team did something bad and we need more funding for our team.

The Building Trades representative talks about any bill which doesn't mandate union labor as being tantamount to murder because the working conditions and the produced buildings will be unsafe.

Building trades unions are basically guilds; just giving them what they want might raise costs a bit, but it won’t stop anything from happening- they do actually do their jobs at high quality standards(and, admittedly, equivalent prices).

Ideally, it would work like that. And with the Carpenters' union, it has; back in 2023, they broke off from the Building Trades and cut a deal where they'd settle for "prevailing wage" (pay union rates, whether you hire union workers or not) rather than "skilled and trained" (hire only union workers). It raises costs significantly, but it doesn't essentially make the bill a dead letter, which is what the Trades consistently push for.

Take for example the IUEC. From WP:

The IUEC forbids modular construction of elevators, preventing the kind of preassembly and prefabrication that have become standard in elevators in the rest of the world, leading to higher elevator costs in the United States. The union limits entry of new workers into the field, and has constrained the ability of firms to use new technology to streamline elevator production in the United States.

Data indicates that elevator-related work is the highest paid trade in the United States, with a median wage $47.60 per hour in 2021.

See also this article (found with google, I can not vouch for the source):

Smith estimates that a new six-stop elevator that costs $170,000 to install in North America would run $60,000 or less across the Atlantic. Operating cost differences are even steeper. New York City guidelines advise affordable housing developers to budget $7,500 for annual elevator maintenance, with private housing operators in New York and Washington quoting similar numbers. This is several times European costs: one German firm, for instance, offers midrise maintenance contracts for about $450 per year.

I will grant you that building costs are not the biggest impediment to building, they come after high land costs and NIMBY, but they are very much part of the problem.

To be clear, unions are not saints. But also labor costs are just generally high in America, it's unfair to give unions 100% of the blame.

Union leadership also limits membership to secure jobs for their members.

If the local union has 500 members and each can do 0.2 houses per year (e.g. a crew of 10 can do two houses per year), then I guess your city is building a max of 100 houses. What if you want more than 100 houses built? Too bad, union labor is mandated, and they're not interested in de-monopilizing the sector.

Those 500 workers will sure be happy that they're in so much demand. The union did its job.

In many cases it raises costs significantly, not because the individual tradesmen are paid that much more (they are, but that's not the problem), it's that they have union-mandated staffing levels. If bargaining were truly Coasian (hah!) then you could easily make a deal to increase salaries even further in exchange for bringing staffing to international standard.

This killed a plan by Steph Curry to open a HQ in the dogpatch.

If bargaining were truly Coasian (hah!) then you could easily make a deal to increase salaries even further in exchange for bringing staffing to international standard.

Not that this is politically feasible in the least, but to keep labor costs down, we could (like Singapore) bring in guest workers from places like Bangladesh to do construction work on the cheap—co-Asian bargaining, if you will

We already do that; around half of California's construction workers are foreign-born, and of those, about half are undocumented. But the cost of living here is so high that you still have to pay a lot for workers, even if they're under-the-table.

Ah, illegal immigration.

Glen Greenwald on Tucker Carlson's show shits all over the CIA and puts in a succinct way the ties between Israeli intelligence and Epstein, lo and behold suddenly on the same day his private sex tape with his husband gets leaked.

Glenn is now denying that he retweeted the video. Normally I'd interpret is as damage control / cope, but I actually have reason to believe him.

You see, I browse twitter through a bespoke nitter -> rss -> miniflux stack, that archives every feed I'm subscribed to, and I'm subscribed to Greenwald, yet I see no trace of the retweet.

The system isn't bulletproof - don't remember the exact settings, but it downloads fresh content only every couple minutes, so there's enough time to post and delete something between refreshes; or sometimes I get hit by rate limiting - but it's pretty good (I routinely catch Alan MacLeod deleting his bangers / retarded takes), so at this point I'm going to need more than a screenshot to believe he actually did this.

I love the insinuation that intel agencies are behind the leak of his sex vids. Are you so fucking edgy a journalist that Mossad used 0-day cyber arms to hack sex vids out of your possession somehow to embarrass you? Jokes on them, I have nothing to be embarrassed about, because my sex vids are 🔥🔥🔥

Please don't watch though, this is a violation of my privacy. My private hot gay sex, that is. Because I bring the truth so hard.

My prediction for who was responsible is the PR firm Jake Tapper hired to push his ridiculous expose of the cover up of Biden's cognitive decline. It could have been mossad or the cia, inserting FUD to reduce Greenwald to Alex Jones tier in the mainstream's eyes, but Greenwald is probably Tapper's strongest critic and I think without this story more people would be mocking Tapper for putting that book out when back in the day he did things like claiming Lana Trump was bullying stuttering kids by wishing Biden didn't have so much trouble speaking (which Greenwald and Tucker kick off the interview mocking).

That's not how these things work.

You just accumulate material on persons of interest (Greenwald would long have been on many's lists) and whenever they start to say stuff that you don't really want heard you use the stuff you have to derail the conversation.

If you doubt State actors are doing this shit you're just blind. We have endless receipts at this point, and Greenwald himself helped pore through much of them, actually.

What conversation did this sex vid leak derail?

His interview with Tucker Carlson, arguably.

Among Greenwald’s core audience (leftists and third-worldists who hate the American political establishment but are not in any way ‘right wing’) this is presumably no big deal. Among Islamist and far-right antisemites and anti-Israel activists…well, Greenwald is literally a gay Jew, so they would have little love for him in any case.

Not that this means it wasn’t an intelligence leak, but I doubt this changes much for him.

it might hurt greenwald's reach with the normies. whenever someone brings up glen's reporting with normies someone else can point to the sex videos to derail the conversation.

Oh I don't think it does. But twitter is talking about embarrassing sex videos instead of how the intelligence community very likely set up a celebrity pedo ring and now it's unlikely to bubble up to anything actionable. Money well spent for someone I'm sure.

maybe I'm not the intended audience but I would never have heard about his interview with Tucker if not for this leak, so...

How likely are you to talk to people who have any actual power about it? That's the only metric that matters. The feds are happy enough with Epstein being relegated to the domain of memes about how he didn't kill himself. That has no chance of becoming a senate hearing.

I am unlikely to. But, why would Glenn Greenwald being into pervy stuff matter if I was?

Is the implication that if I tried to do anything about Epstein, powers that be would hack my pervy stuff and leak it too?

Or you know, suicide you. I think the hint is large enough at this point.

His husband died years ago from a suspicious infection. The video is apparently of a prostitute.

Speaking of which, I find Bernard Kerik’s recent death suspicious. It comes out that he lobbies for Qatar and within a week he is hospitalized for heart issues, dying a month later, with no prior history of heart issues.

CIA's heart attack gun, hard at work.

In case anything thinks I'm joking: that's supposedly a real thing. Air pressure handgun that shoots frozen toxin shards. There were senate hearings about it.

Biggest problem with the toxin-based heart attack gun is that it's easily detectable by coroners, so long as they actually bother to look for it. If your target is old or unhealthy enough (or you grease the coroner's palms) then you have a chance of it going unnoticed.

The assertion in that senate hearing was that the toxin entry hole would be tiny like a mosquito bite and easily overlooked in an autopsy. These are ultra-potent shellfish toxins that kill from minute quantities.

I see, didn't care enough to pry into his home life to learn that. This whole episode has been hilarious watching the usual suspects bend over backwards to try and smear him in front of what they imagine is a conservative crowd. It didn't work with Trump and it will not work with people who are absolutely through with Israel's and Mossad's shenanigans

You didn't care enough about a top level post to get the basic facts straight. That's fine, I guess, but then the question is why should anyone care about your take? Are we really here for "let's get the opinions of people that know very little about the subject matter"?

You don't need to know who he's making his dom/sub home made porn videos for, if I'm honest we shouldn't even know his marital status.

It’s one thing to claim that it’s not a relevant fact. It’s quite another to be straight up defending ignorance and incuriousness.

In any event, you were the one that put the irrelevant and incorrect fact into your original post. If it didn’t matter who it was with, then you could’ve just not written anything about it.

I didn't watch them, so I assumed its with his dude, I still don't care who he has sex with (or not)

Here's - Greenwald's statement on the video - don't use Twitter search, use grok, that's the best thing about grok. Well that and voice chat.

Edit: buh I'm an idiot, I meant to post this in reply to @self_made_human below.

The dude retweeted the video himself. I think it's far more likely to be an extension of his questionable findom practices instead of Da Jews.

From my understanding, he is denying retweeting it.

Is there any proof it was him?

findom practices instead of Da Jews

Some jokes just write themselves.

I think it's far more likely to be an extension of his questionable findom practices

Mash (X) to doubt

I keep hearing people say that, so maybe you can explain to me what happened there. Was he bragging? Was the retweet an attempt to get ahead of the scandal?

I mean if it's out there it's out there, it will be seen. At least if you rt yourself people who see it will also see your response.

Sure, but everybody's acting like no one would know about the video barring Greenwald's actions themselves. So I'm asking what context justifies the conclusion.

Can't say. I saw a screenshot of it, and now I can find people talking about the incident, but Twitter search sucks ass.

My favorite part of this is the anti-woke-right brigade suddenly deciding they don't like gay sexual degeneracy.

Suddenly? Acknowledging that it is a dangerous disease spreading subculture has been part of the anti-woke right from the beginning.

Yeah looks like parentheses are in order. I meant anti-(woke-right), not (anti-woke)-right.

Following Trump's recent victory, some anti-woke centrists decided they need to make sure the pendulum does not swing back too far in the other direction, and started attacking people to their right. They coined the term "Woke Right" to show that their actions are justified by the more extreme elements on the right being functionally the same as the woke left.

It's these people that suddenly decided that boosting leaked videos showing you're a paypig findom-enjoyer is a valid angle of attack on someone.

People are still trying to make "woke right" happen? Give it up Gretchen.

Maybe using capitals? anti-Woke Right is different to anti-Woke right? Though I agree, it's confusing all round.

As to the videos - I don't know the guy, it's cheeky of me to put forward opinions on his personal morality, but it's a tough one. The gay acceptance/gay marriage movement pushed hard on mainstreaming as representing "no, all that stuff about gays being degenerate is propaganda, they just want to get married and have kids like you".

And then the guy has his sex tapes released and oops yeah gay widower with kids is engaging in kink with prostitutes. Well, just like straight guys too so I suppose that is true equality!

I have to agree that this particular kink isn't the worst example of perversity that it could be, just second-hand embarrassment for anyone who doesn't share those kinks. I think we as a society probably are gone past any surviving standards of "public figures should behave decorously" never mind "private citizens shouldn't be frequenting prostitutes".

I still don't understand why the hell people make sex tapes (or take nudes for their partners) in the first place, though. We have plenty of examples of how that goes bad - the tapes get leaked, you break up and your ex uses the nudes for revenge porn, or even in the first place while you're still together they're sharing those private images around with their friends.

There's... a lot of guys where "if it'd never leave my circle of friends" is absolutely a desirable state, rather than a risk. Exhibitionism can have a lot of different drivers, ranging from the less good (eg risk-taking) to the better (eg, here's power over me because I trust you, I want to be seen as scoring good at sex which is a normal and possible thing to do), but even outside of gay circles that have particular reasons for it (for Greenwald's age range, getting caught doing this was at least theoretically a crime when he started fucking, which adds a lot of frission to 'oh no someone caught me') it's pretty common.

The risks make it undesirable for even many with the kink, and should probably make it undesirable for many more that are thinking with their upper head, but it's not an ungrounded fixation.

woke-right is such a misnomer, you can't just use woke- for a generic "hardcore true believer" it waters down the term.

woke-right is such a misnomer, you can't just use woke- for a generic "hardcore true believer" it waters down the term.

James Lindsay uses it on Twitter as a derogatory term for anti-Jewish right wingers, who then all abuse, ratio, and fart on him in his threads. That's all I know it as.

The dunking came after, he started the use of the term trying to convince people that Auron MacIntyre and the DR were running some conspiracy to bring Archangel Michael into this world. His terms, not mine.

In practice it's just a rethorical trick to try and paint any opposition to liberalism from the right with the same brush as opposition from the left.

Which frankly is a transparently losing tactic in world where most people (and an even larger proportion of serious political philosophers) have long given up on the sort of logical positivism that underlies Lindsey's worldview.

trying to convince people that Auron MacIntyre and the DR were running some conspiracy to bring Archangel Michael into this world

Well dang, this is the kind of bait that grabs my interest. Any details? I'm sort of accustomed to hearing about immanentizing the eschaton, but I've never heard of involving the Archangel Michael before, though yeah okay maybe I can see it... in his role as the Weigher of Souls, if you're gonna bring about the end of the world, you need him to appear first.

Not sure on the specific context that led to Lindsay making such an unhinged sounding tweet but here it is: https://x.com/ConceptualJames/status/1840510556056195340

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As I understand it, “woke right” doesn’t just mean “hardcore right-winger”; it means, roughly, co-opting the tactics and analytical methods of wokeism to advance a right-wing political agenda.

For example, hiring quotas for conservatives in academia to boost “viewpoint diversity”, or affirmative action for flyover-country whites, would be “woke right” policies, while Ramaswamy/Musk-style “green cards stapled to STEM degrees” would be “tech right”.

Is trying to associate people, who's views you don't like, with nazis a woke tactic? Do you know who'd qualify as "woke right" if the answer to that question was "yes"?

Frankly both pro-Israel and anti-Israel right-wingers are guilty of this, so I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Even aside from Israel/Palestine stuff, I’ve heard NRA types go on about how the Nazis confiscated firearms and Ron Paul libertarians draw comparisons between the PATRIOT Act and the Nuremberg laws. If we relax the reference class to include communists as well as Nazis, then basically every strand of the conservative movement from the 1980s onward has had adherents who make such comparisons to their ideological enemies.

On the topic of anti-Israel right-wingers: they come in at least three different varieties, none of which is per se what I would consider “woke right”, exactly:

  1. Paleoconservatives of Pat Buchanan’s ilk, who are skeptical of foreign entanglements in general and often support for Israel in particular. These types may harbor some negative opinions about Jewish influence in American politics, but don’t make it the center of their political worldview, nor do they generally harbor any animus towards individual Jews or to their religion.

This group may have some overlap with the “woke right” in the sense that they view preserving the historic American “national character”, and perhaps even the specific “founding stock” ethnicity, as an important political goal; as such, they are, for example, opposed to mass immigration. But the overall vibe of paleocons is very different: more patrician, more old-school Ivy League WASP (at least in bearing, if not actual ancestry) rather than Ellis Islander/white ethnic.

  1. Right(-ish)-of-center contrarians in the vein of Theo Von and Joe Rogan. While open to “questioning the narrative” and “doing their own research” and, indeed, being somewhat prone to conspiracy theorizing in general (e.g. Covid-19 origins, QAnon, 9/11 truth, etc.), these folks mostly seem to have soured on Israel due to (what they perceive as) atrocities committed in the current Gaza conflict. They do not deny the historicity of the Holocaust, though they are increasingly immune to its use as a mystical talisman that renders any criticism of Israel null and void. They likewise do not deny Israel’s right to exist, and, like the paleocons, do not personally hate Jews or Judaism.

These types are furthest from the “woke right” in my view: they genuinely want to go back to 90s-style colorblind meritocracy, with no handouts or special treatment for anyone, white or not.

  1. Out-and-out Holocaust deniers, who invariably do hate Jews and Judaism. Even when they hide behind “just asking questions” or “look at how much influence AIPAC has” or “anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism”—all of which are in theory positions within the ordinary bounds of political discourse or academic inquiry, _when posed in good faith_—I have literally never once known a Holocaust denier not to loathe Jews on a personal level. IME, Holocaust denial in actual practice is, without exception, an argument-as-soldier, and behind the claims of “the Holocaust never happened”, the undercurrent of “but wouldn’t it be great if it had?” is always palpable.

This view is strictly orthogonal to “woke right”-ism, though I would hazard a guess that it’s more common on the “woke right” than on the “tech right”, if only because the latter (correctly, in my opinion) usually attribute Ashkenazi over-representation mostly to IQ, which rather tends to immunize them against crude conspiracies about Jewish subversion and the attendant animosity towards Jews.

EDIT: perhaps you were gesturing at something like the following syllogism: “woke tactics + right-wing views = ‘woke right’; ~every right-winger compares his opponents to Nazis, which is a woke tactic; ergo the entire right is ‘woke right’”

My claim, on the other hand, is that Nazi comparisons are so ubiquitous (cf. Godwin’s law) that it doesn’t make sense to call it a “woke tactic”; indeed, it precedes wokeism by decades.

In practice, lots of paleoconservatives are mildly antisemitic on a religious if not necessarily ethnic level; my filter bubble is ground zero for paleoconservatism-as-more-than-an-intellectual-movement and while antisemitism is not universal, it's by no means rare either. Part of this is surely that Jewish activists do not like paleoconservatives, but suspicion of non-Christian religion is also very core to paleoconservative conceptions of purity testing on 'heritage American-ness', indeed moreso than race.

There's also plenty of paleoconservatives who, although they do not center their ideology around race, are unwilling to disavow white nationalism, either due to genuine though usually limited sympathy or because they see it as a soldier argument, and pattern match Jews to 'not-white and stubbornly unwilling to become white'.

perhaps you were gesturing at something like the following syllogism: “woke tactics + right-wing views = ‘woke right’; ~every right-winger compares his opponents to Nazis, which is a woke tactic; ergo the entire right is ‘woke right’”

No, I'm gesturing at the exact people who are using the term "woke right" and insisting it's meaningful, using the most hamfisted equivocation between their opponents and Nazis.

I get that you could, in theory, define it in such a way that it actually makes sense, and points at similarities between the woke left and specific factions of the right, but in practice it's just a tactic to avoid discussing ideas liberalism knows it will lose against.

The more obvious contradiction is that the very rhetorical trick of "woke right" is equivocation to refuse to address the arguments from Lindsey's right and instead denounce people by association.

Which if you recall the last decades is exactly what the cultural marxist playbook has been all about all this time. Lindsey ought to know, he's studied it more than anybody.

He's therefore denounced by his own choice of tactics. He desperately wants people to keep participating in debate and the marketplace of ideas, but only if he's able to control the outcome. Some open society!

It's these people that suddenly decided that boosting leaked videos showing you're a paypig findom-enjoyer is a valid angle of attack on someone.

I mean, given how insane of a concept it is to pay a sex worker to aggressively not have sex with you, I do consider doing that to be a major red flag for someone's judgment even in non-political terms.

given how insane of a concept it is to pay a sex worker to aggressively not have sex with you

Kink is not rational insert shrug emoji It's like the old joke:

Masochist: Beat me, beat me!
Sadist: No.

Greenwald isn't exactly a spring chicken. If he has poor judgement, I think people should be able to show that directly rather than via proxy.

Findom might be insane, but is probably on the least offensive side of the spectrum of degen behavior, and I find it darkly funny that the liberals freaking out about this apparently don't see all their gay friends are doing this right now.

Ah, I see what you're saying now. Sure, his ideas should be judged on their own merits, regardless of what his conduct in his personal life is.

But to be clear, I don't find findom offensive because it's degenerate, I find it offensive because it's stupid -- there are much more efficient ways to pay people to get your rocks off, even if your thing is being humiliated. For instance, you could pay someone to actually have sex with you while telling you you're a loser.

It's an economic waste, is all. Like someone investing their fortune in beanie babies. I just couldn't look someone in the eyes or think them intelligent if I found out they did it.

For instance, you could pay someone to actually have sex with you while telling you you're a loser.

I believe that is the sub-type of kink known as humiliation kink? And the ultimate humiliation, I guess, is that you're not even good enough to use as a disposable fuck toy. Look, I dunno, even normal vanilla sex is not my thing so I have no idea how the wiring for the kinky stuff goes. Maybe it's all by degrees: you start off with having sex while being insulted, but after a while that's no longer good enough so you need more.

I think there are too many stupid hobbies and sinful acts that too many people engage in for your point to be of much relevance.

I think Arjin means the 'anti' woke right, as opposed to the 'anti-woke' right, which is what I think you mean. But I can't be sure either way, we need new terms for these things.

Yeah that's also my read, but it remains confusing, and the hypocrisy accusations don't help, since there's hypocrisy everywhere and all the way down. I guess arjin means james lindsay (who is the main anti-("woke-right") figure) who dislikes trump and tucker for being post-truth populists, may have also condemned greenwald, using his recently exposed sexual proclivities?

The anti-woke-right brigade has an almost perfect overlap with people willing to lie on behalf of Israel, which makes it perfectly understandable.

There's been some principled people out there, whether I like their principles or not, but yeah, it's been kinda hilarious watching people bend over backwards to either suddenly find a journalist more important than their longstanding adherence to natural law, or where the same people horrified that a musical center guy was fired for being gayand a bunch of competence issues suddenly find hoist petard jokes hilarious because something something Russia fandom. Especially for degeneracy that's little more than dressing in drag and doing the hula, so to speak. I expect Lindsay to be a hypocrite and a dumbass, but it's not just him, either.

((Though I can't claim any special level of correctness, here. I'll offer the Nice Cock complement to someone like cathode_g; for a journalist I can't really offer more than 'at least he found a hobby with some dignity'.))

“anti-woke-right” needs parentheses or something for clarification.

Three of them, even! (Sorry, couldn't resist).

Topical for Greenwald and maybe his opposition!

Braces -> LISP -> lisping -> male homosexuality -> also topical for Greenwald with some stretching? So maybe brackets.

I mean they’re mostly calling him out for being a hypocrite. Which is totally deserved.

Why does it seem like so many conservatives in the public eye are degenerate perverts? Lord have mercy on this wicked generation.

  • -13

Why does it seem like so many conservatives

Glenn Greenwald is a 'conservative' in the same way that Cindy Sheehan was a conservative for running against Nancy Pelosi.

Which is to say- he was a highly acclaimed / respected public voice when he was criticizing the Bush administration and Iraq War, and then quickly lost support when his criticisms continued despite the party in power changing.

Hypocrite how? He was never a right winger or social conservative. The only reason you're confusing him with them is that they're both opposed to the liberal elites.

He isn't right-wing, he is a life long leftist who has been consistently right about the forever wars, the surveillance state, military industrial complex and the over reach of intelligence agencies. As a right winger I don't like his social policies but I deeply respect the work he has done with Ed Snowden on the NSA and his continued reporting on the war machine.

Conservatives are more likely to anger intelligence agencies these days

About conservative degenerates generally:

  1. Something has to be a little bit wrong aberrant with you to be a conservative in a time when their sentiments are flatly unwelcome at our various employers' pride networking corporate events. When I meet someone with conservative leanings I have to determine what that guy's specific deal is, because there always is one. Redneck? Really religious? Too-clever-by-half contrarian? Socially retarded?

  2. Anymore I expect liberals to have some gay stuff going on, or at least to enthusiastically encourage it. So there's no opportunity for delicious, delicious hypocrisy and it's never framed as a clash with a larger set of values. Or the more sinister predators among their ranks are de-emphasized in order to minimize any damaging stigmas against other sexual deviants.

Concerning Greenwald specifically, it may be that gay white men will simply always be on the outs with whomever is in power.

flatly unwelcome at our various employers' pride networking corporate events.

Is that your moral barometer? I've heard of people using the Church's approval as a proxy for moral behaviour, but this might be the first time I've seen someone use corporations in that role.

The absurdity was very much intended.

Thanks for the candor.

Being self-aware that your opinions are absurd is much worse than standing defiant against accusations that your opinions are absurd, regardless of how strong the accusations are. If you already know you're wrong, why don't you change your mind?

I think brawnze is pointing out the absurdity of the corpoclerics and their religion. It's meant to be a little self deprecating, but also an indictment of tribalism. That's how I read it anyway.

I think brawnze is pointing out...That's how I read it anyway.

I read it as fullhearted participation. From the post (emphasis added):

When I meet someone with conservative leanings I have to determine what that guy's specific deal is, because there always is one. Redneck? Really religious? Too-clever-by-half contrarian? Socially retarded?

followed by a clarification that their judgment is deliberately rooted in bad standards.

It's usually difficult to distinguish people who are unserious jokers from those who have foreign (for lack of a better term) values that I'd like to learn about. At least unless they identify themselves.

More comments

Thank you Fruck. This is basically it. But also I'm not a liberal. Grouping the religious together with the socially retarded was supposed to be the self-deprecating part, but I didn't loudly enough signal my alliances or use enough long paragraphs, I guess.

I thought the comment was pretty even-handed. Who ever heard of a liberal calling people sexual deviants?

Also ulyssess just blocked me, after thanking me for the candor and asking me a question. Very lame of him.

More comments

Something has to be a little bit wrong with you to be a conservative in a time when their sentiments are flatly unwelcome at our various employers' pride networking corporate events. When I meet someone with conservative leanings I have to determine what that guy's specific deal is, because there always is one. Redneck? Really religious? Too-clever-by-half contrarian? Socially retarded?

This is very boo outgroup. No thanks bud.

Less boo outgroup, more a total lack of insecurity concerning my beliefs, at least on this anonymous forum.

A rebuttal is much more welcome than accusations of rule-breaking. Refer me to Amadan via the report button if you don't plan to add anything.

Edit: look I changed a word for you. Based on your profile it seems like your specific thing is that you're religious. The zeal of a convert, perhaps? Sometimes I wish I had found Christianity as an adult myself. I mean you no offense.

The report button goes to all the mods, not just me. I do not make all mod decisions, I just tend to be the most visible.

As for your post, well, kind of borderline. "Something has to be a little bit wrong aberrant with you to be a conservative in a time when their sentiments are flatly unwelcome at our various employers' pride networking corporate events." On one level, I get what you are saying, that someone who is publicly signaling opposition is probably a confrontational sort of personality and maybe looking for a fight? But phrased as if there is something inherently wrong or "aberrant" about being a conservative, it is not surprising you got peoples' backs up.

Otoh, @ThomasdelVasto saying:

Why does it seem like so many conservatives in the public eye are degenerate perverts? Lord have mercy on this wicked generation.

is hardly more conducive to a respectful exchange of ideas with people who do not share your ideology.

I don't think either post merits modding, but neither of you have much room to be complaining.

I appreciate you chiming in, and I apologize if I came off as complaining or if you felt as though you were being dragged into the discussion.

I was using synecdoche to refer to the mod team, yes.

The irony is that Thomas and I probably agree on a great number of issues, but he didn’t like my specific examples of potential low-agreeableness groups (some of which I am a part!) and unfortunately appears to have stopped reading.

Heard! Thanks for letting me know. I'll tone it down.

He can blow midgets in a gangbang of dolphins for all I care, what matters is his journalism, and he has been consistently on point. Also he's not an anti-degeneracy firebrand conservative.

Yeah I was mistaken for some reason I had him tagged in my head as a conservative. Idk.

Where's the hypocrisy? Where did you get the idea he's a conservative?

I've seen complaints about hypocrisy of conservative commentates defending Greenwald but those very same complaints (retweeted by James Lindsay) fume about "A leftist pervert with a public sex tape..." (as if he's the one that published it, lol). No sorry, the only hypocrites here are anti-woke-rightists.

I watched him on Tucker and it was very hard to take him seriously after seeing/hearing about the video.

The hypocrisy was at the end when he talking to Tucker about human connection being the most importsnt thing in life. Impossible to reconcile that with interracial gay findom meth sex.

You should not take any gay dude of his generation seriously then.

Him being into humiliation and findom is (in my estimation) somewhere in the middle of the scale for aberrant peculiarities when it comes to homosexuals.

I found it extremely easy to take him seriously, especially in the way he highlighted the political influence of israely politics over the US. They act as if we are their vasal state instead of the other way around.

That's a bit of a stretch. Hypocrisy would be if he claimed to be a good Christian boy, and then this stuff came out. Or if he made the same claim you did about the impossibility of human connection while engaging in interracial gay findom meth sex, and then the video came out. But this? Again, where is the hypocrisy, other than in some of the same people attacking him simping for literal porn actresses?

Oh weird I always just thought he was conservative. Never paid much attention to him tbh lol.

Yeah nevermind I retract my statement.

You may be confusing him with Greg Gutfeld, who hosts a program on Fox News. I make that mistake a lot.

Romance

I recently watched the newest Marvel movie, Thunderbolts. Personally, I have seen almost all of them in a movie theatre and a few of the TV shows. The company's slate of movies in the last few years has been pretty bad, which can be seen in the (lack of) discourse and the box office. As some tweet put it, Marvel movies went from ubiquitous and massively talked about to ubiquitous and ignored.

However, I want to talk about the absence of romance, specifically in Thunderbolts but also in the larger MCU.

Thunderbolts is basically a supposedly anti-hero (but really villains, I won't go into the villain-to-antihero pipeline that is currently happening eg Harley Quinn) team in the vein of Avengers, but unconcerned with letting their targets/enemies live. All but one of the characters has been previously introduced in another movie or TV show.

Thunderbolts follows Yelena (White Widow, from the movie Black Widow) as she is dissatisfied with her clandestine spy work for Valentina (an evil mastermind of sorts who heads the CIA and funny enough looks similar to Tulsi Gabbard) who takes one last job to clear her name and start a new life. Before this mission, she seeks some advice from her loser father, Red Guardian (Soviet Captain America), who despite formerly being Soviet star is now just a boomer washout reminiscing his good old days, living in filth, ordering DoorDash and driving limousine as his job. This meeting is unsatisfactory, so she decided to take the job. That would've been a good setup for a Hallmark-style unfulfilling work focus to romance, but no.

There, she meets the rest of the villains, proceed to fight (Valentina wants to get rid of them since they're no-longer-useful loose ends) and sort of team up when they figure out the plan. John Walker (2nd Captain America, government issued, controlled and discarded from Falcon and Winter Soldier), Ghost ( another female villain, basically a life long lab rat from Ant-Man 2) and the mysterious, seemingly normal Bob.

This Bob guy is a depressive successful experiment of Valentina unbeknownst to the main cast until the 3rd act. We get hints of this when the cast interacts with him throughout the movie and they have visions of their worst moments. Yelena remembers her brutal and traumatic training as a child in the Soviet Black Widow programme but John remembers... his divorce. Specifically, the scene is him doomscrolling on his phone in one hand with his baby in the other while his wife shouts at him asking him if he's watching the baby. Almost all the characters disrespect him ("dime store Cap", "Junior Varsity Captain America"). This guy was a 3 medal soldier, media darling, selected as the new Captain America by the US government and got cancelled after killing a Flag Smasher member in broad daylight in a city centre with his shield. Mind you, this happened after the leader of the Flag Smashers killed his sidekick like a minute before.

I hoped during the movie that John and Yelena would end up together. They both are sort of former villains trying to change, unhappy with how they are perceived compared what they feel they could/should be. The fallen hero and the ascending villain. Both seeking redemption. But no, that didn't happen. And John having an ex-wife and a child isn't the reason, since Ant-Man is in a similar place in his first movie and still has a romantic relationship with the Wasp. Everytime there could be some flirting between the two, Yelena or some other character either makes fun of him disrespects him in some other way, and he kind of lacks any response or has some really cringe ones. Think "You're a real bad boy, John" said in a flirty manner by Yelena, to which John would respond with "A-Actually I'm a man". Although not an actual line in the movie, it wouldn't seem out of place. Every line or quip he is facing against, he comes off as obtuse and mismatched. Imagine a 27 year old model talking to a college freshman, who also gets clowned and dismissed by almost everyone.

Yelena does have some mommy-dom scenes with Bob (whose alter ego Void, is the villain of the movie), but no romance there either. Bob is depressive and lonely, and John gives him a hard time for a bit, but even there he seems outclassed. When he tells Bob he's Captain America, he laughs and when pressed about his reaction, he says "Cause you're an asshole". Yelena is sort of protective of Bob, in a big sister way, which towards the end I thought might turn romantic (you know, the Femme Fatale and soft guy type of relationship, that is, I guess, not unheard of in fiction) but no. She looks after him and is instrumental in helping him take back control over his body from the Void, but it's more like a found family type of thing.

It's feels weird, not just because it breaks the previous established formula of the hero gets the girl, but these characters are pretty much at their physical peak with extraordinary skills. In the real world, when top athletes are put together during the Olympics, well you can guess what happens.

The characters form a team at the end of the movie, but I don't think romance is going to be explored based off the recent trend.

In Shang-Chi, the namesake character has a girl best friend with whom he gets drunk and has friend activities (working low end jobs, getting drunk, karaoke). At the end, after he saves the world together with his best friend, his grandma hints at a possible relationship/marriage between the 2 which is shut down immediately by both of them.

Falcon and the Winter Soldier also lacks romance, with the discourse around that time being the shipping of the two (male) protagonists, which got shut down fast by Anthony Mackie (Falcon). Speaking of him, I don't think he had any romantic relationships in the few projects he appeared; most recently he starred in Captain America: Brave New World, where he fights the Thunderbolt Ross (as the Red Hulk. See, Ross is the Hulk's antagonist in the Hulk movie. He also hates Bruce Banner (the, um, Hulk) as he doesn't approve of him dating his daughter, Betty. Again, the relationship isn't really explored past the first installment, and the Black Widow sort of takes the role of "woman who calms the Hulk down" from Betty Ross but I don't think they ever really dated or kissed on-screen. There were certainly some more emotional scenes between them, but if I remember correctly, any actual dating, if it happened, is just referred to in dialogue. But Betty comes back to talk to her (previously estranged) father. Anthony Mackie's character has no romantic subplot, nor does it seem he is interested in any.

Usually, these big action blockbusters have a romantic subplot so the wives/girlfriends have something to care about during all the fights and explosions happening all around. Even their big hit in the last few years, Deadpool and Wolverine, lacked any romantic subplot. Ant-Man and Wasp marry, but there is barely any romance. Even their most successful relationship, Ironman and Pepper Potts, is an afterthought. To say nothing of how the Thor franchise handled the main relationship. Diminishing screen time and maybe throwaway lines during the big team-ups.

Keep in mind that in the comics characters, especially protagonists, have a bunch of love interests that they jump between. Here is how Spider-Man was portrayed (accurately) in Marvel Ultimate Alliance at 10:38 (spoilers for a 20 year old game) The team gets sent to Mephisto's Realm (Hell) and Spider-Man quips "Why can't we be sent to an alternate dimension filled with lonely supermodels?" which is entirely on-par with what a young guy would wish.

The current Spider-Man has a relationship with MJ which is basically best friends who occasionally kiss. Here is a list of Spider-Man's love interests (spoilers for the comics).

I know there are counterexamples both in and out of the superhero genre. But given how prominent the genre is to movies, especially action/adventure movies, this to me seems way more than just an accidental occurrence.

I guess my questions are if you think that the romantic interest is the new "parents problem" that young protagonists have (which is why they are disproportionately orphans or estranged or never mentioned) and if so, is this a recent development due to less interest by younger generations in romance/dating/sex?

It's worth understanding that werewolf romance isn't about the werewolf-- it's about the girl. The werewolf is just backdrop for a fantasy about becoming materially wealthy and high-status through the interest of a suitor despite the attempts of rivals to interfere. It's the story older women have told younger women for the past hundred thousand years, with only modest embellishments for cultural fit. The distaff counterpart is the story of a young man getting mentored into performing a visible and socially valuable task and being rewarded with wealth and high status as a result.

As pertains to movies, and specifically thunderbolts, tentpole blockbusters typically attempt to have a variety of characters such that everyone in the audience has someone to identify with and follow the movie for. And in eras where characters (and audiences) fit into more traditional gender roles, having a romance was a space-efficient way to simultaneously satisfy the fantasy of the viewers who identified with the male and female characters. But in a movie like thunderbolts, the wealth and status fantasies of women are already intrinsically satisfied by the progression of the plot, and the wealth and status fantasies of men are satisfied by bucky barnes, buff asskicking congressman. A romance wouldn't necessarily detract from that, but the movie would need additional runtime to set one up, and a snappy action movie is very limited by runtime. That extends to a lot of marvel movies-- given that the plot of the movie itself already satisfied most status, wealth, and power fantasies, additionally having a romantic fantasy ends up just not being particularly necessary.

My point is that it doesn't need much additional runtime, just the dialogue in the existing scenes between the two being changed and I guess one short scene of them kissing or whatever.

I always thought the monster was about how dangerous a man can seem/be to women, and how in a marriage he mellows out due to getting to know him better in a romantic context.

My girlfriend read a lot of werewolf romance when she was younger and in describing it I'm always struck by how she focuses on the fact that the main girl is always chosen by destiny, or outcast for being a runt and later discovered to be extra special, or fated to be the alpha's mate, or whatever. She spends virtually no time describing the werewolf himself. Probably she likes werewolves-qua-werewolves too, but the literary genre serves as more of a promise about what kind of main character you're getting and what story they go through than as a promise to feature long descriptions of buff, hairy men. (Even if they also include those.)

As pertains to marvel movies, marvel movies make a specific promise about what kind of plucky heroes will be on-screen for the audience to identify with. If those heroes then get into romances the audience doesn't care about they actually become less identifiable. So unless a romance is well justified by the characters and plot, it's more of a risk to include them then to not include them.

There wasn't much romance in the new Top Gun movie either, Cruise spent much of the non-jet parts being dressed down by former lovers which I found a bit irritating and unnecessary. Quite different to the old one.

In either of the Mission Impossible 'Dead Reckoning' movies there wasn't much romance.

Not sure how you can have romance in the modern era where there seems to be so much emphasis on men being denigrated. Traditional James Bond style romance is too rapey, Roger Moore's Bond is right out. Even soft wooing can still give the ick to some extent. The male can't pursue the female without being humiliated it seems,. And if the female is pursuing the man it seems like male wish fulfillment fantasy, the Japanese trope where a very passive guy ends up with a harem of 10/10s because he's 'nice'.

So how do you have a romance then if neither party can pursue? Ironically, lots of women want Roger Moore x10, they want a billionaire werewolf lumberjack cowboy with a massive cock. The 50 shades of grey movie made 570 million on a budget of 40 million, it's a clear success. As in my previous post, many many women want the alpha male version of Malfoy: https://www.themotte.org/post/877/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/187490?context=8#context

But directors and high society/PMC feminists absolutely refuses to permit the alpha male version of Malfoy, Rowling wrote him to be a wimp and a loser. I saw a funny thread on /gif/ the other day where the premise was 'feminists/liberals fucked hard' and so naturally all these commenters joined in a pointless political debate on 4chan's third most degen pornography board: 'you guys are incels posting this garbage', 'its so cringe, trump supporters don't have sex' and nobody realized that the clips were all from the reddit forum, fuckingfascists. It was leftwing and liberal women who were into this stuff, getting fucked by trump supporters, getting turned into tradwives. Femgooners were to blame. You can tell this instantly because none of it or the stuff from fuckingfascists was anime. Clearly it wasn't authentic right-wing content. There's a huge gap between the roles and expectations that society tries to project and what's actually happening, at least in terms of masturbation fantasies.

I'd like a movie where some gigachad Sean Connery secret agent from the 1950s comes forward in time and has to deal with modern norms and lame gadgets, shows all the paper-pushers and pencilnecks what real racism and sexism looks like. The femgooners can have their dangerous alpha male. I can have an antiwoke, fun, action movie. Everybody wins except the directorial class who've been pumping out all these terrible marvel movies.

Something really amusing regarding Malfoy given your mention of 50 Shades, which was Twilight fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off (meaning the author changed the names to be allowed to publish it as original fiction). There's a Draco/Hermione story that is also being published.

The nearly 16 million individual downloads of the author’s works; the 84,000 likes on Archive of Our Own, aka AO3, where it was first published in 2018; the 19 languages to which it’s been translated; the 71,000 ratings on Goodreads; the 470 million collective TikTok views. The TikTok readers (aka BookTokers) are especially vexed: People are clipping together their emotional states before and after reading — going into it excited and chipper, and finishing with red-rimmed eyes and stifling sobs.

And the latest flick of the wand: SenLinYu, 32, has leveraged all this into a book deal, a reimagined version of “Manacled” that will leave the characters and world of “Harry Potter” behind.

By 2025, the enemies-to-lovers romance centered around Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy will undergo a transformation to become a novel called “Alchemised,” Sen announced Feb. 5. It’ll be a dark fantasy with new characters, published by Del Rey at Penguin Random House in the U.S. and Michael Joseph in the U.K.

The upshot here is that female romance fandom commonly takes franchise characters and smushes them together in transformative works. This is VERY true of Avengers fandom, but a lot of it is slash, because Marvel/Disney are never going to let Cap and Bucky bang onscreen.

Personally, I'm not particularly interested in romance in superhero movies. It feels shoehorned-in.

See also The Mortal Instruments, which was adapted from the author's earlier Draco Trilogy.

In a sane world, writers could just publish their fanfic commercially and send a royalty check to the copyright holder. But we do not live in a sane world.

Cassandra Cla(i)re was well-known in the fandom space. https://fanlore.org/wiki/Cassandra_Claire

I missed my chance to finish reading Manacled then, probably a good thing. The work is basically an infohazard as discussed downthread in my link, totally alien to the male sensibility. And it holds such power over them too, such incredible desire. Who the hell translated it into WELSH?

Needs industrial-grade shaming. Whatever invective and scorn was poured on the 'I got sent to another world and have sexy adventures with Biccus Tittus and her sisters: now with more hot dark elves' genre should be returned against these people. Hermione is not supposed to be a useless, passive, shrinking violet failing to kill herself. And she's certainly not supposed to be with Draco in a Handmaid's Tale scenario where there's barely any sex, just suffering.

I read it due to the buzz and I have deep regrets.

If you ever change your mind, you can still find it in the archives.

I'd like a movie where some gigachad Sean Connery secret agent from the 1950s comes forward in time and has to deal with modern norms and lame gadgets, shows all the paper-pushers and pencilnecks what real racism and sexism looks like.

It isn't a perfect fulfillment of the fantasy, but the Sylvester Stallone series Tulsa King has him playing a traditional Italian mafia underboss who gets out of prison after a 25 year stint, and ends up in Oklahoma, and has to adapt his older-generation mobster style, macho braggadocio and all, to modern times and a smaller town.

The general theme is that his brand of realistic common sense, his willingness to use violence, and his tendency to take what he wants is actually extremely useful for achieving success compared to the beta males that modernity has wrought, and this likewise gives him success with ladies.

I'd like a movie where some gigachad Sean Connery secret agent from the 1950s comes forward in time and has to deal with modern norms and lame gadgets, shows all the paper-pushers and pencilnecks what real racism and sexism looks like.

Demolition Man, but different timeframes.

Demolition Man is the most reactionary movie ever made.

Problem? What problem? From my perspective, the shift in screenwriting priorities is actually nice. There are so many varieties of non-romantic relationships that go underexplored on screen because the writers have to make space for an obligatory romance arc. Maybe the pendulum has swung too far of late, but human desires being what they are, I'm sure it'll swing back.

Also, counterexample: Have you seen the GTA 6 trailer from a few weeks ago? My first thought was: after hundreds of thousands of words spilled about the fertility crisis, dating troubles, incels, etc, the thing that is actually going to move the cultural needle is a video game franchise modelling a healthy adult relationship between its protagonists.

I just now realized I should've included this in the OP, but I was blindsided since it's actually one of the few above-avereage Marvel movies, but in Civil War, the conflict between the 2 sides is over Bucky, Cap's long lost friend, who being brainwashed, killed Tony's (Ironman) parents. The previous movies establish a friend/rival relationship between Ironman and Cap, who are the defacto leaders of the Avengers. There's a line in the trailer where Cap says "Tony, he's my friend" and Ironman responds "So was I" which still gives me goosebumps.

While there still is a ideological undercurrent in the movie (should heroes work unrestrained or should they be state agents and everything that comes with either choice), in the comics that's the main thing.

I guess the jarring thing is that this sort of "drawing battlelines and breaking up the organization/friend group" is usually reserved for romantic conflicts in a love triangle or just 2 guys vying for one woman (think Troy).

I guess this is more common in Japanese media, Naruto has an unhealthy obsession with bringing Sasuke (even weirder friends/rivals relationship) off the wrong/evil path.

There are so many varieties of non-romantic relationships that go underexplored on screen because the writers have to make space for an obligatory romance arc.

I dont watch much superhero stuff anymore but I am fairly certain this is not happening either. We aren't getting Frodo and Sam 2.0. Instead the often poorly written romances are just replaced with nothing.

Maybe. I also stay away from the Marvel stuff, but from the description, it least sounds like it's not nothing.

Yelena is sort of protective of Bob, in a big sister way

... but it's more like a found family type of thing.

that's something!

At the end, after he saves the world together with his best friend

... basically best friends who occasionally kiss

also something

But I haven't seen the movies, so maybe you're right and it's a wasted opportunity.

I recently watched the newest Marvel movie, Thunderbolts.

You have my condolences.

I only saw photos of the cast and I was going "Who the hell are these people, I recognise nobody except Sebastian Stan who must be playing Bucky/Winter Soldier" and while they seem to have a Captain America in the movie, I think that is a wasted chance to have Bucky and Fake Cap arguing it out over "who is Captain America, what does he mean to the public?" - I'm presuming this is more along the line of "wacky gang of misfits get together and pull through for the greater cause", is it?

Yes, that's basically what happens, with some underlying "these people are/can be actually heroic if not for their traumas/life circumstances.

The argument over Cap's shield happens in Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

And "Fake Cap" is kind of weird, since John is arguably much more suited to be Captain America than even Steve Rogers. If you'd have to choose a priori, would you pick the scrawny nobody or the multiple times decorated soldier with proven experience and skills?

The only reason Steve got picked by the guy who developed the highly experimental and unproven Super Soldier Serum is because he showed the willingness to sacrifice himself when he threw himself over a grenade during bootcamp.

You might say that you'd test it on a guy like Steve and then roll it out to all of the John Walkers out there. The only reason that doesn't happen is because the facility gets sabotaged and they lose the formula.

I haven't been following the comics but my impression was that Walker was kind of a proto-Homelander (starting out as Super-Patriot, a villain or at least anti-hero). So Bucky/Winter Soldier, who was there at the start with Original Cap, surely has a lot of opinions about pretenders to the title:

The character of John Walker was first introduced as the supervillain Super-Patriot in Captain America #323 (November 1986). Mark Gruenwald created Walker to counter the general message in Captain America of patriotism being invariably good, describing him as someone "who embodied patriotism in a way that Captain America didn't—a patriotic villain." He said, "Basically, I just wanted to do the opposite of Steve Rogers. Okay, Steve Rogers is a poor northern urban boy. So I'll make a guy from rural middle-class south. Cap is now old, so this guy'll be a real young up-and-comer. Cap has lofty ideals, so I'll make Super-Patriot be more realistic and more pragmatic. So, I put together his background and character traits by playing the opposite game."

I do like how the general aura of Cap means that even the grittier reboot version gradually becomes more heroic to fit the ideal 😀

But yeah, that would have been too deep for this kind of movie.

The only reason Steve got picked by the guy who developed the highly experimental and unproven Super Soldier Serum is because he showed the willingness to sacrifice himself when he threw himself over a grenade during bootcamp.

And also in general because he expressed that he wants to fight the Nazis to protect his people, not to kill the Nazis. It is highlighted that the serum corrupted Red Skull because Red Skull had the wrong morality. Many John Walkers would also fail. To be fair I haven't watched Thunderbolts, so maybe John was just as pure-hearted as Steve.

Cap is the Marvel version of Superman. The idealism is the point. Whether it's starting out as 40s literal "punch a Nazi" or 60s "Vietnam is not what we're about" or 00s Civil War "this is authoritarianism", or whatever they're currently doing with the character, the ideal of Captain America is what is best about America, its foundational myths, its aspirations, the shining city on the hill. The land of opportunity. The nation of immigrants, where you can leave the shackles of the Old World behind and have a fresh start, work hard, succeed on your merits, with nobody holding you down because of out-worn social classes like nobility and peasantry or because your lot in life is predetermined.

If you make the character dark'n'gritty Punisher type, you fundamentally misunderstand what it's about and you wreck it, so you either create a new different character to be the new dark'n'gritty pragmatist, or (as the development seems to have been with the John Walker character) retcon the retcon so it fits the ideals better (maybe our current ideals are feminist anti-racist pro-woke Cap, but the character is still a representation of idealism and not 'shoot 'em all, let God sort 'em out' pragmatism and cynicism).

The nation of immigrants

Ugh, I've always hated the writers for this shit. This is the kind of mindwash you get when you let a particular group of people drive your modern myths for decades. America Chavez and Ms. Marvel are just the latest most hamfisted reincarnations of this.

Eh, Steve Rogers is the son of Irish-Americans (not noted if they're Protestant or Catholic) so he's the exact type the Know Nothings were objecting to (even though he's literally white, blond and blue-eyed):

The American Party, known as the Native American Party before 1855 and colloquially referred to as the Know Nothings, or the Know Nothing Party, was an Old Stock nativist political movement in the United States in the 1850s. Members of the movement were required to say "I know nothing" whenever they were asked about its specifics by outsiders, providing the group with its colloquial name.

Supporters of the Know Nothing movement believed that an alleged "Romanist" conspiracy to subvert civil and religious liberty in the United States was being hatched by Catholics. Therefore, they sought to politically organize native-born Protestants in defense of their traditional religious and political values. The Know Nothing movement is remembered for this theme because Protestants feared that Catholic priests and bishops would control a large bloc of voters. In most places, the ideology and influence of the Know Nothing movement lasted only one or two years before it disintegrated due to weak and inexperienced local leaders, a lack of publicly proclaimed national leaders, and a deep split over the issue of slavery. In parts of the South, the party did not emphasize anti-Catholicism as frequently as it emphasized it in the North and it stressed a neutral position on slavery, but it became the main alternative to the dominant Democratic Party.

I was going to call you out for glossing over the Guardians of the Galaxy series, where Starlord and Gamora have a truly interesting romantic dynamic across the first couple movies, which is SO emphasized that it is the entire reason the heroes 'lose' the Infinity War.

But then I remembered they turned it into a joke for the third film.

So this might just prove the point.

Although James Gunn's NEXT film, this time with a more well known hero looks like it will lean heavily on the Lois Lane romance.

I wanted to mention it as an example for the femme fatale / bumbling idiot pairing example, but I felt it would have taken too long to explain properly, although clearly you demonstrated the opposite.

Starlord is also portrayed as the bumbling idiot of the group, like he gets replaced by Thor as the leader when he just... shows up.

Regarding "losing" the Infinity War, I don't know if that's the case, since Strange foresaw just 1 winning scenario which might as well have necessitated Starlord inadvertently freeing Thanos.

Yeah, hence the scare quotes.

That scene gets maligned for a few reasons. I don't think Quill acting out of character is a good critique, though. This is the same guy, who, in the second film, impulsively started blasting his own father into smithereens because he found out that dad was the cause of his beloved mother's death.

Forgetting the stakes and wailing on Thanos over his lost lover is fully in character.

I think the reason the scene is so maligned, is because it seems contrived to have the heroes lose from a basically unloseable situation, just so they could have thr sequel.

Like, whatever happened to Gamora can be found out or resolved by literally waiting for another <minute since finishing the task gives you literal control over reality. Sure, you can't bring people back sacrificed for the soul stone, but the characters don't know that yet.

Oh yeah.

They had to contrive a VERY particular situation where the heroes are on the cusp of winning and somehow, without some crazy deus ex machina, lose and Thanos achieves his objective.

Hell, they showed that Dr. Strange's portals can be used to sever people's arms earlier in the same film, that should have been the thing they tried first.

So they used Quill as a device for Thanos breaking the hypnosis and reclaiming the gauntlet. While it was in-character for Quill, it required a lot of contrivance to get it to happen.

HOWEVER, I do like that one common theme in the film is that the heroes lose b/c they don't have the "will" to make the hard sacrifices, whereas Thanos puts it all on the line to achieve his goal, and so he does.

There are MULTIPLE scenarios where the heroes could have won if they weren't committed to avoiding any real sacrifice.

Big one: they tried to save Vision's life when removing the stone instead of killing him so they could destroy it faster. Vision himself was okay with dying!

Or earlier, Loki gives up the space stone rather than letting Thanos kill Thor.

The heroes, despite the stakes, couldn't bear to accept losses.

Tbh Dr. Strange's powers are a walking deus ex machina, they could have sent thanos to the mirror dimension or to that no time hell hole if they wanted too. Hell, they showed us Dr. Strange could use time travel to be in the same place multiple times, him being a level 99+ wizard of wizarding he could have had like a 100 of him right there and nuked Thanos out of existence with magic bullshit too.

I can't tell if this is supposed to be ironic since he pretty much did all that.

Not the fake clone dudes, I meant literally using the time stone to have actual multiples of himself there

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Yeah, not to mention the Hulk being afraid to um... Hulk out.

Probably because the action scenes / choreography would've been much harder to do with Hulk rampaging around.

Plus, Thanos had the space stone, so he could've just spammed teleport, grab Strange and go to wherever. While Strange also has teleport, his is much more time intensive, so Thanos had the edge.

Thanos is physically very tough, I can understand not trying the portal cut if Strange was reasonably sure it would just tickle him.

I read Loki giving up the cube as a trick to momentarily distract Thanos while Hulk jumps him. The Vision thing is absolutely stupid, though, yes.

Oh also when Gamora was begging Quill to kill her earlier in the film, and he hesitated too long, even though Thanos complimented him on having the guts to do it.

That also might play into his reaction against Thanos later.

I appreciate that the film made it clear that Thanos 'deserved' his win since he would actually go as far as needed whilst the heroes kept dropping the ball for (comparatively) petty reasons.

That's probably why some fans ironically(?) valorize the guy.

I doubt anyone at that point was even thinking about using the stones themselves. Quill could barely survive holding the Power Stone by sharing it with all his friends.

I actually just wrote a post yesterday touching on some similar points.

One of my theories is that modern relationships and friendships have been so hollowed out that writers just don’t have material from their own lives to work with when it comes to deep romances. It’s something you have to actually live in order to recreate in your characters.

Sadly modern connection has been extremely flattened for a variety of reasons, and it reflects in our art.

Hollywood writers come from hyper-liberal blue tribe backgrounds, yes? I don’t know what courtship norms look like in those bubbles, not really, but if they’re assuming apps and hookups turn into a relationship, there’s some obvious reasons that’s less on the screens- both that it’s harder to introduce and possible ratings issues.

Most of publishing is different sub genres of bdsm werewolf erotica, so I don’t think ‘entertainment industry thinks relationships are a dead end’ is the explanation.

Most of publishing is different sub genres of bdsm werewolf erotica, so I don’t think ‘entertainment industry thinks relationships are a dead end’ is the explanation.

As I said in another comment, it's not that they are dead ends. It is that treating romantic partners as disposable leads to a more shallow exploration of emotional depths you can reach via deep connection in relationships.

And yet Korea, the place with possibly the worst gender relations on earth, accompanied by the lowest TFR by a mile somehow manages to be the world leading producer of romance dramas.

I don't think your theory holds up and this has more to do with what people producing movies and TV shows think people want and whats "in" in their social circles.

There is a massive market for romance out there and a shitton is being produced in America, just not necessarily in film. Romance is the biggest written fiction category by far and accounts for some 25-30% of books sold.

I think American dramas have another big problem, which is that it’s almost impossible to portray a romantic relationship, especially one that develops from a friendship, in a realistic way without tripping over a thousand versions of problematic. Korean and Chinese dramas really don’t have the same culture wars around relationships that Americans do, so they’re free to make a real romantic relationship between the leads where modern western stories cannot. If a Korean story were remade by an American company, it would be seen as extremely sexist.

... what? I think that's the most common trope in the last few decades, friends-to-lovers.

Anecdotally, online and offline, it also seems that at least in the Anglosphere (maybe exclusively?) a lot of women express preference for starting as friends, which may then develop into a romantic relationship.

Stated versus revealed, etc. In real life it's extraordinarily rare for a friendship to 'blossom' into a romantic relationship without at least a long period of separation in-between.

I think you are right, but also I don't think hollywood wants to portray healthy, heterosexual relationships. That thing is basically culture war poison for them. And they would probably love to sneak homosexual and trans things into everything, but you still have to have a product that sells, and that stuff just does not.

Korean romance dramas aren't exactly realistic romances. If you watch just a few of them you can start to see the formula: Episode 1 introduces high-status guy and average girl who hates everything he stands for, Episode 2 we meet their friends, Episode 3 she befriends his best friend who has a crush on her, Episode 4 high-status guy has physical contact with main character in a plausibly deniable way, ... Episode 10 they kiss, Episode 11 something happens to estrange them, ... Episode 16 they marry and live happily ever after. I'm sure the writers and producers spend enough time watching dramas that they know the tropes, know the formula, and have an instinct for the progression of a good drama.

Also, I'm sure that there is a selection bias. We hear about every Marvel and Disney production even when it sucks because there is a large marketing budget targeted at English speakers; we only hear about the Korean dramas when they are actually good. (Counterexample which demonstrates the rule: Squid Game 2 sucked and had a large marketing budget, and I heard about it "organically" before it came out).

Korean romance dramas aren't exactly realistic romances.

But they're still romances. Entertainment exists as wish fulfillment, not as an accurate reflection of reality, that story sounds excruciating but also like something women would lap up.

If you watch just a few of them you can start to see the formula

Which sounds exactly like the romance novel formula (at least as it was back when I was reading them as a teenager). So that's probably why they work: guys are likely not going to be watching romance movies/shows, women are, this is the successful formula for women's romance novels.

Korean romance dramas aren't exactly realistic romances. If you watch just a few of them you can start to see the formula: Episode 1 introduces high-status guy and average girl who hates everything he stands for, Episode 2 we meet their friends, Episode 3 she befriends his best friend who has a crush on her, Episode 4 high-status guy has physical contact with main character in a plausibly deniable way, ... Episode 10 they kiss, Episode 11 something happens to estrange them, ... Episode 16 they marry and live happily ever after. I'm sure the writers and producers spend enough time watching dramas that they know the tropes, know the formula, and have an instinct for the progression of a good drama.

So? People like formulaic fiction. My point is that lack of romance in western writers personal lives (if that is true in the first place) most likely matters little, given the abundance of evidence the places even worse than the west are producing popular stuff and the west still produces a shitton of written romance that is as popular as it's ever been.

Also, I'm sure that there is a selection bias. We hear about every Marvel and Disney production even when it sucks because there is a large marketing budget targeted at English speakers; we only hear about the Korean dramas when they are actually good. (Counterexample which demonstrates the rule: Squid Game 2 sucked and had a large marketing budget, and I heard about it "organically" before it came out).

Romance dramas are more often than not not prestige dramas. They are relatively low budget affairs promoted to their intended demographic. Nowadays that is done by streaming companies by recommendation, not by billboards. Whether we hear about them or not doesn't really matter, they're watched in massive amounts just like romance fiction is quietly the most read literature genre and we almost never hear about that either. The Koreans were able to enter the market for live action romance because it was grossly underserved in the west.

Yes, but how much of that 25-30% is literal smut ("romantasly"?) or a Sci-Fi with added romance to it?

Does 50 Shades belong in the romance category?

A lot of modern RPGs in the last 15-20 years have an optional romance tacked in, but it cannot be said that Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate or Skyrim are romance games. Yes, romance videogames are rare and hard to make/market.

I guess the underlying principle to follow would be "Does the protagonist save the world and gets a girlfriend after" or "He saves the world either together with her or for her". It's hard to describe broadly, without giving examples. I guess The Witcher (books) is closer to a romance despite not being labelled as one then most "romantasy" books, even though the relationship is not the forefront, it's easily seen to be vital to both characters.

Does 50 Shades belong in the romance category?

...Yes?

The romance genre is just the female version of pornography. Much like purpose of porn is to stimulate male reproductive instincts, the purpose of romance movies is to stimulate female reproductive instincts.

The difference is that men and women are attracted to different things, so instead of men watching an endless stream of videos depicting naked girls who moan a lot, women consume an endless stream of stories about billionaire athlete demon pirates kings who declare their undying love for the audience surrogate.

A romance novel is is nine hundred pages of the male love interest demonstrating how aloof and alpha he is, a hundred pages where he breaks down, gets weepy, and shows his soft inner core of twu luving betaness, and one page where he tears the lady’s clothes off with his teeth and the couple finally at long last get some action.

No no no, you're forgetting the very vital sub-plot of the Former Love Interest showing back up! The ex-fiancée, the old flame, the childhood sweetheart - the threat who is hot and sexy and successful and a tigress and everything the main female character is not, and the male love interest either diverts his attention to her and it looks like they'll get back together, or the old flame does all she can to break up male love interest and female love interest.

That leads to the satisfying set-up where male love interest shows up, demonstrates his scorn for old flame because she has shown herself to be untrustworthy/only trying to use him for status and wealth/he was only trying to make female love interest jealous, and reaffirms that he has chosen female love interest over hot successful tigress, and then the ripping off clothes with his teeth scene follows 😁

The sub-sub-plot to that one is the distaff version of new/former love interest showing up for the female love interest. A nice guy (and I don't mean that ironically); someone supportive, different to the male love interest in not being dismissive and curt to her, a guy who is handsome and successful and desirable in his own right (but still not quite the equal of the alpha hot guy), someone who genuinely cares about her. Alas, he is destined to be friendzoned because he just doesn't have that spark, but he is understanding and bows out courteously because he realises that she and alpha guy are destined to be together. This is comforting reading for the consumer of such novels, because it demonstrates that the female love interest (who is the vicarious stand-in for the reader) has options, she's not just doomed to be dumped by the hot guy, she don't need him after all she can always get another guy who truly wants her for who she is.

Writing a romance novel, even a formulaic one, is a lot tougher than you think - way back I was part of an online group that tried doing the traditional tropes in an ironic way and we didn't get very far because writing is indeed hard. I'm given to understand there's a lot more sex in modern romance novels because times indeed change, and waiting for the wedding bells ending isn't enough, so the female and male love interests can get it on a lot earlier and indeed more frequently (while still going through the 'will they, won't they/he loves me, he loves me not' travails until the happy ending).

My point is that there is a separation between "romance" books that are m/f coded, namely harem/vampire type of stuff, and romance like the sitcom/TV show "will they/won't they" stuff that permeated across genres. Think Ross/Rachel or Mulder/Scully. Those stories are not really about the couple, but it becomes a, if not the, driving force the more you go through it. Which mirrors life, since you wouldn't ditch your plans with your friends at the needs of a 2 week relationship at 20, but if you're 30 and in a long-term relationship for some time, it's a different (expected) response.

Yes, but how much of that 25-30% is literal smut ("romantasly"?) or a Sci-Fi with added romance to it?

In Korea? Not much. In the West? I think mainstream romance (which may include a little bit of steaminess but generally ends in a conventional HEA between a monogamous couple) still outsells smut/romantasy by a significant amount.

Hollowed writers is definitely part of it. More broadly, I remember a relatively recent Lindyman post about how people/artists used to have much more interesting and varied lifestyles. Going through their wikipedia seems like their lives just upend at random, back and forth from rags to riches across varied types of work.

Today, people focus on a career pretty early, due to increased access to education, credentialism, safetyism and general structural rigidness of life. Yes, I guess a software dev can just quit, move out of Sillicon Valley to Idaho and be a writer while working some odd jobs, but that's unfeasible unless he saved up a lot or just made millions. But more likely he either got burned out, did FIRE or usually fried himself up with psychadelics.

Even so, there's more romantic relationships now than ever. Maybe it's so common audiences lost interest in seeing them on the big screen. Maybe there is such a discrepancy of expectation from growing up with ideas about romance, that when confronted with the reality personally, people are just not interested. Seeing so many divorces, breakups, cheating or other such behaviors while growing up on "Love conquers all" is cognitively dissonant.

Maybe past works were so interesting because most people didn't marry out of love, but ended up loving their partner nonetheless? So a story of pure genuine desire had a different impact.

Maybe over the last few decades, as fiction became more popular and more media genres portrayed, reached a peak of "people believing romance to be possible and desireable" and "people did find romance" and we're slowly coming off that peak?

I think that's what happened to hookups and hookup culture. Popular sitcoms (and other movies) in the 2000s made it super desirable and popular, out of what experiences, personal or witnessed, writers had from being young in the 1980s and 1990s. As hookup culture gained traction, it reached a peak (probably 1-2 years after Tinder was invented) and now we're here, with the (male) loneliness epidemic.

I'd say that since romance that was previously pretty achievable becomes more "impossible", then we should see more impossible romances and relationships in media. I am thinking of monsters, aliens, robots etc but that would be difficult to disentangle from the lifting of (intimate) taboos.

Isn’t paranormal romance the best selling genre out there? Werewolf porn hitting it big is consonant with your predictions.

Even so, there's more romantic relationships now than ever. Maybe it's so common audiences lost interest in seeing them on the big screen. Maybe there is such a discrepancy of expectation from growing up with ideas about romance, that when confronted with the reality personally, people are just not interested. Seeing so many divorces, breakups, cheating or other such behaviors while growing up on "Love conquers all" is cognitively dissonant.

Yes there are "more" romantic relationships in that people date serially. My point is that these relationships aren't as deep in terms of depth of emotion and connection than they were in the past.

One of my theories is that modern relationships and friendships have been so hollowed out that writers just don’t have material from their own lives to work with when it comes to deep romances. It’s something you have to actually live in order to recreate in your characters.

They also don't have direct lived experience of giant green mutants, alien invasions, Infinity Stones, and so on and so forth; and yet they're still able to write stories about these things in a manner that people find appealing.

Those are all much easier to imagine and less complex than deep human relationships.

I... have to nitpick on this. A lot of comics (and especially their movies) leave giant plot holes. I mean the medium is built on 80 or so years of publishing tens of titles yearly across hundreds of writers. Which means inconclusive answers to a lot of questions regarding power scaling and such.

But the movies have a bigger problem, namely since their stories usually involve origin stories for their villains, they kind of just pop up one after another. Which begs the question why after the Avengers, they don't just all show up to fight the 1-2 villains each solo hero fights in his own movie. I mean yeah it's always explained that everyone else is busy, but in the comics that's sort of assumed since there's dozens of villains per hero (plus, there aren't any pesky IP rights or contracts to have them show up whenever).

So um, besides having literally thousands of pages of lore to just pluck up for the romantic subplots or have the writer(s) insert their cleaned-up bad/great relationships/fantasies, everything is just... hollowed out. Like there's foundations there as I described them in the OP, since I guess Hollywood blockbuster script-writing is more of a science than art, but it's just hollow.


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