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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28689 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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Let's talk socialism and the NYC mayoral race. Apparently the All-in podcast people think it's a sweeping wave that will drown out Progress with a capital P. London, Vienna, Chicago, and of course the California cities have already had socialist mayors for a while. Why not New York?

Honestly despite being a "conservative" I am broadly quite sympathetic to socialist arguments. I do think free markets actually kind of suck, inasmuch as we can even have free markets. Personally I think free markets don't really exist when you take into account that power abhors a vacuum, but they are a fiction with extremely high utility to create material goods.

Anyway, socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class. It's weary writing and thinking about politics when even the best laid plans seem to inevitably just get ground down by the dumbest things. I can completely understand why young folks want to just socialize everything.

Not that I agree with them, but hey, sometimes I wish I were still naive enough to think socialism or any -ism could fix the ills of our society. I sadly am not that optimistic.

That being said, I don't think society is unfixable. I just think that political solutions are pointless. We need what has always been the core of strong societies - a culture that promotes and encourages personal virtue. Without that, you have nothing.

I just think that political solutions are pointless. We need what has always been the core of strong societies - a culture that promotes and encourages personal virtue. Without that, you have nothing.

I feel that, given your own stated preferences, a socialist upheaval should be among the worst case scenarios from your perspective. I get that you said you're not on board with it, but I feel like connecting the dots in what you've said would logically make a sweeping trend of socialism pretty alarming and less seemingly shrug-worthy.

The entire mission of this belief system seems to be dispensing with personal accountability at any cost, rewarding people for giving nothing, and deluding the masses into thinking they can get every possible thing for free. There is no interest in a platform like Zohran's in rewarding people for being virtuous, for working hard or providing things of value, only in redistributing to those who do less of either. Personal accountability is often a dirty term from this perspective, and this sort of belief system explicitly seeks to use political solutions to fix every possible issue, whether it's empowering schools over parents, giving us government-run grocery stores, or censoring for the good of the masses.

I feel that, given your own stated preferences, a socialist upheaval should be among the worst case scenarios from your perspective. I get that you said you're not on board with it, but I feel like connecting the dots in what you've said would logically make a sweeping trend of socialism pretty alarming and less seemingly shrug-worthy.

Surprised so many people think I'm a socialist from what I wrote, lol. I am not. I agree that it's terrible.

You might better have used the term "understandable" rather than "fair". By calling it a "fair response" you are invoking the connotation of "fair" as "just, right, natural" which strongly implies that you believe that socialism is the correct outcome.

Ok, that's fair. Ahaha. I will leave it as it is for now anyway but I'll keep that in mind.

I didn't read you as a socialist, I understood that you said you weren't a fan and all, but that was what I was getting at - Zohran seems like something you'd find more concerning than your comment seemed to indicate given your stated preferences

Anyway, socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class. It's weary writing and thinking about politics when even the best laid plans seem to inevitably just get ground down by the dumbest things. I can completely understand why young folks want to just socialize everything.

This seems like the opposite of a fair response. If we put a guy on the fry station at McDonald's, and he just constantly screws it up over and over again, in the dumbest ways possible, it doesn't seem like a reasonable response to say, "How about we just put this guy in charge of the entire store?"

Anyway, socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class.

It is a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class to put our political class in more complete charge of what is now in the private sphere? This seems utterly quixotic.

That being said, I don't think society is unfixable. I just think that political solutions are pointless. We need what has always been the core of strong societies - a culture that promotes and encourages personal virtue. Without that, you have nothing.

You cannot build or keep a culture that promotes and encourages personal virtue with a political system that does that opposite, like socialism does.

I feel like the track record of third worldist socialism is such that it cannot be considered a 'fair response'.

It's just the usual - a wrong solution to a real problem. People notice they are getting screwed, they notice some others seem to do well, so it's kind of logical to take from them to give to yourself. It also has always been human nature, unfortunately, and an emotion happily stoked by a certain kind of social elite to their own benefit. People who technically do not own all that much money, but who manage large streams one way or another, and for whom socialism means more money to manage. For the common good, of course! And more generally, just promising a lot with no concern for how to actually get it done is very hard to argue against if most voters have little time or willingness to really look into the details. Without the soviet union as a demonstrable failure in living memory, it will only ever get harder.

I read this success as a more general rejection of the ruling elite than a specific left or right wing thing. It's New York so of course the populist candidate is going to be a socialist, but is this really any different than the rise of right wing populists in Europe in effect?

"you fucked this up, are insanely corrupt and we want literally anything but that" has been the nexus of pretty much all politics since 2016. All that's changing is that the people who reflexively vote for or support the status quo are dying and not being replaced by anybody.

Of course the same criticism of the right wing populists applies to the left wing ones: they don't really have any realistic solutions and the system will not let them implement any if they do. New York's equivalent to Jeremy Corbyn will surely have that same problem.

It's New York so of course the populist candidate is going to be a socialist, but is this really any different than the rise of right wing populists in Europe in effect?

Yes; the RWP rally around a policy - immigration restriction and recognition of islamicate/SE Asian cultural incompatibility with western norms - which cuts both against official ideology as well as the fundamental moral order of the post-WWII first world ideal.

NYC electing Mamdani is literally a 50-Stalins criticism of the existing order. "We haven't socialismed hard enough/real socialism has not been tried!"

In what way is this true that isn't true of literally any person getting elected that's more left wing than the incumbent?

That really depends on what you mean by "left wing." But yeah, that's a structural problem for left wingers in a functionally one-party progressive political milieu.

Of course the same criticism of the right wing populists applies to the left wing ones: they don't really have any realistic solutions and the system will not let them implement any if they do. New York's equivalent to Jeremy Corbyn will surely have that same problem.

Depends on your diagnosis of the problem. If you believe, as I increasingly do, that most of our societal ills with corruption and collapse of state capacity revolve around the mass importation of high time preference demographics incapable at a genetic level of pursuing generational projects, deporting them is not only a solution, but the only solution. Because with that anchor tied to your feet, no state project, be it reinvigorating capitalism, monopoly busting or state run grocery stores can possibly succeed. If the labor market is flooded with lazy scammers who shameless loot the till, it's not going to matter if the grocery store is a coop, state run, unionized or anything.

Much like I urged to give the El Salvador solution at least the good ol' college try before cursing entire peoples down seven generations, I'd urge to at least try "assimilate or GTFO" (don't know if there are any success stories as stark as El Salvador, though). People respond to incentives.

The last 50 years have been a failure of "assimilate or GTFO". 50 more years and "GTFO" won't be an option any longer. It may already be too late.

For most of the last 50 years we haven't been doing "assimilate or GTFO". We did it before that and managed to assimilate large groups.

At the risk of doing a "real X has never been tried", I think you were missing the "or GTFO" part.

It hasn't "failed" so much as been undermined and attacked at every turn by our so-called elites and the rise of MAGA is in large part a reaction against this. If you aren't down with making America great you can get the fuck out.

To do the El Salvador solution you need a Bukele tier Great Man of History. That's not a reasonable requirement. Take it from someone whose government is tailor made for such a kind of man. They're much harder to find than you'd think.

As it stands, the managerial rulers of the US are so far from having the spine required to tell foreigners to "integrate or fuck off" that they'll let them fly the flags of other countries in violent rebellion and still not consent to crush them. Asking them to do what you want is doomed.

Is it a reasonable requirement to declare that all of society's problems are caused by a group of genetic untermenschen? I feel like asking for another Bukele is at least on-par with it under current conditions, and the latter is quite a bit more humane.

Oh I think it can very well both be true that a whole class of people are undesirable and that there is no realistic way of getting rid of them.

Seems like the Indian upper classes' whole tragic condition.

All I can say is that I share your longing for competent people that have the courage to take it upon themselves to solve the mess of modern society. But prayer is all I can really provide here.

Oh I think it can very well both be true that a whole class of people are undesirable and that there is no realistic way of getting rid of them.

I mean, I would be content to start restricting suffrage, ending birthright citizenship, and generally "fortifying" out democracy from being co-opted by third world mobs.

Unfortunately, the more I study history, the more I see that all political solutions are temporary. There is only one solution that is permanent, and history is littered with the names of long extinct tribes. Mere curiosities with no survivors to complain, and by and large, the world is better off with that being so.

I'd urge to at least try "assimilate or GTFO" (don't know if there are any success stories as stark as El Salvador, though)

The best example in America are Germans. Germans went from being a fairly-unassimilated minority, with high non-english persistence and significant ethnic lobbying...to completely dissolved in the American "white" mainstream over the course of two generations. Of course, we all-but criminalized the teaching of German in schools and fought two wars against their coethnics with pretty stringent propaganda against the inherent evils of "Germanness," but it worked.

What does "assimilate" even mean in this context?

"Adopt local cultural norms"? What else is it supposed to mean?

If you believe, as I increasingly do, that most of our societal ills with corruption and collapse of state capacity revolve around the mass importation of high time preference demographics incapable at a genetic level of pursuing generational projects, deporting them is not only a solution, but the only solution.

Unfortunately, at least in the US, that's not going to work, for 13/52 reasons.

It’s not going to work in the US because the ship has simply sailed. We’re in far too deep.

The most we can do is try to give the US a smooth controlled landing and encourage European countries to not go down the same path.

Haven't looked deeply into this but my impression is that immigration to the US filters more for competence than immigration to the European countries does, with the latter getting a ton of low quality refugees etc

The blacks are a sideshow in the great replacement, more spectators than anything else- the AADOS share of society is actually slowly shrinking and black immigration is barely enough to keep the percentage of black population from dropping.

The demographic story of the USA is white anglos being replaced with hispanics, and this is 1) not a done deal and way overstated in effect and 2) while hispanics are lower performing it's not clear that that's 100% genetic, and assimilation over time is far more likely.

Deportation won't work because 13/52? What do you mean by this?

As the meme goes, despite making up only 13% of the population, blacks commit 52% of the crimes. But blacks can't be deported.

Not with that attitude...

As @ToaKraka notes, 13/52 refers to the extremely disproportionate percentage of homicides committed by black people (13% of the population, 52% of the homicides). The US (and the pre-US colonies) already engaged in mass importation of high time preference demographics (I'll reserve judgement on the second part); they've been around as long as most of the white people have, and so deporting them is not possible.

they've been around as long as most of the white people have, and so deporting them is not possible.

One quick conquest of Liberia, and you don’t have to let your dreams be dreams anymore.

You don’t even have to move every black person. For males, 2 or more felony convictions should surely be adequate justification to send them to our new prison colony. For females, you could craft some lifetime welfare income calculation. And for kids, well, better to not break up families, so they have to go as well.

Is this an idea that would take two decades to percolate out of the fever dreams of the right and into plausible reality? Sure, but that’s no reason to give up on it out of hand. Leftists sure don’t!

If you believe, as I increasingly do, that most of our societal ills with corruption and collapse of state capacity revolve around the mass importation of high time preference demographics incapable at a genetic level of pursuing generational projects, deporting them is not only a solution, but the only solution.

What? No, that's not true. Granting the (very substantial) premise, the conclusion is obviously going to be "don't let these people run society", but that only requires disenfranchisement, not deportation (except in the edge case of a supermajority that can overthrow the disenfranchising government).

socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class.

It's bizarre to me that you think the political class is inept, and you think the best response is to give them more power to screw things up in the economy.

Socialism at the federal level mostly means endlessly bloating the elder care apparatus, whereas socialism at the state + local level mostly means bribing connected nonprofits and unions to provide various crappy services that don't really work. Zohran's idea for city-run grocery stores is very dumb and will probably be dropped or completely overhauled after a few pilot programs demonstrate how silly it is.

Mainstream leftism is just more power to the elites.

Populist leftism isn't. Opposition to the military industrial complex and the surveillance state would increase our freedom.

Sounds more like (possibly-left-)libertarianism than “populist leftism”, fam

It's bizarre to me that you think the political class is inept, and you think the best response is to give them more power to screw things up in the economy.

Oh I am not in favor of socialism. I said I could understand, not that I agreed. Socialism is a horrible idea, I have actually read history.

Socialism at the federal level mostly means endlessly bloating the elder care apparatus, whereas socialism at the state + local level mostly means bribing connected nonprofits and unions to provide various crappy services that don't really work.

Neither of these things have anything to do with the ownership of the means of production.

I feel like we've fallen into the trap of using "socialism" as a shorthand for "stupid liberal policy I hate" in the same way the "far right" now means "conservative people with ideas I really dislike"

He was a speaker at the DSA, which stands for "Democratic Socialists of America."

Clip here: https://x.com/Osint613/status/1939657700553486380 Actual Quotes:

  • "The purpose is about this entire project, it’s not simply to raise class consciousness, but to win socialism"
  • "We have to continue to elect more socialists, and we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism"
  • "There are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s BDS or whether it’s the end goal of seizing the means of production"

Full long video at https://youtube.com/live/9K7HDuoJ0MQ

I'm not saying he isn't a socialist.

I'm saying "Socialism at the federal level mostly means endlessly , whereas socialism at the state + local level mostly means ."

Is not a very accurate way to describe socialism.

To add a similar thought, "bloating the elder care apparatus" is pretty much a bi-partisan issue in the West.

Going further, "bribing connected nonprofits and unions to provide various crappy services that don't really work" is very true for liberals, and so is the opposite "bribing connected companies to provide various crappy services that don't really work" for the conservative side.

"Ownership of the means of production" is a niche academic definition that typically isn't used in real-world contexts. Example: Bernie Sanders is a "Democratic Socialist", and most people no matter whether they're for or against him think the label is reasonable. Yet most of Sanders' proposals have nothing to do with the means of production, and are rather just the standard "spend more on social services" like Medicare For All.

Socialism at the federal level mostly means endlessly bloating the elder care apparatus

To be fair it also means doling out increasingly huge wodges of cash to professional activist organizations and favored political client groups.

Road to hell is paved with good intentions. I am fairly sure that Marx's ideas didn't include people being boiled alive by NKVD but that is what we got in the end.

The problem with socialisms are two - people are selfish and tragedy of the commons. For the first the only socialist solution that works so far is to beat them into submission. For the second - there is no found cure yet for people not giving a shit for the common good under socialism.

The problem with socialisms are two - people are selfish and tragedy of the commons. For the first the only socialist solution that works so far is to beat them into submission.

Hardly; this just optimizes for the selfish people getting control of the clubs. Marxism has never truly grokked that people's ideological statements and interpersonal solidarity can be faked or hacked.

For the second - there is no found cure yet for people not giving a shit for the common good under socialism.

How about even more beatings?

One of the most common jokes in the soviet bloc was - we pretend that we work, they pretend that they pay us. And neither GULAG or their equivalents in eastern europe were productive. And they beat up people.

I think @Botond173 is referencing the sarcastic quip about how "the beatings will continue until morale improves".

The Juche (kim whatever) guy said it straight face. And in a way the stick works ok up to a point. You can squeeze more productivity. But you rarely can squeeze passion, innovation, and creativity this way - so probably you are doomed to stagnation.

A couple of things:

  1. The “we pretend that we work, they pretend that they pay us” Soviet joke specifically originates from the post-Stalin era of thaw and stagnation and for a good reason, as the GULAG no longer existed

  2. Marx was already convinced that revolutionary terror is necessary and described it as such

  3. As you stated, the commies noticed that beating up selfish people for their acts of selfishness will successfully de-normalize selfishness socially; in a similar manner, beating people up for not caring about the common good will compel them to care about it or else – it’ll work just as much; however, this assumes that the goons and their commanders will never lose their stomachs for beating people up all the time

Pretending that this is a serious suggestion:

It's not the quantity of the beatings, but their accuracy. You need to

  1. correctly identify asocials, and catch them in the act and
  2. beat them appropriately and publicly.

And this is difficult because

  1. It takes a lot of attention and fine-toothed combing to separate social citizens from asocial ones who have learned to pretend to be social where necessary. They will obfuscate their asocial activities, limit them to settings in which they aren't observed closely, and always keep a plausible excuse handy. After a few months and years of beatings, only the stupidest will be asocial where they can be caught.
  2. If the beatings are too piddly, people will not take them seriously. If the beatings are excessive, people will hate the goons dishing them out rather than the poor asocial who just got his teeth knocked out for taking one minute too long on the loo, which weakens the entire institution. If the beatings happen in secret so that nobody can judge whether they were appropriate, you end up with some kafkaeske nightmare state like the soviet union or Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Either way, you raise up class of violent state-sanctioned thugs who beat people up for not loving the state enough. It's not a winning recipe in the long-term.

Right. Nobody said that all this is easy!

It takes a lot of attention and fine-toothed combing to separate social citizens from asocial ones who have learned to pretend to be social where necessary. They will obfuscate their asocial activities, limit them to settings in which they aren't observed closely, and always keep a plausible excuse handy. After a few months and years of beatings, only the stupidest will be asocial where they can be caught.

This might be a problem after a while. It's not a problem right now. There's low-hanging fruit.

I agree with you regarding your critiques of socialism, but

The problem with socialisms are two - people are selfish and tragedy of the commons.

This describes a huge % of issues the capitalist West is currently failing to deal with too

Not quite. The first part - selfishness is usually nudged to be somewhat aligned with the society's interests by the free market. Before Madison avenue takeover of the american economy companies were actually competing with producing better and cheaper items. We had similar boom with electronics in the 80s and 90s, game industry in 2000s. We have such with chinese phones and cars. All those people may have been passionate about their products, but they were passionate about money too.

The second part - yes there is also tragedy of the commons, but just by the nature of the system - the commons are smaller. So there is less tragedy to be had.

Madison avenue takeover

What does this mean?

In a free market the better product wins. In the last couple of decades the better marketed product wins. Which is not optimal for customers

Ahhh

That's an interesting concept. Any good examples? Why do you think the model of "the customer is a rational economic agent who buys the best things for themselves" has fallen apart recently? What changed in the marketing world to allow companies to leverage marketing to make up for sub-par products?

This is for an effortpost that I am not qualified to do. But I think it is combination of two things - women entering the workforce and being single - they just have different buying patterns than men. As every geek that has been forced to buy more expensive and with shittier spec laptop for his girlfriend just because this is such a nice shade of blue. And the other is that marketing stopped selling products, they started selling desire, status, dreams.

London

Sadiq Khan is really more a typical Blairite Labour man than socialist. He's a lot more progressive on cultural matters, but that's par for the course for the wider Labour party these days.

He is also indescribably inept, but I'm not sure his chronic uselessness will open the door for an actual socialist to grab the mayorality of London. They already had that more than two decades ago, with full-blown Trotskyite Ken Livingstone.

Feels like Labour and the UK had their socialism experiment with Corbyn. Didn't last long nor did it do much good, but it was an interesting case study in just what modern day socialism is in practice:

A young and naïve base of support. An old guard of political weirdos who can't decide on if they are doing principled economic classism or third world brown nationalist ethnic warfare. A principled adherence to the former alienates the young, the rhetoric of the latter alienates the old.

It felt like an indictment of the entire left wing project. Insofar as leftism isn't enabling the worst excesses of capitalism, it hardly gets anything done. And what it can get done for its own good takes a lot of time and a lot of hard work, which is not very appealing to young voters who are having their brains bombed with the most impactful political extremism the algorithm can throw at them.

Same with Brandon Johnson in Chicago. The man has made enemies out of nearly every faction aside from the highly-controversial Chicago Teachers Union, who basically blessed him with the position.

Humorously enough, Chicago would've been put in a bizarro-world situation if the opponent had made it in (Paul Vallas), with the Fraternal Order of Police pulling the strings instead of the CTU.

I think either way Chicago's budget would've been fucked, which is the number one issue anyway.

Brandon Johnson in Chicago

I've been meaning to read up on him. Sounds like he's a total fucking disaster.

My general vibe is Chicago has been on a pretty good hot streak of terrible mayors.

He's a caricature of a man. Toxic masculinity, minus the overt misogyny. Nothing is ever his fault. No compromises. All decisions are "tough", but somehow don't solve any issues. Manages to piss everyone off every time he opens his mouth.

Probably the worst defeat progressivism has faced in the US since LaFollete lost to McCarthy.

But, Chicago is a powerful economic engine with a multitude of billion-dollar-per-year, both publicly-traded and privately-owned entities across multiple industries. Even a few decades of bad mayors won't stop it, maybe just slow it down. Pritzker seems to be helping at least, too.

Ken Livingstone, on the other hand, did self-identify as a socialist. Apart from some culture-war trolling, he mostly ran London as a pragmatic leftist - both his term as GLC leader (1981-1986) and his terms as Mayor (2000-2008) are primarily remembered for the improvements he made to public transport.

I believe the American term for this type of leadership is "sewer socialism", although by this time London's sewers were controlled by Thames Water (privatised in 1989, and now bust).

  1. Government creates problem
  2. People ask for more government to fix the problem.
  3. Problem gets worse

Many such cases.

  1. Government solves problem
  2. Rent seekers are inconvenienced, lobbyists are deployed
  3. Problem comes back with a vengeance

Many such cases.

That's...this is bait, right?

  • The government is usually the biggest rent-seeking entity on the block, growing its body of sinecures with every year and funding it through value extracted from the productive classes at gunpoint.
  • The government usually solves problems by implementing solutions that either don't work, or are hilariously cost-inefficient to the point where they could have done better by just distributing the money spent directly to the nominal beneficiaries. Which of course the government doesn't do, because the actually intended beneficiary is (some other part of) the government.
  • Government is corrupt and wasteful; the private sector gets the blame.

I mean, epistemic gap, the rightist and the leftist see two different movies on one screen, yadda yadda. I'm perfectly willing to admit that private sector actors are also self-interested and will bend and exploit the rules as far as they can, but come on. The government is so much bigger, more powerful and further-reaching, it has every opportunity to prove how well it can solve problems. Pointing fingers at filthy corporats and kulaks, as if they were responsible for every government failure ever, regardless of which country and/or system we're talking about...

I rarely come back to look back at comments, but the comment I replied to originally is also bait, when viewed from a different lens.

We're simply arguing about which problem is bigger, not whether either problem exists. Leaving my comment in response to phailyoor cuts back on the circlejerk that regulation is inherently bad. I mostly make comments like this when the circlejerk becomes unbearable.

Which problems are you referring to here?

Because the big NYC ones are:

Housing, which is entirely the fault of local voters using government to prevent more building. I blame the voters for this, not the politicians responding to their voters (selfish) wishes.

Public safety, voters hate all functional solutions to drugs/homeless because they feel "gross" (bleeding heart libtards hate enforcement, delusional rightoids hate proven solutions like SIS, no one wants to pay for more rehab centers).

Traffic/transit efficacy. See the huge backlash to congestion pricing, despite it being an economically sound and obviously beneficial policy. Also note that absolutely no one wants to give the MTA money despite it falling apart all the time (because preventative maintenance is expensive and boring). Admittedly it does seem like the MTA admin is a bit of a shitshow, so I guess we can blame government for that one. Although I've worked for large oligopolistic corporations and their admin was also an inefficient shitshow.

More broadly, in every western nation absolutely every citizen wants more gibs, and absolutely none of them want to pay more taxes to fund the gibs. So they mortgage the future instead.

I find it hard to blame government for all of this, as any politician who actually tried to take action to fix any of this would immediately lose their next election.

SIS

Sorry, but what is SIS? Neither a search for "SIS homelessness" nor "SIS NYC" turned up anything related.

Safe Injection Sites. And the provenness of their effectiveness is certainly disputed. As is that of enforcement, as the 80s drug war showed. And rehab is a joke.

I think it's pretty clear they reduce overdoses and the waste of paramedic/hospital resources.

It's also incredibly clear that alone they do nothing to actually fix anything. They're a Band-Aid for symptom management as we treat the underlying issue. Problem is, we don't bother to treat any of the underlying issues.

The "underlying issues" are that your same 100 people want to keep taking drugs to the exclusion of everything else.

Yes and we should institutionalize them forever

I think it's pretty clear they reduce overdoses...

They may reduce overdoses, but I think that's far from clear.

As a (sort of) counterexample, "...B.C. has implemented every harm-reduction program that has been proposed, from safe-injection sites to safe supply and effectively making all drugs legal. As each new measure has been introduced, drug overdose deaths have increased, except for a brief drop in 2019."

The toy model is that they would otherwise stop (often from from death), but instead they continue for longer before stopping (slightly less often from death), and the time they spend doing drugs is higher and therefore the social cost is higher as well.

I agree. SIS reduce overdoses, but don't make anyone stop doing drugs. And people who implement SIS also refuse to make people stop doing drugs.

We should have SIS, voluntary rehab, and institutions for those who can't stop themselves

So we don’t actually know that they reduce overdoses either. There is a plausible mechanism for them to do so, but there are also a few mechanisms in which they could not.

  1. It is possible that fatal overdoses are reduced, which would allow the individual in question to overdose in the future again.
  2. It is possible that SIS increases the number of people who get addicted to drugs (in BC in particular, there is an ongoing controversy where safe supply drugs are sold to get funds for fentanyl, which leads to more people having drugs than would otherwise; although I realize this is not quite the same thing as SIS, the SIS are responsible for the distribution of the safe supply, so I think the consequences apply here too).

I would also caution in believing that the three items in your list can exist simultaneously - although there is no physical reason that they cannot, there are political reasons they will not, and that is much harder to change.

More comments

Safe injection sites

They reduce overdoses and time wasted by paramedics/hospitals treating the same 100 people over and over again.

They clearly don't make less people use drugs.

Their biggest issue imo, is that the Venn diagram of people who implement SIS and people who also implement the more draconian measures for the un-savable drug addicts are two different circles. And then the awful addicts are left to ruin it for everyone.

Nit: when did our definition of socialism become so drowned-down? Is anything that's not free (free-as-in-captured) market capitalism now considered socialism? The only "means of production" that Mamdani is suggesting be owned publicly are a few grocery stores, no? That's hardly a "seizure" of means.

Is FoxNews blocking the term DemSoc from taking off in the US?

You can read the guy's program yourself

https://www.zohranfornyc.com/

rent freeze, state built housing, free public transport, state owned grocery stores, free childcare, - all of this paid by wishful thinking and unicorn dust. Close enough to socialism. His tax plan is for 10 billion from my understanding for his whole term mostly by the rich.

I really wish he will win. And I really wish he succeeds in implementing his program, just so that USA will see first hand the results of those policies.

I really wish he will win. And I really wish he succeeds in implementing his program, just so that USA will see first hand the results of those policies.

Doesn't work. First because he'll declare it worked even if it didn't, and the media will back him up. Second, because "the Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire"

He's at least said for the grocery stores that if they don't work they don't work, and he'll walk away

They won't work, so we'll see if he actually walks away

Yeah. If the results were marked objectively it'd be one thing, but combination of the media and some thinktanks declaring a resounding success on the topic will just perpetuate more silliness.

Yes. Anything that can be spun as controversial means no revelation. Even something like bankruptcy can be spun as a cumulative problem that [current mayor] merely had set on their plate. Lag time also plays a role. Costs may only become become apparent after a term is over and he's off to Congress or wherever. Barring an Escape from New York level of catastrophe, then one should expect to fight free stuff in the immediate future forever regardless of results.

As an alternative to the expectation voters learn -- which voters are bad at -- they are pretty good at forgetting. They'll forget the last time it didn't work out, they'll forget why, but if a party wins enough times they might forget about bad ideas. Win so hard, so often, that the bad ideas become foreign. Then there is less voter recognition which creates an additional hurdle for advocates. NYC can still partly do this by embarrassing Mamdani in the general.

NYC can still partly do this by embarrassing Mamdani in the general.

I think the only way that happens is if Cuomo yields to Adams and Bloomberg (or someone of equally high stature) backs him. Which ain't going to happen.

Close enough to socialism.

I guess this is the issue lol. Point-by-point, why none of this is particularly radical in most societies that people don't consider "socialist":

rent freeze

Rent freezes are controversial cart-before-the-horse band-aid solution to a problem that may or may not be caused NIMBYism. The proposed rent freeze is for rent-stabilized tenants, a specific class of asset. So hopefully you weren't trying to paint this as a city-wide rent freeze, which would never pass anyway. But also not specifically socialist, at all. Very much no means of production being seized.

state built housing

Hardly uniquely socialist. They used to be called "projects". Also controversial because it tends to have extremely high per-unit costs vs. market rent ROI, but that may or may not be attributable to not being able to just build housing, and more to needing to be state-of-the-art energy efficient, fully ADA compliant, up-to-code, etc. etc.

Better than "company towns" imo.

free public transport

Another exaggeration. The free part is for buses only. As someone who's taken a lot of public transit in many different cities, buses are frequently used by more blue collar / "barista" type workers, whereas light rail is more often used by professionals. It's a pragmatically progressive (in the sense of: tax those who can afford it) solution to the problem of rising fare prices, imo.

Also: no one bats an eye about free public roads. Damage to roads is quadratic to the weight of the load: we all subsidize the trailer truck shipping industry with our gas prices and taxes that build our roads. This lowers prices at every checkout, at the cost of an anemic rail system.

state owned grocery stores

Obviously an experimental / pilot project. Curious to see if there's a nice food distribution middle ground between "soup kitchen" and "Whole Foods" that a city government can occupy. An ideal implementation of this looks more like a 7-days-a-week farmer's market to me than a crumbling Aldi with yellowed fluorescent lights and grimey 90s tiles.

free childcare

Are grade school, middle school, and high school not "free childcare"?

The most ambitious and least achievable point in his agenda. To someone completely removed from the situation, I think expanding pre-K and early childhood programs is the more pragmatic way to go about effecting change - but that doesn't pop on a web page meant to excite people about an election campaign.

all of this paid by wishful thinking and unicorn dust.

Along with everything else the government has spent money on. At least these things are attempting to have a positive impact on working class families as opposed to ammunition for a genocide on the other side of the world.

The proposed rent freeze is for rent-stabilized tenants, a specific class of asset. So hopefully you weren't trying to paint this as a city-wide rent freeze, which would never pass anyway.

You're right, it's not all NYC apartments, just half of them.

You would better serve yourself and your arguments by affirming rather than downplaying their leftism. I'll also here not take the euphemism, socialism is communism's beachhead in capitalism.

Redistribution of wealth is communist. It cuts both ways, your list includes instances where the primary beneficiaries are corporations, the policies remain communist.

I guess this is the issue lol. Point-by-point, why none of this is particularly radical in most societies that people don't consider "socialist":

Communists, as masters of duplicitous rhetoric, have done an expectedly superb job propagandizing leftist policy objectives as "common sense" and especially as "not communist" or "not socialist." They are not considered radical today because it is the way of things, but those fears named in opposition to, e.g. compulsory education, have been justified. We can't go back, so there's not a real use in invoking either their past appraisal as radical or their current view as normal.

But also not specifically socialist, at all. Very much no means of production being seized.

I would agree directionally, in very strict terms. The concept of regulation is not inherently redistributive, and even in practice I don't know that many examples are redistributive, but they do often impair the market from competition and there corporations benefit.

Another exaggeration. The free part is for buses only. As someone who's taken a lot of public transit in many different cities, buses are frequently used by more blue collar / "barista" type workers, whereas light rail is more often used by professionals. It's a pragmatically progressive (in the sense of: tax those who can afford it) solution to the problem of rising fare prices, imo.

Strictly redistributive. Communist.

Obviously an experimental / pilot project. Curious to see if there's a nice food distribution middle ground between "soup kitchen" and "Whole Foods" that a city government can occupy. An ideal implementation of this looks more like a 7-days-a-week farmer's market to me than a crumbling Aldi with yellowed fluorescent lights and grimey 90s tiles.

The experiment was run for decades and it failed. Communist.

Are grade school, middle school, and high school not "free childcare"?

Compulsory education is indeed free childcare, and it is the perfect example of the myriad failures of ideology in communism:

  1. That inequality in outcome can be solved through money; here school funding
  2. That effective systems create effective people; here that good schools make good students
  3. That a bureaucracy can be trusted with considerable power; here that teachers are broadly competent and judicious
  4. That the system will fulfill its primary objective rather than be co-opted or brought to heel by superior agents; here a minor rehashing of #2, but specifically that the school exists to educate

Compulsory education as the public school doesn't actually exist to educate. It educates incidentally, just as a little less incidentally it incorporates students into the cult of the state. Its function is redistributing wealth to the bourgeoise so they don't have to either pay for childcare, accommodate flexible hours for their laborers, or worst of all, have to deal with a 50% smaller workforce and the massive leverage the laborers would gain in negotiations. All to say, the classic example of bad actors prospering from exploiting the system, here capitalism's maybe third-worst practice.

Where I would say today communist ideology has strength is cynicism toward the bourgeoise, where it fails is not showing enough, as even with the means of production seized, the bourgeoise are not made but born, agnostic to actually being of class "bourgeoise," and a communist system will inevitably be controlled by them. The best system accounts for their chronic existence and allows them to flourish in dozens of lanes of competition with each other, while exerting just enough regulation to prevent their exploitation of the commons. Communism reduces that competition to a single lane, and for that it will necessarily and always fail.

Nothing would help the working class more than our economy returning to one where only a single parent needs to draw a salary to support their spouse and children. To that end, anything Mamdani does that increases or keeps static the supply of labor will have harms outweighing all other benefits, and that's even granting that all of his other policies achieve their stated goals.

They are definitely leftist. But they are not that radical and not even close to abolishing capitalism and to be clear I think a few of these are horrible policy. Namely rent control and free buses but I don't consider these policies communist/socialist. They are common and not terribly radical bad urban policy.

I really wish he will win. And I really wish he succeeds in implementing his program, just so that USA will see first hand the results of those policies.

I thought this too at first, but let's be honest. It's really, really difficult to reason one's way into socialism, and that says all there is to say about the prospects of reasoning them out of it by adding one more stone to the mountain of its failures. We are not half a century from the collapse of the USSR and yet its example is not a factor in any of the socialist's consideration. Every failure can be decried as either not real communism or a result of treacherous interference from outside influences - we'll succeed if only we conquer those, too. I really don't think a bad example will teach anyone a lesson on this kind of thing. All they hear is "Free public transit" and they think "That sounds so cool!" without the slightest consideration of where the money comes from.

"socialism" = "liberal policies I dislike, the more I dislike them, the more socialist they are"

"Far right" = "conservative groups I dislike, the more I dislike them, the more far right they are"

"Neoliberalism" = "things about capitalism I dislike, the more I dislike them, the more neoliberal they are"

Western political discourse is stupid and getting stupider, because we are becoming stupider

I like to use neoliberal to refer to things about the establishment domestic policy I don't like, and the more I dislike them the more neoliberal they are. For the establishment foreign policy I use neoconservative.

Based

It’s stupid because nobody really bothers to argue policy (and probably never really did, unless you’re a policy nerd), they’re arguing on the basis of propaganda and vibes. Tge West and especially America are absolutely soaked in propaganda all day everyday and don’t even realize it. Name any issue, and people will be able to quote various talking points for what they want to be true, but won’t understand it. Get them off into the woods where there are no talking points or standard arguments available and people will absolutely sputter trying to come up with any sort of argument or explanation of what they actually want or how the policies they say they want will get them there.

But until people actually see themselves as embedded in the machine they won’t even understand that they understand nothing about the world. So they argue about it and spend a lot of time trying to convince others they’re right. And each set of propaganda has the same feel good stuff in them. My side is the educated side and if the other side wasn’t so uneducated and stupid, they’d agree. My side is the moral side, they’re evil.

Socialist is also a bit of a reclaimed term. Republicans in the Bush era constantly argued against policies like universal healthcare by proclaiming them socialism as an argument ender. That resulted in people who wanted that and other policies claiming the label.

To be clear, you think it is unfair to apply the label "socialist" to a guy who spoke at the Democratic Socialists of America about the "end goal of seizing the means of production"?

I was judging him by his campaign, not by a speech while he was still in his 20s that I wasn't even aware of. Does seem to be a nice gotcha, though. Kudos.

If he brings up any more seizure rhetoric I'll adjust my priors, but for now I'll file it away in "Young politician says something strategically embarrassing to signal being in-group".

It was only 4 years ago. That's hardly an eternity. Is there some evidence he has seen the errors of his ways?

Here's what you actually said

Nit: when did our definition of socialism become so drowned-down? Is anything that's not free (free-as-in-captured) market capitalism now considered socialism? The only "means of production" that Mamdani is suggesting be owned publicly are a few grocery stores, no? That's hardly a "seizure" of means.

Implication is that it's somehow unfair for people to be identifying this guy as a socialist. Given that he has called himself a socialist and he addressed a significant group dedicated to socialism where he quoted approvingly from the Communist Manifesto, seems like they got it right. At the very least, the burden of evidence is on the side that wants to claim he's seen the error of his ways.

If some people were able to determine this just from his campaign rhetoric, all the better for them! They made a correct prediction! The evidence is that their definition of socialism is accurate, not "drowned-down." You should be asking why you weren't able to see it was obvious to them.

If our core criterion for epithets was "one time said something in a speech" then we would be quite exhausted by the amount of "fascist", "Nazi", "communist", "socialist", etc. being thrown around.

Come to think of it, I am quite exhausted by the amount those terms are being thrown around. Maybe we shouldn't use "one time said something in a speech" as a criterion? Maybe we should judge people by what they're campaigning on, and their actions in office?

Edit:

he has called himself a socialist

Does he call himself a socialist now? I see "Democratic Socialist" on his webpage, which is distinct from other types of socialism (e.g. the flavors of authoritarian socialism that are the boogeymen).

You are misconstruing

Given that he has called himself a socialist and he addressed a significant group dedicated to socialism where he quoted approvingly from the Communist Manifesto, seems like they got it right.

as

one time said something in a speech

If Mamdani did actually did actually give a speech at an event for socialism, in which he described himself as a socialist, while approvingly quoting foundational socialist texts - that is very obviously not "one time said something in a speech".

when did our definition of socialism become so drowned-down?

The second half of the 20th century. Expansion of the welfare state and government programs are attacked as socialist. The meaning gets diluted through the 90's after the Cold War. In the 2000s-2010s the meaning continues to change rapidly as progressives claim much of socialism for themselves.

Is FoxNews blocking the term DemSoc from taking off in the US?

I doubt it. Mamdani has not, as far as I know, gone to any great lengths to explain what a democratic socialist is or why he is not a socialist. Did Bernie even bother with this in his 2016 bid? That kind of distinction does nothing for Mamdani's campaign. The public does not have that demand for accuracy or nuance if it actually matters or is real. Plus, I suspect the well off progressive base of NYC quite likes voting for a socialist more than they do not-really-a-socialist. A diffuse contempt for capitalism is a popular meme that can be harnessed. No reason to put a damper on that for the sake of centuries old ideological accuracy.

I think if you're going to demand consistency here, then you should do so consistently. Are these capitalist policies he is proposing?

The second half of the 20th century. Expansion of the welfare state and government programs are attacked as socialist.

Both sides are to blame here. Socialists were, and still are, marketing their economic system as "let's do what Denmark did".

Tony Blair, Nicolas Maduro, Pol Pot, and Castro walk into a bar...

Mamdani has not, as far as I know, gone to any great lengths to explain what a democratic socialist is or why he is not a socialist.

Weird requirement imo. He at least distinguishes himself as DemSoc:

Zohran Kwame Mamdani is a New York State Assemblymember and democratic socialist running for Mayor.

It seems to be conservatives that omit the Democratic half of the moniker Democratic Socialist way more than progressives, but that's just my impression that prompted me to say "Is FoxNews blocking the term..."

I think if you're going to demand consistency here, then you should do so consistently. Are these capitalist policies he is proposing?

I mean, that's a bit of moving the goalposts, no? The argument is that his policies aren't strictly socialist, therefore his policies aren't evidence that he's secretly a socialist despite calling himself a democratic socialist. Why would his policies need to be capitalist in order for him to not be socialist? It's not as if all policies can be neatly placed a spectrum from socialist to capitalist - I don't even think that it's useful for a society to try to think of things in that dichotomy, but it sure is useful for propaganda if that's the way the discussion is forced.

Aside from that, can you name a policy that is purely capitalist? To get ahead of what your answer may be, I would argue that "deregulation" that is often cited as "capitalist" is simply rent-seeking cronyism. As Adam Smith said:

As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords... love to reap where they never sowed.

  • Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter VI

Democratic Socialists are the vehicle for socialism in America. They develop relations with leftists, organize them, use them for elections, and seek to implement socialist policy. Solidarity is praxis.

Differentiating is not a requirement, it's a method to clarify ones own position from another related position. You want Democratic Socialists to stand on their own two legs in America and be less open to smears for bad(?) socialism. I might call it socialism lite or entry-level socialism. Another idea might be for an organization like the DSA -- which Mamdani contributes to and has used to seek power -- to police and toss out the revolutionaries. Truly be a Democratic Socialist organization instead of the place for leftists. I suspect neither of these things will occur. Mamdani is more interested in winning office than standing up for Democratic Socialism. He likely appreciates the fact Fox News will lambast him as a Socialist.

It seems to be conservatives that omit the Democratic half of the moniker Democratic Socialist way more than progressives

It is not unique to conservatives. Parents that object to teacher-student confidentiality are far right. Canadian truckers are far right. J.K. Rowling is far right. Elon Musk is far right and an extremist. All those individuals are probably Islamophobic and racist, too. Many words are unfair. I wish people would be more noble and curious, but this is politics. Being far right is bad. Being a socialist is bad. Being a leftist is bad. There are no goal posts or purity. It is what it is. Don't watch Fox News.

Mamdani has a campaign platform that lists some policy ideas. Several I consider to be bad ideas regardless of how socialist they are. They do appear to be broadly popular among leftists. He also doesn't appear to have an issue using propaganda. Cable news networks are imprecise in their opposition to Bad Ideas from Bad People. That they're imprecise due to a definitional standard that doesn't meet yours or mine is not of consequence. In Bizarro world, Mamdani is a Democratic National Socialist and there's a whole lot of focus on the National Socialist part. Some of it is fair, some not so much.

would argue that "deregulation" that is often cited as "capitalist" is simply rent-seeking cronyism

I share the understanding that, as a general rule of thumb, a more laissez-faire policy is more capitalism. Nuance can be found in every crevice.

Let's talk socialism and the NYC mayoral race

Why?

The primary reason Zohran won in the primary is Andrew Cuomo, the secondary reason that he won in the primary is anti-Zionism and the anti-idpol populist backlash that comes when outside forces try to tell local people who to vote for.

Andrew Cuomo was the candidate the establishment and the financial industry rallied behind in the primary, despite the fact he hasn't lived in the city in years, was covered in scandal on his way to resigning from the governor's mansion, and really didn't have a great record as governor to run on to begin with. There was no good reason for Andrew Cuomo to run for mayor of NYC.

Then the campaign begins and they go after Zohran for his supposed anti-Semitism. Twitter was filled with jokes about Israelis speaking out on the NYC mayoral race from their bunkers in Tel Aviv, and Andrew Cuomo swears allegiance to Israel. Zohran's enemies successfully made the most interesting and present aspect of the race the question of supporting or opposing Israel.

What this tells us is that accusations of racism on IdPol lines are not going to be enough, going forward, to decide elections. The antisemitism stick has been wielded so carelessly, that even cowardly urban Democrats are no longer cringing under the whip.

It tells us that accusations of antisemitism aren't enough to decide dem primaries. It doesn't tell us that racism isn't still a potent political accusation.

As ever, we won't really know the answer until after the question is irrelevant. But we saw the 2024 elections already.

That being said, I don't think society is unfixable. I just think that political solutions are pointless. We need what has always been the core of strong societies - a culture that promotes and encourages personal virtue. Without that, you have nothing.

This is why our politics is broken. The political machine has borged almost everything, and thus the other rival institutions have become rumps of what they would be in a healthy society. Education has been swallowed by the state in the form of mandated curriculum and state testing. Churches have little influence on culture as they have been mostly reduced to the few things that don’t touch politics and then trying to avoid the IRS crackdown for even broaching the subject of some politicized issue. Families are weakened because now that mom works 9 hours and commutes for 1 hour, her children are raised by daycares and the school system, with the parents as minor players in their kid’s lives mostly for a couple hours on weekdays and then on weekends. When politics is everywhere and running everything and no other institutions can match it, people hyperfixate on politics. When it’s not something most people deal with, nobody but us nerds care.

At the end of the day thriving cities need to produce strong middle class families if they want to remain democracies; otherwise it's all about looting.

Thats not democracy, it’s stability. And I agree. I don’t necessarily put democracy on a pedestal as though it’s automatically and axiomatically the best form of government you could have. It’s a social technology much like anything else humans have developed to create orderly societies. I think I’m personally much more interested in the meta part of the question of government— what produces the kind of society where the majority prosper, where the rule of law is more or less kept, and where people are generally left alone to enjoy life. A lot of times, that’s democracy. On the other hand, sometimes it’s something else. The high Roman Empire probably was a pretty good place to live, some of the better monarchies did quite well. On the other hand, there are lots of failed democratic societies as well.

I see it more as a rejection of Cuomo than any great socialist uprising.

My takeaway is that it's just over for white boomer Democrats. They can keep their current jobs but won't be able to win nominations for any new office.

Ezra Klein had some good articles talking about the progressive theory of power and how it causes problems for city administration.

These are more for background than supporting my argument.

https://archive.ph/E6p6W

https://archive.ph/jNDlC

Basically the problem is that progressives are completely dedicated to the idea that billionaires and greedy corporations are the ones causing all of the problems.

However at the city level the problems tend to stem from:

  • Disorderly elements. eg low level criminals like shoplifters, people with sever substance abuse problems, or severe mental illness.

  • Left wing organizations trying to tack on fees to everything to get paid.

Progressives are completely unable to acknowledge that either of those groups cause problems. The idea that left wing groups are just being greedy rent seekers goes against their whole world view.

So you get ideas like government owned grocery stores. During a past attempt to tackle "food deserts", in I think Detroit, a grocery store complained that shoplifting was putting them out of business. A city councillor told them that lossage was just part of the price of doing business in Detroit. So the grocery store shut down the location.

I don't think the solution is really any fundamental social change. The issue is that people on the center left like to play defence for the farther left and hide the crazier elements of their philosophy from the general public. The progressives think that the media hides their beliefs out of some conspiracy against them instead of an attempt to protect them.

There needs to be a documentary series on a major streaming service that, as fairly and calmly as possible, shows what progressive populists believe and what the problems with it are. Right now it's being taught in colleges as the absolute truth with no analysis.

There needs to be a documentary series on a major streaming service that, as fairly and calmly as possible, shows what progressive populists believe and what the problems with it are.

First time? Best case scenario is that this documentary series would be dismissed on sight as right-wing propaganda, worst case scenario is that people making it will have their lives ruined.

Politics is war by peaceful means, you don't win by "calmly explaining", and much more straightforward issues, that would cost a lot less to concede than this, have been a decade long slog of an uphill battle, you have no chance moving people on their fundamental beliefs.

I think political solutions can encourage personal/political virtue. Imagine a really intense anti-corruption campaign, where high ranking people were actually given long prison sentences or executed for corruption? Wouldn't that work on the simple, clear level of 'cant commit crime if dead'? China has become less corrupt since the mid 2000s after pursuing this approach.

How does a culture become virtuous in the first place if not severe punishment crushing the bad elements? If the bottom-up anti-corruption from virtue angle isn't working, then one may as well try top-down. In the US this kind of approach is complicated because there are certain groups that are innately clannish and corrupt or so inclined in that direction that it's nigh-impossible to correct. I don't know why anyone expects West Africans to perform well in anything. You can look at West Africans in West Africa and uniformly it's a mess, regardless of history or laws (Liberia stands out here). You can look at West Africans in Haiti - standard West African demographics and outcomes but in the Western Hemisphere instead. And you can look at West Africans with a non-trivial amount of white admixture in the US, plus a constant inflow of white money - much less of a mess but still a mess. Certain parts of Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, even areas of Washington DC... these are not places one wants to be!

If you don't want a bloated, grossly inefficient, corrupt government, don't let them have any political power.

There may be some actions being taken that contribute to affirming the success of West African immigrants, over and above similar things for other groups, especially since they are not held back by ADOS culture.

That being said, urban Whites are cooked, this has been a reactionary belief for a while.

Sure but they're the best of the lot (still no STEM Nobels though). It's not that easy to get to the US from West Africa.

I don't deny that whites who voted for this guy are fools but there is at least potential for good things amongst a broad, non-cherrypicked white population. Build up a power base of elite West Africans at your peril, see what happens if they get you to open the floodgates.

To clarify - 'them' in the last sentence means West Africans? Politically empowered West Africans means a bloated and corrupt government, you think?

Do you think the US should aim to disempower West Africans? What would that mean? Banning them from running for office? Banning them from voting?

The US can clearly do fine with a modest number of West Africans dragging it down. But if you want first-world performance... If you want safe, efficient, orderly public transport... If you want a lower burden of progressive taxation and affirmative action... If you want crime at civilized, first world levels...

Then you need to address the problem at the root cause. If you let them have political power they'll cause all kinds of problems, they'll West Africanize the country to a lesser or greater extent based on their number, admixture and so on. Bloated and corrupt government is just one and not even the worst problem necessarily.

Consider a thought experiment - what if all the politicians and powerful officials in America had to be black? Give it 20 years for the effects to settle. What do you expect the outcome would be in terms of performance? Would it look more like a high performance country (Japan, Switzerland) or a low performance country like South Africa? Naturally the US has plenty of capable demographics to squander so the decline wouldn't be as severe as South Africa, whose murder rate is actually comparable to the death toll in the Russia-Ukraine war. Nevertheless, there are no white poor performance countries and no black high performance countries. Even on a city level one can observe that having politics dominated by blacks is not a recipe for good outcomes: Detroit.

Now consider the reverse. All the politicians and powerful officials in America have to be non-black. Give it 20 years. Would the outcome be better than the alternate? Is the US really losing much by banning them from office? All that would happen is some rioting, which can be quickly and easily put down with a little effort. West Africans are notoriously bad at fighting, disorganized and inaccurate marksmen. Of course it's a totally moot point since as bad as West Africans are at fighting, US whites are even less willing to force the issue.

I asked a second question as well. To repeat:

Do you think the US should aim to disempower West Africans? What would that mean? Banning them from running for office? Banning them from voting?

Okay, I've processed that you think that West Africans are inherently destructive to national health. Sure. So, you say, you must not "let them have political power". Can you translate that for me into a practical programme? What do you think the US should do?

Is the US really losing much by banning them from office? All that would happen is some rioting, which can be quickly and easily put down with a little effort. West Africans are notoriously bad at fighting, disorganized and inaccurate marksmen. Of course it's a totally moot point since as bad as West Africans are at fighting, US whites are even less willing to force the issue.

I already answered this. There's no practical program because you'd need a game-changing event for this to be possible. We may as well theorize about the balance of power between Earth and Mars or how to restore the Bourbon Dynasty to the throne of France. Maybe I think the Bourbons would be amazing for France. But I obviously have no practical idea to make this happen because it's impractical and would require an incredible turn of fortune to be even conceivable.

Really don't understand the point of trying to get these 'damning' confessions of wrongthink out of me.

I'm not angling for a confession of wrongthink - I'm angling to translate either feeling or theory into practicable action. A political platform naturally requires some sort of plan for implementation. That plan doesn't have to be constrained by the Overton Window. A Yarvin-esque plan to build a shadow regime and step into power when the inevitable crisis of legitimacy comes is a valid answer; likewise a postliberal-esque plan to slowly build intellectual credibility while developing a new consensus in the shell of the old is a valid answer.

But in this case, if I'm reading you rightly, what you've got is basically "West Africans are really bad, and there's nothing that can be done about it".

Okay, so, what's the practical takeaway from that? It can just be "well, the United States is screwed", at which point the next question is, "given that, what do you plan to do, or recommend that others do?" Prepare to leave the US, so that if/when continuing to live there is untenable, you can get out? Build some sort of resilient, presumably West-African-free, community in some part of the US and focus on local welfare? Something else entirely?

It's not unreasonable or searching for gotchas to probe someone as to the practical implications of their politics. I'm not arguing with you in this thread! I haven't contradicted you or challenged any of your points! I'm asking you to elaborate on their practical implications because I'm interested in where they lead you.

Well I have a vague theory that China will demolish the US military in Asia and create the actual conditions for real political change in the US and elsewhere (military defeat + huge economic crisis are a tried and tested combo), whereupon previously unthinkable options become possible.

But the problem with basing a theory on a hypothetical is that it feels like wishing, the infamous 'my ideology will be the one to arise from the ashes'. Trying to predict the world after an epoch-changing event is like trying to look inside or beyond a singularity. Maybe Trump gets the blame for fooling around and the old regime capitalizes it. Maybe the military gets blamed for losing and the US doubles down on democratic-socialist isolationism. Maybe there's a nuclear exchange. Maybe there's an AI singularity. Nothing is inevitable, even assuming a contested hypothetical.

Of course it'd be good to have more accurate, adaptive ideas flowing more widely. The US does not, in my opinion, need more Haitians, quite the opposite. The US shouldn't be spreading multicultural propaganda around the world, that's not a recipe for good outcomes. America isn't screwed, it's powerful and innovative in many areas. But it's running well below peak performance, there are fractures and internal weaknesses based on unsound ideas of human equality.

As for personal advice, well I've read Nightmare Vision's Rosedale thread https://x.com/GodCloseMyEyes/status/1414619671056297984 and 'Don't make the Black kids angry', it seems pretty clear that black parts of the US, London and elsewhere are dangerous and one shouldn't go there or live there. The author of the latter has seemingly been driven into this state of insanity where he just goes on and on, listing all these grievous attacks and perverse instances where white racism gets blamed for black misbehaviour, one after another after another.

How do you change this state of mind, where people speak in code to realtors because they're not allowed to ask about crime, because it's too racist and discriminatory? Who knows, it's bizarre and weird.

I'm not even American and so my theories about US politics are really limited in skin-in-the-game beyond having a lot of money tied up in US shares. Lots of cool stuff is happening in America, it's a country of contradictions.

But the problem with basing a theory on a hypothetical is that it feels like wishing, the infamous 'my ideology will be the one to arise from the ashes'. Trying to predict the world after an epoch-changing event is like trying to look inside or beyond a singularity.

Well, I think it's reasonable to take a position like, "the current order cannot or will not hold, massive changes are likely to come, therefore I/we should try to be resilient for now while being flexible to changing possibilities". If the political order is likely to radically change, in ways you cannot predict but which change the space of what's possible, then it makes sense to avoid investing too much in the current order while remaining open to the winds of change.

That said, oops, I had assumed you were American. Presumably you would need to adapt your specific concerns to your particular country.

Thank you for the serious answer, though. I appreciate it.

Nevertheless, there are no white poor performance countries and no black high performance countries.

Argentina?

Low murder rate, relatively rich. HDI is 'very high' what are you complaining about?

I admit that I didn't define the difference between low and high performance but I do strongly think there's a difference between more or less rich, developed countries and places (like South Africa) where the health minister might declare that HIV vaccines are some kind of imperialist plot, or where raping virgins to cure aids is widespread. You can have bad economic policies but still be high performance, all that means is that your abilities are hampered like taking an exam in a loud room. And accordingly Argentina is still decent and safe, they score OK on the test, could be better. The retarded students though, it doesn't matter if the room is loud or quiet, the results aren't going to be good.

there are no white poor performance countries

Argentina, Colombia, Moldova, Ukraine, are all poorer than Russia, which itself is not conventionally considered a ‘high performer’. Indeed, thé entirety of the Balkans generates little ambition in its denizens except to leave the Balkans, and the nice white parts of Latin America are still nothing to write home about.

Depends how you're defining poor performance. Poor relative to other European or East Asian countries, sure. Poor compared to subsaharan Africa? Not really. The average GDP per capita south of the Sahara is $1500. Ukraine is $5000

The richest black countries (the Seychelles, Trinidad and Tobago, St. Kitts and Nevis) are wealthier than the poorest white countries (Ukraine, Kosovo, Iran, Moldova). The poorest country is Arab (South Sudan).

The poorest country is Arab (South Sudan).

South Sudan is black and Christian, not Arab or Muslim.

Trinidad: Half the people are indian, half the gdp is oil and gas

Seychelles : island micronation(120k souls) living off tourism

St kitts: island femtonation (50k)

The poorest country is Arab (South Sudan).

The south sudan massacres, war and subsequent independence was fought between the muslim arab north and the mostly christian non-arab south. The name Sudan comes from the Arabic bilād as-sūdān or the "Land of the Blacks".

South Sudan is literally not Arab(thats regular Sudan, and the ethnic difference is the entire reason for the split). The poorest Arab country is Yemen.

That’s why I noted ‘doing worse than Russia’ which is crappy by white country standards but able to attract immigration from truly bottom of the barrel countries.

I don’t think this is an exhaustive list, at all. Just that crappy middle income countries are totally a thing that comes in white versions, even if truly awful undeveloped places are mostly restricted to blacks(although Afghanistan is racially white).

Russia is a high performer, not the best but still clearly in the top category. The US was relying on their spacecraft for the ISS at one point (which Russia helped to make) plus they produce a wide range of advanced technological products - drones, jets, tanks, warships, nuclear reactors. There are little robots transporting food and parcels on the streets of Moscow. Ukraine is similarly a high performer, also possessing advanced industry, they exported an aircraft carrier to China back in the day.

The whole 'Nigeria with snow' argument is profoundly silly. How hard would it be for the US or any major power to wreck Nigeria? Is anyone really worried about Nigeria? How do Nigerian industries affect the world, what ramifications do decisions in Lagos have on anything? Now, how about Russia?

Colombia is not white, it's 50% mestizo, 26% white, the rest being black or indigenous according to estimates.

entirety of the Balkans

Not amazing but still pretty rich and capable all things considered. Serbia is fine, they manufacture cars and pharmaceuticals. The whole 'former Ottoman Empire' part of Europe is less developed and orderly than one might expect from Europeans but it's not a barren gulf of civilization. That's what happens if you have non-European input into a country, you get less European output.

I don't care how utopian your proposed society would supposedly be. I'm not going to let anyone take away my political rights under any circumstances. I won't be a subaltern or slave

The upswing in "socialism"* of late is largely a reaction to the perceived failure of political systems to address socio-economic problems. In particular, the GFC, the failure of the ACA to address the capriciousness of the American healthcare system, climate change, and a general inability to hold economic elites to account for anti-social-but-legal behavior. The price of housing hasn't helped either.

Unfortunately, when people get mad, they often vote for stupid and/or self-destructive policies.

*I use scare quotes because to a large degree modern American socialism is simply a middle class left-populist movement. There are genuine exceptions, but when you press for policy details you'll generally find something that is not in any meaningful sense a break from the past 70 years of left-liberalism. A backlash against decades of "socialism is when the government does stuff" has greatly attenuated the negative connotations of the label.

And when you look under the hood, a lot of it is about laundering handouts to the middle class in the class sense, if not in the material sense. It’s downstream of the class entitlement to a middle class lifestyle without much hard work, from holding a college degree.

Don’t get me wrong, lots of people do this too. Notably seniors. But it is mathematically impossible for everyone to be entitled to an above average standard of living.

Yes and no. The GFC left a lot of college grads with a mountain of debt, short-circuited career prospects, and a sense that they'd been sold a bill of goods. But this sentiment is not limited to middle class dropouts. It is also widespread among the professionally successful. As has been noted, Mamdani did his best with upper middle class white people. These are not just career NGO types anxious to keep the taps open. They are lawyers, engineers, doctors, etc... They are the sorts of people you would expect to be most "pro-system", but they're not. They're increasingly skeptical of it.

Economic precarity is a factor - most are acutely aware of what falling off the white collar wagon would mean for their lifestyle - but the points of highest contention don't fit this pattern. Rather, you have a collapse of faith in the ability of US political systems to solve important problems in a just manner (if at all).

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘falling off the wagon’- they’re already doctors and lawyers(who, I’ll note, have from an objective perspective made large sacrifices to their standard of living to dwell in NYC, doctors in flyover live in mansions not apartments).

Maybe this is one of those things I don’t get and won’t get, like why neurotic strivers think they’re better than me without having the pedigree to back it up, or why people live together for five years without getting married.

Losing a white collar professional job at the wrong time can make it very hard to get back your career back on track. Far less of an issue for doctors than most, but most white collar jobs don't have the same level of stability.

Regardless, my point was the opposite: that by and large economic precarity doesn't explain the growth of left-wing populism amongst college grads. In many respects it is a mirror of Trumpism, being driven largely by cultural grievances around the distribution of prestige and a general lack of faith in the political system (albeit without quite the same degree of authoritarian propensities).

Maybe this is one of those things I don’t get and won’t get, like why neurotic strivers think they’re better than me without having the pedigree to back it up

Neurotic strivers don't think about you at all.

In many respects it is a mirror of Trumpism, being driven largely by cultural grievances around the distribution of prestige

But they have the prestige? What are these middle managers and lawyers expecting?

So the Bezos-Sanchez wedding took place, and by all accounts it was exactly as overblown, tacky, and vulgar as anyone's little heart could desire. I haven't watched any of it myself, so why am I mentioning it in the Culture War thread?

Well, because Tina Brown commented on it, and it's at least tangential because we've often discussed on here "what do women want/dating apps/men get the rough end of the stick in divorce/other such delightful War of the Sexes fodder".

I get the impression that Tina wasn't on the guest list so there may be an element of sour grapes here, but in general I think I agree. Jeff Bezos, fourth richest man in the world (depending on the day and the ranking) could have pretty much any woman in the world he wanted. So, who did he blow up his marriage for and before we get into the complaining about his wife taking him to the cleaners, it was he who caused the divorce (actually, divorces because his inamorata was also married at the time)?

The woman next door, a triumph of grinding determination to keep her figure through diet, exercise, and plastic surgery. She managed to find a classy wedding dress so kudos for that, as well as showing off the results of all that effort.

Back to Tina's commentary:

Now that the 55- year-old bride Sánchez has proved that landing the fourth richest man in the world requires the permanent display of breasts like genetically modified grapefruit and behemoth buttocks bursting from a leopard-print thong bikini, she’s exuberantly and unapologetically shown that the route to power and glory for women hasn't changed since the first Venetian Republic.

Ouch. But also, yes. What am I trying to say here? Mostly that the next time there's yet another post about reversing the fertility decline by putting obstacles in the way of women going to higher education, steering them to marrying early, and good old traditional 'the man is the head of the house and women should work to please their husband and that includes sex whenever and however he wants it', remember this. Male sexuality is a lot simpler than female sexuality. Jeff could have destroyed his marriage for a nubile twenty-something with naturally big assets, but he went for tawdry 'sexy' with the trout pout and plastic boobs (though once again, I have to salute her commitment to starving and exercising in order to keep a taut muscle tone). It's not much good to criticise women for being shallow in the dating market when the fruits of success are to dress like this and hook your own billionaire.

I haven't watched any of it myself

Thank god. I understand watching the British royal wedding (well... okay, actually I don't), but come the f- on, these aren't the royals. Why is anyone paying attention to them?

Male sexuality is a lot simpler than female sexuality.

Ah, a good thesis for the Quarterly Journal Of No Shit, Sherlock. Yes, Bezos Bad, and like I said before it's not all the women's fault.

Why is anyone paying attention to them?

One of the richest men in the world is throwing a scandalous marriage with a classless woman, and you wonder why gossips everywhere are talking about it? The story is basically tailor made for that market. Only Prince Harry's shenanigans could surpass it.

7 zillion people do far trashier things every week. Is it because he's rich? We abandoned the whole "leading by example" idea for aristocrats ages ago, and Bezos is no aristocrat.

Yeah, the lives of the rich and powerful are a common source of mass entertainment especially if one can feel a rare and probably undue sense of superiority to them.

Humans naturally imitate those of higher status, which means that de facto aristocrats (/celebs/billionaires/influencers/sportsmen) will continue to lead by example whether they want to or not. What we abandoned was requiring them to put some thought into it.

One of the richest men in the world is throwing a scandalous marriage with a classless woman

Bezos was born in Albuquerque (before Breaking Bad, known mainly as the place Bugs Bunny took a wrong turn at), to recently-wed teenaged parents who divorced shortly thereafter. Class? Why would you expect it?

Oh, this is the new Gilded Age. New money and self-made men, and breaking into the upper classes (elite or not, hard to tell) by sheer shedloads of wonga. It's very funny - if these weren't the guys also steering the direction of the global economy and society which affects all the rest of us, and they've got the tastes and inclinations of when they were seventeen and that hot girl in high school didn't even look twice at them. Now Jeff is living the dream of having that hot girl finally on his arm and in his bed.

Forty years too late, maybe, but he went through a transformation in his early fifties so he can afford to buy more than a sports car to fit his new buff image, and the hottie girlfriend and megayacht is all part of that.

It's very funny - if these weren't the guys also steering the direction of the global economy and society which affects all the rest of us, and they've got the tastes and inclinations of when they were seventeen and that hot girl in high school didn't even look twice at them. Now Jeff is living the dream of having that hot girl finally on his arm and in his bed.

No. Besides marrying the quite attractive MacKenzie Scott Tuttle at 29, he dated a girl named Ursula Werner at 17. You can sneer at Bezos for embodying revenge-of-the-nerds fantasies, but you'll have no factual backing for it. (Same goes for Musk, BTW)

Why is anyone paying attention to them?

3 day wedding, renting out Venice, and tons of money to throw at it. Not as elaborate as the big Indian wedding but then again you can't have a Getty wedding every day, either.

Mostly you'd be watching this for the fashion, but since I think her fashion sense is trashy, no. But it's Gilded Age conspicuous consumption wrapped up in environmental and philanthropic babble, so good gossip fodder.

Now that the 55- year-old bride Sánchez

Wow, I thought she was like a decade younger. Fair play, I suppose.

Oh, she's worked hard and is working hard to keep looking that toned. As you get older, muscles get saggy so to keep her arms from the dreaded bingo wings that's a lot of gym hours (maybe some discreet surgery as well, but since she's always showing off her arms and shoulders and there's no signs of scars, either it's very good work or she hasn't had to resort to it just yet).

So I give her credit for that. She's kinda wrecked her face (that trout pout!) but she hasn't done anything (yet) about the signs of crows' feet around the eyes, so she's being more subtle with what work she's having done. But those boobs are not all real as Nature provided them.

I think you're being dishonest in not recognizing that traditional norms around sex also prohibit this behavior. Kings had to turn schismatic or murderous before they could do what Bezos did there.

Well, rich and high status men had mistresses alongside their wives, so Jeff could have gone that route. But clearly Lauren was bent on trading up so out with MacKenzie and in with Lauren, and she knew exactly what bait to dangle in front of him - sexy. Sure, some of us catty females would call her trashy, but Jeff is a man of simple tastes. Give him boobs, he's happy.

And many men would agree with him, the only surprising thing is that this is not twenty-five (instead of fifty-five) year old replacement Mrs. Bezos. Lauren really must have some charisma going on 😁

Kings had to turn schismatic or murderous before they could do what Bezos did there.

It's not exactly Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon, and Anne Boleyn, but the topic does invite comparison! The first marriage(s) ended in divorce in 2019 but it took until now, six years later, for the big wedding. So like Anne, she managed to hang on to her man through the years and get a ring on it eventually!

Jeff could have destroyed his marriage for a nubile twenty-something with naturally big assets

Is this not evidence for the opposite of what you're positing?

Bezos could've gotten a brain-meltingly hot twenty-something model/influencer/plausibly deniable escort. But he chose a high achieving, age appropriate woman (Who, yes, looks pretty bimbo-ish).

I do 100% believe he's on TRT, and that this affected his preferences.

It seems like he got the worst of both worlds. To everyone with any taste or class he looks like a low-class idiot with a bimbo whore wife, but compared to basically any non-obese 18 year old she looks awful. He should've either gone the Jerry Seinfeld/Leo Dicaprio route, laughed at the haters and had his fun or sucked it up and married someone tasteful. He's dealing with all of the cost and none of the benefit.

compared to basically any non-obese 18 year old she looks awful

She's not bad for her age, but it's clear there's been a lot of work done and a lot of effort into looking like that, rather than going with her age and whatever natural assets she had. I'm not saying MacKenzie Bezos is a stunning beauty, but by comparison Sanchez really does look like "mid-life crisis girlfriend" (red carpet glamour shot MacKenzie here, Lauren here - that's the most restrained version I could find, there are more hotcha ones here and here at the White House).

That's the point of Tina Brown's barb: is Lauren Sanchez Bezos smart, funny, talented and great company? Well we don't know, but we do know she decided the road to a man's heart is load up on the lip filler, silicone, and a stint or two under the knife to freshen up the face, and that this works. Who needs brains when you have zeppelin boobs?

This may be very unfair to Sanchez herself, but she has also made the decision to go this road (very likely because she started out in the entertainment industry and that doesn't care if you're smart, it cares if you look pretty and don't show your age), so commentary based purely on her looks is the natural result of that.

And yes: men don't care if you're smart and fun (though that's nice), they care if you have the requisite sexy figure. Sorry guys if that treats you all as very shallow, but I do think male sexual and female sexual attraction work somewhat differently.

: men don't care if you're smart and fun (though that's nice), they care if you have the requisite sexy figure

Pushing back on this slightly. Yes you're probably very correct if we're just talking about sex and sexual attraction. A pretty face also helps. Smart doesn't come into it too terribly much except perhaps at that level of kink. But past just sex and at the relationship level, smart and fun are absolute requirements, at least for most every man I know who would stick around. (And of those two, "fun" is considerably harder to gauge and maintain).

A woman whose sole offering is a sexy figure will find herself ignored, or at least not really attended to, post-coitally. But sure, she'll get laid as much as she cares to, no doubt about it.

...

She looks ordinary, which fits because they got married back before he was "Jeff Bezos, insanely rich guy" and was just "Jeff Bezos, another guy with a plan to make it big". She's also that little bit taller than he is, at least in photos of them together, while I notice Sanchez is that little bit shorter than him. That might have something to do with the attractiveness of the new missus, as well 😁

And yes: men don't care if you're smart and fun (though that's nice), they care if you have the requisite sexy figure.

One minor corrective here: sexy figure is one thing, but sexy attitude may not correlate. As someone who is recently divorced from an ex-wife with a very nice body but who was borderline frigid, dating a woman who is a little chubby but loves to fuck is a mind-blowing change in fortunes. Sex appeal has many facets.

High achieving is debatable. But without the bimboness, it would be less tacky. Huma Abedin married a guy ten years younger than her, but there were no affairs, nude selfies in the National Enquirer, and after putting up with Anthony "I sext fifteen year olds on our shared laptop where my wife keeps confidential work emails" Weiner as her first husband, it was a lot more graceful. By comparison with the Bezos bash, it was an intimate little gathering (for a scion of a billionaire dynasty).

And the bride's bosoms were never in any danger of slipping their moorings and floating over a sporting event.

Huma Abedin is a very different case. It's pretty obvious that she was raised to be a sort of foreign agent -- her parents are Muslim Brotherhood activists and they moved to Saudi Arabia to raise her right after she was born in the US.

Most women chasing after Alexander Soros are in it for the money. She was in a better position because she wanted access to power and thus could easily pass all tests about being in it for the money.

This is an interesting take. I've no idea how accurate, but certainly interesting.

Her dad died when she was 17 and I'm not aware of her mother having any ties to the MB. For that matter I'm not even sure what her dad's ties are supposed to have been, but I admit I haven't looked deeply into it.

Lauren Bezos is not exactly my cup of tea aesthetically, but she’s probably really fun to be around. She’s also likely pretty smart, or at least smarter than most other women. She’s a helicopter pilot, for one.

Jeff is also extremely white trash coded, and has a very strange apparent short man complex. “Hey look at my hot wife with her huge tits and huge ass and huge lips and she gets all these things out for the world to see all the time when we’re in public” is pretty normal for a man his age who just went through a divorce. He is human, just really rich.

The trashiness is the guilty pleasure. Here's a guy wealthy enough to have his own real rocket set to play with, and this is who and what he spends that money on.

I don't know enough of Sanchez' character to know if she's fun to be around. I think I took agin' her (a) for the busting up of her own and Bezos' marriage and (b) by the Wikipedia account, she does seem to have moved on from one guy to a better guy all through her public dating life; this may be purely coincidental but it can also, on an uncharitable reading, be planned - as soon as a better prospect heaves into view, dump the current one.

i - has relationship with American football player (I don't know enough about American sports to know how famous he is) while she's an entertainment reporter. They have a child in 2001 but the relationship ends sometime after that.

ii - gets married in 2005 to Hollywood agent and founder of a talent agency, I'm presuming he is at least as rich and successful as her former boyfriend. This also seems like a good move career-wise if you're in the entertainment/TV business, but what do I know? They have two children.

iii - as part of husband's business, they meet Jeff Bezos and become friendly. In 2018 possibly she and Bezos start an affair, which eventually comes to light and results in 2019 divorces for Bezos and Sanchez from their respective spouses. The affair becomes public knowledge after being leaked via a story in the National Enquirer involving Bezos' texts to Sanchez, as well as nude selfies (if there's anything I don't need to see, it's nude selfies of Jeff Bezos) and there's some hysteria on his part as he accuses everyone from the government on down of being out to get him. There's an investigation into who leaked, but it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere (though some speculate that 'friends of Sanchez' leaked it. If I'm being cynical, getting your 'friends' or arranging to have it leaked would be one way for Sanchez to motivate Bezos to dump MacKenzie and make her the new official squeeze). Another accusation was that her own brother leaked it, and had been paid to provide photos of the couple canoodling.

But just in September, Bezos and MacKenzie, who have four children, were spotted celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary at LIV nightclub in Miami.

“They were definitely still together,” said a source, adding that they looked happy as they snapped photos in the DJ booth and danced the night away.

By late October, the multibillionaire was seen at the private Casa Tua club with a different woman who looked a lot like Sanchez, sources say.

Bezos, 54, and Sanchez, 49 — who is also a helicopter pilot — got to know each other through her husband, an agent to stars including Matt Damon, Christian Bale, Kevin Costner and Hugh Jackman.

But sources say Sanchez became closer to Bezos after she and Whitesell separated in the fall.

“Patrick and Lauren have socialized with Jeff Bezos and his wife for a few years, because both [now former] couples have houses in Seattle,” a source said.

Not very edifying, however you slice it, not to mention whatever the effect of all this was on her three and his four children. However, now at last she is Mrs. Fourth Richest Man in the World, so it's all been worth it!

There are some people who simply cannot be trusted around most of the opposite sex. They’re usually at least moderately, although only very rarely exceptionally, attractive, but they have an intoxicating charisma and can seduce almost anyone. The archetypal siren, rake, Mata Hari, whatever. Only some variant of the Pence rule is going to protect you from them (if targeted).

I would like to meet these women, for research purposes. I know well some guys who would have sex with probably any woman who paid them even the slightest bit of attention. I also know guys who have absurdly finicky standards (or claim to.) I don't doubt your claim here but I've personally sailed through many siren-populated (if not infested) waters without earmuffs and been able to get through without diving overboard or crashing the vessel. Reflection suggests you're probably right, though. Maybe I've just been fortunate or the Matas Hari I've met have been either insufficiently charming or insufficiently motivated.

He also thought it was important to get almost comically enormous biceps entering his 60s, having been a scrub most of his life.

Having big muscles does change people's perceptions of you. I doubt he would've gotten this banger song made about him if he looked like a nerd: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vTyeZjo7n_M

dang, I need to do more bicep curls

Back to Tina's commentary:

Now that the 55- year-old bride Sánchez has proved that landing the fourth richest man in the world requires the permanent display of breasts like genetically modified grapefruit and behemoth buttocks bursting from a leopard-print thong bikini, she’s exuberantly and unapologetically shown that the route to power and glory for women hasn't changed since the first Venetian Republic.

Ouch.

This Tina Brown seems awfully bitter and judgemental about another woman's appearance for a supposed feminist. I wonder what her problem is.

I think it's a perfectly coherent view - the point is that she (Sanchez) is condemning herself (and in a small way all women) to infantilisation. Getting fake tits is essentially indulging and perpetuating male chauvinism - she should be satisfied with her own personhood without having to surgically alter herself in order to please men. The broader point has been a feminist theme for centuries.

Wollstonecraft:

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison. Men have various employments and pursuits which engage their attention, and give a character to the opening mind; but women, confined to one, and having their thoughts constantly directed to the most insignificant part of themselves, seldom extend their views beyond the triumph of the hour. But were their understanding once emancipated from the slavery to which the pride and sensuality of man and their short-sighted desire, like that of dominion in tyrants, of present sway, has subjected them, we should probably read of their weaknesses with surprise.

I think it's a perfectly coherent view - the point is that she (Sanchez) is condemning herself (and in a small way all women) to infantilisation.

I don't think there are many commonly used modern definition of feminism that directly involve policing other women's choices regarding their own appearances. I'd be surprised if Tina Brown has explicitly endorsed this principle.

In any case, this would be slightly more believable if the author had exhibited anything but total contempt for Laura Sanchez. I find it hard to believe Tina Brown is genuinely concerned about Sanchez's wellbeing.

commonly used modern definition of feminism that directly involves policing other women's choices regarding their own appearances

I mean you've put in a bit of an autistic way but the idea that women shouldn't indulge the male gaze is a very common feminist one across time. This is the whole idea that lies behind critiques of 'lipstick feminism'. It's by no means a consensus view, in fact there has been a lot of debate on whether fashion/beauty is liberatory and agentic, or infantilising, but either way it's definitely not an uncommon feminist position.

I don't think there are many commonly used modern definition of feminism that directly involves policing other women's choices regarding their own appearances

The term is "internalized misogyny" or "the Patriarchy." It's very common, though it's never framed (overtly) as being the women's fault. But the implication is often that they are defecting, selling out for male approval.

I understand that all that could apply in theory, but I'm quite sceptical that it explains this writer's behaviour. To be fair to Brown, I'm not actually sure she's publicly aligned herself with one particular form of feminism, but the usual way feminism is expressed by popular figures in the modern world always seems to include some form of "women should be empowered to do/look/behave as they want", so I - perhaps mistakenly - assume that position unless stated otherwise. My sense is that other schools of thought are much more niche and/or dated.

In any case though, the main reason I don't buy it here is the particularly personal way she wrote that passage about Sanchez - her description is pointlessly nasty and seem to come from a place of bitterness rather than of sober reflection. Less like some form of "what she's done to her appearance has negative implications about how women are expected to look to appeal to a man" and more like "I'm angry that a wealthy man would choose a stupid ugly bitch like her".

she should be satisfied with her own personhood without having to surgically alter herself in order to please men. The broader point has been a feminist theme for centuries.

Perhaps.

But I've also been listening to rhetoric along the lines of "My body, my choice," "We look pretty for ourselves, not for men", and "my outfit is not an excuse" which all go towards that idea that women can dress up as sexy as they want and make whatever changes they feel like to themselves and are all but immune from judgment for it, for over a decade now.

Hence they can get trashy (in my eyes) tattoos everywhere, as many piercings as they like, they can go with fake boobs, butt, and lips, and all of this is just a celebration of their femininity or whatever.

Its a bit discordant for feminism to actively police its own side for doing things that incidentally appeal to the men in their lives, when there's no evidence that it was the result of coercion but rather her own desires... even if those desires were executed with the male gaze in mind.

As always, relevant TLP: No Self-Respecting Woman Would Go Out Without Make Up

Let me offer a contrary position, unpalatable but worth considering: the only appropriate time to wear make up is to look attractive to men. Or women, depending on which genitals you want to lick, hopefully it's both. "Ugh, women are not objects." Then why are you painting them? I'm not saying you have to look good for men, I'm saying that if wearing makeup not for men makes you feel better about yourself, you don't have a strong self, and no, yelling won't change this. Everyone knows you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, now you're saying the cover of the book influences how the book feels about itself?

Yeah. Not to get into the weeds of the evolutionary biology of it, but

"The way I dress/makeup is solely to feel good about myself! That it happens to 90% coincide with what makes men lust after me is completely irrelevant, its not about men's desires!" is the purest cope imaginable.

I've now seen it countless times, women who abjectly refuse to leave the house without putting together a cute outfit and doing at least minimal makeup. And when pressed (politely) its usually waved off as a matter of self-confidence or personal preference, and I just want to whisper "from whence does the preference come? Self-confident in whose eyes?"

Going to the gym, going to the store, going to grab takeout Chinese food, can't risk you might be seen in a state that might cause a man to overlook you. Especially if other women might put in 10% more effort than you and win the status game.

Being attractive to men, is, like it or not, a pretty big part of the typical woman's self esteem, even if she's not looking right then. Obviously they can't just come out and say that, because feminism, so it's unstated, but it can obviously be both.

That's what I'm saying.

Eons of generations have gone into each facet of the female psyche. Their biological imperative is, to a large degree, to appeal to men's sexual desires. Even if its not literally about sex, that's where most of this is coming from.

Their own psychology is innately, inextricably entangled with making themselves appealing to the male brain. "Men like me if I'm pretty, therefore being pretty is good, therefore I feel good when I'm pretty."

So trying to rewrite it to seem like "I just like making my mouth look soft and kissable and pumping up my cleavage for prominent display and wearing painted on leggings that emphasize my rump because I feel good when I dress up this way completely independent of how any man might perceive it" is a tad farcical.

No woman puts in that much effort to make herself feel good and then chooses to just lounge around the house rather than going out in hopes of snagging some actual attention. And rightly so.

(and no, I ain't acting like men's fashion doesn't follow similar principles)

Gonna disagree, why wouldn't evolution just make it feel good to be attractive, without providing us with its chain of reasoning?

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"The way I dress/makeup is solely to feel good about myself! That it happens to 90% coincide with what makes men lust after me is completely irrelevant, its not about men's desires!" is the purest cope imaginable.

I don't think it has to be cope. Evolution isn't transparent to us: it is totally plausible that women naturally want to look good without actually 'feeling' the evolutionary reason why it benefits their genes to do so.

I'm just saying. Women have almost universally settled upon their conception of what 'looks good' by way of what makes men pay them greater attention. In the west, at least, nobody holds a gun to their head to make them wear tight clothing that emphasizes curves and shows strategic amounts of skin, even when those outfits are less comfortable to wear. But they do wear such outfits.

Pull up photos of women attending music festivals. And I mean, regardless of genre, from (warning: Semi NSFW) Metal to EDM to Country, and see that while the aesthetics are different, women generally converge on outfits that are revealing and eye-catching and tight and emphasize the secondary sexual characteristics. (yes, admittedly this is prone to selection effects).

I don't think they 'feel' the biological basis, but its the rare woman who can ignore their own impulses and dress in a way that is actively repellent to men and feel truly satisfied and healthy about it.

Yes, there's some large amount of culturally-transmitted information about what is 'attractive' in the other sex as well, but we haven't seen so much divergence between humans as you'd expect if it were solely culturally informed.

Anyhow, humans are just responding to impulses and they don't really think a lot about where those impulses come from. If you're hungry, eat, if you're thirsty, drink. If you're horny, put on the standard mating display and see if you get any takers.

But humans also have brains big enough to create elaborate, usually post-hoc justifications for actions they take, and so they can pretend that dressing and acting in a way that effectively short-circuits the other sex's thought processes (b/c horny) and claim its all solely motivated by self-empowerment.

But humans also have brains big enough to create elaborate, usually post-hoc justifications for actions they take, and so they can pretend that dressing and acting in a way that effectively short-circuits the other sex's thought processes (b/c horny) and claim its all solely motivated by self-empowerment.

Is that really hypocritical though? Suppose evolution makes it enjoyable to dress in a way that's sexy to men. Why can't women now take that system of enjoyment nature has given them, and use it to intentionally get enjoyment for themselves with attracting men becoming a side effect? It seems kinda similar to evolution making us like certain flavours to help us get the right range of nutrients. Modern foodies taking that capacity for enjoyment given to us by evolution, and employing it for their own non-survival ends. At least in theory, the original evolutionary cause of the impulse can be acknowledged, but then co-opted.

90% coincide with what makes men lust after me

I'd say it's more like 60-70%. There's definitely a percentage of women's fashion that is just signalling taste/wealth to other women. Septum rings and baggy mom jeans aren't sexy but they've still had their fashionable moment.

I mean, no accounting fully for taste. Lower back tattoos had their moment, those hair hump things, Jeggings. None of which did anything for me, my thing was pleated skirts. I assume there are guys who did get into mom jeans and might enjoy septum piercings.

Hence my point elsewhere that I rarely see women doing fashion trends that are completely repellent to men as a class, outside of direct political statements.

I don't think a woman looking good is necessarily about attracting the opposite sex, I think it's convergent evolution.

Let's say imagine a hypothetical man and a hypothetical woman are both separately asked to dress their best to attend an event containing only members of the same sex. How different would their attire be compared to an event containing the opposite sex? Maybe in the woman's case some more skin might be showing if the opposite sex were attending, but overall I think what makes someone look in the mirror and say, "Yeah I look good" is the same as what the opposite sex would find attractive even if they aren't necessarily trying to attract the opposite sex. And I think it holds at least somewhat true for men as well.

This hypothetical kinda goes out the window entirely when you account for the fact that one sex is VASTLY more likely to take a bunch of selfies from said event which they will then publish to social media accounts while being quite aware that lots of members of the opposite sex will be viewing those photos.

Because in the very abstract sense, your hypothetical basically describes a nunnery.

This hypothetical kinda goes out the window entirely when you account for the fact that one sex is VASTLY more likely to take a bunch of selfies from said event which they will then publish to social media accounts while being quite aware that lots of members of the opposite sex will be viewing those photos.

True (though I suspect the tendency goes down quite a bit after 30), but I think this discounts that many will not. Why then are they dressing up?

I don't think I'm describing a nunnery at all. If a man went to high status event containing only men, he would probably wear a tuxedo. He is doing this to project an image of confidence, sophistication and putting effort into one's appearance, but women would also find a man in a tuxedo sexy. The men aren't competing for women's attention, and probably most of them aren't trying to make others jealous, but the standards remain the same.

As always these arguments confuse reasons and causes.

It may very well be that there are evolutionary forces such that women who have a certain kind of preference for appearance that is pleasing to men experience more reproductive success. That seems to me a very plausible hypothesis. But the women who have this preference do not subjectively experience it as "I enjoy looking pretty for men." They experience it as a kind of endogenous preference for a certain mode of dress or appearance. When you are discussing with women why they prefer dressing certain ways they are not giving you a description of the biological or evolutionary causes that may give rise to this preference, they are giving you their subjective reasons for that preference.

But the women who have this preference do not subjectively experience it as "I enjoy looking pretty for men." They experience it as a kind of endogenous preference for a certain mode of dress or appearance.

If this is a statement of your interiority, I value your anecdote because I think off-the-cuff anecdotes are often much more valuable than any amount of social “science.”

But if it’s not a description if your interior experience, on what are you basing this statement?

My experience is that women will be generally pretty willing to admit privately, to the right man, that they do enjoy looking pretty not for “men” in general (and perhaps that differentiation between “men” and “some men” is the whole sticking point), but for the sort of man they want to attract. The fact that this generally parses out to her looking pretty to a large majority of men is just one of those things that she mentally glides over.

However, it also seems to be a fairly recent turn of events that there is some mysterious source of social pressure that causes a significant number of women, as a class, to then turn around and publicly deny that they are trying to look pretty for any man at all.

I have personally been in relationships with women who were quite capable of holding both these thoughts in their head and didn’t see them as conflicting, which feels like it’s a point both for and against the vibes-based interiority you are describing. Another point against it might be that women 40, 50, 70 years ago seemed to be much more willing to say that they wanted to look good for a man or their man. Discounting for the moment the idea that women of either era are lying, it seems strange that internal understanding would regress to vibes.

To use a spear counterpart example, men who become absolute freak beasts at the gym are very willing to admit that they are doing it to compete with other men, out of a desire to move up a hierarchical ladder. Past a certain point, looking attractive to women becomes secondary to them. But they are not experiencing an endogenous preference, they are very clear about their actions being driven by a desire to exceed the men they see as their competitors.

They experience it as a kind of endogenous preference for a certain mode of dress or appearance. When you are discussing with women why they prefer dressing certain ways they are not giving you a description of the biological or evolutionary causes that may give rise to this preference, they are giving you their subjective reasons for that preference.

Yes, and if you stick your hand on a hot stove and instantly jerk it away, you aren't going to explain it as "an inborn reflex that is older than the concept of spoken language that evolved to quickly detect and avoid high temperatures to protect against burning off one's extremities."

You're going to say "because it hurts." That's your subjective experience of an entirely instinctual, unconscious act your brain takes without consulting your higher consciousness.

I don't particularly care what their subjective explanation is for it, if they aren't capable of changing their behavior any more than you are capable of holding your hand on a scalding stove until you smell burning flesh.

Yes, for some of them "go out in public without dolling yourself up first" is nearly as unthinkable as letting your fingers burn to a crisp.

And of course I wouldn't talk in these terms towards a woman I was actually trying to attract, b/c I also know that evolutionary pressures probably don't select for being able to make the most logically sound, rhetorically attractive arguments possible either.

Maybe for some women. I can tell you for a fact that my wife dresses up nice for the same reason she cleans and decorates our house even when nobody is coming around. She likes pretty things and wants to be one of them. From my experience this is pretty common for women.

Pretending it's all about attracting men is not just reductive, it's simply false in many cases.

That pushes it back a step, since I can generally guess at what she believes is 'pretty' when she dresses up.

she should be satisfied with her own personhood

Do you know how many humans (male or female) are "satisfied with their own personhood"?

Not many!

We are all, at all times, engaged in a vain and desperate struggle to alter ourselves in order to solve the riddle of the Other's desire. It's not a woman thing it's a human thing.

"However, the thing to add at once is that the desire staged in fantasy is not the subject’s own, but the other's desire, the desire of those around me with whom I interact: fantasy, the phantasmatic scene or scenario, is an answer to: ‘You’re saying this, but what is it that you actually want by saying it?' The original question of desire is not directly 'What do I want?', but 'What do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I for those others?' A small child is embedded in a complex network of relations, he serves as a kind of catalyst and battlefield for the desires of those around him. His father, mother, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, fight their battles in his name; the mother sends a message to the father through her care for the son. While being well aware of this role, the child cannot fathom just what kind of object he is for these others, just what kind of games they are playing with him. Fantasy provides an answer to this enigma: at its most fundamental, fantasy tells me what I am for my others. This intersubjective character of fantasy is discernible even in the most elementary cases, like the one, reported by Freud, of his little daughter fantasizing about eating a strawberry cake. What we have here is by no means the simple case of the direct hallucinatory satisfaction of a desire (she wanted a cake, didn't get it, so she fantasized about it). The crucial feature is that, while tucking into a strawberry cake, the little girl noticed how her parents were deeply satisfied by the sight of her enjoyment. What the fantasy of eating a strawberry cake was really about was her attempt to form an identity (of the one who fully enjoys eating a cake given by the parents) that would satisfy her parents and make her the object of their desire."

(From Zizek's "How to Read Lacan")

What exactly does Bezos gain from being married again?

That's why I'm surprised that she managed to keep him once she'd hooked him. She has now successfully landed the fish! I imagine if his lawyers had any say there's a hefty pre-nuptial, but even if this ends in divorce down the line, a few measly scraps of tens of millions may be just about enough to keep the wolf from the door for her.

This might be another Anna-Nicole Smith case, in the end.

I dunno, based on interviews he seems sappy enough that he believes in the institution of marriage.

One view is he felt his sex life dwindling and his mortality creeping in and didn't want to accept that, so he started lifting and doing roids and wanting to party a bit but his then wife wasn't really into picking up that same lifestyle.

If being the richest man in the world was worth anything, surely it would be cheating old age at least a little bit.

My theory: VHNWI are so disconnected from reality that they seek out proletariat experiences in order to feel human.

But the funny thing is they seem to fail so hard at it that it probably makes their valley feel even more uncanny: Bezos wedding, Musk trying comedy with Dave Chapelle, Musk trying to get into Berghain, etc.

Oh well, it's probably just cope for being a wage slave. At least I don't have to try to manufacture experiences for myself to feel human.

This is honestly the most convincing theory.

Have we considered that he's in love? IDK, seems like the most plausible reason to me.

In general men on the internet have this level of paranoia about marriage that needs to be pushed back on as much as the 'OMG all men are rapists and abusers' tiktok feminism demoralizing women.

There's paranoia and then there's simply asking what a man would get out of it, and in particular a billionaire in his 60s.

Monogamy is a huge time saver. A spouse can help you with all sorts of random life crap.

Bezos got married young and doesn't want to learn how to do things like plan dinner parties with his friends while in his 50s.

Sure he could hire personal assistants and prostitutes, but he's got a company to run and it's just easier to have a wife.

I've never had a single person tell me it's easier to have a wife. In fact it's the one thing I hear most guys complain about at work.

It is easier to have a wife.

My recently divorced coworker begs to differ.

Doesn't have a wife, now does he?

It's way easier to have a wife. And yeah a lot of guys complain about theirs, but that's generally venting about minor grievances rather than a serious complaint. In truth, most of those guys would be miserable without their wives, and they probably know it.

I think there are two moving parts here: Jeff's marriage and the average dudes marriage. I don't think these two are comparable. And I doubt Bezos doesn't have a bunch of personal assistants and potentially prostitutes.

To that extent the argument that monogamy is a huge time saver does not apply to someone who is in the position to outsource the work. Nor would it apply to Bezos like it would some average guy.

So I'd agree that the average guy is better of with a wife to the extent he can not achieve his wants without one, but that's not saying much in my mind.

Most guys with jobs complain about their jobs, it is nonetheless easier to have a job than not to have one.

Leaving aside those who can get all the benefits of a job without one, but those are rare individuals.

Jeff Bezos is one of the rarest.

As a newly married man, my experience has definitely been that having a wife makes life easier. Pooling our social lives means that she picks up maybe 70% of the organising seeing friends, she organises most of the house stuff, she helps me draft tactful messages with her womanly social skills. Plus even if I'm working from home I'm guaranteed to spend at least some time socialising every day. 12/10 would wife again.

I understand the point but in relation to Jeff Bezos you are not explaining how having a wife is easier than having paid assistants do all of the things that need to be done.

You would also need a butler to supervise the assistants - managing staff is a job in itself.

Having a wife is a job in itself - my coworker every day.

I guarantee you your coworker goes home to his wife and bitches about you/his job all night long.

You have a coworker who is just a bitchy wuss of a person. You can identify this by all the bitching he does. You should exclude his bitchy opinions from your mental map of the opinions of capable people.

In fact, you should do this with more people that you meet, even online. Bitchy whiners should be ignored. If they can express a solution, even a crazy solution, that’s different, but if all they do is whine, ignore them.

Anyways, to countersignal your coworker, my wife and I have our ups and downs for sure, but she is not a “job in herself.” She’s the best part of the day, for which, through the struggles, I remain grateful.

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I dunno dude, the idea of thinking of a wife as like some kind of utility calculation around chore maxxing or whatever seems like the kind of thing that deranges radical feminists. Our society is structured around you picking one person who is closer to you than anyone else, that swears to you a mutual pact of loyalty and confidence. They aren't like your butler who can quit at any moment and you're expected to congratulate them on getting a better offer. We've added some escape clause but the basic idea is still to death do us part. You pick them and then get to turn off the part of your brain worried about mate selection and the two of your focus on the more important things, the two of you against the world. You can't pay and assistant to have undying loyalty through sickness and in health. Maybe Bezos isn't getting that from his wife, I wouldn't know, but I'm providing that to one person and she's providing it to me.

I dunno dude, the idea of thinking of a wife as like some kind of utility calculation around chore maxxing or whatever seems like the kind of thing that deranges radical feminists.

That's not what is being done by me to any greater extent than it was being done by the person I replied to.

I'm not interested in your selective disagreement with me. Marriage in this thread was leveraged in two contexts, a material function one, i.e. you wife can do things like organizing, doing housework etc, and an emotional function, i.e. you love them, they are your soulmate etc.

My point was that Bezos, on account of being a billionaire, does not need a wife for material function. So leveraging the utilitarian functions of marriage in support of an argument that marriage is beneficial to Bezos is asinine. I'd even argue that such a thing would be stupid. He probably has more than one giant house. Do we expect the wife to clean all of that? Of course not. Same for organizing big social gatherings. Hell, why even bother to cook when you can have a learned chef cook for you? It just doesn't make any sense.

For the emotional function, you don't need marriage to love a person or spend your life with them.

As for your definition of marriage, I'd argue that the only coherent view of marriage is when two persons want to start a family together. Marriage is a contract, Both a legal and not, between two people who a binding themselves for the ultimate task procreating. It can be because two people feel a very special connection and want to be with one another forever and start a family. It can also be because two people who don't really know one another all that much were pushed together because of necessity, and everything in between. Marriage is important and sacred all the same as a starting point for procreation.

To contrast this with your view, you can pay an assistant to functionally have undying loyalty through sickness and health, and you can marry a person who doesn't have that. I'm sure you have an enviable marriage, but I'm not sure if you leveraging that is conducive to a coherent argument.

Men will bitch about their wives, but these same men would be eating a take-out sandwich over the sink without them.

I don't know, sure, some wives certainly make some men miserable. Any man with children (except in very rare circumstances) will say it's easier to have a wife.

...

I as well am master of the culinary arts. Still my wife is better, hands down.

I'm not suggesting men have to be this way. I'm suggesting often they simply don't care enough to bother.

Cooking is simple (like going to the gym), but it's a hassle until you're just used to doing it. And for many I assume the calculation goes "I'm less assed eating a lazy meal/paying for takeout than I am instilling a habit to cook".

I think I'd distinguish between being able to prepare a meal and being able to cook. I can prepare simple meals without a recipe and moderately more complicated ones with, but I would still describe myself as not being able to cook. I don't have the knowledge nor inclination to stray far from known recipes, and while I enjoy the results I very rarely enjoy the process. My wife on the other hand can take pretty much anything lying around in the kitchen and make an at least palatable meal out of it and almost never follows recipes even when it is her first time making a dish. She both has the knowledge and experience to make things up on the fly and enjoys the process nearly as much as the end result. I don't know exactly where the boundary between being able to cook and not being able to lies, but I'd put it somewhere between us.

It's not that men can't cook, I can actually cook great (by standards of men my age, though my brother is actually much better). But I also don't take much care of myself and if there's no one I'm accountable to and for, I'll probably go for least effort solutions (fast food, or junk frozen meals).

Me too, and I even like to cook but during my last period of being apart from my wife, I maybe cooked for myself 40-50% of the time, tops. Other times I might have gotten preoccupied with doomscrolling The Motte something or another or I might just not have had the time or bandwidth to actually cook. On those times I was either eating out or throwing frozen food in the Ninja to bake or air fry.

Men can be great cooks. It’s just there’s a certain domestic… well, something when your woman is running a space.

I've become the primary cook for our family and have come to rather enjoy the process of putting together meals. But on the rare occasions I'm on my own for dinner, I cook maybe 10% of the time. It's mostly not worth the effort for one person, especially if you are not a fan of leftovers for days.

I would argue that it's not that big of a deal and that clearly if single men's preference is to eat simply or quickly then it's just not that important to them.

I don't think men will be eating a lot of take-out sandwiches if they are billionaires and can afford a private chef.

Sure we would, we'd just eat more of it.

Damn right. They'll be delivered.

Depends on the quality of the take-out. In any case my illustration was an example of the usual man's lack of gumption when it comes to certain aspects of life. With a wife, certain aspects change, and I'd argue mostly for the better. Of course YMMV.

I was gonna say, if you have a kids a wife is essential (so is a husband, tbh). With more than 1-2 kids, you no longer have a "relationship," you now have a "small business" that requires more than one employee to smoothly operate.

He has a space program, I don't believe it's beyond his power to get someone to manage dinner parties easily, or at least more easily than a massive 80 million dollar wedding. If anyone is elite human capital, it's bezos. He can learn!

Nobody goes that far as a matter of convenience. Bezos is not marrying out of convenience, there must be some deeper reason.

All wives are trophy wives

Care to elaborate?

The traditional meaning of "Trophy wife" (something like "someone married as a status symbol instead out of love") implies a false dichotomy. Or at least, it ignores the fact that a man gains status by having a wife. I would maintain that an alone Jeff Bezos is lower status than one with a suitable wife.

Prostitution is still considered low class enough it's not really an option for someone so public

Male sexuality is a lot simpler than female sexuality. Jeff could have destroyed his marriage for a nubile twenty-something with naturally big assets, but he went for tawdry 'sexy' with the trout pout and plastic boobs

I have to be careful to distinguish here between how much of my experience is idiosyncratic and how much of it can generalize, because I find the Sanchez woman to be rather repulsive, but evidently there are many men who do not.

If you listen to TRP/manosphere content, you'll frequently hear them say "men have the biggest variety of preferences, men can fall in love with anything, but women only want one thing (and that thing is Chad)". This is one of their favorite talking points, they repeat it quite often. And women often react with incredulity when they hear this, and they claim that reality is in fact the exact opposite. "What? All men just want a 'hot' woman. But my hubby, he's got a bit of a potbelly and he isn't the tallest, but he's got a great smile and a heart of gold, so I love him all the same. Obviously women's preferences are more varied and less superficial."

I think the key to resolving the dilemma is that, although the secondary and tertiary traits can vary greatly, there are certain key traits that, if absent in a man, will make it very hard for a woman to be romantically attracted to him. As far as my observations can confirm anyway. Although, pinning down exactly what these traits are is a bit difficult. It's not stability per se, nor is it social dominance per se, nor is it social adeptness per se, but rather it's more like an abstract distilled commonality that forms a part of all these traits. We might call it "agency", or projecting a sense of "in-control-ness", if not over his external environment then at least over himself. If a man can't demonstrate at least a minimal amount of "put-together-ness", then he's not going to have much luck with women.

What the TRP guys are correctly intuiting is that men have no such minimal criteria. In spite of the fact that there are clear patterns, at the end of the day they really can go for absolutely anything. There's an active 4chan thread right now where guys are swapping stories about how much they love NEET girls. As in, "whoa, you're telling me she hasn't had a job since college, AND she never leaves her room, AND she has severe social anxiety? Now that's what I'm talkin' about, I want that". You'll have to take my word for it that they really are fetishizing the status of NEET-ness itself. And they can do this with anything, rich or poor women, fat or skinny, smart or dumb, socially successful or an anxious wreck, it don't matter. Could you imagine any woman saying "you know I really just want an unemployed loser, that's what really gets me going"? If there are any such women, they're a rare breed indeed.

There's an active 4chan thread right now where guys are swapping stories about how much they love NEET girls. As in, "whoa, you're telling me she hasn't had a job since college, AND she never leaves her room, AND she has severe social anxiety? Now that's what I'm talkin' about, I want that". You'll have to take my word for it that they really are fetishizing the status of NEET-ness itself. And they can do this with anything, rich or poor women, fat or skinny, smart or dumb, socially successful or an anxious wreck, it don't matter. Could you imagine any woman saying "you know I really just want an unemployed loser, that's what really gets me going"? If there are any such women, they're a rare breed indeed.

I think this is actually sort of analogous to women allegedly preferring "dad bods". I don't think any woman genuinely finds a dad bod more sexually thrilling in isolation, but for a woman self-conscious about her own weight the idea of a man that lives at the gym and eats a stricter diet than a supermodel just sounds intimidating and miserable. I think 4chan NEETs are not necessarily attracted to a NEET girl so much as they just imagine that she will be attainable and have low standards in men and make their own failure less humiliating.

My understanding is that women are in more unanimous agreement about the attractiveness of various features. For example, tall is considered more attractive than short by probably 99% of women. It's just that women place less emphasis on attractiveness relative to social status/dominance, confidence and so forth. Men are more varied in their physical tastes, a nontrivial percentage of men seem to genuinely prefer mega-obese women not merely as a compromise of necessity but as their first choice. But irrespective of their physical preferences, physical looks are regarded as much more important.

Very possible that what women mean by dad bod is not what's popularly envisioned, too.

This is exactly it. They often mean "guy who looks like he can deadlift and bench a VW Beetle, but has some softness around the midsection (so he's probably not insane about tracking his diet, but also so him having too-defined abs doesn't make me feel insecure about my own body)."

My wife has recently given me a little gentle ribbing about my softer than usual belly. We were at the beach last week, and she turned to me and said, "Yeah, seeing all these shirtless men makes, me realize how in shape you actually are."

Point being I agree.

One of the times I was most proud of my dad was at scout camp. They had a bellyflop contest for all the scoutmasters and other adult leaders at the pool, and my dad had the smallest belly by a massive margin. And my dad isn't morbidly obese or anything, but he's certainly no beanpole either.

...

I think this is actually sort of analogous to women allegedly preferring "dad bods". I don't think any woman genuinely finds a dad bod more sexually thrilling in isolation, but for a woman self-conscious about her own weight the idea of a man that lives at the gym and eats a stricter diet than a supermodel just sounds intimidating and miserable. I think 4chan NEETs are not necessarily attracted to a NEET girl so much as they just imagine that she will be attainable and have low standards in men and make their own failure less humiliating.

Why is whatever this boils down to as a notion of attraction less legitimate than the "in isolation" notion, though? People choose partners on complex criteria, which tend to include some reflexive components like "can I convince myself that the other person in fact desires me" and "how will society judge us as a pair". This is not just a strategic cope to make up for an organic preference that can not be realised - as I see it, for most people, the realisation where you see a happy future for yourself with another is attraction, butterflies and everything! (No judgement intended about respectability - the happy-future fantasy could be anything from "we'll fuck like rabbits in a public toilet" to "we will grow old discussing philosophy until one of us closes their eyes, never to complete their final thought")

I don't see why attraction based on this compound metric should be written off as less legitimate than attraction based on what the man might choose to beat his meat to while completely derealised at the tail end of a gooning all-nighter, or the woman's equally derealised fantasies after drifting off to trashy romance novel la-la land. In fact there seems to be a certain kind of essentialism that bitter people in all sorts of domains converge upon, where some very specific and often even irrelevant metric is elevated to Ground Biological Truth and everything else is ultimately seen as fakery and pretense - "he might say he likes me but Science says that he ultimately would prefer someone with balloon tits and a hourglass figure. We don't make the rules", or "she might claim to like nice guys but Science says that women only really get off on rape and dominance, she may deny it but I'm sure it will come out eventually", or "I might seemingly be performing about as well as everyone else, but Science says that people of my sex/ethnicity are not good at my research area". Every such belief conveniently has the nature of those delusional parasite infections which compel the patient to scratch at them until they actually bleed and get infected.

We might call it "agency", or projecting a sense of "in-control-ness", if not over his external environment then at least over himself. If a man can't demonstrate at least a minimal amount of "put-together-ness"

Nietzsche's Will to Power (expressing a sense of agency, freedom, self-sovereignty)

As in, "whoa, you're telling me she hasn't had a job since college, AND she never leaves her room, AND she has severe social anxiety? Now that's what I'm talkin' about, I want that".

Translation: she's got a cute face, and while she might be a bit of a fixer-upper that's perfect for someone "gifted" with enough autism/slight sociopathy (which is why it's a 4chan thing) to obviate most of the things that [we believe] would make someone that anxious in the first place. There is an element of "might not be self-aware enough/self-doubting enough to not entirely know her full value/potential, so will be available at bargain-bin social prices", or perhaps a bit of a savior complex, but that's underwritten by the implicit co-operation you get from knowing that their actually leaving their room/inviting you into their room is the hardest step.

Could you imagine any woman saying "you know I really just want an [cute but] unemployed loser, that's what really gets me going"?

This is the cougar effect; women being sexually attracted to men with... uh, growth potential. It's kind of a trans-gender behavior (their occasional pursuit of illegally-young men is too- there's very little biological reason for them to take on that kind of risk, especially compared to men for whom that behavior is evolutionary-biologically imperative), though nobody will ever fully recognize it as such.

Rod Stewart (age 80!) played Glastonbury this weekend with his customary troupe of sexy blonde model-looking backup singers/musicians in tight cocktail dresses. Out of curiosity I looked up who his wife is. A sexy blonde (age 54) who was a lingerie model when they started dating. His ex-wife? A sexy blonde model (for the same lingerie brand nonetheless). His ex-ex-wife? Another sexy blonde model. The ex gfs who were notable enough to make it into Stewart's Wikipedia entry? Sexy blonde models.

I don't care for Rod Stewart's music, I like his fashion sense even less. I'm not qualified to judge how physically attractive he is but at his peak he seems average at best? And yet whether it's by fair means or foul he's continually surrounded himself with sexy blonde models for more than 50 years.

In reference to his divorces, Stewart was once quoted as saying, "Instead of getting married again, I'm going to find a woman I don't like and just give her a house."

I don't have a point, just adding supporting material. I'm not sure I get your point either. It can't just be "rich men like hot women", poor men do too! Rich men get hot women? Somebody has to, and if the choice is Man A, rich, or Man B, poor, it's understandable why a woman might pick the rich one.

Rich women exist too lest we forget, and according to the prevailing theory they don't care too much about underwear models and want to marry rich(er) men too. But rich men are already rich. What use does Bezos or Stewart have for a woman's riches? Woman A likes him because he's rich, Woman B likes him because he's rich. Looks like he'll turn to the tiebreaker.

And what of Mackenzie Scott's now 2nd ex husband? Where does he fit into this? Neither rich nor a model, but she divorced him after one year of marriage. Just #rebound things?

In reference to his divorces, Stewart was once quoted as saying, "Instead of getting married again, I'm going to find a woman I don't like and just give her a house."

So weird, my boss told me this quote the other day but he thought it was from WC Fields.

Perhaps the next rich, famous man will update his priors accordingly:

“What’s the reaction from women for dating a fresh, childless young woman in her late teens or twenties?”

“Seethe, rage, accusations of you being a groomer pedophile who’s exploiting power dynamics and taking advantage of someone whose brain hasn’t even developed yet because you can’t handle a woman your own age.”

“What’s the reaction from women for marrying a middle-aged divorced woman who’s already been around the block and had her fun?”

“Seethe, rage, accusations of you being a trashy, shallow, classless bimbo-fetishist who’s too insecure to handle an intellectual woman.”

“Well then…”

A driver of the hate is that she presents as younger than she is, possibly passing as a thotmaxxing woman in her mid-to-late 40s and maybe even pre-menopausal (at least from afar). Thus, she isn’t decrepit-looking enough and is younger-looking than Bezos “deserves.” If she looks like she still might have eggs, she’s too young for the seggs.

I suppose, in general, progressive hate is likely to result whenever, wherever there’s a successful white man enjoying himself—from other tech bosses like Zuckerberg and Musk (including pre-Trump associations) to athletes like Kelce and Bauer. Modern progressivism: The haunting fear that some white man, somewhere, might be happy without benefiting women, racial and sexual minorities.

Do you think Bezos didn't think of simply doing a Di Caprio, or was afraid of the backlash?

I've often heard an opinionoid about the idea of older guys dating 18 year olds that goes something like "there's nothing we can talk about after fucking", and while lately it does look like sour grapes/Havel's groceryism when it comes from older guys, there might be something to it. Of course, if it was revealed that Sanchez is actually not particularly good intellectual company, then I'd be at a loss.

My guess is that he just fell in love with her. If he wanted to fuck 18 year olds he could have divorced his wife 20 years ago (or come to an arrangement, like Eric Schmidt, or done that classic rockstar / Larry Ellison / Henry VIII thing and just had a succession of younger wives). It seems more likely that he was relatively happy or at least comfortable in his marriage and was then seduced by Sanchez, who is no doubt a skilled and immensely ambitious operator, and then divorced his wife (likely at Sanchez’ request, and certainly as a consequence of her will given she gave her own texts to her brother who then sold them on to a tabloid) so he could marry her. There was no buffet of 20 year olds to pick from, it wasn’t like that, and the billionaires who do live that lifestyle are essentially plugged into the party circuit, big time nightclub promoters, model / escort agents and so on on the Cannes/Miami/LA/Mykonos circuit with which Bezos was not really familiar pre-Sanchez given he was a nerd who mainly attended sober economics conferences.

Mail order coeds are almost certainly available to one of the richest men in the world. No doubt he just preferred Sanchez for companionship.

...

Going by the charities his ex-wife keeps donating to, she must be either trying to get back at Bezos or is a liberal NPC. I'm not sure how happy one might be with

From everything I’ve heard, Jeff is fully onboard with all that stuff himself.

Her approach to philanthropy is almost exactly what you would expect of a coastal PMC chick who studies creative writing at Princeton and ends up working as a secretary while claiming she is writing a novel.

It isn't quite NPC - she is doing agentic stuff in terms of looking for promising new charities to donate to rather than putting her name on buildings at the usual suspects, but "blue tribe PMC NPC" is a better model than "inverse Jeff".

Women hate Lauren now-Bezos because she’s a homewrecking harlot, what’s new?

...

Most assuredly know her as a home wrecker. That is, quite literally, what she’s famous for.

There was no buffet of 20 year olds to pick from, it wasn’t like that, and the billionaires who do live that lifestyle are essentially plugged into the party circuit, big time nightclub promoters, model / escort agents and so on on the Cannes/Miami/LA/Mykonos circuit with which Bezos was not really familiar pre-Sanchez given he was a nerd who mainly attended sober economics conferences.

Unless you're Joe Hardy and marry 22-year-old single moms from economic backwaters.

I've often heard an opinionoid about the idea of older guys dating 18 year olds that goes something like "there's nothing we can talk about after fucking", and while lately it does look like sour grapes/Havel's groceryism when it comes from older guys, there might be something to it.

The honest but misogynistic-sounding answer is "well that's why I have male friends, after all." Indeed, a guy who bags a stunning 18-22 year old will probably immediately text his best buds "BROOOOOOO!" since, you know, that itself is something worth crowing about for many men.

And hell, with most one-night-stands among people similar in age... what are you going to talk about, if the whole intention is not to see one another again?

Anyhow, not to derail, but it does seem best to model most complaints in this vein as intrasexual competition all the way down.

I suppose male friends can, in theory, account for all the interpersonal interaction a man needs while women solely provide the occasional intercorporeal fling. It seems, however, that many men desire more than their male friends can give, or are willing to give in the age where male friendship is notably less intimate in many aspects than it had been.

And hell, with most one-night-stands among people similar in age... what are you going to talk about, if the whole intention is not to see one another again?

I wouldn't know, I've never had a one-night stand that I intended to never see again.

I think the main feature male friends can't provide is being the confidant of deep secrets and more purely emotional revelations from the inner reaches of your psyche. Intimacy, as you say.

For that, you want a partner that has some buy-in and is committed to sticking around for the long term and thus has a greater familiarity with your personal foibles and hangups and struggles, and has accepted you 'in spite' of those. i.e. they make you comfortable enough to be open.

So in that case yeah, you'd want somebody who is emotionally mature and a decent communicator, which would be rarer to find among 18-20 year olds.

But it also doesn't take too much experience to just let someone put their head in your lap and talk about their inner world while providing the occasional constructive response or affirmation, and remember enough of the details that they can build on it as you go.

I think the main feature male friends can't provide is being the confidant of deep secrets and more purely emotional revelations from the inner reaches of your psyche.

That's interesting that you say that. I'm incredibly lucky to have some male friends where we have essentially no secrets (or close to it, at any rate). But I recognize that that's unusual and most friendships (regardless of gender composition) never get to that level.

There are a lot of blackpilled guys who feel like sharing secrets and being emotionally vulnerable is one of the things that they explicitly can't do with women, because any perceived display of weakness could cause her to lose attraction, even deep into a committed relationship. I'd like to tell them they're being overly cynical, but I also can't say that their fears are entirely baseless either.

I have some really good male friends too. They know a lot of things about me that could be used to destroy me if they wished. But I trust them to not.

And vice-versa.

But you see, what happened is they all got married and so acquired a partner that could serve that role better than I could.

Which has left me with not many options aside from finding a good therapist if I really want to unload. Although my brothers (as in, actual biological brothers) are still very good for commiseration.

There are a lot of blackpilled guys who feel like sharing secrets and being emotionally vulnerable is one of the things that they explicitly can't do with women, because any perceived display of weakness could cause her to lose attraction, even deep into a committed relationship.

Yep. And that's one hell of a tradeoff to make to achieve reproductive success. I'd want to have a partner who I could occasionally vent to with the understanding that I would always get back to work and make shit happen, but had the basic, I dunno, decency, to get that part of their role was to help take the edge off the stress every now and again so I can be the person they need me to be.

(also, from very direct experience, I have much less need to vent about emotions when I'm getting laid on the regular. Almost no issues feel overwhelming when that primal urge is satisfied)

I'd also gently point out that it was safer to do this when divorce laws weren't as lenient.

I hear what you're saying, but it's still possible to have friends like this. I have a cousin with whom I've always been very close. We've both been married for a while now, but we make a conscious effort to stay in touch and check in on each other. It's a little more awkward to open up now than it was when we were both freewheeling teens, but it's possible.

More comments

Do you think Bezos didn't think of simply doing a Di Caprio, or was afraid of the backlash?

I was being cheeky in half-joking about the incentives and rock-and-hard-place nature of appeasing women's opinions when it comes to the dating choices of high-status men. I imagine it occurred to him on some level, and maybe backlash is/was a consideration of his. However, I also do believe he legitimately fell for her, at least on some respects.

I don't remember if it was specifically about sex/dating or in general, but I recall reading a comment somewhere to the gist of: When you're trying to make sense of a famous actor's behavior, just remember that no matter how cool or suave he looks on screen, he's likely still a weird theatre kid at heart.

This can be easily extended to tech figures and professional athletes.

Where, despite becoming rich and famous, the mental software of many male celebrities remains incompletely updated when it comes to dealing with women, their toolkit remains lacking, and they can exhibit quite what many would call suboptimal behavior—including inertia, passivity, low standards, one-itis, and/or habit of strippers/prostitutes. Hence why Zuckerberg's wife is mid even for tech-dork standards, Julian Edelman can be caught in a one-night-stand with a chubster, Conor McGregor can be filmed heading off with an outright fatty to presumably bang or at least fool around, James Harden choosing to splash cash on strippers instead of maybe resting so he can play defense, etc.

Many men will claim "what's the deal with [male celebrity]? If I were in his position I'd bang so many more and hotter chicks." A large subset of them is likely right.

For sex/dating purposes, I posit temporarily switching Bezos's mind for a few months with that of a random man who's had double-digit one-night-stands with attractive women in his lifetime would result in outcomes that would make DiCaprio look pedestrian (with non-prostitutes and non-single/divorced mothers, of course).

I've often heard an opinionoid about the idea of older guys dating 18 year olds that goes something like "there's nothing we can talk about after fucking", and while lately it does look like sour grapes/Havel's groceryism when it comes from older guys

It's sour grapes, as online dating statistics would suggest from the infamous OKCupid study or the Bruch-Newman paper. Older guys who say stuff like that likely weren’t banging hot 18-year-olds when they themselves were younger either. You can’t reject me; I’m withdrawing my application and never wanted the job anyway. Plus, the elbows of 18-year-olds are too pointy.

Julian Edelman can be caught in a one-night-stand with a chubster, Conor McGregor can be filmed heading off with an outright fatty

It’s quite plausible that they were simply acting on their own preferences!

Conor McGregor can be filmed heading off with an outright fatty to presumably bang or at least fool around

That makes sense to me. If theres a woman right in front of you that you can have consequence-free sex with, and your reaction is to go find a different one, I suspect thats mostly been selected against. It would be too rare to have multiple such options to have a specific reaction for it.

As for Zuckerberg at all, keep in mind that a rich guy that you know for being rich had many opportunities to sell it all and have more money than a hedonist could ever need, and he made it to the point where you know him because he didnt take those. There could well be large numbers who update however you think they should, that you just dont see. Actually, Im curious how you think they should, since you say that prostitues are bad also?

Where, despite becoming rich and famous, the mental software of many male celebrities remains incompletely updated when it comes to dealing with women, their toolkit remains lacking, and they can exhibit quite what many would call suboptimal behavior—including inertia, passivity, low standards, one-itis, and/or habit of strippers/prostitutes.

Or maybe sex with young models is just not their thing. By that I don't mean that they're gay or don't enjoy it, but even for the rich and famous there are opportunity costs. Most men with a pulse I know would enjoy driving an exotic sports car on a track or in an environment where they can let it loose. And most men with a pulse I know would enjoy sex with young nubile models (presumably who know what they're doing in the bedroom). But not every man who has the opportunity to decides to own and collect exotic sports car. Maybe they prefer to spend their leisure time (a scarce ressource that rich and powerful men don't necessarily have more of than the average joe) and money on travel, or on a yacht, or on going on safaris and hunting rare animals, etc... Some, I assume, will go for women, but I'm not surprised it's not all of them. It still requires time and effort of them and some risk, they still need to keep minimally in shape so that they're not so repulsive (while many women find wealth and power attractive, if you're so physically repulsive to her that it's obvious she's just holding her barf in for a payday, I think it'd put a lot of damper in most men's enjoyment of the act), they need to spend time hanging out in places where you meet young models.

They also need to be careful which young model they take to their hotel suite; falling prey to a gold-digger who casts a powerful "one-itis" spell on him like some witch is always a possibility, we're talking about women at the absolute peak of female power here, I'm not sure every man is immune. And sex involves vulnerability for rich men too, often of blackmail.

In that context, prostitutes are almost appropriate, kind of like renting an exotic sports car to ride at the track. The well-vetted high class ones will be discreet and won't be much as much risk. What looks like one-itis or low-standards, could very well just be a man deciding to settle with a woman that has higher value to him than to most others, a sensible choice as it ensures a better return for the ressources invested. Having a preference for traits most others see as a flaw is a blessing; it means less competition.

I used to accept this opinionoid, but I've come to believe that shared experience matters much more than age. Sure, if you're 40, your 18 year old gf might be a bit boring at first, but after you've been together 5 years, experienced the ups and downs of marriage, and maybe had a kid or two, there will be plenty to talk about and bond over.

Yeah. Seems obvious to me that if you don't have a lot of experiences in common b/c you came from different backgrounds or one is a lot younger and inexperienced.

Then... go out and share some experiences. Then talk about them. This is what I try to make the core mission of ANY relationships I form, but doubly so the romantic ones. Talking about one's background is for the early stages, its something you move past within the first few months.

Really this is just dependent on whether people are good at communicating at all, or not.

and maybe had a kid or two

Don't underestimate this one. Once you have children together, you are on the same team - theirs. Some women eventually manage to hate their ex-husband more than they love the children, but men who do are vanishingly rare. The relationship a man has with the mother of his children is nothing like the relationship he has with a woman he is non-reproductively fucking.

A thing: If Bezos is on a lot of gear it might be messing with his libido/sexuality.

A more likely thing: That woman is a turn on in more ways than just physical. Maybe smart, confident and sexually aggressive. On top of that she is probably motivated to keep her man.

To that extent it shouldn't be a wonder a 'feminist' of sorts wouldn't like her. Similar to how Amy Coney Barrett is disliked by many feminists, despite being a power feminist wet dream. Lauren Sanchez might just be a go-getter who doesn't care about what the patriarchy tells her and instead does what she wants.

It's kind of funny. Two women expose the lived experience of most feminists as kind of pathetic and their ire against the 'system' as rather fraudulent. Apparently some women can have it all. So why don't you?

I'd be interested in knowing if there is some feminist literature out there on this topic. Inequality between women is a subject usually broached through terms of class and race, but barring that, most of the stuff I can find reads more like a lot of cope. To take a maximally aggressive angle: Why should the women who win at life pay heed to the women who lose? And why should anyone take the advice of the women who are by comparison losers?

A part of the upheaval of Andrew Tate was the fact that he wasn't a 'loser' whilst doling out MGTOW/incel talking points. Does he have a female counterpart somewhere on the internet?

The true lesson here is to avoid the urge to extrapolate over hundreds of millions (billions?) of people from a single example!

Tina's commentary assumes that no one who lacks Sanchez's assets could have ended up with Bezos. What is the reason to suppose this? It is not as if his first wife, whom he was married to for 26 years, had this kind of appearance. Nor is it the case, so far as we know, that Bezos went through a bunch of similar looking affair partners before settling on Sanchez. As best I can find Sanchez is the woman he was unfaithful with that led to the end of his marriage. We could as well infer that Bezos would not have married anyone who was not a helicopter pilot, by the logic on display here. Going further, the fact that there are many other individuals who have these assets who (by assumption) would have been willing to date him suggests something further about Sanchez that she has and these others don't. This not to say Bezos doesn't like or enjoy Sanchez's appearance but it is far from clear it is either a necessary or sufficient condition for marrying him.

Ouch. But also, yes. What am I trying to say here? Mostly that the next time there's yet another post about reversing the fertility decline by putting obstacles in the way of women going to higher education, steering them to marrying early, and good old traditional 'the man is the head of the house and women should work to please their husband and that includes sex whenever and however he wants it', remember this. Male sexuality is a lot simpler than female sexuality. Jeff could have destroyed his marriage for a nubile twenty-something with naturally big assets, but he went for tawdry 'sexy' with the trout pout and plastic boobs (though once again, I have to salute her commitment to starving and exercising in order to keep a taut muscle tone). It's not much good to criticise women for being shallow in the dating market when the fruits of success are to dress like this and hook your own billionaire.

What is the reason to suppose Jeff Bezos' behavior and preferences are generalizable to all men? That Lauren Sanchez is generalizable to all women?

I note that Bezos had a noted aversion to helicopter flight (perhaps a part a fear of flight, a part knowing the horrible safety record of personal helicopters) that he seems to have gotten over, just for this woman. To the point where he would go on longer helicopter rides just to hang out with her.

Placing your life in the hands of a woman is rare enough: placing it under IFR flight rules is singularly rare.

I don't know if you've ever been in a helicopter, but it's like putting your head next to a concert amp playing the sound of a chainsaw. No amount of plastic titties can overcome that. There are easier ways to get with a chick then that. I am inclined to believe that he is genuinely infatuated with her.

It's not much good to criticise women for being shallow in the dating market when the fruits of success are to dress like this and hook your own billionaire.

I'm all for giving up, but this seems like a silly reason for doing it. Should we stop telling men to grow up and work hard because lottery winners exist?

Semi-related probably Friday Fun Thread Material But It Fits So I'm Posting It Here Anyway: A couple years ago I crashed a billionaire-adjacent wedding. To avoid burying the lede, it was this wedding, which, being a flamboyantly gay wedding was a lot kitschier than anything Bezos could ever dream of. The lucky groom was 84 Lumber magnate Joe Hardy's grandson, and was held at Nemacolin Woodlands Resort, which resort was owned by Mr. Hardy and is now managed by said groom's mother, and which I'm surprised hasn't changed much since Mr. Hardy's death since it was a vanity project that lost money and that his daughter was supposedly planning on changing to make profitable after the old man kicked.

ANYWAY, I serve on the board of a nonprofit that was having our annual kickoff party at a nearby bar and was attended by a friend of ours who happens to work at the resort. My friends and I had no idea about this wedding, but our friend was talking about how he worked long hours getting ready for this elaborate event, the point of which was to avoid actually having to work the event, and mentioned a few details like that it was taking place at a certain golf hole. It was at this point that someone, possibly me, suggested that we should crash the event. Although the resort wants you to think otherwise, most of the roads on what appear to be the resort grounds are public, as there are several in-parcels with private houses on them beyond the front gates. It would be trivially easy to park alongside the golf course and sneak into the wedding, especially after dark.

No dice, our friend said, while the ceremony itself was at the hole, that had already taken place in the morning, and the actual reception was being held in a tent at a different part of the golf course, and it wouldn't be possible to just slip inside unnoticed. It was at this point that the plan began to crystalize. Outside would have actually been worse, since it was early June and didn't get dark until after 9 pm. Our attempts to pump him for information were only marginally successful, as he was under strict orders of confidentiality and only revealed the location of the ceremony because it had already happened that morning. We reminded him that he was leaving his position in a month as he had just passed his home inspector's test, but he wouldn't budge. Luckily, I had already established that the festivities were expected to go rather late into the night, but weren't starting any later than normal, so we figured 8 pm would be the ideal time to go.

My plan took advantage of one simple idea: Act like you're supposed to be there. The problematic thing about a wedding like this, though, is that it's a sit-down dinner with a strict guest list that's been planned and executed in secrecy precisely to keep people like us away from the thing. But, do to our unique circumstances, this presented an opportunity. While acting like you're supposed to be there is essential, it isn't always enough. We also needed a plausible reason to be there; simply saying my name and demanding entry probably wouldn't work. So that gets us to the third thing we could take advantage of, that these billionaire events always have lots of people involved, both as guests and as staff. Our being admitted wouldn't be dependent on getting past the host or hostess, but getting past somebody who ostensibly knows who is supposed to be there but realistically can't pick any of the guests out of a police lineup.

The one snag was that our event didn't end until five, and as board members we couldn't just leave. I happened to live an hour away, optimistically, from both the event venue and the wedding venue, more like 60–90 minutes, and the cover story I had in mind wouldn't work if we got there too late, and I didn't happen to bring a suit with me when I left the house that morning. One of the participating couples that lived close said I could just shower at their house, but that didn't solve the suit problem, and going home and coming back would be a tight squeeze that might hold up everyone else. At first, I saw no way around this problem, until I realized that I didn't have a date. So I frantically began calling women I knew to see if they were interested in crashing a billionaire wedding on short notice, if you happen to be free tonight, and also wouldn't mind stopping by my house and rooting around for suitable clothing. Luckily, this is where having a good bartender comes in handy, and since I knew she was off that night she was thrilled to engage in a bit of semi-illegal fun.

Shortly thereafter, having made a serious omission, called my friend back and instructed her to stop at the liquor store and pick up a bottle of Jim Beam, two handles of Vladimir vodka, and a bottle of the most ridiculous liquor she could find that wasn't super expensive. She was then to go to Dollar Tree and get cards, two gift bags, tissue paper, and delicate wrapping paper. By the time she arrived two of us had showered and the third was in there and would be putting on her face soon, giving my date plenty of time to shower and get ready herself. In the meantime, the we put the Vladdy in a large box and wrapped it, and put the Beam and the other bottle in the gift bags. To my friend's credit she picked up Slivovitz, which was such an obvious choice that I was embarrassed that I hadn't thought of that myself. For those not aware, it's a plum brandy that's behind the bar at every hunky bar in Pittsburgh that nobody ever drinks except on a dare. We then filled out the cards in the most ridiculous way possible. Mine was full of Yiddishisms and sentences like "Your cousin Nathan is going to be a pharmacist. Good money in that." My gift of choice would have been a set of towels that said "His" and "His", but we were unfortunately under a time crunch. The third couple arrived and we all piled into my friend's 2004 Lexus SUV that he ironically brags to everyone about owning, figuring that a. We can all fit, and b. If we have trouble getting in, he can say "Did I mention I own a Lexus?"

We got there a little after 8. It being light out was a better break than we'd originally thought; since we didn't know where the tent was, it was much easier to drive around looking for it fully exposed without headlights making us more noticeable from a distance. We located the tent and found a place to park. The first hurdle came when it became readily apparent that most of the guests were staying at the hotel and that they were shuttling them back and forth in golf carts. Minor detail; the cover story takes care of that. Just keep going. Act like you're supposed to be here.

We arrive at the entrance to the tent, which is of course heavily guarded by black-clad hospitality employees with walkie talkies. "Hi, Rov_scam and guest". I give my real name, which the guy is frantically looking through the clipboard and not finding. My friends give their names, which of course also aren't on the list. This was the first point that I considered that giving three uninvited names in a row might raise some alarm bells, but no worries, act like you're supposed to be there. "You know what, we're coming from the Schwa Foundation fundraiser and we left notes with the RSVPs that we wouldn't be eating dinner. That might be why there's a mixup." I had actually thought of this well beforehand, but it seemed to allay the guy's concerns. "I'm sorry, but none of you are on the list."

At this point, the weaker-willed among us might have given up. The odds were stacked against us. We had just given three names that weren't on the list and a cockamamie story about why we were late. This guy was in no position to let us in. But one thing I do not stand for is being denied access. Asked to leave? All the time. Escorted from the premises? Almost weekly. You can keep the jeans if you promise not to come back to this store? More than once. But I will at least afford myself the opportunity to be thrown out. "Well, I don't know what to tell you," I said, standing there, my date holding a gift bag and two other couples with us similarly situated. Act like your supposed to be here. Someone who was actually invited wouldn't just leave because they weren't on some list. He gets on his walkie talkie and a woman who looks like a supervisor comes over. He explains that we aren't on the list, and looks relieved that this conundrum is out of his hands. I explain everything to the woman, this time adding that I'm on the board of the Schwa Foundation, my friend is on the board of another nonprofit that she may have heard of (which he is), and my other friend is associated with the local tourist bureau, which she is for the next two weeks before she gets canned in a shakeup.

If you know anything about Joe Hardy, it's that he wants to die broke and that he will do practically anything for Fayette County, the poorest county in Pennsylvania. It would be perfectly understandable if he took his money and bought an estate in some old-money suburb like Fox Chapel (where he could hobnob with John Kerry and Theresa Heinz) or Sewickley Heights (where he could hobnob with Mario Lemieux), but instead he lives in a house on his resort, that may be an unprofitable vanity project but one driven by his desire for Fayette County to have a five star resort. He served a term as commissioner, which is like Donald Trump serving on Palm Beach city council or some other local government position that's all work and no prestige. The idea that we might have some legitimate connection to Mr. Hardy's philanthropic activities wasn't beyond the realm of possibility. Actually, his daughter had given us a reasonably generous donation, though it was officially on behalf of the resort, and we never actually met with her.

At this point, it's clear that the supervisor is in a serious bind. There are three options, none of them particularly great. The most obvious option would be to engage the hostess to verify that these were legitimate guests who had been omitted from the list by mistake. Unfortunately, this would mean interrupting Ms. Hardy-Knox in the middle of her son's wedding reception through a tacit admission that her own staff is unable to control something as simple as a guestlist. Even worse, this party was planned under the strictest confidence. The fact that six random bozos were even able to get this close and that she briefly considered letting them in and went so far as interrupting her evening to be sure. It meant that someone had loose lips and various heads would surely be rolling down the fairway the following morning.

The second option would be to simply state unequivocally that we weren't on the list and that if we didn't leave immediately security would be involved. This also isn't a very attractive option. Remember, this event is super secret and the fact that we even know about it means it's highly likely that we were actually invited. We both look and act like we're supposed to be there. We're involved in organization that would plausibly get a token invitation. We have a plausible cover story for being late. For all this woman knows, we are six duly invited guests, three of whom are prominent members of the local community, who went to great lengths to attend, and by categorically denying us entry they would be causing Ms. Hardy-Knox a significant degree of personal humiliation and she would end up having to spend the following week apologizing on behalf of her staff, Nemacolin Woodlands Resort, and practically the entire 84 Lumber Corporation, ensuring us that various heads were as we speak rolling down the fairway, not to mention the fact that someone on the event planning staff must have fucked up royally to omit our names from the guestlist just because we weren't eating.

Or, they could, of course, just let us in. Remember, this event is super secret and the fact that we even know about it means we're probably invited. Besides, we're Acting Like We're Supposed to Be There. We come bearing gifts. We're standing there patiently, sympathetic to the conundrum we're putting this woman in. What's the worst that could happen if she lets us in? We're all above the age of 35 and don't look like the kind of demographic that would get drunk and cause a scene. It's dark inside, and loud inside, and Ms. Hardy-Knox may have been imbibing, and there are literally hundreds of people there, and it's highly unlikely that our hostess recognizes all of them personally.

So she let us in, because, when it comes down to it, what choice did she really have? What's the worst case scenario for us? She asks us who we are, and we give her our real names and positions. And at that point she doesn't know that we weren't on the list and either assumes we were legitimate guests or were invited by mistake. In the event she asks us to leave, we at first act incredulous that we're being asked to leave a party we were invited to for no reason, but we eventually comply. Luckily, this never came up. She did approach us as we were leaving and made small talk and it was pretty clear she wasn't entirely sure who we were but she was very nice nonetheless and thanked us for coming.

The party itself? It was dope, as the kids say. It seems like over the past 30 years there's been an arms race in middle class weddings, where what was once a buffet dinner at a fire hall is now a plated dinner at a special wedding venue with assigned seats and appetizers a waiter brings around. But as much as the doctors, and lawyers, and engineers of the world may break the bank for their special day, they will never even come close to what you can do when money is absolutely no object. For instance, the article only shows a couple pictures from the actual reception, and it looks like those were taken at some point before I weaseled my way in. It mentions some DJ as entertainment, but also has a picture of a stage with instruments on it. The other super top-secret thing about this wedding that no one was supposed to know about and that even the photographer for Vogue had to keep under wraps was that the entertainment for the evening was actually Lady Gaga. Performing for a few hundred people, in a tent. I don't even like Lady Gaga, but I'll admit it was pretty special, especially once I was convinced that armed guards with earpieces weren't about to escort me off the premises. I don't want to suggest that all billionaire weddings are this fun, because the over-the-top gayness had something to do with it, as did the fact that most of the guests weren't the rich and famous but friends and family and other semi-prominent people from Fayette County. So yeah, I did that, and it was awesome.

Fantastic story, had me grinning from ear to ear as I read it. Thanks for sharing! I do think your link is mistaken, though.

I assume he means this one.

Photos remind me of the Capitol from the hunger games.

Fixed

Great story and writing.

This is a fun story, and I apologise for the coming less-fun response. From where I'm standing, this is the story of how you and your friends lied and abused the trust of others in order to get things you knew you weren't entitled to. Like, this is the glitzy high-class counterpart to stories of underclass black guys vaulting the ticket barriers in BART stations.

I'm not saying this just to be a miserable scold (though I probably am that) but because when people talk about rebuilding virtue in society and upholding social trust, this is what they mean. I know that you're an upstanding citizen in many ways and that you work for various nonprofits etc. as well but why are people of a lesser standing going to do the hard, thankless work of keeping up their end when they know that this kind of thing is going on behind their back? Hearing stories like this just makes people feel like suckers for holding to the rules and trying not to trouble others.

I am reminded of a quote from SSC:

On The Road seems to be a picture of a high-trust society. Drivers assume hitchhikers are trustworthy and will take them anywhere. Women assume men are trustworthy and will accept any promise. Employers assume workers are trustworthy and don’t bother with background checks. It’s pretty neat.

But On The Road is, most importantly, a picture of a high-trust society collapsing. And it’s collapsing precisely because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour.

You're not that, most of the time, but it seems to me that this is a little bit of that. Especially when you’re intentionally putting staff in a difficult spot, where they may well be in for professional consequences, so that you can get what you want:

The fact that six random bozos were even able to get this close and that she briefly considered letting them in [...] meant that someone had loose lips and various heads would surely be rolling down the fairway the following morning.

It’s allowed under the good-fun exception. Would the victim really object to the crime? Most weddings would only be improved by a crash from some local notables.

It sounds as though the staff would object.

Their opinion is not the deciding factor. Or rather, their acquiescence was paid for. If their job was made more difficult by rov scam’s antics (hypothetically approved/forgiven by the gay billionaire), then the problem is merely that they did not realize what their job entailed and so were not paid enough.

Do you think employers and employees have any moral obligations to each other beyond those dictated by law and contract?

I was raised to believe that employers should be loyal to, and supportive of, their staff. It seems to me that this leads to a better world than a world where employers can be as fickle and unreasonable as they like as long as they pay enough, and happily fire their staff for failing to anticipate their whims.

I’m trying to avoid double-dipping of people’s unpleasantness veto, that’s all. If you agree to do something for pay, you’ve sold it. You can’t use the veto to avoid the unpleasant part of the job later.

I was raised to believe that employers should be loyal to, and supportive of, their staff.

This sounds like some HR bullshit on some corporate website. Just pay me. I'll judge how loyal and supportive you are, and I'll be, later. The kind of loyalty you're talking about has to be earned.

If the victim did not object to such things, they would not have hired staff to prevent it and said staff would not be in danger of getting faired for failing to prevent it. If they wanted local notables, they would have invited some.

How does the good-fun principle generalise? People have fun jumping turnstiles and prank-calling and shoplifting and getting drunk & disorderly in a public park in the middle of the day. Not to mention all sorts of antisocial but not actually illegal stuff.

It seems to me that you can oppress the worst behaviour of the bottom 10% without too many complaints, but beyond that you either have to allow ‘good-fun’ exemptions for 90% of the population, resulting is an adversarial and low-trust society, or else say that the rules are different for gentlemen, which I regard as being immoral and long-term corrosive to society, or else be clear that ‘local notables’ are required to model good behaviour for everyone else.

Like, this is the glitzy high-class counterpart to stories of underclass black guys vaulting the ticket barriers in BART stations.

The difference being that likely at some point the venerable @Rov_Scam will have a wedding or other event, albeit not one as high-end as all this, which someone in turn might crash. Where a bunch of guys turnstile hopping will never, in turn, have their turnstiles hopped.

People can defect in various ways to each other all the time; I think we can regard these as fungible to a reasonable degree. It seems weird to say that I am free to punch other people (who don’t want to be punched) any time I like since they can always get their own back by slugging me in return.

You seem to be gesturing at a system of tacit acknowledgement where it’s okay for me to sometimes take apples from your garden because I let you sometimes take peaches from mine, but such an understanding requires prolonged contact in a stable society and also agreement on both sides, which seems to be lacking here.

If what goes around comes around as you suggest, shouldn’t we make sure that what is going around is largely respect and cooperation, rather than deceit and defection?

It seems weird to say that I am free to punch other people (who don’t want to be punched) any time I like since they can always get their own back by slugging me in return.

But I didn't say that it was ok, just that it was different; sticking with your metaphor, there's a big difference between my punching someone who could realistically punch me back, and me punching someone who realistically could not. If I punch another large adult male who could punch me back, it's categorically less bad than if I punch a woman, child, weakling, etc. Escalating a conflict physically when I have escalation dominance is unacceptable, escalating a conflict physically when I do not may fall under acceptable mischief.

I've actually been thinking about this same kind of thing, and these kinds of social settings tend to have lower restrictions when you blend in, precisely out of a sense that you have as much to offer those around you as they have to offer you.

That argument might make sense if this were like any other wedding where they're essentially relying on the honor system that uninvited guests don't show up, but this wasn't the case. This is a wedding that was held at a secret location that was difficult to get to and guarded by staff checking names. There's no trust involved here. It's also worth mentioning that even though the grooms weren't celebrities, there seems to be an epidemic of celebrities crashing normal people's weddings and other events on the premise that nobody will mind if a celebrity unexpectedly shows up. Bill Murray is notorious for this, but Taylor Swift has been known to do it and even lower tier celebrities like Zach Braff feel entitled to, even though they'd go to extreme measures to prevent normal people from getting anywhere near their weddings.

It should be mentioned as well, that the level of security behind this wedding had less to do with the family involved and more to do with the fact that Lady Gaga was making an appearance. If they had gotten married at a normal venue and held the reception in a hotel ballroom and hired the band fronted by the guy who sings the national anthem at Pens games as entertainment, I doubt they'd attract any more crashers than any other wedding. But when a celebrity of her stature is involved the risk increases greatly, made all the worse by the fact that she was almost certainly staying in the resort hotel and a little detail like that leaking would mean superfans booking rooms there for the sole purpose of trying to get a bit more close than the typical guest who booked a thousand dollar a night room for other reasons. And this just makes the whole mess more complicated because now that they're paying guests you can't just ask them to leave without refunding their money.

Of course, I had no reason to concern myself with this, because I'm not a fan of Lady Gaga, and when you're at a billionaire's wedding a private performance by an A-list celebrity doesn't exactly take you by surprise, and, after all, I'm acting like I'm supposed to be there. Anyway, given that the hosts didn't actually extend any trust that could be taken advantage of, I don't see how my actions erode that trust. And it was only that lack of trust that made the event appealing to crash. If my friend had just said that Joe's grandson was getting married at Nemacolin and he was glad his part in it was over, the idea of crashing it wouldn't have occurred to us. It was only when he got cagey about the details that the whole thing became intriguing, and when he insisted that we couldn't get anywhere near the place, it became a challenge.

That argument might make sense if this were like any other wedding where they're essentially relying on the honor system that uninvited guests don't show up, but this wasn't the case. This is a wedding that was held at a secret location that was difficult to get to and guarded by staff checking names.

The wedding staff doesn't give up being entitled to assume people are trustworthy just because they have guards there. By your reasoning, if a store has no security, you shouldn't shoplift, but if the store has security, it is okay to bypass the security and shoplift. In fact, stores actually factor a certain amount of shoplifting into their budget, and that still doesn't entitle you to shoplift.

You're also deciding that the security counts or doesn't count depending on which is most convenient for you. You shouldn't be saying both 1) the security is meant to stop people like you, so there's no trust and it's okay to crash the wedding, and 2) the security is meant to stop fans of Lady Gaga, not people like you, so you are not the kind of people they're concerned about.

My argument wasn't that crashing the wedding was morally justified because of the level of trust involved, just that the lack of trust on the part of the hosts meant that my actions didn't contribute to the erosion of trust in the same way they would if they were simply operating on the honor system. You could live in a zero trust society where every box of tic-tacs was sold from behind 4 inches of lucite and two armed guards, and you wouldn't be justified in stealing it. It would just be disingenuous for someone to caution you that your successful theft is contributing to an erosion of trust.

It would just be disingenuous for someone to caution you that your successful theft is contributing to an erosion of trust.

But that's why you're contradicting yourself by saying that the security is meant to stop fans of Lady Gaga, not people like you. If the security isn't aimed at people like you, then you can't invoke the security to say that they already don't trust people like you.

That photo looks amazing 😁 I have no idea why you would get married at a particular hole on a golf course, but I'm sure it had some deep and significant meaning to the happy couple. Glad you had a blast at the wedding, and at least the Magerko groom's family didn't have to pay famous guests to attend, they invited people they actually knew!

Male sexuality is a lot simpler than female sexuality. Jeff could have destroyed his marriage for a nubile twenty-something with naturally big assets, but he went for tawdry 'sexy' with the trout pout and plastic boobs (though once again, I have to salute her commitment to starving and exercising in order to keep a taut muscle tone). It's not much good to criticise women for being shallow in the dating market when the fruits of success are to dress like this and hook your own billionaire.

Dude has enough money to just grab a big-titty college girl off the street like "MMM THIS TEEN IS SUITABLE FOR BREEDING" and get away with it, but instead he marries an age-appropriate woman and he still has to get shit for it? The hell with that. So she works out and had her tits done, so what? Does he have to marry an old fat lady?

Does he have to marry an old fat lady?

No he has to stay married to his wife and the mother of his children

That's not why Tina Brown is criticising him though, according to Wikipedia she did exactly the same thing. She had an affair with a married man 25 years her senior. Ironically if Bezos had married a younger woman Brown might not have written the blog post, because her readers could criticise her for hypocrisy.

This looks like class hatred to me. Lauren Sanchez looks tacky and low class, with her big fake tits and duck lips. Tina Brown can't criticise her for that, so instead she insists that her sneering is on behalf of womankind, for feminism.

Yeah, and? That isn't what he's being criticized for here, so what relation does it have to my post? Were you just itching to drop that hot take about how adultery is bad and couldn't be bothered to post it anywhere relevant?

It has everything to do with your post; it is a counterthesis to the quoted question.

You're basically complaining that there isn't a reasonable 'win condition' against the scolds scolding him, and I am extrapolating on that.

An old fat lady, may have been relatively better percieved, because it could have engendered some 'love is love' sentimentatily.

But mostly, the idea of a rich guy disrupting marriages with children and taking other people's women (whether that's literally another man's wife, or a more figurative, crowding the market of young hot chicks for single guys) ends up producing an aversion response in a large fraction of people.

But modernity can't out and say that, so the complaints about Bezos's are being laundered through secondary issues.

Does that clear up the response, or were you just itching to sneer at a percieved suggestion that adultery is bad and couldn't be bothered to post it anywhere relevant?

Can't we assume that if he divorced her then perhaps she was a bad wife and a mother who deserved even less than she got

I just got around to bothering to read this post 17 days later.

You're basically complaining that there isn't a reasonable 'win condition' against the scolds scolding him, and I am extrapolating on that.

I lightheartedly complained that there wasn't a way to avoid people bitching about what a rich guy's woman looks like. You just sound like some sack of shit whose wife left him, barging in all serious to tell us how actually it's because adultery is bad, like nobody else knows the context around this or why anyone might be mad at Jeff Bezos.

Fuck off, retard.

You've accumulated four warnings in a couple of months for obnoxious raspberries that add nothing to the conversation. And you decide you need to come back to a 17-day-old comment to say "Fuck off, retard"?

I'm going straight to a two-week ban this time, and will be in favor of escalating to a permaban next time, because you seem to be one of those people who's just here to shit on threads.

ETA: Escalated to permaban for ban evasion

Not that he married an age-appropriate woman. He blew up his marriage (and she blew up hers) because he fell for surgical sexiness (gosh, whyever would this lady be mysteriously attracted to a billionaire, you tell me?)

It's not even that, because hey high-profile divorces happen. It's the soap-opera low-class trashiness of it all that both fascinates and annoys. Here's a guy with a stable, functional marriage (as far as we can tell) and enough money to have his own real toy rocketships to play with, who goes through some kind of stereotypical midlife crisis in his late forties/early fifties. He starts working out, beefs up, shaves his head, and starts buying yachts and other toys.

Then he gets involved with a woman who has clearly traded on her good looks aided by artificial boosting, and indulges in a series of unfortunate choices (his fashion tastes clearly didn't improve, and she likes posing in skimpy revealing outfits a bit too much for a woman in her late forties/early fifties). This is mutton dressed as lamb, or rather undressed, and Bezos made a bit of a fool of himself as well in the early days of posing for photos with her clinging to him like a limpet.

There's no decorum going on for the multi-billionaire, and we plebs take full advantage of our right to mock our 'betters' when they behave like jackasses.

I'm pretty confident that if Bezos would have married a literal nubile twenty something, we would have feminist journalists write about how this proves that men are shallow. If he had married a lower class mexican wife, it would be decried as vaguely coercive and that this proves men enjoy power differentials. If he had married white trash, he would be ridiculed as going back to his roots. Hell, if he married a conventionally attractive, age-appropriate, low-agency woman with a conventional job, that would probably also be insinuated as some sort of tradwife, wanting the woman to go back to the kitchen situation.

As several people have pointed out, Sanchez is in many ways precisely the sort of high-agency go-getter that should be popular with feminists, but who in practice always seems to be hated instead. In practice, feminist journalists always want highly successful men to marry women like themselves.

In practice, feminist journalists always want highly successful men to marry women like themselves.

Steve Sailer's first law of female journalism strikes again.

I don’t disagree with this and that the just so undermines credibility of the point. On the other hand, I do think Bezos deserves to be criticized whoever he marries. He started an affair and broke up two marriages with children.

I think part of the issue is that modernity has removed the vocabulary to cricicize the object level misbehavior so they displace their ‘something is wrong’ to a secondary element

Or it’s the other way around, and christianity arose as the spiritual justification for this intrasexual bitching, which no doubt predates it.

No, what @iprayiam3 is talking about predates Christianity by atleast a thousand years its the main driver of conflict in half the great greek tragedies as well as the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.

Yeah that’s what I’m saying, intrasexual competition, gossip, envy and jealousy have always fueled human conflict. Religions then built on and justified that primal pettyness, look at the behaviour of the gods in greek mythology. Christianity is particularly attuned to women’s petty intrasexual concerns, with its emphasis on female promiscuity.

If being on the motte should teach any one anything, it’s that men often care about female promiscuity as much as if not more than women do.

no we just have a lot of women and christians.

Clearly on TheMotte, it’s the men who are writing most of the posts about the ills of promiscuity. (I have specific names in mind.)

That attitude may ultimately stem from their Christianity. But there are also a lot of atheist manosphere types who get REALLY upset about female promiscuity. You can’t dismiss it as a purely female concern.

More comments

We have, off the top of my head, at least one male atheist redpiller concerned about promiscuity. Every time he brings this up I ask him why he hasn’t converted to a fundamentalist branch of Christianity and he doesn’t answer, but theres clearly a reason.

Christianity bans promiscuity for both sexes; thé Vice lists in the New Testament condemn all sex except married PiV, mostly by name. The patristics are even more explicit that the only acceptable sex is married, PiV, at least aiming at conception.

The outsized concern for promiscuity is itself female-coded. The general hostility to sex also. Compare the sex lives of greek gods versus your guy and his mom. Or gays versus lesbians. Christianity is basically the lesbian of religions.

Christianity is particularly attuned to women’s petty intrasexual concerns, with its emphasis on female promiscuity.

I think this is far more complicated a topic than a single sentence can do justice to, but the Christian tradition, as much as it would like to attribute everything to Jesus, wasn't written in stone at the Ascension or Pentecost. Most of the "emphasis on female promiscuity" parts I can think of are from Paul, and were written a bit later.

I'd also point to the context of family matters in Rome at the time: Augustus rather famously enacted some policies that encouraged fidelity and "family values" before Jesus was born (and were continued on and off again with later emperors), and it's difficult to fully extract the existing Roman cultural context from the Christianity that took off there.

Absolutely! I have had exactly one partner, who is now my wife & mother of my children, and the only thing we intend to change about this arrangement is increasing the number of kids. I have very little understanding for breaking up after being a family for so long.

But the people critizing Bezos aren't even better on that front; The journalist writing the article broke up her own marriage with an affair.

Right which is why she can’t criticize it on that front. So the present moral distaste is transferred onto something else

In practice, feminist journalists always want highly successful men to marry women like themselves.

In practice, it seems like feminist journalists get angsty and critical no matter who highly successful men marry. If Bezos had married a feminist journalist she’d be writing angsty op Ed’s about it.

In practice, feminist journalists always want highly successful men to marry women like themselves.

I'm reminded here of "Sailer's Law of Female Journalism":

The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.

I am surprised everyone seems to be missing the obvious explanation. Bezos is a guy who has been transitioning from businessman into a power player in American elite and needs to build up connections with the media, capital and political elite. She is probably an absolute operator who knows everyone, seen everything and can plot power moves in a way very few people are capable of. And she obviously knows how to take very good care of a man.

Another similar businessman, Elon Musk just tried his hand in politics obviously without the guiding hand of such a woman. Look how that turned out for him

I hadn't thought about this theory, but it does explain why women with PR and related career backgrounds are over-represented among rich and powerful men's second wives, particularly relative to the actresses and models you might expect to see if it was about hotness and status. I had always assumed that it was because PR girls had the right mix of hotness, IQ high enough not to be dull but not high enough to be challenging, and elite socialisation.

An excellent post, I didn’t think of this. Should have taken the female half of the deal more seriously. Mea culpa.

Another similar businessman, Elon Musk just tried his hand in politics obviously without the guiding hand of such a woman. Look how that turned out for him

Elon Musk married to a socially competent woman who he actually listens to would be a powerful thing.

Instead he has a weird harem and spends too much time on twitter.

He has a lot of weird things, but how many people exactly got a free run for several months to try and reform US government? I mean, this is a gargantuan task, and Musk if probably severely deluded if he thinks he can accomplish it under the power of his own personal will alone, but how many people actually got at least as far as he did? How many people have managed to kill a $50 billion US federal government agency? How many people could actually get the power to audit Social Security and Treasury money flows? I mean not talk for 30 years about how we need to audit this and that, but actually get access to the freakin data?

He is weird, and he does weird things, and some of the weird things maybe impede his success, but I think he's a pretty "powerful thing" as he is already.


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