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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27455 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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Yesterday, I was out for a late morning run, coming up my city's main commercial and restaurant street towards the capitol square. As I approached a stoplight and took a little break in the sweltering heat, a man across the street was blaring music on Bluetooth speakers; mildly annoying, but common enough in the public square. What startled me was another man on the other side of the road who began rapping (for lack of a better description, since it was basically just yelling with a slight match to the cadence) a stream of invective - he was going to kick people's asses, motherfucker this, n-bomb that, people better not fuck with him, and so on.

Reflecting a bit, this made me think of the recent discourse on asylums and what to do, and it occurs to me that I think many people are still missing the actual point. The man I described above didn't show outward signs of any particular mental illness, I have no idea if he uses drugs, and while he did look like a vagrant, I don't know whether he sleeps rough or not. Do any of those things actually matter to me? In some sense, it would matter if there was a serious and treatable mental illness (e.g. schizophrenia), but I don't actually care whether he has diagnosable narcissistic personality disorder or is merely what we would colloquially describe as an asshole. What's to be done if there is no such diagnosis and no drug-induced psychosis, but merely an asshole yelling at people about how he's going to kick their ass? My answer is basically that I want police officers to exercise their discretion to inform him that his options are that he can knock it off, do it elsewhere, or they'll arrest him for disorderly conduct. We don't need to escalate to immediate criminalization, starting with "move along sir" is fine, but no, you don't get to keep yelling at people all day.

So much of the discourse about bums persons experiencing houselessness seems like we're just talking past each other. At the end of the day, I genuinely don't care what the state does with these people, I just want them removed from my neighborhood. This attitude is derided as not solving the problem, but that claim merely highlights that we don't agree on what the problem is. For the people that insist on handling root causes, that part will be up to them, I'm perfectly satisfied with literally any solution that removes the people that throw chicken bones and vodka bottles on the ground in the park. I'm not actually very interested in whether they're addicts, mentally ill, or simply terrible people. The answer from the BeKind crowd seems to be that everyone has the right to behave the way they want to and that I'm a very bad person for wanting these guys removed; this seems like an unsolvable impasse in preferences for how to live.

There are numerous problems with trying to deal with this. One being that it literally is legal to stand on the sidewalk and curse. Another being anarcho-tyranny. If you make it illegal to do this or stretch some disorderly conduct law, the people who will get collared will largely not be these guys -- the cops don't want to deal with them because they're unpleasant and some NGO will be on their ass if they do anyway. No, instead the cops will go after mildly annoying groups of teenagers (whose parents won't protect them), random people who are swearing because they had a bad day, and most of all, people who swear at the cops themselves.

If you make it illegal to do this or stretch some disorderly conduct law, the people who will get collared will largely not be these guys

I ran into an example of this in even a small town policing context. An older Dead Head hippie lady decided to create, then cycle through semi-permanent campsites nearby an elderly relative's property. One camp she chose was as close as possible to private property while technically still sitting in national forest. I'm talking yards when there's thousands of acres of accessible national forest to choose from. She must have decided a great cosmic injustice had occurred when more secluded alternative sites were offered for her, uh, more natural demeanor and trash. Areas that would be out of view of a sweet, old God fearing woman.

If the squatter was ever liable to exude nice old hippie vibes instead of robbing your campsite is karma, also fuck you scumbag vibes I never saw or heard about it. One expects, unless you're in Vermont or something, a Sheriff can be called out to apply some pressure on behalf of an elderly taxpaying resident. If not to drive a squatter out of town, then at the very least to make a token effort to comfort a voter. "Yes ma'am, you give us a call" instead of "Sorry, nothing we can do-- federal land." Nope.

Eventually this was resolved with trashy, angry nudist hippie squatter moving on. Maybe there was liaising between police and National Forest Service I never learned of that aided in getting the squatter to move on, or maybe the federal land excuse really should dissuade any action. Regardless, I was left a greater impression that the injustices and costs of small town prejudice in law enforcement are mostly just that. Not any great leeway to actually get stuff done or help people that should matter.

I wouldn't be surprised if the person you're describing has been arrested in the past for disorderly conduct or maybe a low-level assault.

Anybody here watch police bodycam videos on YouTube? Post-BLM, there have been dozens of new channels (Midwest Safety is one of the largest) that upload bodycam footage daily. In almost every video, the person they stop and arrest is inevitably a repeat offender. Sometimes they're being arrested for the same offense – like domestic violence – but often times it's an entirely new thing.

The point is, a high percentage of these people have been convicted of multiple crimes but are always let out after a short jail or prison term. That's the issue as I see it.

I don't think the issue can be boiled down to "just keep more people in jail longer".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_incarceration_rate_with_other_countries

I mean sure it would probably work eventually, at great financial and moral cost, but the US is already topping the charts here. Presumably there are other solutions that would get you more bang for your buck.

Does it really matter that the US is topping the charts? Similarly rich countries are probably going to be less violent and criminal (certainly with the cases listed like Canada and Australia) and poorer and more criminal societies probably have less state capacity.

It's a huge huge difference though. Canada to the US is almost a 6x difference. Do the inherent population and cultural differences between Canada and the US really justify that? And even if they did, is more prison the best way to close the gap?

I think the more likely truth is that the US is well past the point of diminishing returns when it comes to prison capacity, and should instead spend in other areas, like trying to bring down housing cost and funding proper asylums (rather than prisons).

It's a huge huge difference though. Canada to the US is almost a 6x difference. Do the inherent population and cultural differences between Canada and the US really justify that? And even if they did, is more prison the best way to close the gap?

Population has some effect. Cultural though I think does much of the lift here. America has an ambitious culture, which I believe pushes people to more extreme behaviors. Canada, as far as it has a national identity, is defined by not rocking the boat and getting along. This dates back to the foundations of both countries as independant entities, the US being created in a bold armed revolution, Canada by convincing daddy Great Britain that its peoples are getting along now.

It's not just Canada, much of Europe is the same in this, ambition is looked at with suspicion. This leads to calm, sedate peoples. Americans are more ambitious, which leads to a more aggressive people; more Americans resent and resist the idea that they have to be content with their lot in life, which leads many to act erratically.

Do the inherent population and cultural differences between Canada and the US really justify that?

At a quick glance the murder rate is 2.5-3x lower in Canada compared to the US. So a lot of the force of that number is cut down immediately.

I've also seen arguments that legal systems play a role: stronger protections in some domains mean that the US must use incarceration as a relatively blunt tool rather than catching people early.

I think the more likely truth is that the US is well past the point of diminishing returns when it comes to prison capacity

Based on? The post-Floyd loosening of the justice system's grip made things notably worse. It didn't lead to a massive exodus of unfortunate bike couriers caught with a blunt from the jails, instead criminals showed themselves.

Do the inherent population and cultural differences between Canada and the US really justify that?

Yes, and Canada has recently reduced punishments on particularly harsh criminals so that they can't be deported. Victimizing your own people to protect criminals is not a policy to be admired.

My intuition is that the optimal incarnation rate is probably somewhere between Canada and the US. That seems likely even if you know nothing about the specifics given that Canada is on the low side and the US is on the high side.

It can be true that Canada should increase its rate, and the US should decrease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_incarceration_rate_with_other_countries

Sure, countries with a lot more criminals per capita will imprison a lot more criminals.

Chicago had 573 homicides last year; the entirety of Australia had 409 homicides in 2023. Australia has about 25 million more people.

For all these problems, whether it is homelessness or criminality like assaults and whatnot, there are two types of solutions. One is an immediate solution that simply puts a stop to the undesirable behavior, potentially by throwing the perpetrator in prison. The second attempts to address root causes that lead people to engaging in these behaviors in the first place. In my ideal world we would pursue both, as one does not exclude the other. But if my only 2 choices are "throw them in prison forever" or "build free mental health clinics and maybe they will choose to use them, maybe this will fix them and maybe in 10-20 years the problem will go away" I'm going with prison forever every time. The "prison forever" solution is guaranteed to make the problem (such as it is from my perspective) go away forever. If there is a homeless guy in the park there is really no chance of prison failing, in the sense that it is guaranteed to solve the problem I care about, that being that there is a homeless guy in the park I want to use. The other solution might work at some indeterminate point in the future. If there is a homeless guy in a park that I want to use there is only way to fix my problem tomorrow

But if my only 2 choices are "throw them in prison forever" or "build free mental health clinics and maybe they will choose to use them

I would argue that if you pick door 1 in this thought experiment, you are a bad person. Almost certainly from a utilitarian perspective (life in prison vs small annoyances * some number of people, unless the number of people is ludicrously high).

I also want to stress that I'm not really caring about root causes either. Another solution that solves the problem in 1-2 years, if there was political will, and is also not abhorrent is: Build cheap-ass housing, screw the NIMBYs (probably compensate them tho), force them off the street.

The primary purpose of the housing isn't to fix the root cause. It's to make the force them off the street part morally justifiable because you've given them another option. (Plus it is likely to help the root cause, but that's not a load-bearing part of the argument).

Can I ask, what do you think is so bad about prison? If you're a homeless guy who goes to prison, you get a roof over your head, a bed to sleep in, three meals a day, and a certain amount of access to a gym, a library, and healthcare. If you're thinking 'freedom', well, there's negative and positive freedom, and a homeless, mentally ill person isn't positively free because they lack the resources and probably the wherewithall to actually do almost all activities, and are forced to spend much of their time scrounging for the basic necessities of life - in my opinion they may be more free in prison because their basic needs are met.

Can I also ask, on a totally different tack, in what sense is it unjust to send a law-breaker to prison? Why would you be morally 'bad' to do so?

I think you're painting far too rosy a picture of prison, and eliding over massive potentially negative harms (such as the abhorrent 4% chance of rape every year edit: less abhorrent, but still bad - 4% "sexual victimization", 2.6% chance of what most would typically call "rape" ). I think treating prison as anything but an extremely negative experience for the majority of inmates is not realistic.

I agree that that mental illness and freedom have a complicated philosophical relationship. My general attitude would be results-focused:

  • Would going to prison disincentive others from this behaviour? (potentially for the "just assholes", no for the crazies)
  • Would it help this individual in the future (like you mention in your post, but I'm very confident the answer is usually no)
  • Does it prevent this person from causing harm to others? (yes)
  • Does it give satisfaction to the people this person has harmed? (Unlike other lefty leaning folks, I think retribution does have a place in criminal punishment, but there's a very very high bar for it. I don't think yelling at people on the street passes it. For murder, rape, serious assault? Yes screw that person. For yelling like a crazy person? Probably not, let's be calm and just try to help everyone involved as much as is practically possible)
  • Does it harm the person in question (yes, definitely)
  • How much is this going to cost vs just putting them up in a cheap room and telling them (forcing them) to go home when they get drunk/high/crazy?

This is a tough question, but the answer isn't to stop considering the rights of the homeless/mentally ill person at all.

Can I also ask, on a totally different tack, in what sense is it unjust to send a law-breaker to prison? Why would you be morally 'bad' to do so?

If you're getting the impression that I'm anti-prison or anti-punishment in general I'm not. But it has to be justified, and that justification should include the cost to the law-breaker themselves. It's the general idea of proportionality - it's pretty uncontroversial the the punishment should fit the crime, and if you're discussing changing punishments you can't just saw "whatever I don't care". You actually have to suggest what's appropriate.

I've mentioned in other comments - I agree the current level of tolerance and punishment for this anti-social behaviour is too low, and this is also an issue that affects me personally. The answer isn't prison forever, or forced labour, you have to have a limit somewhere.

I think you're painting far too rosy a picture of prison, and eliding over massive potentially negative harms (such as the abhorrent 4% chance of rape every year).

Down the rabbit hole a bit, but the actual report cited there doesn't seem like a 4% chance of what I would typically see referred to as "rape":

Approximately 1.1% of prisoners and 0.7% of jail inmates said they were forced or pressured to have nonconsensual sex with another inmate, including manual stimulation and oral, anal, or vaginal penetration. An additional 1.0% of prison inmates and 0.9% of jail inmates said they had experienced one or more abusive sexual contacts only or unwanted touching of specific body parts in a sexual way by another inmate.

An estimated 1.5% of prison inmates and 1.4% of jail inmates reported that they had sex or sexual contact unwillingly with staff as a result of physical force, pressure, or offers of special favors or privileges. An estimated 1.4% of all prison inmates and 0.9% of jail inmates reported they willingly had sex or sexual contact with staff.

Plenty of bad stuff going around, but I think it's unhelpful to put these all in the same category.

Would you agree with the 4% if I softened my language from "rape" -> "sexual victimization" like the report uses? I suppose the "willing inmate-guard" relationships don't count for as much, but I still have concerns there.

And I would still argue that a 2.6% chance of "actual" rape is still very bad.

I challenge someone to refute the central point which is "Prison really, really sucks. Yes even if you're mentally ill and on the street." Any arguments would also have to explain why these people are not trying to get into prison with any regularity.

More comments

I would argue that if you pick door 1 in this thought experiment, you are a bad person. Almost certainly from a utilitarian perspective (life in prison vs small annoyances * some number of people, unless the number of people is ludicrously high).

Only if you lean towards a negative utilitarian perspective. The steady worsening of aspirational cities has incredibly high utilitarian cost from my perspective.

What's your take on something like Wireheading City? It seems no less feasible than any other proposal to force people off the street.

I don't think you need to be a negative utilitarian, a lot depends on exactly how bad the person is vs how bad you think prison is. And as I mentioned elsewhere, prison is very very bad.

Wireheading city could be better than prison, but fraught with potential issues. Pure pointless hedonic pleasure isn't the same as utility. But honestly, less extreme versions of this are not particularly objectionable, and could even be compared to progressive harm reduction approaches (way way different in degree though).

The second attempts to address root causes that lead people to engaging in these behaviors in the first place.

I guess my problem with 'root causes' strategies is that the root cause of most crime is 'he's just like that'. Most 'root causes' that get highlighted by activists are just correlates of criminality (e.g. poverty) not causes. If poverty caused crime then our grandparents' generation (in every developed country) would have been extremely criminal during their youth, and they weren't.

Most 'root causes' that get highlighted by activists are just correlates of criminality (e.g. poverty) not causes.

You'll see someone raise a point that's evidence for "just like that" position and draw completely different conclusions. The funny one usually goes something like "Jamie spent 30 years in and out of juvie and prison for various violent offenses. His dad also went to jail for murder and he was raised by his single mother. Just another example of how interactions with the justice system create an intergenerational spiral".

It never seems to occur to the people most likely to use this stuff.

My girlfriend likes true crime — and it comes up even with the most vile, wicked people you can imagine. Lots of gesturing about how serial killers who raped women and or men and then tortured and killed them were that way because dad was an abusive drunk.

The idea that the abusive father and the killer son could have been that way because of their shared genetics and personality characteristics never seems to occur to anyone.

The problem with the "root cause" thing is attempting to address the "root cause" never alleviates the symptoms. This may be because the claimed root cause isn't actually the root cause, or it may be because we can't actually do anything about the root cause. But basically that trick never works.

Subjectively, I feel like my local incarceration rate is way too low. Given the endemic property crime, illegal encampments ruining public spaces and open hard drug selling and use. Some enormous societal failure has occurred. Step one on the long road to fixing it is institutionalizing the crazy homeless people rather than letting them self medicate with hard drugs while living in filth and stealing to afford more drugs. And imprisoning the non-crazy ones.

I am not very invested in Canada's incarceration rates. If this boosts our incarceration ratio to 8x of Canada's, so be it. We have a real problem with the cost per prisoner per year. I'm open to building much cheaper prisons or paying 3rd world countries to house our prisoners.

Some enormous societal failure has occurred.

Agree 100%

Step one on the long road to fixing it is institutionalizing the crazy homeless people rather than letting them self medicate with hard drugs while living in filth and stealing to afford more drugs

Also hard-agree (though I do think some consideration to their well being is still warranted)

And imprisoning the non-crazy ones.

I become skeptical that the problem is this simple. Maybe 8x Canada will fix it, but what if you have to go further? What if you have to get up to 10x, 15x 20x? Are you willing to pay that cost?

I bring up the comparison just because it seems like other countries do better, or at least not much worse, while having much lower incarceration rates. If you think that the nature of the US makes it impossible, what factors make it so?

Our sizable underclass of drug-addled, criminally-inclined, antisocial losers, many of whom come from broken homes and shitty communities. As Europe imports the third world, I expect it to struggle with many of the same issues.

We aren't other countries. Sure Japanese people live long healthy lives with lower medical spending. And if our nation was composed of Japanese people then we would too. But we aren't and won't be, so nevermind.

We are a strangely violent people. Even excluding gun crime we have very high violent crime rates compared to other developed countries. I'm not clear what factors cause this. The good news is we don't have to root cause our problems to get rid of junkie encampments in major cities.

My understanding is that a fairly small number of serial offenders commit a majority of quality of life crimes. I believe a modest increase in the prison population could fix these problems. I don't think it would take extremes like multiplying the prison population.

Doing a bit of googling I see that my state spends 2.2% of its budget on incarceration. I would gladly bear a 2.2% tax increase to fix these problems. Again, not that I think we need to go to the extreme of doubling the prison population. But if we had to it would be very affordable.

modest increase in the prison population could fix these problems

It didn't work before, but it might work now!

Repeating that logic is how the US got into this situation.

I'm not saying don't lock the serial offenders up! But there needs to be better planning on how to target and convict them specifically. There's a high risk of collateral damage to people who are essentially harmless.

I don't think the issue can be boiled down to "just keep more people in jail longer".

Something like 60% of shoplifting in NYC is attributed to a relative handful of people (IIRC, a couple hundred people out of a city of 8 million) that have been caught and released dozens or hundred of times each. If three strikes laws are too harsh, how about 25? 50? 100? I see no moral cost there. You just have to have DAs that actually hate crime instead of praise it.

The US is both over and under-policed, depending on the exact time and location you look. And since historically sentences were generally longer than under current policy, looking at incarceration rate adds in a hangover effect that doesn't reflect the current situation well.

The US is both over and under-policed, depending on the exact time and location you look

Exactly what I mean when I say it's more complicated.

I do think that long rail of terrible offenders should be locked up, but identifying and punishing them is a more complicated problem than just "be meaner".

I'm a very bad person for wanting these guys removed

This doesn't make you a bad person, but

I genuinely don't care what the state does with these people

certainly doesn't make you a good one.

I also live in an area rife with these problems and I sympathize, and think that the state needs to do better at dealing with it. At the same time I wouldn't be fine with "literally any solution", there's got to be red lines about their treatment somewhere. I'm curious where exactly you'd draw the line, and how much you'd want the state to spend on it.

I'm not OP but I think I understand his take. It's a question of priority; it's not that I really don't care what happens to these people, but I think what happens to these people is less important than them being removed from public spaces.

Remove them first, then we'll discuss what compassionate solution we can find to make their lives better. As opposed to the standard western liberal answer that if we improve their lives first the problem will itself disappear from the public square, which has time and time again failed to bear out as the affected people actively resist and sabotage efforts to improve their lives.

If you want to think less of me because I prioritize my comfort and peace in public spaces over these strangers' wellbeing, then go right ahead, but I do also believe that there's complex feedback loops where tolerance of public disfunction leads to more disfunction, so I do still want what's best for my fellow human beings.

The western liberal answer is that if these people and the nuisance they represent are removed, any motivation to solve their problems will immediately disappear. IMO this is probably correct.

Maybe, that's possible.

Yes, and that's fine. Their problems are theirs to solve.

I worded it like that because the OP worded his comment like it was surprising people think these opinions are seen as "bad person" opinions. I think if you say "this group of people is annoying, I want them removed by the state and and don't care what happens to them" you've eliminated any possibility of having yourself seen as good, at best you're amoral. You need to at least give some thought to the well-being of these people, who in some cases are in their situation through only minor fault of their own.

When you say "Remove them first" I think you need to specify more precisely what that involves. There are absolutely moral lines you can cross. If you just get them to "move along" they just switch locations and annoy a different group of people. If you want to throw them all in prison you should keep in mind the cost (both moral and financial) of doing so.

That's not to say I think the desire is wrong at all! I also want these people removed, and I also don't think the standard western liberal approach is working. I think you need to provide some level of reasonable alternative before forcing people out of public spaces. I think that alternative does not exist in many places, due to housing and healthcare costs, and we are therefore forced to endure the ruin of our public spaces.

I think the correct approach is some combination of:

  1. provide housing as cheaply as possible (that standards for what is acceptable to provide should be much lower than they are today, but still provide a stable, permanent space) and the force these minorly disruptive people into them
  2. increase policing of minor offences like yelling at people, force them to move along (if they have their own space, then they have an actual private place to go to not annoy the public rather than just shifting the issue around)
  3. institutionalize the most severe ones - this is expensive and difficult, so you want to minimize it's necessity as much as possible

When you say "Remove them first" I think you need to specify more precisely what that involves.

Of course I have preferences as to what I think it involves, but what I mean by it and what I assume OP meant is that all solutions that removes these people from the street are superior to those that let them there, including some that cross moral lines (for instance, some mild forms of supervised forced labor), and excepting only, for me at least, the most extreme ones (such as killing them).

I do broadly agree with your plan but I'm afraid that without a lot of "drawing the rest of the owl" it wouldn't necessarily resolve the issue, as some countries have actually managed to provide cheap housing to push its undesirables into, and the result is unpoliceable ghettos (see: French suburbs) that erupt into large-scale violence regularly. And as disfunctional as French immigration can be at times, the people that end up in the banlieues are still likely an order of magnitude more functional than raving park yellers.

If you're going to make this argument I you can't elide those details and still argue in good faith.

Actually spelling out at least the broad outlines like you did is good, it gives some sane limits and allows us to discuss actual tradeoffs.

all solutions that removes these people from the street are superior to those that let them there, including some that cross moral lines

This is exactly how I read what OP wrote, and it's obviously abhorrent if you allow solutions like "shoot on sight", or "Vagrant? Straight to the mines, no appeal".

I worded it like that because the OP worded his comment like it was surprising people think these opinions are seen as "bad person" opinions.

No, I'm not surprised by it, I am accustomed to it and acknowledging that I am simply at an impasse with people that differ on this. We have irreconcilable moral intuitions and I'm articulating where I think that comes to a head.

I think if you say "this group of people is annoying, I want them removed by the state and and don't care what happens to them" you've eliminated any possibility of having yourself seen as good, at best you're amoral.

Yeah, obviously I just disagree with this. I consider myself a good person, most people I know consider me a good person, and many other people that both think I'm a good person and see themselves that way agree with my perspective on this matter. I actually don't see my opponents on the issue as intrinsically bad, I understand them to be softhearted people that are unwilling to accept mean solutions to problems. The exception to that would be people that seem to revel in things sucking, that suggest that there's something wrong with people that don't want bums camping in parks, but I actually think this is a pretty small minority view even if it's overrepresented on social media.

Much of what I'm pointing at here is what I see as an actual, real difference in preferences though. You're back to the root cause end of things here with the implication being that the individual I'm referring to is either mentally ill or homeless. As mentioned, that wasn't clear to me at all, and I have certainly encountered individuals that are just aggressive assholes that enjoy bullying other people in public spaces; they would stop if they were forced to stop, this isn't some uncontrollable tic or a product of them not having a nice enough abode in which to blow off steam. I'm fairly confident that there are already statutes that could be enforced against this, there is just a cultural norm of not doing so in blue cities, so everyone gets to enjoy the serenade of belligerence.

Sorry I wasn't clear, I'm actually not trying to focus on the root cause, I agree that focusing on the causes doesn't help in the short term.

I'm agreeing that you should be mean and force people out, but that you're not a good person if you don't have a limit on how mean to be.

I don't doubt people think you're a good person, but until you're going to say what your limit is, there's no way to judge. If you limit was all the way to "shoot on sight" that's bad - if it's "we can't move them until we have median-quality housing for them free of charge" that's unrealistically generous.

My line is somewhere around "they should have free housing options somewhat better than the hell-on-earth shelters that currently exist", then you can force them out.

hell-on-earth shelters

Are yours actually that bad, and not simply because the homeless people themselves are shitty? I ask because I’ve heard plenty of complaints about the ones in my area, but when I’ve asked what the specific problems are, they tend to boil down to

  1. They have strictly-enforced rules against bringing in drugs and alcohol.
  2. If residents behave erratically, they’re given drug tests and are expelled if they test positive.
  3. The residents are kicked out during the day (the place needs daily cleaning and the residents are supposed to be out working or looking for work).
  4. There aren’t enough beds.

And of course

  1. The shelters are all run by Christian organizations, and they strongly encourage (but don’t mandate) church attendance.

For most critics, this last-named is the greatest offense of them all. Of course, suggesting that the complainers considering funding a secular alternative just makes them irate.

I meant what I said. I have trouble imagining any plausible solution that any modern state has taken to this problem that I would object to as long as it resulted in people not camping in the park, throwing trash on the ground, and yelling obscenities at passersby in the public square. I might have preferences about solutions, but it's hard to imagine proposals that I would consider worse than the status quo on this front. Singaporean harshness would be fine by me. Softhearted liberal utopian visions would also be fine by me. Huge public spending would be fine by me if it actually removes the problem. As long as the problem is solved, I am not that concerned with the exact solution.

I meant what I said.

There should be no surprise about why people would think you're a "bad person" then. Explicit lack of caring about others is kind of what makes one a "bad person".

I am also not okay with the status quo either, but I think there is some minimum level of support that must be provided (or possible to achieve) before you violate people's autonomy willy-nilly.

(my preferred solution is low-quality, cheap housing, that doesn't have to be right in the most expensive locations for some freaking reason. If you make that available that justifies a lot more force when removing people from public, as they actually have somewhere to go.)

Again, I am not surprised by that view.

To focus on the substance though, I think this is exactly where the whole impasse is coming from:

Explicit lack of caring about others is kind of what makes one a "bad person".

I don't agree with that at all. The extent of care that an individual deserves is contingent on their behavior, it isn't just automatically owed to everyone. Related but probably tangential here is that I also don't think I owe care to all humans around the globe and my level of care is higher or lower based on relative levels of closeness to me. For my wife, infinite care. For the guy yelling obscenities at people on the street, very little care. For the terrorist or brutal murderer, anti-care and explicit wishes for the state to terminate their existence.

I’m curious, if you were to estimate the level of care you owe to the following people on a scale of 10 (as a brother) to -10 (omnicidal maniac), what would it be? (assuming you’re a white American)

  1. Another white American

  2. A white European living in Europe

  3. A Hispanic mestizo legally living in the US

  4. A Hispanic mestizo living in Mexico

  5. An Ethiopian Christian

  6. A Saudi Muslim

  7. A black American who has been convicted of two counts of petty vandalism and one count of shoplifting

  8. A white American who has been convicted of three counts of felony assault and one count of attempted murder

  9. A Simbari tribesman who practices traditional pederasty rites

  10. A black American pedophile with a preference for young white boys

Assuming that these are all generic representations of people that I have not met personally and have no additional ties to:

  1. 3
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 2
  5. 1
  6. 1
  7. -3
  8. -7
  9. -7
  10. -8

The reason for the low valuations on the generic "these are all fine" groups at the top is that I just don't think I owe very much to distant countryman in general. My high levels of care are reserved for people that I have much closer ties to. I wish no ill on the Ethiopian Christian or Saudi Muslim, it's just not my problem how things work out for them in their faraway land.

The negative rankings are somewhat challenging owing to the fact that whatever anti-care is owed diminishes with distance, so some of these numbers reflect distaste rather than a willingness to do anything.

I don't put any meaningful emphasis on race as an element of care. Individual behavior exceeds racial preferences for me in effectively all cases.

A Simbari tribesman who practices traditional pederasty rites

TIL. Also, WTF.

Though from what I can gather it's not strictly pederasty because the initiations rituals and the rites of passage don't involve an adult male. It's older boys abusing and raping younger boys.

if you were to estimate the level of care you owe to the following people

That I am obligated to owe? 10. Always 10. God is pretty explicit about this.

That I am physically capable of owing without supernatural intervention?

... admittedly less than ten in all respects.

But I don't think ranking people by how much you "owe" them makes sense. If you're going to rank people, rank them by your ability to help them. If you have a glass of water and a man is about to die of heat stroke, you should give it to him regardless of which of these men he is. You should also take the chance to restrain him, if he is likely to harm innocents, but in any case should help him survive. If you have a glass of water and ten thirsty man, give it to the man for whom it maximizes the chance of survival (plus survival chance multiplied by net good the man will do over his life, to the best of your ability to estimate second-and-third-order effects.) You should help your wife, or a member of your community, over a total stranger, not because the stranger is a distinct, worse class of human, but because you are more capable of helping your wife or community member. Your help goes further, and does more good in the world. But again, that's a matter of maximizing good, not about people being entitled to different levels of brotherhood.

...and that's why I give some, but not all of the money I allocate for charity to the GiveWell foundation. It's a very cost-effective way to do lots of good, but I'm also uniquely capable of targeting "good" when it's aimed toward buying gifts for my family, or drinks for my friends, or donating to my own local parish.

On a personal level prioritization of care is right and good. What kind of world would be be in if it was morally wrong to care more about your wife!

Buying jewellery for your wife instead giving change to the crackheads on the street! Sure perfectly fine! I never give change out, I too prioritize myself and very much dislike the incentives that giving change creates.

Shooting the yelling crazy guy on sight because your children heard him say the F-word? Obviously obviously wrong. You'd call the cops on someone who did that.

There's a bar between those two extremes somewhere, if you set it low enough, even for the street crazies, that makes you a bad person. It would actually help if you specified where exactly you'd put it.

(I also think my argument here is giving the impression that my bar is very high, but it's absolutely not. I think the tolerance level is currently too high, and should be lowered, but you just can't drop it to the floor).

Explicit lack of caring about others is kind of what makes one a "bad person".

But it’s not ‘ others ‘ - it’s pieces of shit.

He doesn’t hate his gay or black or Jewish or Polish or Haitian neighbor, nor presumably any of these, or other, peoples.

He doesn’t care about the pieces of shit.

That doesn’t make him a bad person, it actually makes you a bad person for judging him based on him disliking criminality.

You think another person should feel like you do because of culture, or god, or morals, or something else.

But you’re actually trying to scold him for caring about living a peaceful and crime free existence.

That’s my take from your posts anyway.

If he had expressed basically any level of care, even a small amount I wouldn't have kept beating the dead horse here.

I also don't like these people! I also want the worst offenders removed from public spaces! Prison, involuntary commitment, etc are all valid tools here.

I think harm to them can absolutely be justified for the greater good of peaceful society.

He doesn’t care about the pieces of shit.

"Love thine enemy."

I know not everyone is a christian. But aside from the fact that everyone should be, it's just good game theory. A society that has made a pact to be utilitarian still has all the justification it needs to prevent bad individual behavior, but at the same time doesn't risk arbitrarily turning its instruments of judgement against someone without regard for their preferences just because they're doing something someone else doesn't like. But to defect against that is to ask people to in turn defect against you. And as proof for the danger of that, I'd point out that that's what the OP was literally doing against these "pieces of shit"-- presumably, reacting to some prior defection. I know, in turn, that no society can survive unilateral total disarmament... but disarmament need not be total, merely proportional. Spending less of your effort caring about bad people is still better than spending none of your effort.

Plus, it's just good virtue signaling. If a man will give his son a fish, that says little about what he'll give a beggar. But if a man will give a beggar a fish, he must be generous indeed to his sons! I would rather be friends with a generous man than a stingy one, and will therefore work harder to make it into the good graces of the latter man. That's the (nonreligious) essence of being a good person: the ability to gain long-term benefits from your reputation!

Just give police discretion to knock heads around like they used to. A summary judgement followed by public lashing of a sort. Or put them into those public mocking where passers by can throw garbage at them while they’re locked into something. That would end the problem in most cases I would assume.

It is extremely clear to me that allowing low-level casual brutality against those the local beat cops deem repeat troublemakers is absolutely critical to keeping societal order.

It’s also merciful to its victims. Many a repeat shoplifter or drunk who likes starting fights might be saved from a lifetime in and out of jail by getting beaten up by the cops a few times as a teen.

Yup. And while we are granting wishes for things that are good but will never happen, Corporal punishment should also be brought back into schools

All these ideas fall to the same issue. You can't trust the people with discretion. Do you really trust a high school (or middle or elementary school) principal to decide who is worthy of corporal punishment? Especially given the outside incentives? Beat cops may be better people than the criminals they arrest... but only by a little bit, and they'll be happy to beat up anyone they dislike, who gives them lip, or who gets in their way.

I think they are aware of that, and are saying that the juice is worth the squeeze.

And they're completely wrong, because they won't get the juice, only the squeeze. The cops aren't going to go back to beating up drunk/high vagrants of color if given the authority to beat people up; they'll beat soft and fun targets like teenagers, white collar guys, and generally anyone who gives them lip.

middle or elementary school) principal

Yes.

Counterpoint: No.

I'm concerned enough about what school administrators may be imparting to impressionable young children. I don't want them to also have the power to physically punish students for transgressions that will inevitably differ from teacher to teacher.

I have no inclination to hurt my children beyond maybe a light spanking; the thought that some freak might get off on inflicting serious pain on a child, let alone my own, is intolerable.

See, teachers can and do do some bad things. Using corporal punishment for no reason isn’t one of them. Corporal punishment is protected by law in my state and getting schools to use it is… difficult.

Then you are insufficiently familiar with the breed.

That’s fine, bring back the lash then. Have judges order public lashings. The effect will be similar, so long as delays in arrest - punishment aren’t too long

Anecdotally, corporal punishment in (rural) schools was ubiquitous through well after WWII. I'm not going to defend the practice, but there are plenty of family stories of it within living memory.

Family stories? The school I attended had corporal punishment into the late 80s. The teachers who practiced it are still living, and the last cohort of students to experience it are only in their 40s.

ETA: I had those same teachers in later years. They found some creative alternatives to the paddle and the rod once those were banned. I think I might have preferred a quick paddling to the more protracted punishments they used instead.

I'm not sure exactly when it disappeared, but that sounds about right. I know the laws still allowed it in some cases through at least 2000, but I never saw it myself. My parents have stories of it happening.

Unlike almost every other person talking theoretically here, I actually did go to school with corporal punishment. I am not even old this was mid 2000s. I do remember that it was 1) quite good at establishing teacher’s authority 2) pacifying the troublemaker kids into learning a bit or at least not disturbing others and 3) extremely discriminatory. Girls virtually always got a pass, so did the boys with middle class or higher parents. I remember vividly the day when an inspector visiting the class noticed the wooden stick in the corner and remarked to our teacher that the ministry doesn’t approve of this anymore. It disappeared and never came back.

Yup, that absolute confirms my priors

My school teachers are not trusted to make good judgments. They'd screw up corporal punishment. In a better world we'd have reliable teachers who could correctly determine who needs a paddling. We don't live in that world.

Agreed. All the teachers I know who ever indulged in corporal punishment were assholes, and not very bright assholes to boot. I could tell the majority were malicious.

(This is coming from a place where corporal punishment was nominally illegalized maybe 15 years back?)

The only people who I think ever gave me a spanking for my own good were my own parents.

Then why have school teachers if their judgement is that poor?

My school teachers are not trusted to make good judgments.

"X" are not trusted to make good judgments is why any variant of corporal punishment/extra bullying/more police brutality doesn't work in person. We intuitively want to do this because through the vast majority of our evolutionary past we lived in small bands with a smaller population than dunbar's number where the discretion of a few enfranchised elders and warriors was a fair, just, and effective way to police our behavior because they could know everyone under their authority as a fully realized person. But while that remains an effective approach even now, in many small agricultural communities, it's indisputably a bad model for policing a city.

I don’t think that fixes anything.

Well. Maybe it pushes the nonviolent homeless out of the choicest spots on the West Coast. But the fent users go through worse. Public mockery ain’t shit compared to whatever they’re already doing to their bodies. Opioids mean the normal rules of shame and discomfort just…get washed away.

This probably also increases the number of shootings of police. A medieval peasant had zero chance against one or two men-at-arms. A crackhead with access to Austria’s finest export? You never know. Police are already on edge when they confront these guys. There’s no way that raising the prospect of a beating makes them safer.

Manner Wafferl are dangerous indeed. Im not sure the average cops waistline can take it.

Maybe it pushes the nonviolent homeless out of the choicest spots on the West Coast.

That's most of what I'm asking for. The takeover of formerly nice public spaces is beyond unacceptable.

Just give police their nightsticks back. A poke in the back or a tap on the shins is enough to motivate most people to move along while discouraging the impulse to fight back.

Perhaps you aren't a bad person for not caring about removing these vagrants by any means necessary, perhaps you're a good person for wanting to preserve safe and clean public spaces for your community to enjoy together.

Sure, as long as you assign 0 value to a bum, you will always come out positive when weighing "preserving a public space" versus "taking N bums out behind the shed".

As well if you assign 0 value to a safe and clean environment to your city, you can contort yourself into supporting any number of asinine and ineffective policies.

I'm generally sympathetic, but even if your utility function has a straight 0 for the welfare of bums, you still have to account for second order effects of any policies you implement on ordinary people.

Simply displacing them immediately runs into public goods dilemmas. If you don't want them in your neighborhood so you bus them a couple miles East, then they start harassing the people who live there. But then your neighbor doesn't want them in their neighborhood so they bus them a couple miles West and they're your problem again. Now you both have the same number of bums but you're both paying extra for wranglers and bus fares for no net benefit.

Massive jail terms for small misdemeanors runs into issues with non-bums who occasional have small misdemeanors. You get drunk at a bar and your asshole buddy who's supposed to be the DD bails and leaves you stranded so you try to walk home but fall asleep on the sidewalk. Or your spouse cheats on you and you find out while in public and start yelling at her. Or a bum starts assaulting you and you defend yourself but the police end up arresting both of you and both end up in trouble. Ordinary and sympathetic people get in trouble with the law way way way less often than bums, but it's not unheard of. It's not as if the laws are perfectly just and you, by being a good person, are automatically immune to ever getting in trouble with it. If you get a 5 year jail penalty for something stupid it could ruin your life, which is why small things normally carry small penalties.

If you straight up genocide the bums you run into huge PR problems, human rights violations, and again, the opportunity for this to sometimes happen to regular people.

There are sophisticated, intelligent, and probably effective solutions that people are unwilling to do, such as escalating penalties for repeat offenders (much more than whatever they do now). But then it DOES matter what the solution is, because bad solutions are bad, even for you.

How does Israel make Jews safe?

I've seen it suggested that having a Jewish state creates a refuge that isn't dependent on the goodwill of non-Jews. Yet the past several years have demonstrated that Israel isn't actually self sufficient and that it is, in fact, totally dependent on trade with Europe and aid from America for it's continued existence. Israeli Jews would hardly be any safer than American Jews in a scenario where their primary patron went anti-semitic.

Yet even in a world where America does unconditionally support Israel I can't help but think of anyone who takes Aliyah as a certified moron. Modern Israel is not a safe place for Jews, it's a place where thousands of Jews can be killed or maimed in a day and hundreds kidnapped. If you are kidnapped, the "Jewish State" will not pull all the stops to save your life but will instead attempt to murder you to prevent you from being used as a bargaining chip. If you survive that then your best hope is that public pressure will eventually force Israel to free some mass killing gigaterrorists in exchange for your life, since Israel has demonstrated that it is incapable of rescuing hostages by force after more than 2 years of intense combat against the weakest militia on it's border.

All this for the low, low price of North Korean taxes, mandatory conscription, reserve service, and getting arrested if you choose to vacation anywhere outside of the US

Even for non-Israeli Jews who don't care about Israel either way, the brutal yet failed campaign to destroy Hamas is a giant anti-semitism producing machine. If the ghost of Hitler possessed Netanyahu with the goal of empowering a new generation of anti-semites then he could hardly have done better. Before 10/7, the slightest hint of anti-semitism was instantly denounced. Today, when the giga-normie Nelk Boys interview Bibi the next day they're forced to go on an apology tour with all the big name internet anti-semites like Nick Fuentes and Sneako. The shift in the public perception of Israelis and Jews is so downright seismic and probably couldn't be replicated in a world without a "Jewish state" soaking up bad press.

The shift in the public perception of Israelis and Jews is so downright seismic and probably couldn't be replicated in a world without a "Jewish state" soaking up bad press.

Yet it's happened hundreds of times for thousands of years across different civilizations, cultures, eras of technological progress. These are the fruits of the Jewish state and Jewish civilization, and nobody can say it's unfair to identify Israel as such.

Israel is a first world nation trying to survive in the third world. There have been a smattering of experiments in this regard, South Africa, Rhodesia, maybe others I'm not aware of. To maintain first world standards of civilization, they more or less all had to resort to the same methods of keeping the savages out, and disenfranchising as many of those that made it "in" as they could. Also violence. Lots and lots of violence. Because violence truly is the universal language, no matter what anyone tells you.

It's a shame South Africa and Rhodesia didn't have a Jeffrey Epstein to take whatever measures were necessary to make sure they maintained the support of their essential trade partners and patrons in the face of global disgust at how the third world behaves, and the measure that are required to survive in the face of it. I suppose Jews don't have higher measured IQ's for nothing.

But they exercise a great deal of authority over Gaza and the West Bank, and treat those people far worse. Israel exercises all the power over Palestinians that a national government would, but denies them any representation in that government.

Just off the top of my head, they perform law enforcement, control trade and the flow of goods (including a naval blockade of the Gaza strip), control the movement of people, collect taxes... All the traditional responsibilities of a state.

Israel's relationship to the West Bank is that of a military occupier. Gaza is largely occupied now, but from 2005 until 10/7 was not occupied. A blockade is not occupation.

Uh, how do you think the national party treated Bophuthatswana?

Israel exercises all the power over Palestinians that a national government would,

I can only assume this is a joke statement. So, holding the power of government over Gaza, Israel decided to redirect all of the resources there into a total war with...themselves?

The entire purpose of Israel's exercise of government-like power has been to prevent Gaza from leveraging resources or building state capacity in a way that would harm Israeli interests. That's obviously challenging, since it goes against the will of the vast majority of Gaza's population, and they have had to maintain some degree of pretense that Gaza is self-governing to appease the international community. October 7 broke that balancing act, because Israel is now exercising it's authority in such a blatant way, and has created such a severe humanitarian disaster, that the international community can't turn a blind eye anymore. The UK and Canada are threatening to recognize Palestine as a state now, this would have been unthinkable five years ago.

Just to clarify, when referring to governmental or government-like, I'm describing how Israel de facto controls many elements of modern statehood for Gaza and the West Bank. Eg. Defense, law enforcement, taxation, regulation of the movement of people and goods, medical care, etc. They effectively have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That does not mean complete or universal control over all elements of Palestinians' lives, just that they hold onto many of the authorities that would normally rest with the government of an independent entity.

There are a lot of truly baffling statements in this post (Israel controls law enforcement in Gaza?), but I'll focus only on the most bizarre one:

They effectively have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

Oct 7th, and the war against Israel that Hamas has redirected all resources in Gaza towards, represent an Israeli monopoly on the use of force in Gaza. Right.

Jeffrey Epstein

I am of the opinion that as far as securing the US support for Israel, Epstein is not even in the top ten, and possibly not in the top 100.

Most politicians have a thing were they accept campaign donations from special interest groups in exchange of political consideration. Some US Jews are very rich. At the risk of sounding like an antisemitic conspiracy nut, I think political donations are the main way that the US position towards Israel is influenced. (For the record, there is also Christian Zionism to consider, as well as the fact that Israel sometimes just is a good ally to the US.)

Nor is it only Jews who can lobby. United Fruits certainly influenced US policy, for example.

By contrast, blackmailing politicians with videos of them fucking underage girls is much riskier. If such an operation was traced back to Mossad, it would create an existential threat for Israel. And even then, a politician bound to your will through blackmail will likely resent you and try to undermine your cause, while a politician who sees you as a big donor will proactively try to keep you happy.

When Epstein was active, few people cared really about Palestinians. "No political donation could convince me to send bombs to Israel, but faced with the threat of the blackmail material being revealed, I am willing to kill a few Palestinian kids" was very much not the stance.

And even if Mossad had wanted to blackmail senators, having a single "Pedophile (sic!) Island" seems a strange way to go about it. Once you reveal the first bit of footage and the first senator 'fesses up, the cat is out of the bag and Epstein is implicated. What you would want to do instead is to target the politicians independently, so you can reveal any slice of evidence without compromising your whole operation.

Mohammedan nations have spent and spend far more on lobbying than Israel. This is of necessity a crude measurement, but it's also necessarily as close to objective as you're going to get.

the "Jewish State" will not pull all the stops to save your life but will instead attempt to murder you to prevent you from being used as a bargaining chip

I've seen countless crypto-Hamas supporters citing the existence of something called the Hannibal Directive as if they're masterfully laying down a trump card; in some cases, explicitly claiming that Hamas killed literally zero civilians on October 7th, and that 100% of the Israeli civilians massacred on that day were in fact killed by the IDF. These people seem to be engaged in a kind of curious doublethink: on the one hand, they want to express their support for Hamas and the broader Palestinian cause - but on the other hand, on some level they're aware that this means tacitly endorsing some rather monstrous and brutal tactics. The "solution" they've hit on is to assert that Hamas is entitled to fight back against oppression and colonialism, up to and including murdering unarmed Israeli civilians - but in point of fact, 100% of the unarmed Israeli civilians in question were actually murdered by the IDF themselves! How convenient - for a moment there I was worried I might have to confront legitimate moral ambiguity, acknowledge that this conflict isn't as black-and-white as I would like to pretend, or do something facially grotesque like actively endorsing the slaughter of music festival attendees. What a relief that I can instead fall back into the warm, comforting embrace of that isn't happening, and it's good that it is. (See also "Denial by a thousand cuts".)

But for all that such people are keen to cite the existence of the Hannibal Directive, they are generally strangely reluctant to cite specific cases in which they believe it was actually used by the IDF. The intention seems to be to conjure up a free-floating miasma in which all claims of Israeli suffering are responded to with reflexive suspicion, a permanent asterisk over any and all Israeli casualties in this conflict, while being careful to avoid specific (and hence falsifiable) assertions that this specific Israeli was in fact killed by the IDF. "Yes, yes, Israeli civilians being murdered is bad - but hey, did you know there's this thing called the Hannibal Directive? Sure is interesting, huh? Now, I'm not saying the IDF intentionally murdered their own people and then Mossad created some AI-generated footage to frame Hamas for the massacre as a casus belli - but I'm not not saying that. At the end of the day, I'm Just Asking Questions."

You seem to be claiming that Hannibal directive (or more broadly an IDF strategy of killing hostages if necessary to stop hostage taking situations) isn’t real but then instead of explaining yourself you just prose about some crypto Hamas supporters.

When I talked to Israelis about this topic pretty much all seemed to take the existence of such a strategy as given and necessary because Middle East. Do you have any evidence that this is a made up conspiracy?

I'm not saying the Hannibal directive isn't real. I'm saying I find it very suspicious that the primary context in which it's brought up is to reflexively dismiss any and all claims that certain groups have mistreated the Israelis. I'm sure if you look at the ratio of "Israeli civilians killed by groups which are hostile to Israel" vs. "Israeli civilians who were intentionally killed by the IDF as part of the Hannibal directive", it would be extraordinarily lopsided - maybe 9:1 or higher. But critics of Israel seem to have decided that, because the Hannibal directive exists and has ever been employed, therefore they can dismiss all claims that Hamas or whoever murdered Israeli civilians by saying "eh, they probably did it to themselves". But of course, they're aware that this looks really bad, unserious and conspiratorial (perhaps even bearing a family resemblance to that great woke sin, "victim-blaming"), so rather than explicitly asserting "I believe that Israel is lying when they claim that Hamas killed these Israeli civilians, and they were in fact deliberately killed by the IDF", they'll just wave their hands and say "Hannibal directive, look it up", hoping the reader will join the dots themselves.

It's a cowardly, dishonest style of argumentation. If you believe in conspiracy theories, at least have the balls to be upfront about it.

That’s a lot of words for saying “I don’t like the people who mention bad thing so I will make up an imaginary argument in my head and win it”. Congratulations I guess.

The OP uses the Hannibal directive as an example of how Jews are very unsafe in modern Israel in a way they aren’t in pretty much any other modern country. This is trivially true no matter how much you foam about the true intentions of the people who mention this uncomfortable fact.

The OP uses the Hannibal directive as an example of how Jews are very unsafe

Even saying "very unsafe" is an example of exactly the kind of thing I'm complaining about. In an actuarial table of how Israelis met their ends since the founding of the state, would "being intentionally killed by the IDF to prevent them from being taken hostage by groups hostile to Israel" even crack the top hundred most common causes of death? The top five hundred? The top thousand? No, obviously not. And yet critics of Israel have this obsessive fixation on the Hannibal directive as evidence of how uniquely barbarous the nation is - when in reality, a counterfactual world in which the Hannibal directive didn't exist would only mean a tiny handful of Israelis would still be alive.

Let me put this in terms that you might find more agreeable: being shot dead by a police officer is a live possibility for black Americans in a way it isn't for black Britons, or indeed black citizens of just about any European country. But if you were investigating the causes of the reduced life expectancy among black Americans relative to other ethnic groups, "risk of being shot dead by police officers" shouldn't even enter into the equation. It's evidence of a mindset warped by political partisanship.

This is nonsense in the same way that people argue terrorism kills less westerners than sharks or lightning strikes and therefore caring about terrorism exposes some bias or ignorance. With your same logic, one can show that traffic accidents or obesity is much more dangerous to average Israeli than any hostile action as well. What are you arguing about then? Let’s get cutting the IDF budget for healthy eating campaigns.

But of course this is all atrocious nonsense. Just like how you should of course care many orders of magnitude more about a sentient adversary trying to kill you compared to random accidents, your own state security forces murdering you knowingly to avoid an awkward situation for the politicians is something again many orders of magnitude worse and more troublesome.

your own state security forces murdering you knowingly to avoid an awkward situation for the politicians is something again many orders of magnitude worse and more troublesome.

Sure, it's more troublesome. But as I've gone to great lengths to argue and contrary to your and the OP's framing, Israelis are not "very unsafe" because of the existence of the Hannibal directive. Ostensibly, this thread isn't about how "troublesome" the Israeli government is, but how safe Israelis are relative to peer nations.

Is the Hannibal directive a troublesome policy for which the Israeli government ought to face criticism? Of course, I've never suggested otherwise. Should it factor into any honest, disinterested discussion of how safe Israelis are relative to peer nations? No, obviously not. Surely no one would dispute that a random Israeli civilian is orders of magnitude less likely to die violently than a randomly selected civilian of any other Middle Eastern country - and none of those countries, to my knowledge, have any official policy analogous to the Hannibal directive. I'd even go so far to say that, given the rate of civil war, ethnic cleansing and political repression, a randomly selected civilian in any other Middle Eastern country is vastly more likely to die at the hands of that country's security forces than a randomly selected Israeli civilian is.

Israel is not supposed to be “a Middle Eastern country”. It’s supposed to be a European colony situated by historical coincidence in Middle East, offering safety to a minority religious group of Europeans who deemed themselves too vulnerable in Europe. If the best you can say in favour of this country that it offers its citizens better survival rates than the civil war Iraq or Syria, then it’s quite a failed project. This is of course not a fringe remark, there is a reason why vastly more Ashkenazim live in the US than in Israel and Israel is turning into a madhouse of the most lunatic religious Ashkenazim and low human capital Mizrahi Jews.

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Before 10/7, the slightest hint of anti-semitism was instantly denounced.

I don't know what world you were living in before 10/7, but it seems to be a very different one from the world I was living in.

Yet the past several years have demonstrated that Israel isn't actually self sufficient and that it is, in fact, totally dependent on trade with Europe and aid from America for it's continued existence.

Is Israel anymore dependent on trade than other developed nations? My understanding is that its economy is quite diverse and ranks very high in innovation. As for US aid, it's not insignificant, but Israel would still be wealthy – it's the 16th largest economy by GDP per capita – without any aid at all. It seems like a stretch to say that Israel is "totally dependent" on the US to survive. Certainly this isn't the case for its economic survival.

The more relevant question is how Israel would fare in a region-wide war against it if the US suspended all military support. I don't know enough to say.

big name internet anti-semites like Nick Fuentes and Sneako.

I'm very skeptical that online anti-Semitism has or will translate into real-world (right-wing) anti-Semitism in the US. X has created the impression that there are millions of Nazis actively living among us, but the vast majority of the public are and will remain normies. However, the emergence of a legitimate anti-Israel bloc in the Democratic Party is a real possibility.

The shift in the public perception of Israelis and Jews is so downright seismic and probably couldn't be replicated in a world without a "Jewish state" soaking up bad press.

Of course it could be replicated; anti-Semitism was far more visceral and violent before Israel existed. But the justifications for hating Jews in the past – they control the banking industry, they're culturally incompatible, they're communists – are no longer salient in the West, or really most places in the world. For example, Europe is far more "degenerate" now than it was when it had way more Jews.

Wall Street Journal literally 2 days ago:

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/washington-struggles-to-rein-in-an-emboldened-israel-14fa3a74

A senior administration official said the White House coordinates closely with Israel and has considerable influence over Netanyahu because the prime minister knows that “the United States literally is the sole reason the state of Israel exists.”

The idea that the US assistance is not crucial because Israel is a high income country on paper is either extremely motivated reasoning or just an indication of knowing pretty much nothing about the situation.

I'm very skeptical that online anti-Semitism has or will translate into real-world (right-wing) anti-Semitism in the US. X has created the impression that there are millions of Nazis actively living among us, but the vast majority of the public are and will remain normies.

Look, I live among the offline hardline right wing in the US. Trust me when I say Israel and Jews in general have seen a giant decrease in popularity over the past year and a half or so. It's one of those huge increase over a trivial base things but it's real.

I wouldn't say it's over Gaza- all of these people think Mohammedans deserve it- the media person who thinks Russians are inferior savages, Israel is proving that 'judeo-christian' was a lie, and the nineteenth amendment was a mistake is more upset over Israel manipulating us to not pay its own bills. But right wing antisemitism went from a twitterati thing to a real thing during the time period.

I'm not totally following. I get the anti-Israel sentiment, but what exactly are they angry at American Jews for? Because this

more upset over Israel manipulating us to not pay its own bills

is just as readily a left-wing complaint.

I'm saying these people who hate Russia on barely-concealed-racial grounds, think Mohammedans can't not deserve something(and have trouble feeling sorry even for the children), are upset about Jewish manipulation to spend money on Israel(which after all is a wealthy country that could just pay for its weapons) are often enough the same people.

it is, in fact, totally dependent on trade with Europe and aid from America for it's continued existence.

That's true for most countries. But as long as you have friends somewhere and don't become a pariah state, you'll be able to continue existing.

Even "pariah states" have friends somewhere; e.g. North Korea and the PRC.

North Korea is backed by two giant nuclear superpowers directly bordering it. Its main adversary is literally at the other end of the globe. Israel is in quite a different situation

Unless I've been reading maps really wrong up to this point, North Koreas main adversary is immediately to its south and connected by a land border.

South Korea probably wants North Korea to remain exactly as it is.

If the NK government falls, the refugees will overwhelm South Korea. Even if the NK government peacefully reforms, the migrants will overwhelm South Korea - it will take generations for the NK economy to catch up, and in the meantime the North Koreans can travel.

South Korea would be forced to implement immigration control that would make Trump blush (or maybe even Netanyahu), and against what are technically their own countrymen to boot.

Israel has(unofficially) quite good relations with Jordan and Egypt, and its main adversary is Iran.

Israel has good relations with the current dictators of Jordan and Egypt, both held in place by enormous American aid and effort so that they would keep having good relations with Israel. It always has to face the possibility that in an Arab-spring like event or a US withdrawal from Middle East, it will be once again bordered by very hostile governments.

The State of Israel makes it safe for Jews to live in the Land of Israel. That is the whole point. Living as a Jew in Jerusalem is a higher level of Jewishness than living as a Jew in Brooklyn. It just is. Yahweh did not promise Abraham and his descendants that they would live in New York. You cannot analyze the Israeli conflict from a purely secular lens. Both sides are fighting for the same magic dirt.

Strangely, it looks to me like very few early Zionists seemingly actually justified Zionism in Palestine in terms of Yahwe and high level of Jewishness etc. These were mainly secular socialist/liberal/masonic people. Yet the emotional pull of the religious land seems to have had overridden any cerebral secularism.

I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, but I don't see a real or workable idea that results in the dissolution of Israel for those reasons.

A significant portion of Israel's population, along with its ruling class, seem to me to fully embrace tribalism to an extent that the Western mind can barely comprehend anymore, let alone embrace. What's fair or beneficial in the grand scheme of things is secondary to their survival. Israel clearly demonstrates this over and over, and so many Westerners (having had their tribalistic instincts redirected to focus on things like social, gender, or racial power dynamics and "fairness") are just completely baffled by it.

From what I can see, it's not about them being the most safe place, or the most fair, or making the rest of the world as prosperous as it can be. It's about Israelis' survival instincts being far more easily triggered than most Westerners can begin to imagine, and thus anything that can even be perceived as being a threat to that survival is dealt with, harshly.

I'm not saying I agree or disagree with it. Israel has clearly engaged in disgusting tactics, acts of violence, manipulation, etc. I guess what I'm saying, or rather asking is "What is your realistic alternative?"

Antisemitism was always extremely high in the Muslim world (moreso since 1947) and was rising in the West long before October 7.

Charlottesville with the ‘Jews Will Not Replace Us’ chant was in 2017. Online antisemitism exploded after 2015/6, although it was growing on /pol/ and in conspiracist parts of YouTube many years before then. Polling suggested rising antisemitism too.

I think the response to the war in Gaza accelerated things, but it was very clear things were heading in this direction long before then. A combination of a new reactionary right and mass immigration from the third world (the latter accelerating the former) meant a renewed antisemitism was long inevitable. Maybe if October 7th had never happened (or had been thwarted in advance) things might be 3-5 years behind.

Charlottesville with the ‘Jews Will Not Replace Us’ chant was in 2017.

The chant is "you will not replace us"; you can hear it very clearly on video. "Jews will not replace us" was made up by the media.

This sounds like "Jews will not replace us".

The two are, notably, similar sounding. Like all of the vowels are the same, 80% of the consonants are identical, and the initial consonants are both palatal.

I mean to make things even more complicated, youz/youse is recognizable as a slang term for 'yall' even if it isn't totally normal.

I don't think it's unreasonable to think that there were more than one group of people saying more than one phrase. It was called the "Unite the Right" rally, there had to be different groups there.

What I think happened, just personally, is that someone started a "You Will Not Replace Us!" chant, someone heard the 'Jews' version and started chanting their version. Or vice versa, although I don't think even at that point someone would be ballsy enough to start with the Judenhass-version. Once they thought they heard someone else say it, sure, but not out of the gate.

Because those guys in the first video were definitely saying 'You', and the second post was, I think pretty clearly, 'Jews'.

Who were they claiming wanted to replace them?

"Israel actually makes Jews less safe!" as a statement by itself is almost always concern trolling, and the rest of your comment basically confirms that's what you're doing. But for what it's worth, here's why this is straightforwardly incorrect:

1/ There were hundreds of thousands of Jews living in mandatory Palestine prior to Israel's war of independence that the Arabs tried to slaughter as soon as the Brits moved out. Establishing the state of Israel was the process of not allowing this to happen. On a pure lives saved vs lost basis, this by itself justifies the existence of Israel even considering all Jews killed worldwide since then.

2/ Israel makes Jews unpopular, but Jews have always been unpopular, so once again this is a bad faith line of argument. The idea that Jews might have reacted to the holocaust by thinking "maybe we shouldn't establish a sovereign state, because then people might really not like us" is hard to entertain with a straight face.

The idea that the only choices were "no sovereign Jewish state" and "sovereign Jewish state that is approximately akin to the present-day institution", which seems to be the premise of your second point's interpretation, is a false dichotomy.

Not really, unless you want to broaden the scope of the debate to include possibilities that I doubt OP had in mind like the Jews having a sovereign state in Madagascar (which I do think would have been preferable but has not been a viable choice for about a century).

By 1945, about any land suitable for human settlement had a local population, including Madagascar. British Palestine still had a rather low population density (1922: 30/km^2, contrast with Germany 1925 @ 133/km^2). Seasteading just was not an option.

The area around Jerusalem was an obvious Schelling point. Picking another place would have meant splitting the project of a Jewish state into two, because some were likely determined to settle in their ancestral homelands or die trying.

The other alternative would have been North America, but I do not think that a truly sovereign state would have been in the cards there. Even if they had convinced the USG to sell them land, they would still have depended on having good relations with them because the US could have invaded them at leisure at any time.

I think the actual best option, with the benefit of hindsight, would have been to carve out a New Israel US state somewhere around Nevada (1920 population density: 0.27/km^2) or New Mexico. I think the only point where a Jewish state would really require sovereignty by design would be to allow Jewish immigrants from all over the world in, which in the US would be a federal matter. Something along the lines of "Jewish migration is unrestricted, but the migrants will not become full US citizens and are restricted to their state (with birthright citizenship still in effect)", would alleviate most of the concerns the rest of the US might have with allowing immigrants in while also being sufficient to allow refugees shelter.

In short, some similar deal to what the Mormons have in the form of Utah.

Sure, New Israel would have had to keep on the good side of the US for survival. But this is not very different from present day Israel. Only that it is much more popular for the US to leave a desert state like New Israel or Utah to its own devices and rather unpopular to send Israel tons of military aid.

I feel like this is missing some obvious "thirteenth tribe" joke, maybe in reference to the great Mormon work of literature Battlestar Galactica.

Thanks for getting me to ask ChatGPT, "how many Jews could survive on South Georgia Island?" which definitely didn't put me on a list somewhere. (The answer is 5-10 thousand btw)

I think the actual best option, with the benefit of hindsight, would have been to carve out a New Israel US state somewhere around Nevada (1920 population density: 0.27/km^2) or New Mexico.

Or Sonora, per the Cooper Plan?

I have argued before that the morally obvious solution after WWII would have been to create the state on the territory of the Axis powers. The Gdansk/NE German corner would have been the obvious choice given how much of a Jewish homeland the South Baltic already had been, and the German population was already getting purged from there either way, but if Soviet buy-in could not be obtained, then Holstein (putting them on the bloc border as a tripwire) or even Swabia (putting them next to neutral Switzerland) would also have been a reasonable option.

(I know @Southkraut hates this idea for obvious reasons, but there is a causal path from Israel in its current borders to US Middle East policy to refugees being generated and from insufficient direct German atonement after WWII to German self-loathing to refugees being accepted. Would giving some clay to the Jews back then really have been worse than slowly giving all the clay to the Arabs now?)

Besides, even for broadly the current location, there would have been better solutions (proper ethnic cleansing followed by the establishment of a firm border, not the current slowly expanding blob with partially incorporated territories).

(Also @ZanarkandAbesFan)

Honestly, if we had just donated Berlin or, fuck it, all of Germany north-east of and including Berlin to the Jews and considered ourselves quit of any debt after that, sure, fine, that'd have been a good enough deal in retrospect. Better than the near-century of guilt-mongering we had instead. But I doubt it. The propaganda game has taken on a life of its own even as far back as WW1, and Germany was going to be the villain for some time yet no matter what. With the Soviet propaganda and infiltration machine doing its thing during the cold war on top of the earlier propaganda, the WW2 propaganda, the holocaust narrative and the profound jewish self-interest in maintaining Germany as obliged to pay infinite reparations forever, there was no way in hell Germans could have gotten off with paying no matter how high a one-time price. Too many parties did too much to ensure that we would not be left off the hook. And, yeah, okay, I can kinda see their reasons for it too.

But in the end I stand by this: Giving away German clay to no matter who wasn't worth it, because Land - they're not making it anymore. And once you sell, you're never getting it back. And Germany wasn't going to be buying its way out of German Guilt in any event.

Even if the guilt tripping had happened either way, I think it is plausible that it would not have translated into so many Middle Eastern refugees - both because American entanglement in the region would have been lower, and because admitting them is now also seen as part of our duty towards Israel (I have seen multiple instances of "Israel should expel the Palestinians and we should take them all in" in the deep-green comment sections of German papers at this point).

Also, under some versions of the idea, not that much clay would even have to be taken from Germany - Poland was already shifted far more west than it had to be, at the expense of Germany. It's counterintuitive from a modern perspective just how Jewish the Bloodlands used to be - percentages in the typical larger city ranged from 10 to 40.

Besides, even for broadly the current location, there would have been better solutions (proper ethnic cleansing followed by the establishment of a firm border, not the current slowly expanding blob with partially incorporated territories).

No arguments there.

There's no way Israel could be anything different. They're surrounded by enemies.

They started out with a fairly "European" mindset back when Israel was founded. That's why they didn't just ethnically cleanse the area back when they could've gotten away with it more easily. A cynic would say that that was a mistake. They are becoming Middle-Easterners in order to survive among the Middle-Easterners. Again, a cynic would say they're not adapting fast enough.

The only other option would have been to do it in a different location. Hand them part of defeated Germany after the war, and move the Jews already in Palestine out. But of course, Germany isn't the Holy Land.

1/ There were hundreds of thousands of Jews living in mandatory Palestine prior to Israel's war of independence that the Arabs tried to slaughter as soon as the Brits moved out. Establishing the state of Israel was the process of not allowing this to happen. On a pure lives saved vs lost basis, this by itself justifies the existence of Israel even considering all Jews killed worldwide since then.

It seems like this begs the question of how Jews survived in Jerusalem for a thousand years under successive Muslim regimes (Ottomans, Mamluks, Ayyubids, etc) with minimal issue yet in 1947 Arabs suddenly decided to try to fight a much better equipped foe. Perhaps the Arabs weren't driven to violence by the prospect of living alongside Jews who had been there for thousands of years but by the prospect of being politically dominated by, forcibly removed from their homes by or outright slaughtered by a would-be Jewish state or terrorist paramilitary groups like the Irgun.

It's not like there weren't other options. A minority faction of Zionists from Ihud wanted a single binational state and cooperation with the Arabs but their proposals were rejected. What would have saved even more lives than the 1947 war would have been if such a war had been avoided entirely.

2/ Israel makes Jews unpopular, but Jews have always been unpopular, so once again this is a bad faith line of argument. The idea that Jews might have reacted to the holocaust by thinking "maybe we shouldn't establish a sovereign state, because then people might really not like us" is hard to entertain with a straight face.

There's "people calling you names" unpopular and then there's "people trying to wipe you out" unpopular. The latter has never had any purchase whatsoever in the United States and even the former has typically been highly stigmatized. Endangering a favorable position within the most powerful empire in human history so that you can have a country where you can look forward to getting your house levelled by missiles or getting kidnapped by terrorists just doesn't seem very rational, particularly from the perspective of an American Jew.

Yeah, that's the bet all western jews are making. They think Israel is going to fall someday, and their political opinions are often a sublimation of that basic choice. Some take it one way, some take it the other, but it's just pre-survivor's guilt.

This is how the jewish people have survived thousands of years without a country.

Yeah, that's the bet all western jews are making. They think Israel is going to fall someday

While I am sure that there are some Jews who carefully select their country of residence based on minimizing the chances of being genocided, I am positive that for many, other factors (employments, economics, existing relationships) play a more crucial role.

My subjective mental model of the median US Jew is not "these fools in Israel will get themselves murdered again" but "having a state which is guaranteed to accept Jewish immigrants in a world where countries sometimes expel their Jewish citizens is a nice fallback solution, and we should support Israel for that reason even if we do not have a compelling reason to move there."

I know a Jewish family that has carefully acquired and maintained multiple passports across generations rather openly based on the lived experience of their parents (and grandparents, and great grandparents) during WWII. The cynics would say "rootless cosmopolitans" here (and maybe there is an element of that), but having heard their Holocaust stories second-hand, I see why they care so much.

WW2 affected more people than just jews.

This brings up feelings similar to when I see news stories from Ukraine of all their African migrants fleeing the country. A bunch of brown fighting age men who suddenly aren't Ukrainian like the others. All rhetoric of unity and shared humanity thrown out the window for a train ticket out of there. So they can, presumably, do the same song and diversity dance someplace else.

Are you suggesting German Jews should have proven their loyalty by fighting for the Reich? That wasn't really on the table for them.

They weren't migrants, they were German citizens, until they weren't, and they weren't given the option of proving how German they were.

No. How did you reach that? The point where jews could make inroads with Germans had long passed them by.

I'm suggesting that Russians, Lithuanians, Poles, Latvians and Ukrainians for example, don't carry 12 different passports in case of another war, despite being victims of WW2.

There are no "inroads" they could have made with people who hate Jews for being Jews. You are implying there was a rational reason for Germans to hate them and want them removed or exterminated.

I'm suggesting that Russians, Lithuanians, Poles, Latvians and Ukrainians for example, don't carry 12 different passports in case of another war, despite being victims of WW2.

That's because they have a country that isn't going to suddenly decide they don't belong there.

A convincing case has yet to be made that Jews are simultaneously unreasonably paranoid, disloyal, and also do not deserve to be considered fellow citizens and got what was coming to them.

That's because they have a country that isn't going to suddenly decide they don't belong there.

For one, citation needed. Eastern Europe might be behind the current trend, but the current trend definitely is that Europeans have no particular claim to Europe and deserve less rights than immigrants.

For another, this reminds me of the claim that gay men are so prone to promiscuity because they've been denied marriage, and that giving it to them will moderate their behavior. Hasn't worked out for gay men, and the results for Jewish people are kinda mixed. I don't think Israel as a country or Israelis as a group, on average, can reasonably be described as "not paranoid".

NGOs like ADL are also not helping the perception about Jewish people living in other parts of the world. Admittedly this skews results quite a bit, since normal Jewish people aren't going to open an NGO devoted to showing how normal they are, and how they just want to get in with their life. Either way I don't see it as straightforward as you're describing it.

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You are implying the people in question were simply deranged and hated jews for being jews. Which is a sort of backhanded otherization rhetoric that would not fly in any other context. Most principally for being an obvious lie. But also for just being silly. Denying others a theory of mind to make your case just means you don't have a case.

That's because they have a country that isn't going to suddenly decide they don't belong there.

Historically, this is just not true. And more pertinent to the topic, sometimes it's not their own nation that's doing the deciding. Acting like the predicament many jews found themselves in during WW2 is any worse than that of many civilians in the aforementioned nations is invalid.

A convincing case has yet to be made that Jews are simultaneously unreasonably paranoid, disloyal, and also do not deserve to be considered fellow citizens and got what was coming to them.

You can't both be a citizen and also exempt from service to the nation if the concept of a national is supposed to hold any relevance. This rings especially loud after decades of diversity propaganda where everyone is touted as an equal national. If your alleged co-nationals are hoarding passports they certainly do have a different view on the nation and their membership. If you want to verbalize recognition for that fact using hyperbolic thought ending rhetoric... fine. But you are certainly not looking for rational discourse when doing so.

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That's because they have a country that isn't going to suddenly decide they don't belong there.

Except, you know, that millions of eastern Europeans literally did find themselves in that situation at various times between the end of WWI and 2022.

I get what you're trying to say but altered borders so that Russians find themselves outside Russia, or Poles outside Poland, has been a pretty constant problem.

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WW2 affected more people than just jews.

At the risk of invoking a meme around here, "What did you think 'Never Again' looked like? Vibes? Essays? Poetry?"

Of course it potentially meant finding or making a safe place for themselves and investing in defense spending to be too thorny to tangle with again. That mentality clearly seems to explain how they interact with parties that call for their deaths regularly (see the Houthi flag, for example). Many of those calls come from Muslims, but I'm not sure they like Richard Spencer any better.

But that 'Never Again' thread runs in other groups too: see defense spending in Poland and Finland, arguably China and Korea too. Or why you shouldn't ask the South American with a German last name when their ancestors moved to the New World (not always 1945, but it's common enough).

I'm inclined to agree with you. There is 'hatred' in many nations regarding past wars. But that's between nations.

To change perspectives, how one can say they are part of a group with a righteous feeling of anger, fear and vengeance against another national group whilst still claiming to be an equal national to that group strikes me as peculiar. Similar to how some advanced progressive/liberal/leftists manage to order their politics in such a way that brown people can do no wrong.

It is necessarily the case by dint of these emotions that there is a difference. How one would categorize or order that difference is up for debate, but that's where it starts.

I don't know any Jews well but those that I'm acquainted with are very concerned about escaping the genocide that is just around the corner despite all evidence. Maybe Jewish history has naturally selected for having a backup plan.

Yet even in a world where America does unconditionally support Israel I can't help but think of anyone who takes Aliyah as a certified moron.

Do you think we live in such a world? I am American and can assure you we do not. We are the primary constraint on Israel's conduct during this war. Without American restraint there already would be no one alive in the Gaza strip and the annexation of all the land towards the Jordan would have begun. And it would have been done with fewer Israeli casualties than the current war, and it would probably have been over 3 decades ago.

Modern Israel is not a safe place for Jews, it's a place where thousands of Jews can be killed or maimed in a day and hundreds kidnapped.

Yes indeed, as a result of "humanitarian" causes the US and Europe impose on Israel.

If you are kidnapped, the "Jewish State" will not pull all the stops to save your life but will instead attempt to murder you to prevent you from being used as a bargaining chip. If you survive that then your best hope is that public pressure will eventually force Israel to free some mass killing gigaterrorists in exchange for your life, since Israel has demonstrated that it is incapable of rescuing hostages by force after more than 2 years of intense combat against the weakest militia on it's border

The post 10-7 war can hardly be described as intense combat. Kid gloves at best.

the brutal yet failed campaign to destroy Hamas is a giant anti-semitism producing machine.

Lack of punctuation aside, this is just incorrect. All that antisemitism already existed. I knew about it on 10-6, we saw it on 10-7 before they launched a single counter-attack.

We are the primary constraint on Israel's conduct during this war.

Maybe.

Without American restraint there already would be no one alive in the Gaza strip

Definitely not.

In a counterfactual world with full american support for israel, I actually seriously doubt they would genocide the palestinians. It's just bad geopolitics-- they're surrounded by arabs on an sides, and several of those arab nations can very credibly threaten to nuclearize.

I recognize that this was probably hyperbole-to-demonstrate-a-point rather than an actual assement of what israel would do, but it's worth remembering that "kill them all and salt the ashes" is historically not what most empires do with their enemies. that's especially true with succesful empires. A more realistic strategy looks like either "collaborate with local elites to suppress popular sentiment in response for tribute" or "raise up a local minority group to serve as a precarious class of administrators beholden to your own political order." Plus some sort of long-term incentives against childbirth and in favor of out-migration... were I genuinely trying to eliminate a particular ethnic group as a local political force, I would be encouraging late marriage age, spending a long time in foreign countries in guest workers, gating employment behind credentialing, enforcing wealth transfers from the young to the old, increasing the employment rate of women, and so on and so forth.

Boys don't like girls, boys like postgrad housewives

What does the man with a lot of romantic options want?

Does he want a beautiful young trophy wife? Does he want a high-earning girlboss?

The answer, according to Lyman Stone, is neither. What he wants (according to the data) is a woman around his age, with the same academic qualifications. Men with younger (and indeed, older) wives are the ones earning less money. What rich men want, it seems, is a (cultural, educational) peer.

With earnings is becomes a bit more complicated. As a man's income goes up, so does the income of his wife. But richer men earn a larger proportion of household income, and the women married to these men are the most likely to not work at all.

So what's going on here? The Red Pill explanation of men preferring younger women doesn't seem to fit, since the men with the most options (high earning ones) are more like to choose women the same age. However, these couples also choose housewifery at the highest rate. My interpretation of this is that the more money a man earns, the more secure in their class position the couple can be. Therefore, they can afford to have the wife give up work without losing their place in the class hierarchy.

The bitter professional woman explanation (men are intimidated by my qualifications and high salary) doesn't seem to work either. Sure, wives of rich men are the least likely to work, but those that do work are also the highest earners among women. A more parsimonious explanation seems to be that high earning women want higher earning men, and they (mostly) get them.

High earning men seem to want class peers. A woman's qualifications are a marker for class, and a woman's high salary is a manifestation of her class. Of course, once married, they can afford for her to stay home more easily than poorer families.

The thing that surprises me most is that you don't see richer men marrying younger women, as all of the older-younger pairings I've seen in real life have involved high-earning men. It might be that richer men marry younger, and therefore there is simply less scope for large age gaps. Or it might be that richer men are more sensitive to judgement from their peers, who would disapprove of larger age gaps.

Rich men do indeed tend to marry same class women, but who do they fuck around with? How many of those marriages are faithful?

I remember that the site AshleyMadisons most frequent occupations of the users was physician, second highest? Lawyer….

Like SeekingArrangement, AshleyMadison was low key just a prostitution site on which more expensive ‘escorts’ found clients and vice versa. Most women who desperately want an affair don’t need a dating site to find a partner. Poor johns are of no interest to self-respecting and moderately expensive escorts who do even the most basic background checks.

I presume that poor men who want to cheat do so with women in their social circles, on hookup apps (they’re usually higher time preference and from families with more divorce so care less about the consequences of being found out) and with cheap street walker or truck stop prostitutes.

Ashley Madison was a scam site populated with almost exclusively female bots. Pretty sure there was a data dump that confirmed this, there were no women, not even prostitutes

I remember that the site AshleyMadisons most frequent occupations of the users was physician, second highest? Lawyer….

A website well known for its users' strong commitment to honesty.

Slowly over the last 150 years (the roots predate the Victorian era but it was cemented in it, long before most wealthy women worked much outside the home) the primary purpose of marriage moved from children to romantic companionship. This was to some extent true even when upper class Victorians were having 6 kids each. You can trace in literature, the press and so on the concept of a ‘love match’. And then, in accelerated form since the 1970s, married men and women began spending much more time together. The world of a century ago had fraternal and women’s organizations.

A husband and wife would live together but often sleep in separate beds (if they could afford it) and would spend perhaps every evening of the week doing different things. A married man would be at the pub, at an organization like the Freemasons, at a men’s political meeting, whatever. A married woman would be with the children, often with other women in the community and extended family around her, and in free time (or more regularly if she had money for a governess, maid, nanny) at what were effectively sororal (if often more informal) gatherings, lunches, meetings and so on.

The family might be together at church, but that was it.

As Coming Apart narrates to some extent, the rise of suburbanization, the small nuclear rather than multigenerational extended family and then the slow withering of both male fraternal organizations and extended familial/communal women’s groups of the kind that existed in the Victorian city and town ended much of that.

Today, married couples spend an amount of time together, alone (by which I mean with only each other and possibly children for company) that would have been hard to fathom for most of our ancestors in recent centuries. That means that the personality and interests of a spouse are much more important. Money is more important now that women work too, but it isn’t the only central thing about the enterprise.

It reminds me of (I think @Gaashk) the recent discussion on Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez. Why divorce and remarry to a woman your age when he is surely wealthy enough to enjoy the company of endless 20 year old models? I suspect because he enjoys her company and they have fun together, and in the modern age (when even most billionaires spend a lot of time with their spouses, at dinners, events, other gatherings and so on) that is the most important thing.

This sounds very likely.

Why divorce and remarry to a woman your age when he is surely wealthy enough to enjoy the company of endless 20 year old models? I suspect because he enjoys her company and they have fun together

And it's probably bloody difficult for a billionaire to find someone they feel genuinely comfortable with.

I mean, this is true, but also the, say, Georgian, upper crust did not get to marry the most attractive woman catching their eye, either. Part of marrying an upper class man has always been being an upper class woman.

In our society upper class men are marked by high salaries and upper class women by extensive education. They marry each other because they’re expected to marry class peers, not because those things are overwhelmingly important in themselves.

High earning men seem to want class peers. A woman's qualifications are a marker for class, and a woman's high salary is a manifestation of her class. Of course, once married, they can afford for her to stay home more easily than poorer families.

The thing that surprises me most is that you don't see richer men marrying younger women, as all of the older-younger pairings I've seen in real life have involved high-earning men. It might be that richer men marry younger, and therefore there is simply less scope for large age gaps. Or it might be that richer men are more sensitive to judgement from their peers, who would disapprove of larger age gaps.

Princeton Mom strikes again. College is the place to meet your partner.

I read The Original Preppy Handbook from the 1980s recently, my wife loved it and wanted me to read it. The whole book is built around a guide to being part of the preppy, mostly Northeastern, old money upper class. And the majority of the book is built around the social life of educational institutions: you go to this school, not so much to learn as to learn who to talk to. You meet people at your prep school, or your undergrad, or one of the sister/brother institutions to those schools, and those are pretty much your friends for life.

That's a fantasy of a past subculture that maybe never quite existed, but it does reflect the centrality of education to the modern American upper class. A young lawyer who goes K-JD is in full time schooling until they are 25 or 26, and basically that entire time their peer group is age-gated such that they have neither opportunity nor reason to get to know people much older or younger than they are. The median age at first marriage is around 30, and the median couple knows each other for a little over three years before getting engaged, followed by a year long engagement before they get married. So a huge number of our young professionals barely form a peer group or life outside of school before they meet their future mate.

That said, I definitely see some problems with their method.

What he wants (according to the data) is a woman around his age, with the same academic qualifications. Men with younger (and indeed, older) wives are the ones earning less money. What rich men want, it seems, is a (cultural, educational) peer.

With earnings is becomes a bit more complicated. As a man's income goes up, so does the income of his wife. But richer men earn a larger proportion of household income, and the women married to these men are the most likely to not work at all.

My own wife had an easier time getting her degree because she was married to me, I helped support her through school. She probably earns more money as a result of the family connections we have in the area. She would have been successful on all those things on her own, but...lots of people don't finish their degrees because they can't afford it. She is very smart and very good at her job, but being Mrs. FiveHour has helped her a bit at times. And in turn, being her husband has started to help me in business, people know her and like her and that helps me get my foot in the door.

A rich man might marry a woman who is on her own a well-educated high earner; but it's also a lot easier to get educated and to become a high earner if you're married to a wealthy man. Connections, support, sinecures. A rich wife can choose to continue her education, and if she wants a job it's easy to secure a highly paid one through her husband.

The Red Pill explanation of men preferring younger women doesn't seem to fit, since the men with the most options (high earning ones) are more like to choose women the same age.

TRP has a tremendously difficult time conceiving of women as individual humans who have their own desires, interests, and other properties that aren't fully exhausted by their status as women, so that can help explain their blind spot in regards to this issue.

The guy I know who's really into TRP is always saying, "I don't care if she's into what I'm into, I don't care if she's good conversation, I don't care about any of that. I have male friends for that. Why would I go to a woman to socialize?"

Obviously you tend to share more in common with people who are of a similar age and education level to you. And, surprise surprise, the majority of men do want to be able to have reasonable social interactions with the person they're going to be spending the rest of their lives with, funny how that works out.

High earning men seem to want class peers.

Well. That's who they want on their arm when they're seen in public. Certainly selection bias in terms of what we actually see.

My inherent issue with this is its not differentiating between what they chase as sexual partners vs. what they might actually settle in for a long term relationship.

So what's going on here? The Red Pill explanation of men preferring younger women doesn't seem to fit,

Red Pill would suggest that a wealthy man can and would keep a soft harem of younger women, discarding them as needed, which isn't really refuted by the data here.

Or it might be that richer men are more sensitive to judgement from their peers, who would disapprove of larger age gaps.

Possible. I'll also throw out that younger women are a little less likely to successfully keep up the right appearances and are probably somewhat more likely to do something that is blatantly embarrassing to you either intentionally or unintentionally.

So even if your peers 'approve' of large age gaps, you're still risking reputational damage if the woman you choose is actually immature.

The thing that surprises me most is that you don't see richer men marrying younger women

There's the key word. Marry. Leo DiCaprio has gone through 12 younger women in the last 20 years alone (is he an outlier? Probably, but not by much). No wedding in sight.

Broaden the question to more general 'relationships' and I'd imagine age gaps are more prevalent.

So yeah, is there anything in the data to suggest that rich men wouldn't pump and dump as many young women as they can (Elon sure goes that route) and only marry one that actually matches his personal status more closely?

I'm genuinely not trying to be contrarian, I'm just put off when I see a claim like this, backed up by a narrowly-defined set of data that purports to refute an idea that is making a substantially different claim.

Red Pill would suggest that a wealthy man can and would keep a soft harem of younger women, discarding them as needed, which isn't really refuted by the data here.

I’d guess actual billionaires (like Hollywood stars, whose indiscretions are more public) have a higher rate of infidelity than average, but do male investment bankers have a higher rate of infidelity than male bartenders, tattoo artists, taxi drivers or nurses? I doubt it. Polling shows that male infidelity stays pretty similar controlling for education and most non-religious class background.

The idea that every rich man who can afford to is secretly fucking hot teens or young women seems like more of a prurient fantasy than anything else. Some do, just like plenty of married cops and truckers fuck hookers. But most? I doubt it.

Question is a bit fraught.

I'd absolutely bet that historically and recently, it was more likely that wealthier men had higher infidelity rates simply because it would be relatively easy for them to find attractive affair partners.

If nothing else, they can afford to pick a high-end escort for a night.

The idea that every rich man who can afford to is secretly fucking hot teens or young women seems like more of a prurient fantasy than anything else.

Invert it. Consider that young women are actively pursuing the rich men (if you're on dating apps, this is effectively explicit) and are much, much quicker to put out for them.

On balance, what effect would we expect this to have? Rich guys getting laid a lot, and very few of these women getting wifed up by said rich man. He can wait for the 'ideal' match, hopefully one that isn't so naive as to bang the nearest rich dude without much discretion.

I've talked to death about the lack of actual long-term relationships forming among the current crop of young women, I think the point that's relevant to this discussion is that there's a class of men who have their pick of women, and actually DO get to have it both ways. Bang the nubile ones for fun and then eventually find one worth marrying.

So what these men are marrying isn't quite revealing what they're actually pursuing, sexually.

If nothing else, they can afford to pick a high-end escort for a night.

1% is the general number for American men using escorts or prostitutes in the past year, and the highest estimates are only two and a half percent. It's also negatively correlated with income in general.

Just not a real thing people do at a level where it would impact these numbers.

Yes, we've all recently learned that the multimillionaire CEO of a tech company will risk it all to have an affair with the head of HR at said company.

I'd agree escorts aren't the MODAL case here, for sure.

But for most guys, a night with a decent escort is not likely in the budget, so he's likely to throw money at strippers or somesuch.

Rich guy has that fallback, but is not necessarily going to need it.

I suppose the availability can have an impact on the market even if they aren't used. Like the Marxian theory that the unemployed are the Reserve Army of Labor, driving down wages by fear of competition. And I suppose the same goes for young floozies: my wife sees a 20 year old woman admiring me and knows she has to compete, and chooses to be better? I don't know.

I just don't think it's the case that there's some secret activity that proves that men don't really want the things they are visibly pursuing.

Eh, its the same as how we crave unhealthy junk food but can restrict ourselves to eating the healthier (but still flavorful) options over the long term.

I think guys have their horny brain which will screw almost any living thing, and then the post-coitus clarity brain that knows they need to find someone stable.

Guys have the things they want when they are mostly aiming to get their rocks off, then the things they want when they consider what kind of kids they'll have, who will help raise them, and what type of person would they tolerate sticking around AFTER they've had sex with them.

Rich guys presumably have the same urges, I'm just suggesting they have more options on the table to chase some strange if they can't keep the urges in check.

I don't disagree, but at some level...call me old fashioned, but marrying the rich guy is generally how we define winning for a woman. No one is disputing that rich men can find poor women attractive, but if they aren't marrying them, then it's sort of irrelevant to the outcome of the match.

Saying that rich men are really attracted to something other than what they're marrying is just kind of a misunderstanding of terms in my mind. Like saying that the team that is losing baseball games is better at baseball than the team that is winning baseball games. Or, to mix sports metaphors, it brings to mind the classic Sampaoli quote on possession in soccer:

“One night, I went to a bar; I was with a woman. We talked all night. We laughed, we flirted, I paid for several drinks of hers. At around 5 am, a guy came in, grabbed her by the arm and took her to the bathroom. He made love to her and she left with him. That doesn’t matter, because I had most of the possession on that night.”

For a woman trying to net a rich husband, it doesn't really matter if he stares at the big-titted waitress at the bar, it barely matters if he bangs her on occasion. It matters who he marries, who he supports financially, who has the children he raises and supports. Those are the goals, the sex is just passing the ball(s) around.

((That said, when you talk about "soft harems" I think we're mixing up what the data here is about. The granularity on income stops at percentile. The top 1% of income is "only" about $400k/yr. While I suppose, with some cleverness, you could manage to squirrel enough away to spend enough to keep a glamour girl on the side off that, you're not keeping a harem. DiCaprio or Trump, ultra wealthy celebrities, are in another stratosphere from the data on record here.))

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It's also negatively correlated with income in general.

I don't know, man...

There are only about 2,000 men at Davos, only about 500 of them American. It wouldn't seriously impact the chart drawn above if every single one of them was balls deep in a hooker every night after the conference.

After reading the whole article:

In 2020, an investigation by The Times found at least 100 prostitutes travel to Davos for the summit according to a Swiss police officer.

Well, I guess this makes you right about both the rate, and the correlation with income. Though I suppose we'd need to know the native population of Davos prostitutes to know for sure...

It's more just a data thing, the men are sorted by income percentile. There are around one million men in the top 1% of income, and because it's not weighted by income Elon Musk counts the same as my local Nissan Dealership owner or any law partner at a big firm. If it were the case that Davos type masters of the universe frequent prozzies, there just aren't enough of them to move the needle on what we're looking at, even within the pool of the 1%.

I'd add that everyone I know who has (admitted to) paying for sex was lower or working class, so it lines up with my experience. I'd imagine there are a few marginal cases I'm missing though.

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Not just the rich guys at Davos, though, is it? It's the support staff around them, and all the journalists reporting on it, etc. Plenty of transient custom to be worth importing some short-term workers for.

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I would imagine rich men getting married (relatively) earlier, as it used to be (and maybe still is) that settling down and getting married was seen as a sign of mature stability that proved you were ready for greater responsibility and promotion up the ladder. So marrying someone of a similar background and age who knows how to navigate the work and social circles where you'll be networking your little heart out is an advantage; you can always have a discreet affair with a hot young thing from the secretarial pool later on once you're established.

I'm not sure that's as true now, marriage rates being lower and median age at first marriage are creeping up.

But maybe. "Early" being early-mid 20's still leaves time to screw around a bit in college, find a girl by Junior year, lock her down, and get married and established early enough to start social climbing.

I'd guess that flings with younger staff are actually less common in the post Me-too era, but its genuinely a target-rich environment to find single women in any corporate environment.

If I had to pick high rates of infidelity by profession, I would put bartenders, tattoo artists, and taxi drivers towards the top, and male nurses solidly above average just due to gender ratios in their field.

I would agree that working class men in male dominated but lucrative(by working class standards) professions are much more likely than average to see sex workers of any description, regardless of marital status. I would also say that fucking teens is either weirdo coded or solidly working class(in the not particularly high income sense) in American culture. But bartenders and tattoo artists cheating on their wives is mostly shocking in the sense that they got married in the first place; these are (relatively)high income men surrounded by easy(relatively) women.

This is interesting. I think this might be very much a US phenomenon. It would be even more interesting to look at how this varies between cultures and between countries.

In the US cultural context, rich men usually got rich by either having upper-class connections or by being workaholics. In the former case, they are beholden to upper-class cultural norms, which condition a certain status and social acceptability with a similar-age bride from a family of similar class. This might make the young bride less attractive even to this subset of the rich.

Among the US nouveau riche, social skill development is stunted by workaholism, and this probably limits their ability to date young upper class woman. The young upper-class American women I have met recently seem to have their creep detector tuned up to 11 and to habitually present an attitude of cynicism. Which is to say that they will probably make an older man really work for it while they are young, go single for a long time, and not marry until they are late in fertility, starting to get desperate, and cannot afford to be so bitchy.

In the US, there is also a lot of financial risk to marrying young women. Younger women are generally more likely to lose interest in their partner after the first few years, and the loss of 50% of assets during no-fault divorce makes their departure really expensive to rich men.

But thinking of other countries I'm familiar with, it seems that even where 50% split of assets during divorce is not common, compensating social dynamics exist which make the rich man/young woman pairing less common than one would expect. Korea completely lacks the financial divorce risk, but makes up for it with increased social pressure and higher standards for social acceptability, which pushes all relationships (and especially marriages) into similar age brackets.

Perhaps a good experimental counterexample for my explanation would be China, which has low divorce risk and fewer social norms. I think women there get very very picky about their partners' finances, which would predict that rich men there will skew toward younger women and middle-class men there go unmarried until later in life.

I suspect China's relationship dynamics are more related to gender asymmetry than divorce laws. Or at least it's a huge confounder that merits consideration.

Uh, does this distinguish between kinds of rich men? I know a master plumber who founded a construction company with some big contracts. Four ex wives.

There's definitely some other studies showing that graduate women are marrying high-earning non-graduate men, like your plumber friend. That explains how graduate women have been able to maintain their high marriage rate despite a lack of graduate men to go around.

How did the wives of your friend compare to him in terms of age and educational credentials?

They were definitely younger. About half of them had worked as teachers(so better educated than a high school dropout who managed to become a master plumber, at minimum), none of them worked again after marrying him. Each got a Carribbean condo as part of the divorce. Only three had kids.

Might one of them have been a grad student who had sex with a fat old plumber for a few years for a condo in Belize and a check? Uh, maybe but they didn't strike me as the type.

Personal antecedent; A friend of mine(who eventually married) confided to me part of the issue with dating he had was potential gold-diggers who were more interested in his and his family's wealth than an honest relationship.

Another personal antecedent; The same friend finally married a nice brain surgeon who's the only one I've seen capable of keeping up with said friend in all areas, and once she got settled into her job, her paycheck meant they could indulge in all their hobbies.

I think there's a hidden factor not accounted for; that rich, successful men don't have options - not really. That if they're trying to build a family, that their options are actually very limited - someone with a similar outlook, ideas for the lifestyle they want to lead, with a pleasant(or at least compatible) personality. So, while the data is interesting(and I'm not disagreeing with it), I think the host of assumptions are off and thus make things skewed when trying to apply it to the real world.

It would seem like the "millionaire next door" approach would work plausibly for rich guys not quite rich enough to be public figures. Maybe that happens often enough (has golden handcuffs from startup acquisition, still drives a Prius), but I've never seen it explicitly called out as a strategy. If you're rich enough and a public figure such that Google knows who you are (doctors, lawyers), that seems harder.

People fall for specific individual people more than they fall for hypothetical lists of attractive traits. So the women rich men are interested in are often just the ones they happen to have contact with. Statistical differences between groups can't be assumed to reflect the preferences of those groups, they can also reflect who they have contact with in the first place.

Notice how even when they aren't peers they're often stuff like Arnold Schwarzenegger cheating on his wife with his housekeeper, rather than with some beautiful model. That's not "rich celebrities prefer housekeepers", he didn't cheat with some random woman employed as a housekeeper to someone else, he cheated with a woman he was actually in contact with. It reminds me of when people were questioning Jeff Bezos's marriage recently - sure he could theoretically pick between a lot of women, but she was the one he actually met via work.

They want peers who can fit in with their social and work circle and who will advance alongside them. Younger wives might not be as clued-in, so unless it's a second marriage it's not going to work as well. Her career is in the home supporting his career; making sure the dinner parties are hosted, the right people invited, remembering when to send cards and gifts for special occasions to business contacts, helping him navigate the web of relationships, turning up at the right events looking suitable on his arm, and so forth. His suits are pressed and ready for him, the home looks as it should, the exact balance of good taste and understated wealth on display to help him get promotions and move on up in the world. Everything running smoothly in the support system to his career so he can concentrate on work and not on "are the kids going to piano lessons or horse riding after school today? who is going to pick them up? mom is in the hospital, is everything okay on that end?"

Its a cute picture, but I suspect it was true of old people when you where young, more so than it is now. Im from a relatively well-off family, and the only part of this that seems true to live for them and their friends is the last sentence.

They want peers who can fit in with their social and work circle and who will advance alongside them.

Don't marry her unless she can secure an alliance with the Burgundians.

OK, horse riding codes rural in America more than upper class. At least in Texas. And upper class housewives do not iron their husband's suit, they take it to the dry cleaners.

Upper class housewives pay(as in enter the credit card number) for private school, they manage IRA contributions, they maximize tax exemptions, they pay the contractors. They host dinner parties. What they don't do is, uh, housework. There's Mexicans for that, as in the Georgian era there were the lower classes for it. It has always been thus.

OK, horse riding codes rural in America more than upper class.

Definitely depends on the location, but it makes sense to me that Texas would see it as more rural than wealthy in comparison with say, the North East.

Not sure if I can get behind this message hypothesized here. Whilst I can understand that the Anti-Red pill crowd is desperate for something to chew on, this is a stretch.

Sure, the data is there, but it says nothing about what men want, as there is no causal direction implied anywhere outside of editorialized headlines. It does, however, fit the Red Pill box of women 'rejecting' men they see as lesser than them and instead looking for men who make at the very least equal. To that extent it isn't rich men choosing rich women, it's rich women hunting down every single rich man they can. And when they get him they predictably, according to TRP philosophy and this data, stop working and start making a family. 'Because that's what women actually want.' (Italics read in the voice of Nick Fuentes)

To that extent the data fits that red pill 'truth' and the general red pill assertion that dating is a different market for men as they get older.

Right; "Revealed Preference" only counts when the goods are a) equally available, and, more importantly b) have the same effective "cost." This is never the case with marriage.

The first strike against this article is that it's only counting already-married men; we wouldn't rebut the assertion that women, in the main, don't "marry down" by pretending all the women loudly claiming they'd rather be single than marry "a loser" don't exist, and we should do the same for men.

Further, the data only shows men tend to marry within the same general socio-economic status, and just assumes that this must be by choice (women have no agency in the matter, I suppose). It ignores opportunity, propinquity, peer pressure effects (just how many men can truly ignore everyone in their social circle calling them a creep for chasing a girl half their age? This article isn't going to even bother asking the question, let alone tell us the answer).

Hilariously, it acknowledges that men prefer stay-at-home wives, and immediately claims that this is actually proof that men prefer ambitious girlbosses. This is RadFemHitler levels of copium huffing. Trash article is trash.

It's not a death blow to the redpill or anything, but the article does dispel maximalist claims that redpill types tend to imply about the reciprocity of men and women's attitudes towards each other (e.g. "women desire dominant men who are their social superiors, thus masculine men reject uppity girlbosses for submissive women who know their place"). In truth, women have a much stronger preference for dominance than men have for submissiveness. (source)

More generally, redpillers/antifeminists tend to have a myopic focus on the utility of a woman within the "trad" marriage script (cooking/cleaning/birthing/boning), to the exclusion of more general or "unfeminine" traits/considerations that might be desirable in a wife[1]. It won't make your dick hard to know that your wife has an MBA, but an intelligent and educated woman has far more potential as a proper life partner than a meek and servile tradwife.

[1] See Primaprimaprima below for further commentary in this direction.

In truth, women have a much stronger preference for dominance than men have for submissiveness.

The charts you linked are about sex. What people do in the bedroom is often different from their general behavior or personality.

It’s not at all hard to find women who are generally ‘dominant’ or decisive in life, but like to be dominated in bed.

I don’t disagree with your point that ‘servile’ is a bad description for a life partner, but I don’t think that’s the evidence for your argument. I believe you're collapsing men's preference for agreeableness with preference for sexual submission.

Sure, the data is there, but it says nothing about what men want, as there is no causal direction implied anywhere outside of editorialized headlines. It does, however, fit the Red Pill box of women 'rejecting' men they see as lesser than them and instead looking for men who make at the very least equal. To that extent it isn't rich men choosing rich women, it's rich women hunting down every single rich man they can.

Why do you assume that only women have agency in this situation? Surely the wealthiest men have the most romantic options (controlling for age)? If millionaire men want younger women, we can assume they can get them more easily than poorer men who are the same age. But what we see is that it is poor men who are most likely to be in relationships with younger women.

Eh, I'd think of it more in terms of if an attractive looking woman is hitting on you, you don't need agency.

Also, I'm sure wealthy men are going for young women. Just not marrying them. To that end I'm not sure if the data is demonstrating that recently married men are getting married to parity partners or if these parity partners have been an item for a long time. It would certainly match my experience of people meeting in university.


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