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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25836 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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In 2023, at a Wuhan University library study space, Yang Jingyuan (JY), a female master’s student in Economics/Law, was seated close to Xiao Mingtao (MX), a male first‑year undergraduate student. JY secretly recorded MX for approximately 70 minutes whilst seated near him for around 100 minutes. During this time, MX can be seen touching his clothed crotch area, reportedly due to eczema‑related irritation.

Once she believed she had obtained sufficient footage and had formulated a plan, JY confronted MX and demanded an official written apology on the spot, promising that this sexual‑harassment episode would be handled privately.

JY subsequently pressed the university for disciplinary action against MX and for preferential treatment as a victim of sexual assault. She circulated the video and the written apology online amid a wave of feminist activism in China in 2023, garnering wide support. Personal details of MX and his family members—including their occupations and backgrounds—surfaced online, with many voices supporting JY and amplifying female victimhood. Wuhan University awarded JY a distinction for her thesis, among other recognitions, and she was admitted as a doctoral candidate at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU). MX was later disciplined by Wuhan University and, according to some reports, expelled.

JY sued MX using the evidence she had gathered (the video and MX’s written apology). The court dismissed the case on the basis that MX’s written apology had been produced under duress. This was evidenced by an additional clip showing JY threatening MX on the spot as the apology was written; JY’s lawyer voluntarily supplied this clip to the court.

Court decision happened on 25 July of 2025. Around August 2025, JY posted online again from multiple accounts, stating that she had been accepted by HKBU for a doctorate in law, and that she did not think Mr Xiao (MX) would be accepted into any programme of similar prestige. In the same posts, JY said she was aware of efforts for MX to apply to a university outside China and that she would submit evidence of MX’s alleged sexual‑harassment acts to any institution to which he applied.

By August 2025, the ebb and flow of feminist movements in China had produced different sentiments. Voices emerged emphasising the damage that JY’s posts—and the 2023 wave of online support—had caused to MX and his family, leading to stress and harm. MX developed mental‑health issues during this time.

JY’s master’s thesis became the most downloaded thesis from Wuhan University. Multiple errors in key components of the award‑winning thesis were identified, some pertaining to econometrics and others to different areas. JY has since been permitted to make corrections to the submitted and published thesis, and has claimed that she was harassed by journalists while working on it, which caused her mental‑health harm.

As of 9 August 2025, Wuhan University officials had yet to provide an official response to netizens’ scrutiny of how the 2023 case was handled, as well as to questions about the recognition of the quality of JY’s master’s thesis.

Hong Kong Baptist University, a lower‑mid‑ranking tertiary institution, was also under netizen scrutiny for the decision to accept JY onto a doctoral law programme. It has since hidden acceptance‑decision information and made no statements regarding online pressure.

A sizeable number of netizens remain supportive of JY, linking her success to the life and death of feminist movements in China.

Conversely, some companies have reportedly either explicitly or quietly rejected internship or job applicants who are Wuhan University graduates, citing concerns either about the actual quality of candidates or about the ethos and culture of the university’s management.

  • It is reported that, in Chinese universities, more severe cases of sexual assault—for example, rape—may result in the victim being awarded degrees without completing required components of study or examinations, and being guaranteed a place in postgraduate studies with a scholarship that would normally require a qualifying examination.

  • In China, sexual harassment and rape are, in key legal formulations, recognised as offences against females.

Jingyuan Yang (JY): 杨景媛 Mingtao Xiao (MX): 肖明韬 https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hant/武汉大学图书馆争议事件

Hi, first time poster here. Had discussion with a friend who recommended me to the motte.

I grew up in China, went to Wuhan University.

My experience with what I understood to be feminism has been leaning more towards the negative: I found vehement advocates tend to be fueled with anger, and riddled with what I perceive as various forms of double standards.

I think advocates of the Chinese feminist movement should be allowed a 2-year live and work experience exchange to India.

Also, Chinese internet sphere is kind of scary.

Welcome!

It's always interesting to get a perspective from another part of the world, though that always comes with a built-in inability to comment on it much, due to the same lack of familiarity that makes it interesting to begin with. It's a bit sad to hear the same sort of controversies are taking place in a completely different culture. What's worse, even the pushback that followed doesn't feel like cause for much optimism, as it reminds me of various backlashes in the Western internet ~10 years ago. Here's hoping China is on a different trajectory, and not just a bit behind on the same path.

Kind of sounds like a smaller-scale version of Mattress Girl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattress_Performance_(Carry_That_Weight)), without any sexual contact between complainant and defendant alleged to have taken place.

Note that Columbia ended up settling a lawsuit with the guy in question on account of (presumed) Title IX violations in the course of its disciplinary actions and allowing the performance art piece, including issuing a formal apology.

How are gender relations in China, in your experience? We have a lot of issues and stories like this in the West, though South Korea always seemed the most insane to me in terms of complete gender relation breakdown.

Also, welcome to the Motte. I would love to read about more Chinese culture war skirmishes like this, and I'm sure I am not alone in that. These stories tend to not make their way to the English side of the web often.

I second @Lewyn's welcome. I would like to learn to read Chinese someday but I'm very interested about what goes on. The Chinese internet is basically dark matter for most of us - you know it's there and you know it's huge, but you have no idea what's in it. The Great Firewall notwithstanding, I believe that the reverse is not quite true, though that may be parochialism on my part.

Welcome! China is often discussed here, but only "from afar," as there seem to be very few people who have visited, and even fewer who can speak the language or have a more than superficial understanding of the current culture. I hope to see you post here frequently to weigh in on these discussions!

Welcome from China! Feel free to answer my questions or not:

  1. is pinyin/use of Chinese characters a culture war flashpoint? If so, how so?

  2. what’s the state of Chinese gender relations?

  3. is china’s education obsession driven by straightforward economic factors, or is it entirely cultural? What’s the delta between high skill blue collar and average white collar salaries?

  4. what’s the great firewall like in practice? Is it mostly focused on keeping news sources state approved? Or is it very block heavy? Obviously there’s some keywords(tianmen, June 4), are there some odd or unexpected ones? What’s the whispernet/samizdat situation like?

  5. does China see itself leading the world as hegemon, or is it more of a place of honor thing?

Jingyuan Yang (JY): 杨景媛 Mingtao Xiao (MX): 肖明韬 https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hant/武汉大学图书馆争议事件

I have never been on Chinese wikipedia and I must admit suddenly opening a Chinese webpage which is entirely text almost felt like something physically hit me in the face. So many boxes and sticks.

It is difficult to comment on this episode, especially since you drop the information that the guy supposedly wasn't actually touching himself but rubbing some eczema spots. In my personal experience mainland Chinese men (or at least international engineering student types I interacted with) have by far the worst personal hygiene or etiquette awareness I have ever seen in any group of people. But I also never heard or seen them act openly sexually creepy so I am struggling to even visualize this episode.

I must ask: I read about Korea (and heard about Taiwan from personal acquaintances) that in these countries there seems to exist some serious animosity between young men and women. Would you say the same applies to PRC as well?

Following up on the post about assisted suicide, here's more about that Swiss clinic which is the subject of allegations by an Irish family:

Two families whose loved ones ended their lives at a Swiss clinic in secret have said they are heartbroken that another family has been put through a similar ordeal.

Anne Canning (51), from Wales, travelled to the Pegasos clinic, near Basel, to end her life in January following the tragic death of her only son. She told her family she was going on holidays.

Under similar circumstances, Alastair Hamilton (47) travelled from the UK to the clinic in 2023.

Following Mr Hamilton’s death, the clinic reportedly promised last year that it would always contact a person’s family before carrying out an assisted death.

However, Ms Canning’s family claim they were never informed.

Last week, the daughter of a Co ­Cavan-based woman who ended her life alone at the same clinic told the Irish Independent that the first she knew that her mother had died was when a volunteer for the group sent her a WhatsApp message.

Maureen Slough (58), who had a history of mental illness, travelled to the Pegasos clinic on July 8, having told her family she was going to Lithuania with a friend.

Now, I'm not going to argue over the right to die, when is suffering intolerable, religious objections, slippery slopes or the rest of it. What I'm going to do is say that this is a business (indeed, this is a claim made in the story by one of the families). And, just the same way that IVF has become a business, and embryonic selection (see the Herasight proceedings) will become a business, when we get into business territory, it's about profit. And to maximise profits, we reduce costs. If that means setting up a clinic that looks like a blocky industrial estate unit and skimping on postage, so be it.

There's some indication, at least from claims by these families, that procedures are not being followed through, or at the very least, merely rubber-stamped and not, in fact, keeping the promises they made about communication with and informing the families:

The Pegasos group said it received a letter from Ms Slough’s daughter, ­Megan ­Royal, saying she was aware of her mother’s wishes and accepted them.

It also said it verified the letter through an email response to her using an email address allegedly supplied by Ms Royal.

Ms Royal said she never wrote such a letter or verified any contact from ­Pegasos, and her family think Ms Slough may have forged the letter and verified it using an email address she created herself.

Her family have questioned why ­Pegasos staff did not ring Ms Royal on a number that Ms Slough had supplied to them for her.

The same way that someone in the comments over on ACX described her experiences with IVF and why the clinic downplayed/ignored her problems, it's the same answer here: it's a business now, and profit (not the message about "we'll compassionately give you what you so emotionally desire") is the motivation. And the more it becomes just another business, the more slippage we'll see. No, I don't mean slippery slope, I mean this kind of thing: we don't email you, you have to track your mother's ashes "using a code, like she was a parcel in the post", and hey, verbal promises aren't worth the paper they're written on, we're legal in this country so too bad.

Standards only last as long as the brakes are on. When we take the brakes off, then it's a business and death (and life) is a commodity to be monetised.

A person who travels to another country in secret to end their life has, by their actions, expressed a powerful preference. That preference is not just for death, but for a death conducted on their own terms, which in these cases explicitly involves secrecy from their family. They tell their loved ones they are going on holiday. They, allegedly in one case, forge letters and create fake email accounts to maintain the deception. This those not strike me as ideal, but I can't really condemn someone who is clearly this desperate to die.

From the patient’s perspective, the ideal outcome is one where their autonomy is maximally respected. For the clinic, this presents a dilemma. Who is their client? The patient who is paying for a service and demanding confidentiality, or the family who is not their client but has a profound emotional and moral stake in the outcome?

If they were merely a profit-maxxing company, the answer becomes clear. They could, with ease, tell the family to fuck off, or something a tad bit more polite than that. After all, they followed the letter of the law.

When the clinic reportedly promised to “always contact a person’s family”, it may have been making a well-intentioned but practically impossible promise. What does a clinic do when a patient insists their family not be contacted, or provides false information for them? If Maureen Slough did indeed forge a letter from her daughter, the clinic was not simply "skimping on postage". It was being actively deceived by its own client in a way that pitted its promise to families against its duty to the patient. The failure to make a phone call seems like a clear error. But in a context of deliberate deception, we can see it not just as a cost-cutting measure, but as a failure to be sufficiently paranoid in the face of a determined client. And the paranoia would have been pointless, the family has no legal right to stop the process. At most, everyone feels better if they're on board.

I run into similar issues every week. Hospitals are forbidden from divulging patient details, even if the voice over the phone claims that they're a brother/wife/best friend. Especially if the person has capacity to make decisions, and this lady seems to fit the bill.

Second, the characterization of Pegasos as "a business" may be both trivially true and misleading. Of course it is a business in that it charges fees for a service. But reducing its motivation solely to profit maximization seems to be a category error. It appears to be a mission driven organization, an ideological entity that must also be a business to survive. The people running it are almost certainly true believers in the cause of bodily autonomy and the right to die. They charge money, like many an NGO does, to pay the bills and keep the lights on.

Their own site says:

At Pegasos we philosophically believe that no one should be prevented from a VAD with us, simply because they lack the financial resources. Pegasos hopes that in the future we will be in a position to provide financial aid to those who would otherwise be unable to avail our service.

And I believe them. The regulatory paperwork alone must be an awful nightmare. If Charles Schwab is handing out big bucks to save on the expenses of more longterm pods and chicken feed, they're not getting a cut.

Finally, we must be wary of the availability heuristic. We are reading these stories in the newspaper precisely because they represent catastrophic failures. The family who has a peaceful, well-communicated experience with an assisted dying clinic does not generate headlines. At least not after the first dozen times.

We have no access to the base rates. How many clients does Pegasos serve in a year? For what percentage do these communication breakdowns occur? It is possible that these tragic cases represent a small number of "glitches" in a system that, for the most part, functions as intended by its clients. Or it is possible that they represent a systemic failure. The point is that from this handful of terrible anecdotes, we cannot know. You can come up with lurid anecdotes for just about anything, and in medicine?

I've already presented a quantitative analysis. The slope doesn't seem very slippery to me and it certainly hasn't reached the point where fair and open-minded advocates feel beholden to shut the whole thing down.

The Swiss have had legal assisted dying since 1941. If the "businessification" of death inevitably leads to this kind of procedural slippage, we should have seen decades of this. We should have a mountain of data on Swiss citizens being bundled off to industrial parks by greedy doctors against their families' wishes. Instead, we have a few tragic stories, mostly involving "suicide tourism," where the informational and logistical challenges are exponentially greater.

The complaint about tracking the ashes "like she was a parcel in the post" is emotionally powerful. But what's the alternative? A private courier hand-delivering the ashes internationally? Who is paying for that?

will become a business, when we get into business territory, it's about profit

A tired and overly generalized critique. Do the police run Burglary 101 classes when the crime rates get too low? Do cardiologists open McDonald's outside their hospital? Do the hospital admins squeeze tubes of trans-fats into the sandwiches served at their cafeterias?

In most professions, especially those with an ethical or ideological core, the profit motive coexists with, and is often constrained by, professional ethics, reputational incentives, and a genuine belief in the mission. A scandal like this is terrible for Pegasos, both for its "business" and its "crusade." It invites negative press, legal scrutiny, and tarnishes the very cause they champion.

A person who travels to another country to end their life has the agency that they can commit suicide the normal way.

I don’t advocate for putting cancer patients on a list of prohibited firearms possessors, even if I think them killing themselves is a bad thing.

There's a good deal of overlap between support for assisted suicide for everyone and support for nerfing the world so it's really difficult for anyone to kill themselves (e.g. bans on weapons, dangerous sports, etc)

Have you ever seen someone advocate for sports restrictions on the grounds of preventing suicides? I don’t think I have.

Firearms are a different story. People certainly make the argument. But I suspect causation goes the other way, and they’re using the suicide statistics as a motte for policies they want anyway. Ex. Prevent Firearm Suicide.

Have you ever seen someone advocate for sports restrictions on the grounds of preventing suicides? I don’t think I have.

No, nor am I claiming anyone has. I'm saying they'd nerf the world for other reasons as well.

Booooooo outgroup bad

Is it? Please explain.

He made a sweeping statement about people who's views he dislikes having other views he dislikes with 0 evidence or support

Is that not the definition of "booing the out-group"?

Well, fair enough. I suppose it didn't seem that way to me because

  1. I'm probably very biased,
  2. He hedged via "good deal of overlap", and
  3. It actually sounds correct, on the object level.

I actually suspect he's probably not wrong, but I'm unimpressed with the lack of rigour

Travelling to Switzerland to get MAID will impose much lower externalities on society than most other suicide methods.

Leaving aside obviously bad suicide methods like trains, you will in any case place your corpse in the way of people who did not sign up for this. EMTs. Loved ones. Police who break your front door after the neighbors complain about the smell. Random members of the public.

I have it on good authority that there are also other Swiss jobs than suicide assistant. They know what they signed up for, you pay them for handling your corpse and all the paperwork.

When the clinic reportedly promised to “always contact a person’s family”, it may have been making a well-intentioned but practically impossible promise. What does a clinic do when a patient insists their family not be contacted, or provides false information for them?

If it is not possible to do what they advertise, they shouldn't be advertising it. False advertising doesn't cease to be false because the thing you advertised was impossible, but you really wanted to do it.

And if truthfully advertising what they actually do leads to bad publicity, so be it.

This is an isolated demand for rigor. Even the KYC protocols for banks don't have a 100% success rate at stopping identity fraud or impersonation. Out of N Pegasos clients, it hardly strikes me as worthy of damnation that one of them went to such lengths to throw them off. What if she'd hired an actor to come along with her? What if she brought forged legal documents? How easy is that to check from Switzerland?

  1. Your argument also included "What does a clinic do when a patient insists their family not be contacted" which is a much easier case. They should have a policy of dealing with such requests, and they should be able to describe this policy in advance of it actually happening.

  2. If she brought forged legal documents that can't be checked, they can have a policy that treats patients who show up with uncheckable documents as patients who have no documents. If legal documents are even an issue, the whole point of having them instead of taking someone at their word is so that they can be checked; if they cannot, they are useless.

If she hires an actor, you're probably stuck, but then, she didn't.

If she brought forged legal documents that can't be checked, they can have a policy that treats patients who show up with uncheckable documents as patients who have no documents.

I hate to break it to you, but most legal documents are basically uncheckable. Even a notarized document can likely be faked without too much trouble. Government-issued documents (id cards, passports, banknotes) are certainly harder to forge, but also require someone who is familiar with the safety features.

If legal documents are even an issue, the whole point of having them instead of taking someone at their word is so that they can be checked; if they cannot, they are useless.

That is not at all the point. The point is that verbal statements reported by third parties are notoriously unreliable. If Susan says: "Bob said I can sell his car", that is bound to create a he-said-she-said situation. Nobody will ever untangle if it was a honest misunderstanding or if one of them was lying.

This is why Susan needs a signed document to sell Bob's car. Can she easily forge Bob's signature? Sure. But that is now a serious criminal offense! If it is found that Bob never signed the paperwork, she is looking at jail time, and can not claim that she just misunderstood Bob's intention.

With assisted suicides, the difference is that nobody is going to put Susan's urn into jail.

I am sure that for every such sob story, there is also a sob story where someone could not get their next-of-kin to sign a paper stating that they were aware of the patient's intention to opt for MAID. A patient in Ireland would be hard-pressed to compel a relative to sign such a document through the court system. Likely, they would get themselves committed.

So I can totally understand that Swiss law does not require patients to provide a notarized genealogy with all the relevant death certificates to prove that whom they say is their next of kin is that.

With assisted suicides, the difference is that nobody is going to put Susan's urn into jail.

That reasoning proves a little too much--it's basically saying that because Susan can't be put in jail, legal documents aren't useful at all. In that case there's no point in even asking "what if she brought forged legal documents". And this also amounts to admitting that the whole system has a fundamental, unfixable, flaw in it--there's no way to verify that Susan is telling the truth.

The proper response to this is not to say "well, they can't verify the documents so that doesn't matter", it's to say "well, they can't verify the documents, so the system is unworkable". Making sure that they're not killing more people than the assisted suicide law allows is actually important; if they have no way to make sure, they shouldn't be doing it at all.

I am sure that for every such sob story, there is also a sob story where someone could not get their next-of-kin to sign a paper stating that they were aware of the patient's intention to opt for MAID. A patient in Ireland would be hard-pressed to compel a relative to sign such a document through the court system. Likely, they would get themselves committed.

The answer to this is "only take patients from places where they can legally get documents", not "stop asking for documents".

Making sure that they're not killing more people than the assisted suicide law allows is actually important; if they have no way to make sure, they shouldn't be doing it at all.

Suppose that you are a Swiss marriage registrar, and that Switzerland does not want to facilitate marriages where one or both partners a coerced into marrying. There are approaches with very different costs to filter these out. You could just keep a lookout for people who look unhappy or nervous. You could have a separate private chats with both the groom and the bride and mention that there are ways out for people who are coerced. You could require both of them to separately talk to a psychologist for an hour. You could require both to undergo psychotherapy for a year. You could just declare defeat and refuse to marry anyone, because it is not possible to know what motivations people have for sure.

In reality, you will probably not do that last thing generally -- even if you are fine with not having marriages, the same argument would also extend to employment contracts, loans, purchases, sex, etc. Or few people would argue that as you are quite likely to be able to smuggle a few grams of cocaine in a truck without it getting detected by customs, we either should abolish customs or stop international trade.

The assisted suicide case here was not even a matter of consent. But I will be sure that sooner or later, a case where consent is violated will appear. The chance that the evil family of some rich guy will kidnap their beloved pet and threaten to torture it horribly unless they opt for MAID is low, but not zero.

There is a conversion factor for violating the autonomy of those who would really want to live to violating the autonomy of those who really want to die. We probably disagree about the magnitude. From a utilitarian standpoint, I think that we should not minimize the suffering of those denied MAID.

Suppose a djinn offered you to prolong your life by a decade. If you accept, they will flip a coin. Heads, you get to live in the 98th percentile of happiness. Tails, you get to live in the second percentile of happiness (for your age cohort), with no way out. They also reveal that you will be 70 at the time your extra decade starts.

Personally, my answer would be fuck no. Sure, that decade in the 98th percentile would be sweet -- travelling, having sex with a great partner, enjoying life without being trapped in the rat race, playing with your grandkids. But the horror of the 2nd percentile would be much greater. You body failing, your mind fogging -- but not to the point where you do not notice any more, without social contacts, getting bedsores in some retirement home, in constant pain, waiting for a death which will not come for a decade.

In reality, we are not subject to the veil of ignorance imposed by the djinn. We can just ask the 70yo's what their quality of life is and if they want to die or not, and we will mostly get accurate answers. Nobody suggests randomly murdering elderly in the hope that they might welcome death.

So the next djinn offers their deal, which is the same as before, only you have a way to die before the decade is over -- say by stating your wish to die on seven subsequent days. They warn you that it is possible that someone will pressure you into taking that option even if you are in the happy branch.

This seems like a great deal to me. Sure, I lose some utility in the happy branch, but I also reduce the suffering in the pain branch by a factor of 5000.

The answer to this is "only take patients from places where they can legally get documents", not "stop asking for documents".

Luckily, this is not how liberal governments deal with foreigners whose governments are uncooperative. If you are a refugee from Iran, and the regime hates you and will not give you any ID documents, then a reasonable country would recognize your plight and try to work around it, not just ship you back to Iran because without ID you can not stay legally.

The Swiss people (or their representatives) have decided that humans in Switzerland should have a right to assisted suicide. Why should they deny this to foreigners just because their backwards government is uncooperative?

This is the same problem as I have with open borders proponents: If you want to have open borders, then make your case for it and get laws passed which say that we have open borders. But don't have laws which say that we don't have open borders, but then work to make it easy as possible to not follow the laws.

If you really want there to be no conditions for assisted suicide, then have policies (and laws if necessary) saying "there are no conditions for assisted suicide". But if you can't or won't do that, don't have policies that say that there are conditions, but then set things up so that they are trivial to work around.

Arguments like "what if we compare various possibilities a djinn might give you and what if we ask the 70 year old", etc. are arguments that there shouldn't be conditions, or at least not the conditions we have now. They are not good arguments for "we should have conditions but since conditions are bad let's make sure they don't work".

If you are a refugee from Iran, and the regime hates you and will not give you any ID documents, then a reasonable country would recognize your plight and try to work around it,

If you are a refugee from Iran, and Iran won't let you have documents, the other country should try to determine that you actually are a refugee and from Iran, even if it is not as easy to determine this as it would be if you had an ID. If the other country says "Iran doesn't give out IDs, so we'll just accept everyone who claims to be an Iranian refugee", that's a bad policy which is forseeably going to be abused. (In fact, similar policies are abused in real life by "refugees" that aren't really refugees.)

Also, it's a lot easier to revoke a bad refugee status (or a marriage, or your other examples) than to revoke a suicide.

Do cardiologists open McDonald's outside their hospital?

Genius vertical integration, we should find some VCs

Look, Private Equity firms have a reputation for evil, but I haven't heard of them going that far.

At Pegasos we philosophically believe that no one should be prevented from a VAD with us

The tipoff that these people know that what they are doing is not quite right (or at least that they are running against thousands of years of ongoing overwhelming consensus, and run a strong risk of hanging from a tree themselves if the public at large were to start paying attention) is that they will never call a spade a spade -- "VAD", "MAID", whatever other cutesy acronyms they might generate, the fact is it's suicide (at best) -- why not call it that?

The tipoff that these people know that what they are doing is not quite right (or at least that they are running against thousands of years of ongoing overwhelming consensus, and run a strong risk of hanging from a tree themselves if the public at large were to start paying attention)

The thing is, there's a vast gulf between your first phrase and your parenthetical. If they knew what they were doing is "not quite right", that would be damning. If all they actually know is that they're running against overwhelming and violent consensus, it is not.

I mean I'm more sympathetic to the latter for sure -- but "thou shalt not kill" has a little more weight of history behind it than "two weeks to flatten the curve" or whatever.

In my heart-of-hearts it's probably that it smells like a sales-job, as much as anything -- and I hate those.

Moses brought back "thou shalt not kill" from Mount Sinai, it had more exceptions to it than any rule stated so fundamentally should possibly have. It did not apply to people from other tribes -- killing the kids of enemy tribes was fine. It did not apply to people found guilty of any of the numerous crimes which were punished by stoning. Or being willing to sacrifice your kid if God gaslighted you into thinking that this is what he wanted. And don't even think about non-human persons.

Killing people just because they ask you to has always been kind of fraught though -- particularly doing it exchange for filthy lucre.

non-human persons

Is there such a thing? I mean, AIUI, unless you're talking about the legal construct that is the "legal personhood" of things like corporations (and I don't think you are), modern US law says humanity is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for personhood; and, also AIUI, most countries aren't much different. (I've seen this discussed in the context of legal issues surrounding potential future contact with intelligent alien life, including the claim that the branch of the US Federal government with the proper legal authority over such contact would be the Fish and Wildlife Service.)

I think another comparable industry is trans-medicalism, which is clearly, and documentably associated with profit motivations, and led to an incredible rise of something that was once much much rarer.

much of self_made's response below is a predictable mix of techno-libertarian priors and false assurance against corruption (or simply runaway incentives to overexent) by profit-seeking via ideological purity.

In most professions, especially those with an ethical or ideological core, the profit motive coexists with, and is often constrained by, professional ethics, reputational incentives, and a genuine belief in the mission.

Again, with the case of trans, we can se that was is laughably not the case. We saw the ideological core of trans distort and blind a lot of otherwise obvious ethical, and reputational issues. And we are seeing the backlash now.

Also much like the trans question, we are going to have two movies on one screen interpretation of any rapid rise: A need being met vs creeping pressure and social memeplex.

Self-made's objection is again the same tautology that is used to defend an ever growing number of trans individuals as self-justifying:

A person who travels to another country in secret to end their life has, by their actions, expressed a powerful preference.

If powerful preference is the driving justification, then people with ideological motivations will push their hand on the social memeplex / overton window, even if just to make the existing number with these preferences or marginal preferences more free; it will cost lots of money to do this, and lots of money with be made. And then the number will grow inorganically.

This is exactly how it works.

Most people’s opposition to the trans thing is solely aesthetic, in that it is about pretending that a physical state of being is something other than that it is. It is biologically impossible to go from being a man to a woman or vice versa. Suicide has no such mythos, in fact legalized euthanasia is to some extent about the end of a particular mythology surrounding suicide in which the body belongs not to the man, but to God. It is about cold, hard, material reality.

Most people’s opposition to the trans thing is solely aesthetic

Not if you have kids.. The consequences go far beyond "solely aesthetic".

I've got a 1 year old.

If a magical pill existed that instantly flipped my daughter's gender to male and then society proceed to see her as a male and she went from quite-likely to commit suicide with 'gender dysphoria' to absolutely cured of 'gender dysphoria' by the pill. I would probably be a little put-off by her taking the hypothetical magical pill when she's an adult, but largely fine.

Alternatively if we existed in an alternate universe where gender was solely defined by what color badge you wore, and everybody was happy to change their perspectives of an individual's gender if they swapped from the blue badge to the red badge. Bit weird, but nothing fundamentally wrong with it.

Unfortunately the current gender-transition thing is an insane death cult that overwhelmingly leads to suicide and invasive surgeries that create a very distant proxy of the target gender appearance.

I find the 'it's just aesthetics' argument to be an empty dodge in these spaces. I understand the intended usage, but it's almost a nonsequitor. Rather, your attempt to distinguish the aesthetics of suicide from trans, kind of makes my point; Because the trans-advocate doesn't see it in your terms.

The point I'm making does not rely on trans and suicide being ontologically similar; only that the nature of the social-legal issue will follow similar social-activitst/profitmaking paths.

You can regard the end result of those paths as of different moral worth based on the object level issue, but the libertarian objections which try to deny that social modulation and profit-making greatly influence these systems, is naiive or lying.

I am very skeptical about profit motive in trans medicine being a notable cause of the rise, rather than both being a result of a social movement that involved true-believers creating or taking over trans medical institutions. As a matter of chronology I'm pretty sure the movement came first, I remember the ancestor of the present trans movement (and SJW stuff more generally) already existing back when a common complaint was that medical gatekeepers would require prospective (adult) trans people to live as the opposite gender for a year before prescribing them hormones. That wasn't a policy designed to maximize the number of trans people, and I believe it fell to the trans movement not them suddenly realizing it was reducing profits.

The rise of "non-binary gender identity", for instance, doesn't seem like something that would have happened if it was mostly driven by medical profit motive. Yes it is sometimes medicalized - a few days ago The New Yorker had a puff piece about a mother and her "non-binary"/"demi-girl" daughter who went on testosterone at 11 and got "top surgery" at 13 - but it seems much less common than with conventional binary trans identification. The trans movement has similar patterns to all sorts of SJW stuff with no profit motive. Nobody is going to doctor due to identifying as "demisexual", and indeed people who identify as "asexual/grey-asexual" are presumably less likely to seek treatment than those who identify as having "hypoactive sexual desire disorder".

While it isn't well know, there is an immense profit motive for trans medicine. Jennifer Pritzker came out as trans as an adult man in 2013, well before the social movement spun up in its modern incarnation. The market cap for gender transitioning is $200 billion. While I wouldn't say that the profit motive is the main reason for the increase in trans identification, it's at least a contributing factor, just because of the immensely powerful players identifying as trans, as well as the immense size of the market. The state of trans research is a mess, and recommendations are made based on faulty evidence; it is plausible that such reduced standards are pushed (or at least encouraged/ignored) by pharmaceutical/insurance companies that just want to make a quick buck.

I'm rather torn on this issue.

On the one hand, I do think that people have a fundamental right to commit suicide if they want to, and I think it would be healthy if we as a culture took some steps to demythologize suicide. Specifically, it would be nice if we could revoke its status as a "superweapon"; all too often, certain unsavory individuals will use "you're making me suicidal!" as an emotional manipulation tactic to immediately end all rational discussion and assert the priority of their own immediate desires. If these outbursts were met with indifference instead of panic, maybe people wouldn't be so quick to go there. Alan Watts once mentioned that he would occasionally get people coming up to him and telling him that they were suicidal, and his response was always, "Ok! Well, you can do that if you want". And in the majority of cases, the person would immediately start feeling better upon hearing this; it simply "deflated" whatever problem they had become fixated on. What happens sometimes is that people get stuck in a powerful negative feedback loop where they feel suicidal, and then they realize that that desire is bad and wrong and they shouldn't want to do that, which makes them feel even worse, which makes them more suicidal, and so on and so forth. By demythologizing suicide, you make it a less attractive option in the first place and you cut off the feedback loop.

On the other hand, you are correct to point out that there are clear dangers associated with suicide becoming a "business" (or even worse, an "institution"), and this institutionalization is indicative of a fundamental underlying current of cultural nihilism.

Specifically, it would be nice if we could revoke its status as a "superweapon"; all too often, certain unsavory individuals will use "you're making me suicidal!" as an emotional manipulation tactic to immediately end all rational discussion and assert the priority of their own immediate desires.

Way ahead of you. If someone threaten to kill themselves to get something from me, I will happily call the cops and they will spend a night or two in an asylum. I have done it before. It is unlikely to restrict the patient's long-term autonomy, and will put an end to further blackmail attempts. (Not that I would stick around such a person, these days.)

OTOH, when someone were to tell me about suicide plans which are not conditional on my behavior, I would probably let them do it if I came to the conclusion that they had made up their mind.

So I had a cousin commit suicide this year. I don't know the exact means and methods he used, seemed garish to ask at his funeral, and frankly it doesn't change anything to me how he did it. He suffered into his 50's with mental health issues, and I can only assume the ruins of the life he was still inhabiting overwhelmed him. I wish he hadn't done it. I wish I could see him again, have a cigar, and shoot the shit for another evening. I wish it wasn't so hard for him to exist. But I can't change it.

The pain it caused in his mother, who he saw all the time, and his sister, who he saw less often being states away, was beyond words. That said, as nightmarish as that act was to them, there at least was no 3rd party to the act to complicate their feelings of grief. There were no accomplices who gave him advice, walked him through the act, supplied him with means and methods, or even just did it for him. When all was said and done, he took all the guilt for the act to the grave with him, and saved his family the further grief of having anyone else to be angry with, anyone else's actions to judge.

I can accept that some people just want out. I can accept that though it may be painful for their families, their decisions about what to do with their life is theirs to make. I don't think I can accept third parties being involved, making it easier, "normalizing" it, and complicating the grief of an already unimaginable difficult thing to cope with.

Before I was born, a culture war was fought over ending life, and the defenders of it ran on the slogan of "Safe, Legal and Rare". 63 million abortions in the United States later, it's clear this was just a slogan. I don't know why I would trust these same people a second time.

Well, not me personally, I wasn't alive for "Safe, Legal and Rare", but you know what I mean.

It’s worth noting how total the failure of safe, legal, and rare was- this ain’t even a ‘in practice, Dutch hospices give power of attorney to people who don’t agree with their patients on end of life issues’. Abortion advocates literally don’t advocate for it being rare.

Abortion advocates advocate for widespread education about and research on alternative contraceptive methods like the iud / coil, condoms, the pill and so on, which with regular and responsible use significantly lower the likelihood of someone needing an abortion.

And they don’t consider ‘there will be fewer abortions’ a reason for pushing IUD’s the way they did in the 90s. Fewer babies yes, but not the ‘rare’ part of abortion.

Do they not?

The women who are getting IUDs obviously prefer them to abortions. Providers like Planned Parenthood seem happy to offer them. What more do you expect?

I think that for a typical liberal woman not looking to conceive, the preference order is:

  1. not get pregnant (using birth control)
  2. getting an abortion
  3. giving birth

So birth control is absolutely preventing abortions. It is also preventing some babies being born.

Of course, the pro-life crowd has largely not embraced birth control as a method to prevent abortions, which is telling. While I get that there are age-old Christian objections to abortions specifically, I think that a lot of the point of being pro-life is to want to punish women for a sinful lifestyle. "If you fuck around, you get punished by being a single mother."

You believe pro-life advocates see motherhood as a punishment?

Only in the uncharitable case; more charitably, the inevitability of motherhood as an inescapable consequence of sex forms exceptional leverage when arguing for the cultural aesthetic they want.

If they can (unnaturally) impose the former condition, the latter naturally follows- it's the same thing the abortionists are doing when they argue for their aesthetic.

"More sex, less baby death" is not a goal the anti-sex side or the pro-baby-death side can publicly profess, since the anti-sex side promises less baby death as a consequence of less sex[1], and the pro-baby-death side promises more baby death as a consequence of more sex[1].

[1] Well, I say 'sex' but it's more 'choice', as in, which faction gets to write the social rules about how women get to leverage sex as a meal ticket. The "celebrate my abortion" stance is consistent with this, as is the "life begins at conception" one (but requires a bunch of other social context to fully understand why, since this is more a piece of a larger system that adds up to leverage rather than bestows it by itself).

I believe that the Christian right, which is the camp of most pro-lifers, see non-procreative sex as inherently sinful.

There are probably some people who really hate abortions but are fine with fucking around, and will get their daughter an IUD at age 12 so she is protected from pregnancy, while also being fine with her experimenting with her 14yo boyfriend.

But the modal pro-lifer would emphasize that abstinence until marriage is the only 100% effective birth control. (For perfect use. For hormone-laden teens who do not typically get married before 20, I think that the Pearl Index for abstinence would be rather abysmal.)

Take the official Catholic position (my emphasis):

Therefore We base Our words on the first principles of a human and Christian doctrine of marriage when We are obliged once more to declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children. (14) Equally to be condemned, as the magisterium of the Church has affirmed on many occasions, is direct sterilization, whether of the man or of the woman, whether permanent or temporary. (15) Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means. (16)

So it is not that abortion is very bad and using a condom or getting a sterilization after your fourth kid is a little bad -- they are all similarly worthy of condemnation. At the end of the day, at least the pope cares little about unborn kids being killed and a whole lot about people having deliberately non-procreative sex.

I think from a Catholic theology point of view, abortion, sodomy, sex outside marriage, sex within marriage with contraceptives and masturbation are all mortal sins. If you commit any of them and are not cleansed by baptism or confession, you go to hell. Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, and all that.

In conclusion, I think that the CR does not see single motherhood as a punishment for fornicating women, but simply as a natural consequence of her act which should be her cross to bear. But the underlying idea seems to be that during the heydays of Christianity -- in the good old days -- the choices of a woman were (1) marriage, (2) chastity (e.g. becoming a nun) or (3) being a fornicator, which meant to be an outcast of polite society. (Sure, gays and lesbians could always fuck around without biological consequences, but at least for men there were severe legal consequences instead.) Birth control and abortion have changed that equilibrium in a way which leads to a lot more sexual immorality especially from women (as men were probably always going to whorehouses). If birth control is illegal, then a woman are much less likely to engage in PIV sex outside marriage and will have their hands full with their kids instead of dyeing their hair green and studying feminism, or something -- I do not claim that I would pass the CR ideological Turing test.

Clearly you wouldn’t pass a CR ideological Turing test- literally, having a kid is seen as a blessing. Do you hate children or something? Evangelicals and Catholics don’t either.

That said, as nightmarish as that act was to them, there at least was no 3rd party to the act to complicate their feelings of grief.

I actually think the method in which he committed suicide does matter somewhat.

It's hard to make up a counter factual when we don't know the "factual". Would his mom's pain have been better or worse if the two options were:

  1. he goes to a clinic and gets euthanized painlessly

  2. she discovered his headless corpse after he takes it off with a 12 gauge?

I don't have a child, but I think stumbling into the horrific aftermath of a DIY suicide would be infinitely worse than receiving the worst phone call of my lifetime.

For 2), I can think of many many more colorful horrible scenarios. Including but not limited to walked into a failed suicide, where instead he's writhing around on the floor blind, as he shot out his optic nerves but didn't die (never shoot temple to temple kids, in your mouth, up and back).

I guess the counter-counter factual is how would they feel if they discover him in bed peacefully lying there after ODing, or slumped in his car after flooding the garage. I guess that's probably roughly equivalent to receiving the "we just euthanized him, sorry" call.

But the call will always "work", DIY guaranteed 100% will result in all the hypotheticals I'm making up, and more.

If we respect basic autonomy, why should an adult’s adult children have to sign off on whether they are allowed to end their life? As @self_made_human says, Switzerland has had legal euthanasia since the 1940s, and major clinics offering the service since the 1980s.

This is in possibly the most civilized country in the world, certainly in the top 3. People live better, longer, healthier lives in Switzerland than almost anywhere else. Things in Switzerland just work. Even from other wealthy countries like the US, going to Switzerland often feels the way a Malaysian must feel going to Singapore or something - there is a clear upgrade in the quality of life in a general sense, things are just cleaner, better, more efficient, more advanced, more premium. Along almost any scale it would be good for any other country to become more like Switzerland, and bad for Switzerland to become more like any other country.

The functional outcome of articles like this is for other Western countries to try to start banning their terminally ill citizens from going to Switzerland. This would be laughable, since you can just cross the border, but the effect would be to harass innocent people for no reason.

There are things that work in a high trust society that don't in a low trust society. Switzerland, notably, almost singularly in Western Europe, is still super homogeneous, and hasn't thrown open it's welfare state to 3rd worlders. Good for them that they haven't manage to slide down some slippery slope when it comes to assisted suicide. But they've made profoundly different choices about the type of nation they want to be than just about all their peers. I doubt we can pick and choose how we wish to emulate them without there being significant unintended consequences.

Switzerland is less homogenous than much of Western Europe and has relatively large amounts of non-European immigration. In any case, given that legal euthanasia is nonexistent in the Islamic world (for largely the same religious reasons Christians oppose it) I find it hard to believe mass immigration from there will lead to greater permissiveness.

super homogeneous

Is there any other country in Europe that has as many official languages (4, not including English as a common lingua franca)? Granted, Singapore has that many too, but I'd hesitate on calling either "homogeneous" across the board.

A Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman, ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty’.

Milton Friedman replied, ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either’

Source

I fear the steps to solve such issues involve impossible tasks. If the first step on your master plan involves 'First, you must become Swiss', we have quite the road ahead of us.

often feels the way a Malaysian must feel going to Singapore or something - there is a clear upgrade in the quality of life in a general sense, things are just cleaner, better, more efficient, more advanced, more premium

To a certain degree this is the case though the gap's closed a lot between the absolute nicest parts of Malaysia and Singapore. Also Singaporeans radiate a certain energy of chipper productivity which is Flanders-like and annoying.

That is because the nicest parts of Malaysia are essentially outposts of Singapore, demographically speaking.

Yes and no.

I live in a 'demographic outpost of Singapore' suburb in the Klang Valley which is nice for that reason. Kuala Lumpur City Center is an outpost of oil money and is also pretty nice without being a demographic outpost of Singapore perse. Malaysia's rich enough and construction's cheap enough that the better areas are on par with what's available down South. The gap's closed in a lot of ways

KLCC and the wealthier suburbs, like the gated communities around Putrajaya, are pretty unique. I think we discussed them before. Clearly the oil money is going to someone, but much of Malaysia is still pretty poor, and comparable with other parts of ASEAN that aren’t Singapore.

Also, even in KLCC there are pockets of low quality. Car-focused, walking very difficult, those meth / crack addicts on the pedestrian foot bridges just behind the big mall itself, still quite noticeable garbage on the street even sometimes. It’s just very clear it’s still a developing country, and of course plenty of developing countries have rich elites who like Chanel and Lamborghinis.

I agree that Malaysia walkability is generally awful, but I've been to about 60% of the country's major cities and have only seen pockets of what I'd consider proper Poverty. Even places like Sabah and Sarawak tend to have a floor of 'okay' housing, for a given value of okay. I've lived in Darwin and spent time in Broome & a few other parts of Northern Australia and I've seen a lot worse than the typical Malaysian dwellings in a similar climate.

Personally I'd consider KLCC a bit of a confusing dump. Petaling Jaya is where most of the best areas for livability are, partly due to demographic reasons and there's islands of gated communities practically everywhere in the greater Klang Valley. Also the vibes in Putrajaya where it's the government swinging around large amounts of oil money and still a bit of a ghost town are quite different to the affluent suburbs of PJ.

Because it's the adult kids end up with "hi, here's your mother's ashes in a parcel, oh you say nobody notified you? not our problem anymore!"

And they're likely the ones who'll end up walking into a house to find the body unexpectedly if they do just commit suicide.

Thats a problem with suicide generally, not the Swiss system specifically. The Swiss system at least means some kids will be informed in advance who wouldn't otherwise be.

You have to compare it with "standard" suicide and in almost all of those relatives are going to have to unexpectedly deal with remains. Excepting those where the suicidal person tries to disappear themselves. But that of course leaves family members with other issues instead.

I don't see the need to complicate things. Assisted suicide is objectively bad, and restricting a persons freedom to commit suicide is objectively bad if and only if said person is having an episode (a temporary state of mind of lowered lucidity).

Making it into a business incentivizes death (by incentivizing profits, which is a trivial result of the death of unproductive members of society). Do I need more arguments? Did I even need this one? Assisted suicide is never needed. Suicide is trivial, and obvious. Obviously trivial. But in case there's some psychological defense mechanism which blind people to obvious, painless methods of suicide, I'm not going to write the method for now. If anyone reading this is suicidal, it's a good thing that they think they need to travel to an entire other country just to stop being alive. Being unable to think of a fast, easy and painless way out is great.

Suicide is trivial, and obvious.

Also incredibly unfair to subject innocent bystanders to. Jumping in front of a train is horrific for the train driver, plus the massive inconvenience to thousands of people as train schedules get disrupted.

Jumping off a high structure runs the risk of hitting someone at the bottom, and guarantees some flavor of first responder has to scrape you off the pavement/fish out your bloated corpse. Let alone the trauma to whoever finds you first if it's just a random who gets to watch you splat.

Basically every flavor of at home suicide also involves at minimum a first responder having to deal with your aftermath, and again runs a very high risk of traumatizing a friend or family member who discovers your corpse.

Also people are fucking stupid, so failed suicides are guaranteed. That means you also eat up finite medical resources AND probably have a lower quality of life.

Suicide is fucking barbaric, and honestly pretty selfish.

One of the methods I have in mind can be done at home, and if they fail, I don't think they do lasting damage (though I'm not sure). Of course, somebody will find your corpse, which might traumatize them. Suicide can at best be painless for the person who dies - it's painful to everyone connected with them.

I think many suicidal people won't go through with it as long as they know that somebody actually cares about their well-being (even if only superficially). One of the things which leads to suicide is the fear that the world doesn't care about you. Of course, there's multiple kinds, and some of them are rather selfish. Suffering generally leads to selfishness as it turns your perception inwards.

It's pretty much a given that somebody is going to have to deal with each and every one of our corpses at one point, unless (maybe) we get buried in an avalanche and churned into a glacier while on some sort of Hock submarine ride expedition; even then, you can't really say whether somebody might come across your mummified corpse 30,000 years from now.

It doesn't strike me as obvious that paying a Swiss person to murder you and deal with your corpse afterwards is less harmful than a paramedic finding you poisoned in the tub or something -- in fact the sterility of it all is a big part of the problem for me.

I mean one big difference is the Swiss person is consenting to dealing with your body and is paid explicitly to do so.

You might argue the paramedic consents by virtue of their job, which is true, but their time is also finite and could be better spent on a QALY-basis helping alive people.

Also the person who finds you might be a family member, friend, or random innocent, none of whom contented to this or are paid to deal with it, which is just pure negative utility.

You might argue the paramedic consents by virtue of their job, which is true, but their time is also finite and could be better spent on a QALY-basis helping alive people.

And the Swiss presumably have better things to do than killing people?

Also the person who finds you might be a family member, friend, or random innocent, none of whom contented to this or are paid to deal with it, which is just pure negative utility.

Perhaps this encourages the suicidal people to rethink their course of action?

In an case, life and death are both messy -- and I'm not a utilitarian.

Suicide is fucking barbaric, and honestly pretty selfish.

By that measure, every kind of death is. Someone always ends up having to deal with the corpse.

Suicide is fucking barbaric, and honestly pretty selfish.

That depends on the alternatives. If you want to argue that jumping of a tall building after we have reasonable legislation for assisted suicides, I agree with you.

But as long as such legislation is not in place, my attitude is fuck society. I would still prefer methods which are unlikely to endanger or traumatize others, but if society does not provide a non-messy way out, they can hardly expect me to stay alive just to avoid making a mess.

Look at it this way. I believe in my autonomy to decide if I live or die (within the obvious biological limits, until we can get around them). I would happily blow the brains out of someone who is attempting to murder me. If some 6yo sees this they will likely be traumatized, and that is bad, but at the end of the day I value my autonomy over my life more than the kid's lack of trauma. I do not think that this is unreasonable, and few would suggest that I am not justified here.

But this autonomy is a double-edged sword. Wanting to die is just as valid a choice as wanting to continue to live. I would not blow my brains out in front of a group of kindergardeners if I have a better choice, of course. But at the end of the day, my autonomy comes first.

I agree with everything you said and that's why I'm very much in favor of MAID

Can you, uh, rely on the most miserable, desperate portion of the population to make optimal decisions? Optimal for the rest of us, that is. It’s not like they’re going to be around to clean up.

In the best case, that’s first responders removing a body. I think most cases are messier, more personal, or otherwise worse. They’re externalities to the suicide. Mitigating those is worth something.

incentivizing profits

Okay, but that’s a fully general argument against doing stuff. Plenty of companies are naturally incentivized towards collateral damage. We generally handle this by regulating them instead of banning their industry outright.

Well, you can't, but I still think this is the only correct answer. If somebody wants to kill themselves for say, a year non stop, then at that point, it's not just a hasty decision they've made because they sank into a bad mindset for some time. Depriving them of freedom for extended periods of time in order to 'keep them safe' wouldn't be right.

Assisted suicide is a terrible idea. You cannot possibly regulate this, it's simply a lost cause. It will be used to mass-murder the elder population for economic reasons. I can see many many ways to abuse this and zero ways to make it even slightly unlikely to happen. Suicide should remain one of these things which is illegal, but which nobody can stop you from doing if you really, really want to.

I'm skeptical of every popular modern thing which could have been introduced decades earlier if we wanted to. In almost every case, the reason we didn't do said thing earlier is because we argued that they were terrible ideas. And only now, as the modern world is becoming increasingly ignorant of traditional arguments against these things do we consider them "good ideas". They're chesterton's fences. Other examples are IoT, online IDs, social credit scores, mass immigration, censorship laws, guilt by association and "fact checking". I'm too lazy to think of more, but the years to come will provide us with plenty more examples

Given that somebody has waited a whole year longing, nonstop, for death, he should be allowed to die. If he must die, it should minimize the harm done to those who survive him. Therefore, he should be allowed to seek assistance.

I understand the perverse incentives for his caretakers, his beneficiaries, his insurer, and the welfare state. A random nonprofit in a foreign country does not have these same incentives.

I'm skeptical of every popular modern thing which could have been introduced decades earlier if we wanted to.

Naturally.

In almost every case, the reason we didn't do said thing earlier is because we argued that they were terrible ideas.

This is certainly not true. It’s not even true for your examples. Some of them didn’t make any sense before modern technology. Others are playing games with definitions—how much immigration is “mass” immigration, exactly? And the others are laughable. Do you seriously think censorship laws were held at bay by “traditional arguments”?

I think assisted suicide also harms those close to you, so being found in your apartment is not that much worse. Except maybe for the cleaning. Anyway, I'd agree if not for the pervsese incentives. You can have two entities A and B which are structurally safe from exploitation, but which can be exploited if you connect them as (A + B). An easy example is that countries cannot lagally spy on their own citizens, so they spy on each others citizens and share the information (FVEY). In my intuition, corruption is the inability to keep things separated, but "optimization" pushes us in the direction of centralization and higher connectivity between everything, which is why I expect these issues to get worse.

IoT is kind of new, but you still have this line from 1979: "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision". 46 years later, and idiots go "What if my fridge could order new milk by itself!? I'm a genius!"

"mass" is quite subjective, but the numbers have gone up a lot and there's many clear reasons for that. One of them is that we used to filter migration so that people who seemed skilled/competent and at least somewhat aligned with the culture of the destination made it through. That filter is now gone, immigration is purely altruism, it's not an economic investment.

And yes, censorship was held at bay by clear principles. Almost everything wrong with the internet is because we've ignored these insights:

1: You're innocent until proven guilty.

2: Guns are not to blame for murderers, knives are not to blame for stabbings, supermarkets are not to blame for theft, an online service is not to blame for criminal behaviour by users, car manufacturers are not to blame for my reckless driving, Google is not to blame for torrent websites, and torrent websites are not to blame for pirated content, and I'm not a criminal if a friend of mine commits a crime. Sentences like "You're either with us or against us" are mere propaganda. These are basically all the same thing, but I'm not sure there's a word for this concept, so I cannot describe it well.

3: Open communication is the best path to truth. Silencing anyone is objectively worse. An arbiter of truth is a ridiculus concept (which is why the 1949 book 1984 ridiculed the idea). Blind faith to science, too, goes against the principles of science.

4: You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

5: Ownership. You don't really own anything like you use to. This has a lot of negative consequences as well.

I'm fairly sure even John Stuart Mill understood all these principles, why there can be no exceptions, and why there can be no hybrid solution which is better. I'm not too knowledgable about politics, or even history, but I do know some very important principles, and most issues which appears "new" to regular people is something that I consider solved more than 100 years ago. My heuristic is "if it breaches any of these principles, it's bad", and no matter what issues I throw at my principles, they gracefully solve them

If those principles were enough to gracefully preempt censorship, we’d never have had the original Comstock Act. Puritanical book-bannings. Witch hunts for communists and anarchists. Acting as if our elders had it all figured out is the laziest sort of rose-tinted glasses.

I find myself curious. Are there any cases where your principles haven’t guided you to agree with whatever Fox News has most recently said?

That's likely due to the influence of Christianity being stronger than the influence of classic liberalism. But isn't this also explained by most people being stupid? I think most dumb ideas are prevented by a low ratio of the population (perhaps 10%) knowing that they're dumb ideas. When the ratio of knowledgeable people falls too low, bad things happen. This is especially true today, since the dumb average person has more decision power than ever, and since there's a lot of money in promoting dumb ideas (smarthomes, cars with internet access, useless LLMs in every product, etc). It's memetic warfare. Since most people are too dumb to think ahead, they will need to experience negative consequences first hand in order to learn. And these learned lessons are quickly forgotten. Online IDs are being now implimented in the UK, but this was actually tried before in the past, around year 2020. The idea was already shut down once before, and the arguments that people wrote against it online were a sort of vaccine, but like I said, insights disappear, and then people retry terrible ideas.

I can't answer your second question as I've never watched Fox News. I basically reject everything modern. How could anything I say be downstream of recent propaganda when I came to these conclusions more than 15 years ago?

And only now, as the modern world is becoming increasingly ignorant of traditional arguments against these things do we consider them "good ideas". They're chesterton's fences. Other examples are IoT, online IDs, social credit scores, mass immigration, censorship laws, guilt by association and "fact checking".

  • IoT and online IDs and social credit scores are becoming a thing because technological progress makes them feasible. In 1994, when most people were offline and the few which were online were mostly running PCs with Windows 3.11 and a modem, a dishwasher costing twice as much with a BNC port to connect to a home network which 98% of the population did not have would not have been very successful. Today the hardware costs are basically nil and most customers have WiFi in their kitchen. That does not mean that these are good ideas! Mao simply did not have the tech level to track which of his countrymen were good commie citizens and which ones were bad at the level of granularity, but I think he would have liked the idea.
  • Censorship is an ancient idea. When the first warlords turned into nobles at the dawn of civilization, they very likely reacted badly to anyone claiming that Kodos would make a better king than Kang. You put "fact checking" in scare quotes, and I get it -- calling biased fact checkers neutral and objective does not make them so. My personal approach to fact-checking would be bottom-up. Rather than having a fact-checker in chief appointed by the president, I prefer random bloggers who have a track record of being credible in my book (i.e. Scott Alexander). I would also add that fact checking has become a thing because populists have increasingly told the public laughable lies. A lot of politicians lie, but GWB lying about WMD in Iraq (which CNN was not in the position to call BS on) is different than Trump lying about Immigrants eating cats and dogs or the size of his inauguration crowd. News organizations should call bullshit on provably wrong claims of fact. (Like SA, I have a bounded distrust for MSM. They will certainly report selectively and apply spins, but they will rarely conjure a story out of thin air. My distrust for Trump is unbounded -- if he told me the sky was blue I would go outside to check.)
  • Guilt by association is likewise ancient. In Rome, the smallest legal unit was generally the family. It mattered little who in a family had committed an offense, the head of the family was on the hook for paying the fine.
  • "Mass immigration" is likewise nothing new for the US. In 1850 and 1930 and 2000, about 11% of the census were foreign-born. In 2022 it was about 14%. More, but not dramatically so.

Tech is making it more feasible, but keep in mind that these ideas have not been promoted to the extent that they've become feasible. There's forces pushing back against them. What are these forces if not competent people?

Second point makes social norms and systematic censorship into the same thing. The second one can be automated, and it only requires following strict rules. The problem with this is that one can follow rules for so long that they stop considering the reasons behind them, and also that rules are rigid - they lack the flexibility that people have, they cannot take context into account. In short, "Seeing like a State" is a great book.

You cannot really outsource trust. Here's my reasoning: If you're more intelligent than the person you're outsourcing your trust to, then you don't need them to judge for you. If you're less intelligent than them, then you cannot reliably assess whether or not you can trust them. They could just be lying to you.

So, how did you decide that Trump was actually lying? You likely updated your belief over time based on things you couldn't verify. Don't get me wrong, Trump does lie a lot, but if they compared Trump's inauguration crowd to somebody elses, they'd take pictures of his at the time of the day where the least people arrive, and then find pictures of the other crowd which makes it look at flattering as possible. People who support Trump experienced the opposite, they saw the flattering image of Trumps crowd, and the unflattering images of the other. And who told you that Haitians don't eat cats? I don't read the news, this is one of the reasons I'm so clear sighted.

Populists have increasingly told the public laughable lies

The "fact-checkers" are the same people as the liars. Every original fact-checking website is propaganda. The term might have caught on, leading to independent people having "fact checking" blogs online or whatever, but the concept is still ridiculous. Plus, no meaningful conversation can be had about any modern events, it's just people throwing sources at eachother that the other party already considers completely untrustworthy. If you ask me, nothing but raw evidence is worth anything, and people should use just that (and if they can't, then they're not competent enough for truth-seeking in the first place)

Again, people have been lying for 1000s of years, it's an ancient problem, so why have there been no "fact checkers" until now? It's simply because the modern world is retarded.

You make a good point about the family traditionally being one unit, but being judged by your family is still way different than being held responsible for how people (edit: ones who are complete strangers) use the things that you've sold them.

Foreign-born

The problem is not immigration itself, but the mass import of people who are incompetent, culturally incompatible, 10 times more likely to commit crime, or otherwise a net drain for the destination. Again, only the modern world is too stupid to realize this.

Assisted suicide is never needed. Suicide is trivial, and obvious.

An able-bodied person has a million ways to kill themselves. It looks very different when you are paralyzed from the neck down and lying in a hospital bed with a heart rate monitor connected and a reanimation team on standby.

Reading between the lines of your post, you are saying that a person of sound mind should have the right to kill themselves. But for most rights people have, there is an assumption that they also have the right to hire others to secure their rights.

  • I have the right to buy a car => I have the right to send a properly authorized agent to buy a car in my name.
  • I have the right to defend myself (in some circumstances and jurisdictions) => I have the right to hire a bodyguard to defend me.
  • I have the right to freedom of expression => I have the right to hire contractors to spread my ideas (e.g. running a webserver, or a billboard campaign) instead of just yelling them at random pedestrians.
  • I have the right to face my accuser => I have the right to let my attorney cross-examine my accuser.
  • I have the right to masturbate => I have the right to hire others to masturbate me (in the civilized world, anyhow).

Now, society can impose reasonable restrictions on what agents I am allowed to contract -- I can not send a 10yo to sign a contract in my name, and I certainly can not hire them as a prostitute.

Garden variety suicides are unregulated. You can't imprison a dead person, so there is little society can do to deter them. This leads to a lot of messes. Bystanders become traumatized, or get killed. People who survive but at large costs to their health. People who die on an impulse action they would have regretted five minutes later.

With homicides, there is a wide understanding that there are different categories, that some are vile crimes while others are tragedies or even completely justified. With suicides, there is little distinction that way. The lovesick 16yo and the 60yo cancer patient who jump of a bridge are lumped together in one category.

Rather than leave it up to chance who gets to die, I would prefer legalized but regulated suicides. Let the people who are of sound mind and have a stable commitment to end their lives do so with a minimum of harm to themselves and others, and delegitimize unilateral suicides. "If you want to exit the building, we ask that you walk out through the corridor and the front door and not try to jump through the closed window."

I agree with this first claim, but I imagine that the "suicidal and paralyzed from the neck down" crowd is pretty small. My arguments so far have not accounted for that one situation, but I think a good rule is "Follow their instructions, even if they request something which will kill them". You cannot really implement this legally, so this should be one of those things which are technically illegal but which everyone pretends that they don't see when they happen.

There is an assumption that they also have the right to hire others to secure their rights.

This is basically the right to give away some of your agency, which could lead to consequences which harm your rights. Tricky situation, but I don't think it's bad from this direction. Having the right to ask somebody to end your life isn't the issue - the issue is that, if we make institutions which can legally end your life, then your environment could systemically pressure you to make this decision.

To give an example, you're not forced to marry anyone. Being able to marry is a freedom you have. But there may be economic benefits to marriage, and this is where the problem starts. Do you know why I'm not an organ donor? It's because it seem that some doctors don't really do their best to save you if you're an organ donor and they're short on whatever organs you have. I haven't looked into it much, but it's not hard to imagine how this incentive might come into being.

There is little society can do to deter them

This is how it should be. For instance, I could grab a hammer right now, run out of my apartment, and start bashing random people with it. I won't make this choice, but you cannot deprive me of the ability to make it without depriving me of my fundamental human freedom (the ability to use tools, the ability to open my front door, the ability to move my body, and the ability to interact with other people). My neighbour has the same freedom. This is exactly how it should be, every alternative is worse.

I'm alright with temporarily putting suicidal people under watch, since they might be acting on impulse. But if they continue being suicidal for longer periods of time, it becomes apparent that it's their genuine will.

I would prefer legalized but regulated suicides

Here's what will happen: Millions of old people will be considered a drain on society and made to kill themselves. There's a million paths leading to this, and number 13215 is "Accidentally give older people medicine which has the side-effect of increased risk of suicide". An AI will A/B test medicine, and then look at the results. Would you look at that, medicine X leads to greener numbers: Lower costs, and less complaints about pains. The reason you don't see: The lower costs are due to less old people remaining alive, and the lowered complaints are because those who suffered the most have died. Another possibility is that they're given medicine which is stronger but accelerates their death, this also leads to less pain, and thus less complains, and it also makes other numbers on the spreadsheet look green in that more deaths mean lower costs. Did you know that "we don't know" how most modern algorithms actually work? It's just a blackbox with an input and output. Well, that's why we won't see that we're just killing old people faster, all our metrics will show "improvements".

Let the people who are of sound mind and have a stable commitment to end their lives

Except I've seen plenty of people argue that these are completely mutually exclusive — a "commitment to end one's own life" being itself proof positive of an unsound mind. I once had a therapist argue, in all seriousness, that the 47 Rōnin must have been clinically depressed — along with every other samurai who ever committed seppuku — because suicidal intent always means depression, without exception.

This can be used to turn your proposal to a clear Catch-22: you can kill yourself via "legalized but regulated" suicide so long as you're of sound mind… but the fact you're seeking to do so proves you aren't — the only people allowed to kill themselves, then, are those who don't want to.

suicidal intent always means depression, without exception

I find this view fascinating, like flat-eartherism or young age creationism. Like learning about the biotopes around hydrothermal vents which work without any sunlight and are utterly alien to any life forms I regularly interact with.

9/11 was not a self-help group for depression gone horribly wrong. These jerks were fully expecting to respawn in heaven and be rewarded for their great deeds. Their final moments were the best moments of their lives.

Even a pure suicide without any intended side effects can be very rational. The caught spy biting on his poison pill is a well-established trope. He is not depressed because he is anticipating getting tortured and betraying his secrets.

If some comic book super-villain captures a person and her loved ones and tells her that she can either kill herself and save her loved ones or she will spend the next month first watching her loved ones being slowly tortured to death and then being tortured to death herself, suicide is an entirely rational response.

A toy model of endogenic depression would be that it just imposes some mood penalty, which adds to situational modifiers. So a person who had just been dumped by their girlfriend (-30), buried a parent (-40) and got caught in the rain (-1) might not attempt suicide, but a person who was also melancholic (-20) might.

Or one might describe depression as an epistemic attractor state -- a strong belief that one's life is shitty which is self-reinforcing through confirmation bias.

I generally support interventions to prevent suicides if it seems likely that the mood penalties can be fixed or that the patient can be moved away from that attractor state. Turning a depressed person into a non-depressed person is much preferential to turning them into a corpse.

But at the end of the day, people's emotional baselines differ, and it is not up to outside society to tell them if their permanent modifiers make their life worth living or not. And I would fire any therapist who could not agree to that on the spot as fast as if they had suggested that I should just let Jesus into my heart.

9/11 was not a self-help group for depression gone horribly wrong.

The 9/11 Attack Considered as a Self-Help Group for Depression.

Osama Bin Laden was the organizer of the therapy session.

The north tower got off to a bad start.

Something I feel has been under-discussed so far:

Estate planning, and assisted suicide as a tax avoidance tool.

Estate tax rates have been a classic political football for decades, with policy shifting radically between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans want higher exemptions, so that the tax starts at a bigger estate, and lower rates; Democrats want lower exemptions and higher rates. Republicans cry crocodile tears about family farms forced to sell; Democrats whinge about billionaire feudal dynasties. Each administration has made moves towards eliminating, or raising, the estate tax; often unsuccessfully but always attempted. It's reasonable for any wealthy American to be concerned about major changes in the estate tax system, they come around every decade or so, following party politics.

I've often joked that a particularly wealthy family I know would Weekend at Bernie's their patriarch if he died during a bad (Democrat) period for the estate tax, as one could reasonably hold out for another five to eight years and expect a better (Republican) estate tax law to pass. They could drive him around to various places where he could be "seen" in the window of the family Escalade with heavily tinted windows, and just keep it in the family until it was time to "declare" his death publicly and pay the taxes.

But with assisted suicide, new options open up.

It's November 2032. JD Vance has lost in a landslide to AOC, the Republican party having been crippled by a "True MAGA" independent run by Donald Trump Jr who claimed that Vance's administration had betrayed his father's legacy. AOC and her fillibuster-proof Democratic majority plan to increase the estate tax to a punitive 95% on all estates over $50mm. Does a 95 year old multi-billionaire decide to take a one-way vacation to Switzerland to avoid the tax? Do his children pressure him to take the trip? It's Succession supercharged. When death is a taxable event, you choose death at a convenient time for taxes.

But, for that matter, if suicide vacations become routine, then that makes for quite an opportunity for fraud, right? Ok, I don't want to get hit with the AOC taxes when I die, but I'm only 80 I've got years left to live, what to do? Well, Switzerland might be out, but Columbia allows MAID. ((I'll note I'm probably engaging in gross American racist stereotyping here)) I travel to Columbia, pay to obtain a death certificate from a MAID clinic to send back to the USA with the kids, and then I start a new life in Costa Rica, where my kids will send me cash to support my Jimmy Buffet lifestyle.

one could reasonably hold out for another five to eight years

I’m no doctor but you’re going to need a really oblivious mortician to present an eight year old corpse as fresh :P

Bonus question: if a man dies at 40 and gets WfB’d for another 3 years, is he:

  • a 3 year old corpse
  • a 40 year old corpse
  • a 43 year old corpse

Genuinely not sure.

Wherefore do you need a corpse to present publicly at all? You presumably have been telling everyone for years that he suffered from a disfiguring illness which lead to his reclusiveness, he sure as hell wouldn't want an open-casket. Unfortunately in his disfiguring illness he turned to a lot of weird woo-woo spirit healing, and there are no medical records for several years because he refused to see a doctor. We're talking about billionaire local feudal lords here, the death certificate comes from the [Family Name] Building at the local hospital, paying off a mortician is the least of the concerns.

Keep in mind that the only cheated party is the government. All members of the family are presumably on-side, the hospital suffers no harm (in fact, under the new will, they're getting a new surgery wing!), the mortician suffers no harm. Even the local government suffers no harm. Only the Federal Government is concerned, and there's not actually much nexus for them to check if someone is alive.

Bonus Question: A 3 year old corpse of a 40 year old man. This is obvious if you think about the corpse of a young woman from the perspective of a necrophiliac.

Columbia -> Colombia

So there's generally a lot of questions about why R politicians such as Ted Cruz are so pro Israel.

There are a lot of theories about AIPAC, money, and Evangelical beliefs about judgement day.

But from what I've seen the truth is that it's about staff. More specifically, lawyers.

To start off with a bit of preamble, it's more common to get screwed in the legal system than a lot of people think.

While the ideals of the practice of law talk about the zealous representation of clients, in reality lawyers have their own careers to worry about. Judges hold grudges. Other potential clients hold grudges.

Most of the time things work out because in a typical criminal or civil dispute the judge is genuinely disinterested. There are a lot of business lawsuits, there are a lot of criminal prosecutions. The one before them isn't special.

However there are a lot of legal issues around political campaigns and judges definitely have opinions about which party they'd like to see win.

Election law is a legal specialization. There are also relatively few clients since lawyers typically only work for either the Rs or Ds.

So for a local lawyer going against party brass in court because their client is getting screwed in the nomination is a potentially career limiting move. They may get cut off from representing other candidates in the future.

There's a similar problem with judges. In theory if a judge is being biased the lawyer should call him out and aggressively go after him in the appeals court. But if the lawyer expects to have twenty more cases before that judge, is it really a good idea to do that? Letting your client get screwed is just so much easier.

In theory the bar association should step in when something like that happens, but they really don't. They tend to defend their own, especially if the client who got screwed is someone they don't like.

Remember it was easier to throw Michael Avenatti in prison than to disbar him.

So where do the pro-Israel Jewish organizations come in?

Simple, they know a lot of lawyers with experience on election issues. They can fly someone in, pair them with local counsel, aggressively defend their client, then fly home and go back to their normal practice.

They are unconcerned with local patronage networks or pissing off local judges, within reason.

It's just incredibly beneficial to Republican politicians to stay friendly with the pro-Israel Jews.

Do you have any evidence or specific examples? Even anecdotes? Or is this merely idle speculation?

Partially speculation, partially extrapolation from what I've seen in Canada.

Really what I've seen is more organic than how I've presented it... Pro-Israel Jews make it a point to get their kids to volunteer on campaigns or get summer jobs in politics. Some of people they meet end up as future candidates. If they become lawyers then they end up getting phone calls to help out because people know them.

I was trying to give a framework for understanding influence and glossing over some of the details.

How could you extrapolate from what you've seen (As a lawyer? As a politician? Have you ever worked in politics? Have you ever been to a legal society meeting?) to a country with a different legal and political culture? Why not just ask these politicians why they support what they do, they will probably just tell you. You can glean from interviews that he sees Israel as a strong military ally against a number of nearby states that the USA is hostile towards. Why is that less convincing to you than a conspiracy theory?

Why is that less convincing to you than a conspiracy theory?

I don't think it's fair to call it a conspiracy theory.

I see it as more of an important life lesson. If you want people to care about what you want you'd better make yourself useful first.

Sure, there's a lot more to it. But I don't think anyone really wants to hear me recount USSR geopolitical strategies in the Middle East lead to the Palestinian activist networks in the west.

But I don't think anyone really wants to hear me recount USSR geopolitical strategies in the Middle East lead to the Palestinian activist networks in the west.

The thought of starting a top level comment with the question "where did all these pro-Palestine activists come from anyway?" did enternmy head more than once, as their level of organization is obviously inorganic to me (and somewhat scary in it's efficiency).

So yeah, I think I kinda do want to hear you recount it, as it would provide something in the way of an explanation.

  1. WWII mortally wounds the British and French Empires, meaning their holdings all over the world are now up for grabs.
  2. World War Two was (among many other things) an extremely violent six year long PowerPoint presentation about how controlling major oil fields is really really important.
  3. For this reason both the US and USSR are very interested in getting friendly proxy nations in the Middle East.
  4. For various cultural and political reasons, the US ends up backing the new state of Israel and the old British and French backed Arab monarchies. The USSR ends up backing the rising tide of Arab socialist movements. This was not set in stone, and there are plausible alternate scenarios that end up with the USSR backing Israel. It just didn’t shake out that way.
  5. Now that everyone has chosen their fighters, a forty year war of proxy battles ensues to control the Middle East. For the USSR, that includes eventually knocking out Israel.
  6. The USSR and various Arab states begin arming and training nascent Palestinian paramilitary groups as part of this strategy. Most of these groups like the PLO are pretty secular and vaguely Marxist even while they pursue goals that are basically ethnic nationalist with religious characteristics. If you want a western example for reference, look at the Provisional IRA.
  7. If you are an American Soviet fifth columnist (read: “University Professor”) the hip thing to do is to ardently support these Soviet-backed paramilitary groups and denounce Israel.
  8. The Soviet Union and the Islamic world suffer a messy break up over Afghanistan, immediately followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without the Soviet backing to keep them nominally on the socialist track, the Palestinian militant groups increasingly drift in an Islamic and nationalist direction.
  9. University professors are mentally stuck in 1968 and they don’t receive the memo about anything that happened in paragraph 8.
  10. In the 2000s, George Bush’s adventures in the Middle East reawaken and inflame the dormant Islamist sympathies of the University professor set. This passes it on to a new generation and sets it in stone as a foundational left wing tenet.
  11. Fast forward to modern times and now leftists endlessly simp for various Islamic militant groups even though it really doesn’t make sense anymore given that these groups are all reactionary religious organizations with a heavy overtone of ethnic nationalism and ethnic supremacy.

I don't know if I buy that it's just "simping". Organic trends come and go, they aren't usually capable of maintaining world-spanning activist infrastructure for decades on end.

Well the Arab world maintains its own massive charity-lobbying-propaganda industrial complex that works to keep that alive, but I think the historical outline I have is the reason that sympathy is around to exploit.

But the Republican legal movement is overwhelmingly Catholic, which is not by the standards of US conservatives particularly Zionist.

People on the Republican judge track don't get involved with small legal troubles of senate nominations or congressional campaigns. The disputes are too small and they don't want to make enemies in the party.

Getting on the bad side of a Republican patronage network (https://scholars-stage.org/patronage-vs-constituent-parties-or-why-republican-party-leaders-matter-more-than-democratic-ones/) can tank any future nomination.

edit:

Also I have the sense that it's more acceptable for a lawyer at a prestigious largely Jewish firm to do pro bono work for a pro Israel Republican than it would be for a lawyer at a prestigious non Jewish firm to help a pro life republican.

I think one factor everyone is forgetting is that it didn’t actually cost much to be pro-Israel for the last 20 years. It didn’t cost much to be pro-Palastine either. Go to AIPAC conference once a year “blah blah unbreakable commitment to the continued existence of the state of Israel blah blah” pass Go, collect 2 million dollars in PAC money. Or alternatively, “blah blah illegal apartheid regime, boycotts and sanctions” all the college students clap, your leftist card is now good for another three years even though 80 percent of your votes are solely for the benefit of Raytheon. There had only been minimal violence since the end of the Second Intifada, and it looked like things would only get better in the future.

Now, supporting one or the other carries significant costs, and someone is going to hate you whomever you pick. Each choice is also going to permanently associate you with it’s own set of gory videos showing various unsympathetic behaviors by your guys. Politicians have spent the last two years trying to figure out the new reality and how to best exploit it for votes and campaign contributions. In conclusion, blah blah rational argument, blah blah updating my Bayesian priors blah blah Aella HBD whatever give me updoots.

This is way too much words and speculation. The actual reasons are quite simple: Muslim Arabs did 9/11; Muslim Arabs would do 10k 9/11s if they were capable of doing so, they say so themselves; Muslim Arabs also hate Israel and sometimes divert their hate in that direction; Muslim Arabs also disrupt other important interests to normal people like international boating trade; Muslim Arabs that have been allowed into America or borne to such people statistically disfavor the Republican party.

There is no reason for a Republican to be in favor of any Muslim Arab until you get to the "they hate Jews" dregs level. Instead, what the actual question is why would anyone support Palestine ever. They are losers who lose, and they lose while intentionally killing civilians. It is hard to think of a valid reason to support not just Hamas, but ANY Palestinian. They elected Hamas after all. Hamas continues to sustain support at levels unheard of in the US for a political party.

So it is all odd, probably nonsensical, arguments to convince anyone on the American right that Palestinians aren't bad. I certainly think that there is good evidence that they are deserving of a nuke to the face and subsequent scattering if not deserving in a full elimination.

GWB, is that you?

So Muslim Arabs are terrorists, disrupt international shipping with rockets, and vote Democrat?

9/11 was masterminded by a rogue Saudi. The vast majority of Arab Muslims do not make it their life's work to blow up anyone. Of those that do, most will join regional projects like Daesh and murder their local neighbors (who are often also Muslim), not far-away Americans.

There are causal arrows in either direction for "the US supports Israel" and "Muslim Arabs tend to hate the US". Sure, in an alternate world where Israel had been founded in the Mojave instead, Muslims would still not be thrilled about the US support for various repressive regimes starting with the Shah, but I think 90% of the butthurt is about Israel (which is seen as a US colony).

Hamas needs to be wiped of the Earth in the same way that the NSDAP was. However, the Allies got rid of the Nazis (at least as a relevant political force, many adjusted well to the post-war environment) without genociding Germany. Starving Gazan kids in the hope that sooner or later Hamas will also starve seems a terrible way to accomplish that goal.

I think that apart from minor dogmatic differences, American Muslims and Evangelicals have a lot in common. The idea that sex should only happen between husband and wife, with implications for birth control, LGBT rights, abortion. I would expect that Islam would have a generally similar attitude towards germ-line gene edits in humans, embryo selection, MAID. Neither seem to care a lot about key concerns of secular Westerners such as animal welfare, climate change or AI x-risk.

I think you'll enjoy John Derbyshire's take: https://www.nationalreview.com/2002/05/why-dont-i-care-about-palestinians-john-derbyshire/

Little has changed in 2 decades

It's a multi-factorial issue.

There's a bunch of pro-Israel political donors who'll spend lavishly on Israel supporters/threaten attack ads against perceived hostile politicians. Republicans grovel for the Adelson seal of approval. Media power. Lawyers may well be part of it too.

But these politicians like Cruz also say 'god commands us to support Israel'. Why disbelieve them? Furthermore the US is a special outlier in support for Israel, much more than say Britain or Australia or Canada. The US also has a large evangelical contingent while lawyers are more international. Presumably it's not just about lawyers.

But these politicians like Cruz also say 'god commands us to support Israel'. Why disbelieve them?

People are frequently dishonest about their motivations. Often they don't even understand them.

You'll never hear a politician say "I don't really care enough about X to have an opinion, but I think position Y is what voters want." People don't want that kind of honesty.

"god commands us to support Israel" is rhetorically useful because it ends the conversation.

But is that really a popular message? Does Cruz think it makes him look good? It might make him look good to evangelicals who he might want to rely on or court favour with but America as a whole? Surely it's a small minority who believe 'we should support Israel for theological reasons'. That just opens up all kinds of problems for Cruz such as 'why should you be trusted with the nuclear codes if your foreign policy views are so dependant on religion', it makes most sense if he's just being honest.

The specialization of [parasocial] romantic/sexual partnership

(More than a shower thought, less than a fully formulated theory.)

While the median person in the US is still in a romantic relationship, singlehood is on the rise, with some claiming a prevalence of 30%.

It is very apparent that the median man and the median woman have quite different ideas about what they seek in a romantic or sexual relationship, with men being more interested in casual sex and women being more interested in long-term relationships.

(
This seems plausible from a kitchen table evo psych point of view: in the ancestral environment, all things being equal, the man who jumped at a chance to have no-strings-attached sex had a greater inclusive genetic fitness than the man who did not. Realistically, quite a lot of the opportunities for no-strings-attached sex in the ancestral environment were probably wartime rapes, but there were likely opportunities for consensual casual sex as well.

For women, it was likely more complicated. There was a selection for pair bonding to secure paternal investment -- because that increased the reproductive chances of the kids. If one had paternal investment, one would have preferred someone had has the status or ability to provide well for ones family.

On the other hand, one also wanted to select for genetic fitness to boost the reproductive chances of one's offspring. For a lot of traits, this coincided with being a good provider: being a great hunter is partly genetic, so there were both immediate and genetic reasons to prefer such a mate. While being the victim of wartime rape was quite bad also from a genetic point of view (zero paternal investment!), having a partner who was genetically inclined to wartime rape was preferable. One also wanted a partner who was winning the Keynesian hotness contest in your society, because that will bode well for the reproductive success of one's sons. If all the other women of the society thought that men with blue eyes were icky, marrying a blue-eyed man was a very bad reproductive strategy!

In short, from kitchen table evo psych, the ideal man was someone who had a lot of sexual success who was also willing to enter a committed long term relationship.
)

In my world-model, the median single woman going on a successful tinder date is going to meet a man who is great at getting tinder dates and convince them to have sex with him. This is a highly specialized skill. Women pass 95% of the suggestions. Together with a 2:1 gender imbalance towards men, this means that the average man who gets a match probably had to outcompete 30-40 other men to get there. However, being found hot by one woman is strongly correlated with being found hot by another woman. Of course, part of being found "hot" here is "being willing to breadcrumb women into thinking that there is a long term potential".

There are probably men who are moderately successful at dating which use apps for a while, find true love in their fifth match and live happily ever after, but those are also unlikely to stay on the apps (and if they are, will likely state outright that they are in a happy primary relationship, which will likely lower their appeal significantly).

While most of the men using online dating are trying to get laid with little success, I think that for the few men who are able and willing to sacrifice time, money, and ethics to get really good at tinder (or the offline equivalent: being a PUA), stringing along three or four women seems achievable.

While the link in the last paragraph bemoans the fate of these women, I think that it is fair to say that their revealed preference is to pay with sex for the illusion that a hot promiscuous guy is going to go exclusive (or primary) with them any day now. There is a difference between being the hottest unconquered available woman within driving distance on some cloudy Wednesday and being the woman who will make him forget about all other women, forever, though. Relatedly, if a real Nigerian royal had trouble getting money out of the country, chances are they would contact specialized firms on the Cayman Islands, not random owners of email addresses. (That does not change the fact that scamming or lying to get laid is evil, though.)

(Of course, this is not only an online thing. For most offline social situations, the workplace rules are more or less in effect. You have to know what your relative status and SMV is and what you can get away with. Also, flirting is all about deniability and avoiding establishment of common knowledge. I would argue that the possibility to commit a social faux-pas is intentional, being willing to do something which would be transgressive if you had read the signs wrong is a costly signal to send and generally appreciated if you are right. In the real world (at least outside Aella's RMN parties), people do not wear wristbands indicating what they are comfortable with, so engaging with women is left to those men who either are good at reading the cues or who do not care if they come across as sex pests to any women who are uninterested. Dark triad and all that. For spectrum-dwellers like myself, the main advantage of online dating is that women there can be safely (if mostly futilely) approached: as long as you do not use crass sexual language or send unsolicited dick picks, you will be considered background noise, not a sex pest.)

--

On the flip side, catering to the sexual and romantic needs of single men is also a trade which greatly benefits from specialization. Para-social relationships allow for economics of scale far beyond what the fuckbois can achieve. With straightforward porn, there is little malicious deception going on (stepsibling status aside), but I think that there is a niche of softer content (e.g. without guy participation) where romantic attachment from the audience is actively encouraged, and the relevant persona's foster an air of singleness despite being in a happy relationship or married.

--

This symmetry is not perfect, of course. The fuckbois are motivated by their sex drive or some obsession, while the women selling sex to men online are mostly motivated by cash.

Given that this is the CW thread, I should probably show some links to the culture war.

  • The dynamic where willing to deceive about long term prospects gets men more sex is probably responsible for a lot of hate women have for men generally.
  • I think that the broader feminist culture considers the 'man-centered' woman to be a victim of patriarchy, while they would consider someone guy who pays 300$ a month to some boob-flashing video game streamer an icky incel (who may or may not victimize the streamer, depending on the brand of feminism).

The dynamic where willing to deceive about long term prospects gets men more sex is probably responsible for a lot of hate women have for men generally.

Its probably fair to say that the bottom 50% of men, in terms of attractiveness, are functionally invisible to the average woman. And you ever heard the saying "the opposite of love isn't hate, its indifference?" Yeah.

Which is to say, they don't actually count those men in their own personal calculation of what "men" are like. If you tell these women that a huge portion of men are actually not able to get matches on tinder, or can't successfully approach women, and thus are unable to find a relationship despite honest best efforts, these women will simply disbelieve you. Availability Heuristic and all that.

So from their perspective, the men that they notice and pursue, i.e. the ones that actually 'exist' for them, are doing just fine. In fact they're doing TOO well, its not fair that he can just pump and dump her because she's one of 5 or 6 others he has on tap!

I'd say that most of the intersex animosity is because women see the top, call it 20% of men as "men" and the bottom 50% as nonentities that don't enter their thought processes at all. And then there's that awkward 30% of men who are in a superposition of 'man' and 'not man' unless and until a woman decides to pay them attention.

If they only compare themselves to the upper 20% of guys, and ignore the bottom 50%, then mentally yeah it feels like SHE is the disadvantaged one in this situation. They can ignore things like the male suicide rate, the fact that most of the crappiest jobs are male-dominated, and that men are generally disfavored by the law because they only see the top 20% of dudes, who ARE in fact doing really well, and assume that's representative. And boom, there's your patriarchy.

Meanwhile, the other 80% of men are painfully aware of their own status, and are finding that every woman they attempt to approach is in fact pursuing those top 20% of guys, and, as noted, is un-self-aware of this factor, and disregards the experience of the vast majority of men when judging them.

So women are mad at 'men' because the only men they care about are rejecting them in the end, refusing commitment but taking sex.

Men are mad at 'women' because when women get mad at those top men, they put ALL men on blast, and that catches a lot of guys in the crossfire who have not done a damn thing to deserve it. They're being treated like villains ON TOP of being rejected by women en masse because those top men are gleefully exploiting their position, and women are incapable of regulating their own marketplace so are getting increasingly distressed and lashing out.

And uh, it looks like said men are getting very, very fed up with this.

And no, this is NOT explained solely by manosphere influencers. Even men who are successfully dating seem to believe less in gender equality. Because those top 20% of guys probably have come to understand women from the other side.

One possible solution I've been considering recently is forcibly marrying and then if that doesn't work, castrating these men. Of course I would like women to shape up too, but that seems like a tall ask.

The thing is, the top 20% of these men that don't get married are frankly throwing a lot of their life and use to society out the window by continuing to live the lifestyle of a Lothario. Not only does stringing 2-4 women a long at a time embitter those women and make it more difficult for them to stably pair bond, the sheer amount of time that it takes to juggle these relationships impacts your ability to do work, have friends, take care of yourself, and generally contribute to society. These men are also ruining their own ability to pair bond by engaging in this lifestyle. Consider two examples. One of my current roommates, let's call him James, has lived like a Lothario almost the entire time I've known him. Long term "girlfriend" back in California who he constantly cheats on with a rotation of 2-3 women here in Baltimore. Some of my resentment towards him is certainly jealousy (he has recently been fucking a girl I went on a date with and mildly liked), but it's hard not to see how this behavior is ruining his life. When I first met this guy he was deeply interested in history and biology and in pretty good shape. Now he doesn't do anything except scroll on instagram, watch retarded kids TV shows, and have sex with these women. He also recently got his PhD, but with ZERO publications, despite being in a computational biology lab where the expectation is 3-4 papers by graduation. This guy is smart and should be contributing to society, but instead is mooching off the NIH tit and ruining women. The other example is my friend Saul, who used to live this kind of lifestyle, until he started dating this girl Deborah. They got married last year, and since then his efforts around the house, at work, with friends, and with his art projects have skyrocketed because all that time he was spending at bars and on tinder is now going into his actual life.

  • -10

One possible solution I've been considering recently is forcibly marrying and then if that doesn't working, castrating these men. Of course I would like women to shape up too, but that seems like a tall ask.

I'll do you one better and suggest summary execution.

The logic being that screwing with a relatively fresh, innocent, 'happy' young woman and leaving her worse off is irretrievably depleting a scarce, somewhat fixed supply of a critically valuable resource.

There's legitimately no way to repair the 'damage' through monetary compensation alone, and in a sense, the extent of the damage is probably 'incalculable.'

So hey, just remove your ability to do further damage via permanent incapacitation, rather than risk your continued despoiling of the dating pool.

But yeah, castration seems a reasonable compromise position there. I don't know how many it'd take to successfully deter, but its probably fewer than you think.

I mean, most historical law codes proscribed seduction of a virgin as a crime that could be made up for by marrying the girl as if she was a virgin.

In fact, Frank Sinatra was once charged with seduction for promising to marry a woman if she slept with him then backing out. Turns out the woman he banged was already married but didn't tell police (or him) that so the charges got dropped, but it led to his famous mugshot. This all happened in 1938, when Sinatra was 23, so it's interesting to see it predate the sexual revolution by so many decades.

https://www.crimemuseum.org/crime-library/celebrity-mugshots/frank-sinatra/

This all happened in 1938, when Sinatra was 23, so it's interesting to see it predate the sexual revolution by so many decades.

What?

I assure you adultery was a thing for the entirety of human existence. The sexual revolution just ramped it up by saying "it's a good thing, actually".

Maybe your and @faceh's sentiments are more motivated by jealousy than you consciously realize? I don't know, maybe you guys really do care deeply about the health of society and about protecting women from being emotionally damaged by Lotharios. But in my personal experience, whenever I had such intense negative feelings about Lotharios (one of you suggested castrating them - which, even as a joke, is pretty intense...), it was actually motivated 100% by jealousy.

Certainly jealousy is a factor. But I don't think that explains my feelings. I've been jealous about many things in my life, but the direction of the jealousy is that I usually want to become like the person I'm jealous of. Be faster, more witty, etc. I don't want to fuck an untold number of bitches, I want to pair bond with a stable, well-adjusted woman whom I love and respect.

Fair enough. For me it was 100% jealousy, but you and I are different.

I don't think that the Lotharios are actually a major problem preventing you or I from finding women to pair-bond with.

No they are probably not THE problem, but they certainly don't make it easier.

The reason I don't talk about my own success or failures in this arena much is that it simply doesn't matter for the arguments I'm making. I don't want people to give my words more credence or less credence based on my own personal status. Read the stats, bring your own stats, make the arguments without regard to personal achievements.

My romantic life is kind of a mess on the whole, lot of false starts and pursuing the wrong people. But I've never had actual trouble getting dates. Its finding the right person and getting them to commit where I've struck out.

I was at one point two weeks out from being married to a girl that I truly loved. Then SHE cut it off, shacked up with 'the guy I didn't have to worry about' for a bit, then flew off to the other side of the country. I felt (still feel) a sort of irrational fury towards the other guy in the situation. I would gladly go a few rounds in a boxing ring with him, for instance. "Jealousy" ain't it, though. He'll never have what I had.

I currently have a second date scheduled with a cute redhead that I met through an old friend of mine. About a month back I had a couple dates with a petite little Haitian girl that I could literally toss over my shoulder with one arm and carry off to bed.

I feel what could be described as jealousy towards the type of guy who just lines up women for almost every day of the week, rotates through them, dumps them when they become inconvenient, and literally never ever commits but uses commitment as a carrot for getting laid. I'm sure that lifestyle has tons of perks in the current social environment.

But then I think about how corrosive to their own wellbeing that process must be, and I lose the part of the feeling of "Man I wish that were me" and its mostly replaced with the anger of "he pays no cost for ruining them, then leaves the rest of us to deal with the fallout."

I'm about as jealous of these guys as I am of a guy pissing in a swimming pool. Sure, it's easier than getting out and going to the designated bathroom, but I know that if everybody starts doing it, we all end up swimming in urine.

Because of the aforementioned woman I almost married, I know full well that my actual preference is to have a long, established relationship with an intimate partner and having regular sex with the same person is qualitatively superior (to me) than a few flings per partner with many partners in a row. I've run the experiment on both sides, I know the outcome. I act accordingly.

But none of what I just said changes the nature of the stats out there. A small portion of men are being chased by a large proportion of women, banging them, getting their hopes up, breaking their hearts, and moving on, leaving the women bitter and with heightened standards going forward, making life harder on all the guys who come after.

And believe me, I am GENUINELY WORRIED about the social effects that will arise if those guys continue to struggle. I can't hate women. Its not in me. I see them as 'different, but not inherently lesser.'

The generation that's coming up? Many dudes don't seem to have that restraint. I'm trying to warn people, and hey, I worry too because I live in this society. But believe me I ain't the one struggling.

Some of my resentment towards him is certainly jealousy (he has recently been fucking a girl I went on a date with and mildly liked),

Just wanted to say that this is extremely shitty and I'm sorry you are going through that. If you have a friend who is also having a hard time with girls and he gets with a girl you liked that sucks, but you can at least be happy for him. Having that girl instead get used by a guy who is already having an order of magnitude more success than you is just shit all around and makes you lose all respect for both of them. Hang in there.

Thanks man. I've decided to stop dating for now so it's not weighing on me too much, but definitely does breed a lot of resentment. This is not the first time this dude has done this to me either. Should have moved out last year, but didn't want to pay more rent.

One possible solution I've been considering recently is forcibly marrying and then if that doesn't working, castrating these men. Of course I would like women to shape up too, but that seems like a tall ask.

I’ve been inwardly giggling at you and @faceh’s recent comments matter-of-factly talking about castrating or even executing “Lothario” men.

Like the state of affairs is so bleak, the cultural inertia too powerful to reverse, that such a practice is more realistic and further within the Overton window than marginally but directly limiting or inconveniencing the FUN or freedom of young women in some way to increase the protections afforded them.

Some of my resentment towards him is certainly jealousy (he has recently been fucking a girl I went on a date with and mildly liked)

lmao, epic roommate-mogging.

Do you have to listen to her moaning when he’s taking her to poundtown in your apartment? If I had a roommate, I’d be looking into lease-breaking options before subjecting myself to potentially seeing a crush, even a mild one, walk into a roommate’s room—much less listening to her moaning when it’s her turn out of his soft harem to get railed, at which point the recently discussed option of assisted suicide would rise in temptation.

Maybe he could kindly grab a PoV cellphone sex tape with her for you. It might break her spell on you, cure your crush on her, for you to see her Wonderfulness get defiled. On the other hand, it could also skyrocket your seethe and jealousy.

When I first met this guy he was deeply interested in history and biology and in pretty good shape.

Well, he’s laying pipe left and right, so it sounds like he’s still in decent enough shape. The market speaks. What better judge of shape than what’s deemed sufficient by various young women to dick them down?

Now he doesn't do anything except scroll on instagram, watch retarded kids TV shows, and have sex with these women.

That’s disgusting: scrolling on Instagram, watching TV shows, and having sex with various women. How does he meet these women and how does he seduce them? Just so I know how to avoid such a lifestyle.

He also recently got his PhD, but with ZERO publications, despite being in a computational biology lab where the expectation is 3-4 papers by graduation. This guy is smart and should be contributing to society, but instead is mooching off the NIH tit

“What do you call someone who gets his PhD with zero publications?”

“Doctor.”

If he’s not intending to go into academia or pursue one of the rare industry jobs that cares about such a thing, publication grinding is a poor use of time. If he indeed is intending to do so, the only real victim of his lack of publication record would be himself.

If he’s “mooching” off the NIH, to the extent this is an injustice, the fault primarily lies with his PI and/or dissertation committee for letting him coast his way to a PhD. Otherwise, I disagree he has some unilateral duty to Contribute to society based on some nebulous Social Contract, a duty rarely demanded of women or non-Asian minorities.

Expecting him to labcuck and publication grind Just Because instead of chilling out and slinging dick would sound like Calvin’s dad and “misery breeds character” to me.

You should invite James here. Would be entertaining to hear things from the perspective of jdizzler’s rizzler roommate.

ETA:

I was mentally formulating a response to @mrvanillasky's reply along these lines with a tag to @thejdizzler, but given @FCfromSSC's reply this is combined with the follow-up to that too.

I did not intend to insult nor antagonize @thejdizzler with the portion @FCfromSSC quoted, nor any of my original comment. The opposite, actually: I was expressing to @thejdizzler the sense of horror and hilarity I got from the situation like I would have if a close real-life, similarly-aged male friend recounted me such a tale. Perhaps I was in an overly jovial mood from the comments about castrating/executing "Lothario" men,* for the reason described in "like the state of affairs is so bleak..." But then again, one's crush signing up to be on a Lothario roommate's roster of fucktoys—what is this, if not a plotline out of some dark comedy?

I was not trying to "teach a lesson", nor was I (on the other side of the coin) trying to provide @thejdizzler guidance, gentle or otherwise. As at least for the immediate situation at hand, I didn't have anything in mind to be taught or guided beyond the generic "just live solo," which is a common suggestion of mine, especially to young men having anything less than a blast of a time living with (a) roommate(s). Or "just don't have crushes on chicks who are potential soft harem members for other guys," which might not be all-too-actionable advice.

Conditional on having-Lothario-roommate-casually-piping-down-your-crush, @thejdizzler's tolerating the situation with better chillness than I likely would, hence my partially joking comment that such a scenario would make me feel more tempted by assisted suicide on the margin.

* If I wanted to object to such proposals I would have (time/energy permitting), but I didn't—the proposal(s) of castrating/executing "Lotharios" strikes me as mostly amusing and fanciful. The thing I did want to provide a friendly objection for was something more grounded, the notion of a unilateral duty to "contribut[e] to society," and/or an obligation to for some reason having to go above and beyond in completing one's PhD (or any degree, for that matter). This was unrelated to the section @FCfromSSC quoted.

Alright man this was a little far.

Courtesy
One of the most difficult parts about communities is that it is very easy for them to turn into a pit of toxicity. People who see toxic behavior in a community will follow that cue with their own toxic behavior, and this can quickly spiral out of control. This is bad for most communities, but would be an absolute death sentence for ours - it's impossible to discuss sensitive matters in an environment full of flaming and personal attacks. Therefore, this set of community rules are intended to address this preemptively.

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Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
Some of the things we discuss are controversial, and even stating a controversial belief can antagonize people. That's OK, you can't avoid that, but try to phrase it in the least antagonistic manner possible. If a reasonable reader would find something antagonistic, and it could have been phrased in a way that preserves the core meaning but dramatically reduces the antagonism, then it probably should have been phrased differently.

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No matter how careful we are, someone's going to come up with a way to be annoying, in a way that technically follows the rules. If we were to write a rule saying "don't do this thing", they would bend the rule to be as broad as possible, then complain that we're not enforcing it properly. The goal of this community is not, however, slavish adherence to rules. It's discussion. And if this means we need to use our human judgement to make calls, then that's exactly what we will do.

Compare and contrast:

lmao, epic roommate-mogging.

Do you have to listen to her moaning when he’s taking her to poundtown in your apartment? If I had a roommate, I’d be looking into lease-breaking options before subjecting myself to potentially seeing a crush, even a mild one, walk into a roommate’s room—much less listening to her moaning when it’s her turn out of his soft harem to get railed, at which point the recently discussed option of assisted suicide would rise in temptation.

Maybe he could kindly grab a PoV cellphone sex tape with her for you. It might break her spell on you, cure your crush on her, for you to see her Wonderfulness get defiled. On the other hand, it could also skyrocket your seethe and jealousy.

My assessment is that you are intentionally aiming to be as inflammatory as possible to another commenter with the above, perhaps in an attempt to "teach a lesson" to someone you disagree with. Your post appears to me to be well outside the sort of discussion we aim to foster here.

Your record is four warnings and three AAQCs, and no warnings this year and the last two notes being AAQCs. If this were the usual line-toeing, you would get a warning, but as it stands you are getting a three-day ban. Your record shows that you have a fairly good understanding of where the line is, so I am not buying the scenario where the above is anything other than a willful choice. If you decide to make a habit of this sort of comment, you can expect further bans to escalate rapidly.

My assessment is that you are intentionally aiming to be as inflammatory as possible to another commenter with the above, perhaps in an attempt to "teach a lesson" to someone you disagree with.

??? I think it's because Sloot didn't want to be castrated, or be 'erased from the gene pool' for the crime of not living up to his full potential or fucking girls @thejdizzler pines for. Which aside from being petty and mean is quite a hardline policy, let's face it.

I recognize that it's a pretty hardline policy. I'm throwing it out as a potential solution to the Lothario problem because every other solution other than "bootstraps" I see as equally outlandish in today's political climate.

I really shouldn't have stated that I was interested in the girl at all, or done any introspection and admitted I was slightly jealous of the guy. Like at @faceh has stated before, even trying to discuss this gets you labeled as an incel.

Yup.

Its not so much a complaint that the playing field isn't level or fair, "Wahhhh Mommm they aren't sharing the pussy, make them share!"

Its objecting to playing the game this way at all because its making everything worse for everyone involved. Either crack down on the people who are making it suck so much... or make everyone play a different, friendlier, more fun game.

But both complaints read like you're sexually unsuccessful and crying for someone to give you a boost, to the uninformed observer.

If both men and women are allowed to lie, misrepresent their intentions, back out of their agreements, and undercut each other, in other words, to defect without penalty, this is where the game spirals to. And there is no obvious bottom.

Coordination to improve things is fuckin' hard, but it requires people to admit the problems that exist and to being impacted by them. And we can't even get to THAT step without people dogpiling on the ones who admit weakness.

And when the people most capable of effecting and coordinating change are also one of the few ones who benefit from the status quo (high value, somewhat sociopathic dudes), its even harder to shift. They don't see a need to adjust things.

Don't have anything more to add, but just wanted to say that I really appreciate your voice on these topics. You're one of the few posters who actually seems to take suggestions in this sphere seriously, rather than trying to question the psychology or underlying deeper motives of the poster in question. And maybe these are my insecurities talking, but this kind of thing drives me absolutely up the wall. Like yes, I am sure there is a little bit of jealousy involved in my reaction to Lotharios in real life, and my life could be improved by following the PUA handbook a little more, and not caring what women think a little bit more. Yet I fail to see how this reflects on the deeper problems that you and I both are pointing out.

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I also appreciate your posts. Modern "dating" just seems like the mother of all coordination problems. And people have been playing defect for so long that we've forgotten what it's even like for cooperation to be possible. The guys bragging about their success seem like some "fisherman" who's bragging about how he made a bunch of quick cash using dynamite to exterminate an entire lake of fish.

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Yes, violent fantasies of what you're going to do to Chad and Stacy is standard incel fare. I don't see it as serious discussion of policy.

If it was, I'd say morally it's an evil policy - you need far more, and more tangible evidence of harm, to harm others. Practically, it would require the incels to win against the chads on the battlefield when they couldn't on the football field.

The Incels don't need to win against all Chads or even most Chads. The problem is not Chad, it's Lothario. Look, I've said it a billion times on this thread and others, my problem is not with guys who can lock down hotter girls than me (although I would be lying if I said I wasn't jealous). It's with guys who churn through tens or hundreds of girls by lying about their intentions, making those girls slightly less dateable for a healthy Chad, and with standards that make relatively normal dudes invisible. In this case forced marriage, followed by castration when there's adultery, doesn't actually seem that far outside of the historical wheelhouse as a way to rein these guys in.

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To be completely fair, lots of societies have policed cads. It’s not some drastic never before tried policy.

If Sloot or anyone else wishes to object to the policy of castrating or killing "Lotharios", they are as free to make their case as those in favor. I think the ludicrous nature of such a policy is sufficiently evident that arguing against it is a waste of my time; others who judge differently are free to discuss as they will. We allow people to make foolish and even insane arguments here, because we are not interested in accepting responsibility for policing which ideas/positions/ideologies are good and which are not.

What we do not allow is commenters using their posts to directly attack each other, or wind each other up. It seems obvious to me that this is what @Sloot did, and doing so is a violation of several rules here.

It's also worth pointing out that the interpretation of the rules that I am applying here is the reason @Sloot has not himself been banned up to this point. He routinely makes comments that could be described as "petty" and "mean", as well as "advocating hardline policies". He usually does so from behind a level of abstraction similar to that employed by @thejdizzler above, which helps a great deal to keep him on the right side of the line.

It sounded to me like you thought sloot's inflammatory tone came out of nowhere. But it was the equivalent of an inflammatory response by a woman to a 'misogynistic' policy someone here might propose.

Sloot talks like this all the time. If he felt particularly threatened or incensed by the castration comment, it did not show.

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Thank you for your service, keeping me inside the overton window.

That’s disgusting: scrolling on Instagram, watching TV shows, and having sex with various women. How does he meet these women and how does he seduce them? Just so I know how to avoid such a lifestyle.

Any app can be a dating app, Instagram included.

Truly a tragedy, flood of nudes in your DMs. Feeling for you brother.

One possible solution I've been considering recently is forcibly marrying and then if that doesn't working, castrating these men. Of course I would like women to shape up too, but that seems like a tall ask.

I’ve been inwardly giggling at you and @faceh’s recent comments matter-of-factly talking about castrating or even executing “Lothario” men.

Like the state of affairs is so bleak, the cultural inertia too powerful to reverse, that such a practice is more realistic and further within the Overton window than marginally but directly limiting or inconveniencing the FUN or freedom of young women in some way to increase the protections afforded them.

Indeed. The wars of the sexes, and the resulting fertility collapse, have gotten so bad that people are willing to resort to literally anything to fix them: killing womanizers, paying women to birth orphans, anything at all...

...except the one thing that we know works, and that kept civilization running for the past 5,000 years. De-emancipate women? Never! Better to go extinct.

If it worked, it would still persist. Clearly it does not work now. You go on and on with intellectual historical arguments in favor of de-emancipation, yet those are not enough because there is no more hard physical dependency of women on male physical labor. Inb4 "what if all male power plant workers quit": they won't. The dependency of society on strictly male labor has grown too abstract to leverage or to bellyfeel.

Given that civilization ran in the same ways for 5 thousand years, you should expect whatever broke the cycle to be a pretty fucking good reason to break it. You act like it was just a whim, a momentary lapse of men to free women and if they just Rise Up and Retvrn, the toothpaste can be put back in the tube.

I expect the societies that do not go full Amish to crush the ones that do before the latter can outbreed the former, or in spite of it. As to what happens to them later, maybe they will start killing womanizers or otherwise solve the equation of the sexes infavorably to men. No one said that personal physical strength and long distribution tails is going to be king forever. I do not expect the intellectual desire to not go extinct to be sufficient to revert all existing societies to Amish mode.

Islam is on course to dominate Europe within the next generation or two and Islam's take on the gender culture war is much closer to the Amish than to the descendants of the sexual revolution who are currently being displaced in their ancestoral homelands.

Women are currently too valuable as a political force for the political class to remove their power to vote, let alone reduce them to chattel.

So that is DEFINITELY a 'coup-complete' sort of solution.

Having been around de-emancipated women it isn’t a panacea.

Sand wigger white sharia posting tends to fail to realize that sharia- and deeply oppressive traditional cultures more generally- have a lot of supporting social structures which are much harder to generate de novo.

deeply oppressive traditional cultures more generally- have a lot of supporting social structures which are much harder to generate de novo.

On the one hand, yes, this. It's why the atheist Confucian Xunzi is rather more conservative than many of his contemporaries — social technologies are a fragile inheritance, the accumulated wisdom and social capital of centuries, and are not easily regained (if they can be regained at all) once lost. I, too, find myself frustrated by people who act as if generating such institutions de novo is trivial or easy.

But on the other hand, the second best time to plant a tree and all that. Sure, working to rebuild all those social structures is, again, a multi-generational project requiring a lot of hard work and sacrifice… but what's the alternative?

Yes, we should plant trees. But can you blame women for not signing up to be de-emancipated in the hopes someone else solves all their problems? Putting the cart before the horse there.

I think what puts us between a horse and a hard place in this situation is that the default that women have chosen - something I certainly can't blame them for - is to be emancipated and then hope that someone else solves all their problems, and this combination of emancipation + hoping for a savior seems to result in poor life satisfaction, arguably even poorer than non being emancipated and then hoping that someone else solves all their problems. Whether this means that de-emancipating and hoping that someone else solves all their problems will have positive impacts is an open question. It's also arguable that being emancipated and using free will and agency to give away control to others and be unsatisfied about it is better in some way than to not be emancipated and while being forced into a life that's more satisfying. What I think most people would consider the golden path or the ideal outcome is women embracing their semi-recent emancipation and the agency and responsibility that goes along with it to solve their own problems, but recent history in sociopolitical movements relating to women's issues shouldn't give us much hope for that happening anytime soon. Hence why there appears to be no good option, just awful and more awful ones.

Do not use edits to argue with a banning. You may send us modmail if you want to plead your case, but normally post-ban edits like this are grounds for a permaban.

I concur with @FCfromSSC that regardless of how you "intended" it, this post was clearly a direct attack on @thejdizzler, and it did not strike me (nor him, apparently) as good-natured at all.

This is maybe the funniest comment I've seen in all my years on SSC/CWR/Motte

This shit turns people into the Joker.

Where is your source that pair bonding is not a thing in men?

I don't know man. Most Lotharios I know would be better off out of the gene pool. There are many men in the top 10% of attractiveness who do not behave like James. I'm not saying we need a world filled with beta office drones, but society would be better if we had more men who could "think of England".

Yes that's why marriage is an option before castration. If Lothario stops behaving like Lothario there is no problem. Have you really pulled a 180 dude? You kind of seem to be in the exact same situation (unsatisified with your academic performance, lusting after women but not actually closing the deal).

Look there's nothing wrong with meeting and talking to women. I'll even grant that there's nothing wrong with sleeping around (a stretch in my book), as long as you are honest with your intentions. The problem is creating an impression of commitment when you have not intention of doing so. This is lying and manipulation and is bad. Now the girl is usually not innocent here either: she usually is lying to herself and very easily could clarify the position of the man in question.

Get off of dating apps, hit the nearest nightclub and if you succeed, you'll sound the way me or @faceh or those who did way more with way hotter girls than any of us.

Personally I'd say skip the nightclub and hit the best Martial Arts gym you can find in a 10 mile radius.

Don't send a guy into a nightclub without either knowing how to dance or knowing how to throw down if someone pushes him around. Preferably both.

if you succeed, you'll sound the way me or @faceh or those who did way more with way hotter girls than any of us.

That's not very appealing. As highlighted in comments such as this, even you yourself don't sound happy with it.

Don't take this personally but I think this is exactly the sort of modern nonsense that got us into this mess.

People should stay together because they are bound by contract and oath; attraction is the unimportant vaguery of adolescents who don't yet realize all flowers wither.

Sensate pleasures are a child's idea of marriage, which is of course really about children, business and the general rubric of legacy.

Yet of course moderns insist on remaining children their whole lives and attempting to manifest a love story's erotic ideal into a world that can only contenance reality.

Divorce should require more than whim, and adultery should have harsh consequences. Anything less is essentially a return to barbaric norms of sex relations, along with their barbaric consequences.

No amount of social gamesmanship alone can maintain society. People respond to incentives.

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If everything you believe you've learned about women from PUA is true then it should require massive amounts of shortsightedness to think you can "keep" a girlfriend or wife's attraction on any significant large scale of time. Chances of cheating will only increase as you approach 40s, your wife approaches 30s and younger, more jacked, more exciting playboys around her remain in their 20s.

I think we have different ideas of romantic success. Hook ups are not appealing to me. I'm happy that you've managed to overcome whatever sexual hang ups you had in 2021, but going out to clubs and fucking random tourists far from home is not appealing to me and does not constitute my idea of success. I'm sure I could learn a lesson or two from doing it and from your experience, you're probably not wrong.

I'm off the dating apps as of a few weeks ago. Nightclubs aren't really an option: my training schedule means I'm often running 20+ early on weekend mornings. Perhaps I really shouldn't be complaining, as I've kind of put myself into a box of the kind of life I want to live, but nightclub girls ain't it for me.

I don’t believe that with your appearance and accent you were hooking up with large numbers of beautiful European women in Thailand or Bali or anywhere else, but it doesn’t really matter. If you did, then your post history clearly shows it brought you no fulfilment or happiness.

You hated the man you were, so you constructed the fantasy of an alpha male, a sexually successful man, to replace him. But the neuroticism, the angst, the self-doubt, the fear of a life unlived still haunts you to no lesser degree.

Pair bonding is not a thing for guys.

I often doubt if I have anything of value to his not subreddit except anecdotes, but, hey, I believe I have a worthwhile anecdote.

"Pair bonding is not a thing for guys" is one of the takes that just too alien to any and all life experience that I had. Majority of males that I know clearly had have a pair-bonding going on. Everyone I know of who I have had the opportunity to observe closely enough (mostly, extended family) and had a serious long-term relationship and the relationship ended were evidently emotionally confused and miserable for quite some time afterwards. No everyone was dramatically devastated, but given the aftereffects after the bond broke, it is simply implausible to argue the guy had not emotionally pair-bonded, unless the words are twisted beyond their meaning.

I have fallen romantically in love exactly enough times to recognize that yes, I am capable of pair bonding.

Sure, I guess there are guys who don't pair-bond. I hear about them and I sort-of know of such people, but not very well, never got to know them. Wouldn't be surprised they are over represented in redpill. Perhaps it is one of those correlations where "like attracts like", or maybe it is actively causal, enough of PUA kills one part of the male mind which is capable of romantic notions. Am not surprised at all they are underrepresented in a convenience sample of "middle aged men who had a family and/or widowed pensioners (and relatives with offspring who could observe them)", PUA doesn't seem big on family-formation.

It's qualitatively different than stereotypical female-coded pair-bonding, true. It does not follow immediately from sex act. I suspect without traditional Western cultural constraints, many men could imagine themselves with a wife and a long-term mistress or two, with romantic pair-bond going on in different stages, and some concubines without any real feeling. Yet, the reality is that the WEIRD Western liberal city-dwelling places have officially dismissed the traditional Western cultural constraints and embraced non-monogamy ex cathedra,but I am not be surprised either that surprisingly few men are capable of acting on such fantasies, in particular if the guy has ancestry from the European part behind the Hajnal line.

Sometimes I wonder if the received wisdom about stereotypical female pair-bonding is wrong, too. It certainly can't be any hard rule, there are far too many women who seem to be totally on board with the promiscuity project or becoming party who jumps ship and initiates actions that make the serial monogamy serial. Middle aged women seem to have as good or better chances of successfully bouncing back from their divorces.

Pair bonding is not a thing for guys.

That’s… definitely not true. Just because you have never been in love before doesn’t mean other men haven’t.

One possible solution I've been considering recently is forcibly marrying and then if that doesn't work, castrating these men... One of my current roommates, let's call him James, has lived like a Lothario almost the entire time I've known him. Long term "girlfriend" back in California who he constantly cheats on with a rotation of 2-3 women here in Baltimore. Some of my resentment towards him is certainly jealousy (he has recently been fucking a girl I went on a date with and mildly liked), but it's hard not to see how this behavior is ruining his life. When I first met this guy he was deeply interested in history and biology and in pretty good shape. Now he doesn't do anything except scroll on instagram, watch retarded kids TV shows, and have sex with these women. He also recently got his PhD, but with ZERO publications, despite being in a computational biology lab where the expectation is 3-4 papers by graduation. This guy is smart and should be contributing to society, but instead is mooching off the NIH tit and ruining women.

The whole point of pursuing money and status through your career is to gain access to women. If you can cut out the middleman, why not? What's a job other than working 40 hours a week to make your bosses richer?

Hate the game, not the player. The problem is that society allows James to get access to women without contributing his fair share. The only way to stop this is to prevent the women from going to James by force, and that we are not willing to do.

You fantasize about castrating James because you are not allowed to fantasize about locking up the girl you dated.

I think this a rather cynical way at looking at the point of a career or society in general is. There are many other goods and services that I enjoy in society other than WAP because people have been driven to excel at their careers. Women are one lever, but we also used to have other levers (empire, community, religion) that we have systematically dismantled.

There's also a lot more to life than women. As @faceh has explained many times, he's very happy with his life outside of the romantic sphere. I would count myself in the same boat. I like my job (mostly), I have intellectually fulfilling hobbies, I'm very fit, I have a pretty good platonic community where I live. James has none of this stuff and all the women. I frankly would not trade places with him.

The whole point of pursuing money and status through your career is to gain access to women. If you can cut out the middle man, why not? What's a job other than working 40 hours a week to make your bosses richer?

I got laid plenty before I had any serious money or status. The main reason why I pursue money and status now is so that I can stop working and enjoy life in many dimensions, only one of which is women.

Hate the game, not the player. The problem is that society allows James to get access to women without contributing his fair share.

I don't consider that to be a problem.

You fantasize about castrating James because you are not allowed to fantasize about locking up the girl you dated.

Sure he is, who would stop him about fantasizing about it? Even if we mean "fantasize about it openly", I don't think that the average person would be much less disturbed, if at all, about hearing someone say "I want to castrate a man because he is getting laid without contributing to society" than about hearing someone say "I want to lock up women so they don't have sex with men who do not contribute to society".

No, the second would be way, way more offensive.

‘Fuckbois who lead women on should get their dick chopped off’ will make people laugh or grimace depending on how you say it, but ‘women should be kept chaste for marriage’ will get you labelled as an misogynist and people will vanish at the speed of light.

Wait for marriage isn’t the coolest opinion, but it’s not offensive, either. More old fashioned.

In London the social dynamics are pretty different. More importantly, though, there's a BIG difference between

'girls should wait for marriage to have sex'

and

'girls should be made to wait for marriage before having sex'.

Plenty of people in London wait for marriage, they just tend not to be natives.

It doesn't just sound like someone's grandma?

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Why not frame it like cigarette smoking?

I don't think people look down on people on a deeply moral level for smoking nowadays, but it's definitely at the level of "Yo, how can you be so stupid? Those cause cancer. And we've know that for years"

I won't judge a woman for going through a ho phase, but I'll shake my head and think "Any smart and respectable man is going to find a subtle way to filter you out. And we've know that for years."

I would also apply this exact same logic in reverse to a man. You spent your 20s and 30s dogging chicks and being a cad / skeezer? Well, in your 40s, any worthwhile woman is going to find a way to filter you out as well.

It seems worth noting that there are very few chaste virgins sleeping with Casanova. Very promiscuous people mostly have sex with each other- even if certain cads like to insist they introduce chaste virgins to the lifestyle on the reg.

Boats, nice cars etc can absolutely bring the ladies.

They can act as a multiplier for someone who already has game but really isn't a method with high returns.

Boats boosts it by approximately four billion.

Owning a boat is financial masochism. I've never done it because literally every blog on the planet - including super bro boat blogs - categorically informs you that it's a horrible idea. Yes, yes, "if it's a true passion" -- but, if it is, then you'll deal with the logistics of renting or chartering.

But got-damn to the bitches love a boat. My first experience with this was doing a half day rental of a pontoon boat on a B-Tier lake in greater Appalachia. This was not Miami, Catalina Island, Mykonos, what have you. This was a hot-ass august day on a "lake" that was made when Uncle Sam dammed a river 80 years ago.

The bikinis were on only until they were off. Sound track of Sports Illustrated Photo Shoot giggles. As I was the guy who decided to rent the boat and then drive it, my girlfriend was the ring leader and, although I didn't pursue it, I kind of felt like she was listing threesome on the menu.

Although I now see it for the moral sugar-high-and-crash that it was, and would never orchestrate a similar scenario, I cannot lie and say the memory isn't a warm one.

I have zero inclination to buy a boat, but when I drive past a marina in the summer in some of these mountain lakes, I smile, turn up the Kenny Chesney, and go back.

The whole point of pursuing money and status through your career is to gain access to women. If you can cut out the middleman, why not? What's a job other than working 40 hours a week to make your bosses richer?

So why do straight women and gay men have careers then?

Low-effort answer:

Straight women have careers because they thought they could have what the men they see have without giving anything up. That and wartime conscription + companies realizing they could devalue labor + governments enjoying a larger tax base.

Gay men have careers because that's where all the men are, duh.

In my experience, for the great majority of women, they don't. They prioritize either fun, free time, self-actualization, etc., on the one hand, or they prioritize safety, stability, morality etc. when making job decisions. The former for the young and attractive, the latter when older and settled down. Money is a concern insofar as it is necessary to guarantee a certain minimum living standard, and is preferably gained through parents, partners or the state.

Going for an actual career is, by and large, a thing men do. If this post may read too anti-women for some, there is also plenty of dysfunction in male life decision making, mostly centered around taking unnecessary high risks that are believed to plausibly have high returns but really don't, and/or playing competitive negative sum games on the mistaken believe that one is surely far above average.

Not sure if this is a class or geographical thing but that does not reflect at all the reality I live in, and it still doesn't answer why Tim Cook or Sam Altman are billionaires despite having zero interest in women.

The other point of going to work is to have money, and potentially social status. People like the things money brings. As the old saw goes, a woman makes a house better- but it still beats a cardboard box under a bridge.

You fantasize about castrating James because you are not allowed to fantasize about locking up the girl you dated.

Style and phrasing is straight out of The Last Psychiatrist and Sadly, Porn.

Well done.

I was actually repeating what the little copy of the Dreaded Jim on my shoulder said (it looks like a tiny Foghorn Leghorn).

I didn't reply to your original comment in the small-scale thread, but since you posted this again in the CW thread I feel obliged to say something.

One possible solution I've been considering recently is forcibly marrying and then if that doesn't work, castrating these men. Of course I would like women to shape up too, but that seems like a tall ask.

This is unhinged and unreasonable, and genuinely alarming. This just further confirms my prior statements on the hypocrisy and one-sidedness of many people (including many social conservatives), in that they like perpetually invoking men's supposed degenerate nature and women's supposed inherent vulnerability and manipulableness (which of course implies nothing about their ability to occupy positions of influence), and will routinely place extra responsibilities for prosociality on men that they won’t on women.

Expecting women to shape up and stop participating in antisocial and reckless behaviours of their own isn't something to be advocated for since it's too tall an ask. Expecting women to regulate their own sexual behaviour, sensibly assess risk and accept the consequences of their bad decisions like adults apparently is not reasonable, and they deserve recompense for their freely-made decision to have sex with obvious players whose intentions would be clear to anyone with an IQ above 20, like children who must perpetually be sheltered from the repercussions of their actions. Judging women for their sexual behaviour and placing restrictions on them is also a no-no. But ordering forcible marriage, castration, etc on men is I suppose no big deal. I'm not even a fan of lotharios or players and don't believe it to be a particularly beneficial life choice, but this is an extremely disproportionate punishment relative to the actual harm caused. But hey while we're coming up with bright ideas about how to fix dating, perhaps we should infibulate women or something for engaging in acts of deception in the sexual marketplace like gold-digging and serially stringing men along for attention, and “ruining men”.

This kind of casually expressed sentiment nudges me closer and closer to harbouring @Sloot's positions every day (a user who is very abrasive, very different from me and wants vastly different things out of life, but who I actually think is more right about things than people here give him credit for). I am always amazed by the sheer unparalleled power of women's tears, such that it can get people to order atrocities for offending them.

You and @Tree and @Sloot are correct. Upon reflection last night, I think I don't want to hold this position, and at least some of it comes from rage at my personal living situation. The prosocial thing for me to do would be to move out as soon as my lease is up (which I will do). It's not good for me to hold enough rage in my heart that I'm willing to advocate for castration (although everyone seems to miss the marriage part which is much less severe), and to hold such a dim view of women that I think they are fundamentally incapable of change. Thank you for helping me realize how ridiculous my position here is.

That's reasonable, and for the record you do have my sympathies - I do understand the rage at your living situation and at your roommate, it seems rough.

Definitely you should move out, I wouldn't like living there either if I were you.

Good. Soaking in that much bitterness is not healthy. Poor James never knew how close he came.

It’s rare for people to admit they’ve changed their mind as it happens, so thanks for that. Hard to say if in this instance it’s purely the result of rational argument, or the moral condemnation by multiple people (in addition to describing it as low status), and if so, if that is just as legitimate a reason to use/change one’s mind. Probably.

I think a combination. There's rationally no reason for me to hold this opinion, as it's not actionable (unless I want to end up in jail). It also implies that women are not accountable at all for their actions, which I disagree with. It takes two to tango, and most of the time a women knows what she's getting with Lothario (she thinks she can change him however). It would be abhorrent to me if someone advocated FGM or something similar for women in this situation, so my position on castration doesn't make sense.

And then morally it makes me sound like a whiny bitch that is upset he isn't getting any. That's not the kind of person I think I am, and it's certainly not the kind of person I want to be. Although I agree with most of the arguments that @faceh here and in general, I'm starting to wonder what the use of arguing about this on the internet actually is for me. It's not fun like other debates here are, it doesn't help me develop my arguments for the real world, and it doesn't really help me improve my own attitude and life. Think I am going to ban myself from discussing these topics further on here (@Mods feel free to enforce this from now on).

Poor James never knew how close he came.

According to OP James has a pattern of stealing women from his lovelorn roommate. Such a fellow is lucky to still have all his teeth, and if he continues in that vein will not have them all for long.

The problem here is that James will not lose his teeth and everyone knows it, especially James. What pretty much everyone misses is that patriarchy is fundamentally about dealing with male intrasexual competition. All the stuff psychoanalyzing women largely misses the point.

patriarchy is fundamentally about dealing with male intrasexual competition.

Please say more about this!

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Patriarchy wouldn’t have applied to begin with; these aren’t chaste Virgin daughters he’s laying with. They would, by the standards of a patriarchal society, have been reckoned as prostitutes.

thejdizzler's comment is pretty extreme, and if I had to bet I'd bet that this is just him coping with his own jealousy and shortcomings while trying to find a "logical" solution to the problems that affect his type the most. It's not rational though. It's an absurd proposal. It seems like he's just grasping for straws in hopes that some others will empathize with his situation. I do empathize with the sort of turmoil he's dealing with right now, because I think it's become a broader societal problem.

Expecting women to regulate their own sexual behaviour, sensibly assess risk and accept the consequences of their bad decisions like adults apparently is not reasonable, and they deserve recompense for their freely-made decision to have sex with obvious players whose intentions would be clear to anyone with an IQ above 20, like children who must perpetually be sheltered from the repercussions of their actions.

It's reasonable in the current moment because current society allows it. The problem is that it has the potential to bring about societal consequences that people no longer seem to think are possible. A group willingly volunteering to scale back the most freedom and opportunity they've ever had for the sake of the other half of the population will not happen. If I were a Western woman in the current environment, I too would not want to willingly give up my position in society.

What's likely to happen though is that after this has run its course for a while, either A) some capable portion of the lower 80% of men, accompanied by a handful of the top 20% of men, will make increasingly harder pushes for men's control than the one that's happening right now, or B) AI will increasingly fill the emptiness these men feel, come up with new methods to prevent human violence, and stave off a chaotic uprising. Plenty of other scenarios could play out, but these two seem the most obvious in the current setting. Any other scenario that trends away from prosperity will be much worse for current women's rights, because ostracism, shaming, and emotional manipulation will take a backseat to the threat of violence.

Right now, warning the population about the possibility of something violent like this happening just rings hollow. Nobody in the lib or progressive camp actually believes that their behavior fuels the fire they most want to put out. Worst of all is that there's nothing to be done about that on a macro level. In my opinion, the only real way this shakes out is people learning the hard way, like we always have.

My predictions are obviously open for criticism. I present two distinct possibilities and a vague third one, when in reality there is an infinite number of possible outcomes.

Here's my prognostication:

A disproportionate number of western women enter their 40s and 50s single, never married, and childless. It doesn't matter if they "realize" they want a family or not. Instead, the tyranny of aging means they will simply get less male attention as time goes on. Gracefully accepting defeat isn't something many humans do, so they will rebel in their own way. Not against men in some sort of wide scale "Go Girlboss!" moment. Instead, they will attack the easiest to spot targets with the lowest possibility of retaliation; young women.

The great reckoning will thus be these spinsters attempting to shame or otherwise emotionally blackmail these younger women not into avoiding the older generations mistakes (see: failure to accept defeat) but into agreeing with the spinsters ahead of schedule. Recommended Slogan: "The only way to be a feminist in 2035 is to admit that all men are evil. Defund the patriarchy!"

But young women themselves will largely see this for the spite fueled grift that it is and veer away from anything that even resembles this. They'll continue to be pretty and young and go on dates, but perhaps not put out as much, and perhaps seek the counsel of trusted male friends on their potential mates. Play this tape forward enough and all of a sudden the "cool girl" thing to do is to take things slow, pair bond hard, and get married early and have babies.

My primary support for this prediction is that it's already happening. Gen Z women, from the survey's I have seen, are super divided between "all men are evil" levels of feminism and "lol, I just want to be a mom" levels of trad. There isn't much of a middle ground. I've also seen some millenial women, after having become moms, hit the hard defect button out of the sisterhood. My anec-data of note was seeing a FAANG director-of-something-made-up leave that $500k / yr job to be a SAHM after taking an extended maternity leave and changing her mind to "whoooaaa babies are way better than spreadsheets."

In business, there's always a lot of discussion about the unit economics of company. Simply put, does selling one unit of your product to a customer cost more than you're selling it for? In startup land, the answer to this question can be "yes" for some amount of time. In a high growth setting, paying to buy up market share can be a viable strategy. But, eventually, the answer has to be "no." If it isn't, you're running a structurally negative return and it's just a matter of time and debt before the company dies.

I see failing ideologies like third wave feminism in this regard. You can have whatever worldview you want, but if having and professing that worldview leads to a lifestyle that cannot support itself in the long term, eventually that worldview dies out. Freezing eggs, looking for sperm donors, and then being a single mother is a far far higher risk, lower return, more expensive, and more complicated strategy than "get married. have kids" You can try to find some sort of grey middle ground, which has been the entire experiment since, roughly, the late 1990s / early 2000s, but I think the experiment has shown that middle ground is, at best, a thin isthmus rather than a lush and wide peninsula (geography metaphors for the win).

Of course these lotharios are doing something bad, should they not have consequences?

I agree that castration is dumb. But what’s wrong with seduction laws?

Well, women are actively giving Lothario what he wants. It's not like women should be considered incapable of assessing their own risk or bearing the consequences of their own decisions, and it's often trivially easy to identify a cad - they barely even need to hide that fact. Personally I think that if women decide to play with fire, it should come as no surprise once they get burned. You did a stupid thing and had unrealistic expectations of a man you probably already knew wasn't looking for the same thing you were, learn from it and grow.

Perhaps seduction laws make some level of sense within a traditionalist sexual/moral framework, but right now, we don't live in that world. We live under a bizarre marriage of Victorian era morality and female sexual liberation that is the schizophrenic brainchild of modern gender feminism. Most people are somehow still capable of harbouring the traditional idea that female sexuality is a Big Deal and must be guarded closely; that any woman who feels violated (by her own free choices, mind you) is an agency-less victim who should have the ability to shift responsibility onto the man and obtain restitution of some form from the one "responsible", while somehow also holding the liberal idea that women are agents who can freely make whatever sexual choices they want without outside constraint or any personal responsibility to safeguard their own virtue. All the choice, without any of the responsibility.

Men and society have no ability to police women, despite the fact that once the sex they assented to does not result in what they want, it is the responsibility of society - whether that be the men around them, or society as a whole - to intervene on their behalf. Historically this would've been a woman's father beating the daylights out of the man in question and forcing a shotgun wedding, today it comes in the form of public cancellation and blacklisting of the man as a predator and objectifier of women. In effect, this means that men are policed, whereas women aren't even expected to accept the consequences of their own behaviour. Introducing seduction laws into this clusterfuck makes the situation even more unbalanced, not less.

At the very least it should go either way - sexual liberation or sexual traditionalism. But we fall short of even that basic standard at the moment. Right now many people's moral evaluations are incoherently structured around what would be most convenient for women, switching between traditionalism and liberation in a way that allows them to maximise the benefits women extract while minimising judgement and stigma, and that is something I do object to. It needs to be consistent.

Eh, the case for sexual traditionalism is pretty strong.

  1. No one has every died from being too horny. If this were the case, men would have an expected and maximum lifespan of 16 years.

  2. Men commit the overwhelming majority of murders and violence crime. The are, generally, three broad reasons for this; money/currency (including drugs), respect or prestige, and access or exclusive access to women.

  3. The near human universal antipathy towards prostitution is largely based in concerns for a) health and b) preventing the breakup of families due to infidelity. I know it may come as a shock, but our hundreds of millions of illiterate agricultural ancestors weren't actually involved in a highly ideological effort to "own women's bodies and sexual agency" -- they didn't want creepy-crawlies in their pants, and also knew that Uncle Nimrod was one seriously horny dude.

  4. Won't pay it much attention here but; pregnancy and abortion.

Simply put, sexual hyper-liberalization is obviously high risk for society. Risk, even when high, isn't inherently bad, but one then has to weigh it against the other side of the equation; reward.

And what is the real reward for sexual liberalization? I mean this genuinely as a question, not a rhetorical device. The most common responses I have heard or seen fall into a bucket of fuzzy, highly emotional self-justifications; "People should be able to express themselves however they want" , "sexual agency is a necessary requirement for personal liberty" (I don't know what that means) , "people have a right to love whoever they want to love." None of this is very concrete and side steps the entire risk-reward framework.

I also haven't seen much in the way of good faith or realistic discussions of the downsides of a return to sexual traditionalism. The Handmaids Tale LARPing is, hilariously, just a publicly accessible BDSM fantasy. Sexual traditionalism wouldn't mean women couldn't vote or drive or have "real jobs" (read: high status wordcel jobs). I can see slut shaming becoming a little more prevalent but my thought there is that it still absolutely exists, but is just done in layers-upon-layers of backhanded compliments and covert communication styles instead of out in the open.

Men commit the overwhelming majority of murders and violence crime.

Gonna go off on a tangent here that's unrelated to what you were trying to say, but I'm just going to point out that this is largely down to their risk taking and greater aggressiveness within the public sphere, which also means that they are responsible for the overwhelming majority of acts of heroism (men are 90% of those who have received the Carnegie Hero Medal, for example). Of course, the negative aspects of these traits always get discussed so much more than the positive ones, and by virtually every political group in existence. Wonder why. Then there's also the reality of violence-by-proxy by women, which is yet another thing that fuels male-perpetrated violence. I wrote a longer comment about all of that here.

And what is the real reward for sexual liberalization? I mean this genuinely as a question, not a rhetorical device.

I wasn't so much advocating sexual liberalisation or disparaging sexual traditionalism as much as I was simply pointing out that if we're accepting a sexual framework, we need to fully accept all of its consequences. Sexual traditionalism doesn't just mean "shotgun weddings for men" and "penalties for cads for having deflowered a woman": it also means stigmatising and penalising women who have premarital sex or tart themselves up inappropriately or use sex/intimacy to wheedle money out of men, granting the men around them the power to vet and police who they can go out with (since they will have to defend any breach of their honour), and placing responsibilities on both husband and wife in a marriage to put out and provide sex to their spouse. The responsibility for maintaining a pro-social scenario was not placed only on one party.

Note I don't consider this to be the Handmaid's Tale either. I very much agree with you that that's basically feminist oppression porn and an unhinged caricature of traditional sexual mores which borders on the fantastical. I think all of these traditional strictures are just a consequence of accepting that entire framework of looking at things, and I don't like how we've basically adopted a chimera of sexual liberalism and traditionalism, having accepted only the parts of both worldviews that benefit women while discarding all the bits that may inconvenience them. Within this current context, I won't accept any more sexual strictures being placed on men; the system is already engineered to give women maximal choice while displacing maximal accountability onto men. If we're advocating a traditional society, the obligations of women that made it make sense need to be enforced. We need to pick a lane and stick with it, instead of relying on women's tears to help us shape our approach to everything regardless of how conflicted and schizophrenic things get.

I wasn't so much advocating sexual liberalisation or disparaging sexual traditionalism as much as I was simply pointing out that if we're accepting a sexual framework, we need to fully accept all of what it means. Sexual traditionalism doesn't just mean "shotgun weddings for men" and "penalties for cads for having deflowered a woman" but also stigma and penalty for women who have premarital sex or tart themselves up inappropriately or use sex/intimacy to wheedle money out of men, the ability for the men around them to vet who they're going out with (since they will have to defend any breach of their honour), and responsibilities for both husband and wife in a marriage to put out and provide sex to their spouse. The responsibility for maintaining a pro-social scenario was not placed only on one party.

What makes you think I have a problem with any of that?

None of this is very concrete and side steps the entire risk-reward framework.

Does it? "Not having a fundamental moral right infringed upon" is a kind of reward, surely. You may as well ask why a traditionalist sexual mores shouldn't simply shoot all transgressors without a trial. I'm sure a practical argument could be constructed on why such a policy would be detrimental to society along some tangible metric, but that's not why any sensible person will immediately reject such a proposal with horror: it's because they feel that killing people is, all else being equal, morally wrong. This isn't "concrete" and it "side-steps the risk-reward framework", but all the same, you can't have a real conversation about the issue without bringing it up.

In the same way, as a true liberal, I feel it is, all else being equal, axiomatically, fairly wrong to prevent people from doing whatever the hell they want; and doubly wrong to force them to do things they don't want to do. Society naturally has to mandate a little bit of each to keep itself running, but that's a trade-off from the word go, and you should only add more restrictions and duties with the understanding that you are doing harm to your citizens with each new bylaw by infringing upon those basic rights, so the payoff had better be damn good. Traditional sexual norms include a fair bit of forcing women to do things they don't want to do, and positively enormous amounts of preventing people of both sexes from doing things they want to do. There's an enormous penalty in the "cons" column on that basis alone, and in a world where STDs and unwanted pregnancies are under control, the fuzzier benefits just don't have a snowball's chance in Hell of making up for it. It's like asking what kind of subtle improvement to demographic statistics would be worth mandating that people whack themselves in the knee with a hammer every morning.

In the same way, as a true liberal, I feel it is, all else being equal, axiomatically, fairly wrong to prevent people from doing whatever the hell they want

I want to sincerely thank you for creating such a succinct illustration of why liberalism always fails within its own framework.

it was never the lines that did it, there's no such thing as a pickup line. Women were attracted to the self perception they saw which I can firmly state is extraordinarily difficult to fake. Something not tied to looks, actual status or money.

"Frame" or "Presence" is probably the best way to put it.

Physical appearance (being tall and large, that is, muscular) helps a lot. Voice being deep helps. Eye contact. And good fashion sense.

But beyond that, it comes down to being so self assured and unbothered by anything that this particular conversation with a woman is just not a big deal to you, and you're clearly going to go off and do something fun and awesome as soon as you leave it, and she can tag along if she plays her cards right, but if not, its not like you care much.

Its not enough to act like a king. You must be the king.

As you say, the lines themselves don't matter. If you can capture the attention by just being present, and command her attraction by exuding confidence, its easy.

Hard earned insights that were A/B tested for quite a while.

I've done a lot of lifting over the past year and a half and I'm already 6 foot 2. I won't say that I can capture any given woman's attention at will, by any means, but if I can get that initial attention its funny how positive the interactions are regardless of whether I'm being a dick or just being friendly. Its like the words don't matter in the slightest.

Learning how to flip between a general aloofness and then a more intense, undressing-with-your-eyes energy was also key.

The points that you are making have become commonly accepted, at least among highly online people. I'm saying this as a social observation, not as a criticism of you.

The modern highly online understanding of male-female relations is pervaded by PUA teachings, attempts at evolutionary psychology, a general notion that "the game" is a brutal Darwinian contest, and a deep mutual mistrust between men and women. Many of the modern dating conversation's insights are accurate, and the conversation is not new - men and women have been treating and discussing the art of finding a sexual partner as being a skill or an optmizable strategy for probably almost as long as there has been language.

It's good to look at sexuality from this analytic side. But past a certain point, looking at it analytically becomes very drab, boring, and limiting. Viewed through the lens of purely analytic sexual gamesmanship, both men and women seem like horrible creatures whom no-one would really want to be with other than for a cheap temporary bodily satisfaction, an ego boost, perhaps money... just not for the joy of being with them.

If one doesn't already know the vital lessons that the analytic perspective teaches, it is very useful. Lessons like: Don't be a simp. Have confidence. Don't automatically trust people just because they are attractive. Flirting is largely about nonverbal communication. Don't expect the logic of sexual attraction to work the same way as the logic of friendship. Women are attracted to status to some extent. Etc. These lessons are especially important to pick up if one is shy and/or inexperienced and/or neuro-divergent, or has some other issue that has prevented one from already learning these things.

However, the analytic perspective by itself is joyless and one-dimensional. If taken too far, it reduces romance and sex to a real-life equivalent of grinding a video game. Joy re-enters the equation if one sees the other person as someone who transcends yourself and your image of them and predictions about them. The jaded perspective thinks "oh boy, here's yet another woman who is just like all the other women". And while there is a grain of truth in "all women are like that" (or "all men are like that"), it is not actually true. All women are not the same. All men are not the same. And to over-analyze them, to treat romance and sexuality like attempting to optimize a game strategy, turns the whole thing into a meaningless chore.

By the way, I think that what I am saying applies equally whether you're looking to settle down monogamously or whether you want to go out and keep meeting new people for sex. My comment should not be taken as advocacy for settling down.

However, the analytic perspective by itself is joyless and one-dimensional. If taken too far, it reduces romance and sex to a real-life equivalent of grinding a video game. Joy re-enters the equation if one sees the other person as someone who transcends yourself and your image of them and predictions about them. The jaded perspective thinks "oh boy, here's yet another woman who is just like all the other women". And while there is a grain of truth in "all women are like that" (or "all men are like that"), it is not actually true. All women are not the same. All men are not the same. And to over-analyze them, to treat romance and sexuality like attempting to optimize a game strategy, turns the whole thing into a meaningless chore.

You have it exactly backwards. Everyone starts here. Well, I donno, maybe I shouldn't say that. Maybe kids these days really are growing up on a steady diet of Andrew Tate and Pearly Things instead of romantic heroes in fiction. Maybe I'll circle back to this.

But back when I was a young man, this was our default stance of myself and the peers I knew. Overwhelmingly myself and my male peers viewed and treated the women we tried to date as a person who transcends ourself and our image and predictions about them.

And overwhelmingly we were disabused of those notions. "All women are like that" doesn't spring out of the void. It springs for many from spending their entire 20's experiencing women like that. Some of my peers made the adjustments and adopted what "red pill" truths and strategies they could stomach, others were too disillusioned at the amorality of dating to continue.

Sure, many people start there and then get disabused of their original innocent notions. I know that well. I went through some of that journey myself. My point is that, once you've reached the point where you've absorbed the lessons that a more analytic and cynical perspective has to teach, it's good to go to something more innocent and joyful, to a perspective that respects the cynical lessons but is not hollowed out and made joyless by them. I think it is possible to be a romantic without being a clueless simp. The red pill cannot be the final stage, at least not for me. It is just so utterly boring and unappealing to look at romance and sex from that perspective. When I read most red pill authors I get the sense that they're not even enjoying the sex that they are having, it is just an ego boost for them.

If a man is not succeeding sexually because he has not absorbed enough red pill lessons then by all means, he should absorb those lessons. But if he gets stuck at that stage, it's hard for me to imagine him being actually happy with his sex life. The red pill people don't seem happy or sexually fulfilled no matter how much sex they're having, they seem constantly angry and they seem like they hate the women they are fucking.

I am absolutely not advocating that guys stay stuck in some kind of simpish innocent outlook. I went through the whole PUA thing myself, that's part of why I'm writing all this. My point is just that there is something more out there. I'm not saying that one shouldn't "spin plates". What I'm talking about is separate from the question of whether one should be with one woman or many. My point is that even if you "spin plates", it's pointless unless you learn how to deeply enjoy it and be happy with it. If it's just a chore to get ego boosts, it's rather valueless.

I guess let me be clear. Not I, nor any of my peers, were spinning plates.

Well, there was one guy... but there's always one guy...

The point I'm trying to make is that red pill observations about women where the only thing any of us found with any explanatory or predictive power. They were horrifying, and reduced women to attention seeking narcissist/children most of the time. But damnit if they didn't work. And frankly, at the time, they hardly seemed worse than the covers of women's magazine's you'd see in the checkout isle proudly advertising ways to "train your man".

But all the same, when your attempts to treat women as people with equal agency and responsibility to you fail miserably for 10 years, and the advice you constantly receive is "Treat them like narcissist/children" and it works... I mean... how do you go back? How do you compartmentalize that back away? And once again, this isn't in the effort of getting laid all the time and having as much sex as possible, but merely getting a second date. Merely not being immediately rejected. And then maybe, if you are lucky, having her decide to decamp the cock carousel for you, and hoping she doesn't regret it and go back on your commitments to each other.

Now, I suspect there is a hidden breed of woman out there, well adjusted and predisposed to marrying a humble well adjusted man, and starting families. I may have seen a few back in my highschool days. I think some of them even married their highschool sweethearts, and I think some may even still be together. I think by some degree, if you are still dating in your 30's, you've got problems, and you are picking through other people with problems. I also think our society is destroying the environment that raises well adjusted, family oriented people, and they are damned near an endangered species at this point, such that the modal advice to treat women like spoiled children is probably the most actionable, especially into your 30's.

They were horrifying, and reduced women to attention seeking narcissist/children most of the time. But damnit if they didn't work. And frankly, at the time, they hardly seemed worse than the covers of women's magazine's you'd see in the checkout isle proudly advertising ways to "train your man".

Yep.

I can distinctly recall the dawning sense of disgusted realization when I began implementing the Red Pill stuff in small doses with women I was interested in and saw it working in real time. Very consistently. Even against women who were anti-redpill.

The easiest way to notice it nowadays is see how any given woman will 'ignore' most compliments paid to her by onlookers... but A SINGLE VEILED INSULT and suddenly all her attention focuses in and she responds ONLY to that. And the nature of her response will vary entirely based on how attractive the insulting party is.

Its tapping into baseline truth more closely than the narrative I was brought up on ever did.

Can you please give some specific examples about how treating women like narcissists/children works? Like specific anecdotes and stories. I've always heard that the red pill implies this interpretation, but I've never read any stories that actually show this phenomenon.

I can probably dredge up a few if I thought for a bit.

But women will tell it to you directly if you let them.

This video also lives rent-free in my head.

Even straight up liberal bisexual chicks will let it slip.

Also, try flipping through any given Romance book on the bestseller's list these days.

It's another trope / basic lore in RedPill forums that your "blue haired, heavily tatted, super pierced" feminist is probably into pretty rough sex / degradation / submissive kink.

I love the recurring word "organically" here. Translation: "I didn't have to ask for this dammit."

I'm sorry I missed this entire discussion by two weeks, but I won't reanimate it now.. I'm sure it'll come around again, and I hope you can forgive me this one necropost. A lot of people in this thread could take advice from each other, but I'm entertained by the pushback you and mrvanillasky are getting on what is basically the attracting-women equivalent of Calories In/Calories Out.

Its also entertaining to me, or else I wouldn't persist so much.

I actually get where they're coming from. I was taught a narrative for 20 years that women generally dislike being told what to do, that you should be nice and unthreatening when talking to them, and that "no" unequivocally means "no" every time, rather than "CONVINCE me."

You really have to internalize rules 1 and 2 (be attractive, don't be unattractive) and then notice how if you're attractive, you are already 80% of the way to winning, you just have to play the game correctly and overcome some token amount of reluctance and 'close the deal' (for whatever "the deal" is). This means being assertive and, frankly, treating them as if they don't know what they want, and you're just the man to give it to them.

One observation that really made it click for me was "if they really want you to stop, they'll leave/avoid you." If they aren't actively packing and heading for the door, you're still in play. For some people reading actions comes naturally. For the guys who have been taught their whole lives to take women at their word, they're left VERY confused as to why ignoring their words would work so well.

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I'd say the absolute floor is to be aware of how to handle the "shit test". The fact that women are relentlessly probing your boundaries for weakness, and like children, if you give in they lose all respect for you. If you treat women like peers with mutual respect, you might foolishly give into one of these "shit test" and then you're fucked. You can literally watch them lose interest in you and check out of all future dates.

I have no theory of mind for this behavior. Red-pillology says there frankly isn't one, it's entirely biological. They don't even know they are doing it, and don't even know that's how they are reacting to it. Maybe that's a less inflammatory theory than thinking it's on purpose, maybe learned from those "How to train your man" magazines I always see at the grocery checkout and never read.

I think it’s about safety. If a woman cant absolutely feel safe around you, you are done. And one of the best ways to find out if you’re able to stick up for yourself is to try to push on the boundaries until the choice is you stick to your guns or you cave.

But all the same, when your attempts to treat women as people with equal agency and responsibility to you fail miserably for 10 years, and the advice you constantly receive is "Treat them like narcissist/children" and it works... I mean... how do you go back? How do you compartmentalize that back away?

Women have had the knowledge that men are sex-crazed brutes forever, they tolerate us anyway.

I think the issue might be the implict (?) belief that there is some kind of genderless human standard that women (or men) need to meet. There isn't. There's men and there's women, as different as chalk and cheese. Holding women to male standards is like expecting the cat to play fetch. The wise woman doesn't expect her husband to talk deeply about his feelings or know that she's upset even if she says she's fine. You should take the same attitude to women and their foibles.

Women have had the knowledge that men are sex-crazed brutes forever, they tolerate us anyway.

Debatable, but also, let me compare the information ecosystems at work here. Men's many faults and failure modes are part of mainstream culture. Women can open say, in mixed company, in virtually any setting, "All men want is sex." And all the men will nod thinking "Not me, but those other guys sure". If they have daughter's they'll think of all the men they hope stay the fuck away from her. The women might still be thinking of their husbands. But generally, nobody will protest the statement, and it's treated as just obviously true and uncontroversial.

Knowledge of women's many faults and failure modes exists in a ghetto and is profoundly stigmatized. It's not worked into mainstream culture at all. Father's rarely pass the information they've learned onto their sons, lest their wive's overhear and lose their shit that their husband is teaching their sons to "hate women". All we ever hear is a litany of "Women never lie about rape/lie about paternity/baby trap men". To accuse any woman of doing so sets off the entire cartel like you have personally accused every woman of doing such a thing. They cannot dissociate from the "Women lie about rape" the same way men can from "All men want is sex."

So most women are armed against male excesses, and most men are fed into the wood chipper repeatedly until they rediscover the forbidden knowledge from first principles yet again. Or they get lucky and find even some light red-pill takes.

X. I remember a lot of ‘yeah, son, women are emotionally unstable’ and the like.

Yeah, but that's up there with milquetoast phrases like "Boys will be boys" IMHO.

Like, by comparison, it is not uncommon for women to check in with friends before and after dates "Just in case". It's just common knowledge that it's a thing you should do. Maybe mother's tell their daughters, I wouldn't be shocked. But I knew many women who had this sort of buddy system when they were going on dates. Along with dozens of other rules of thumb to protect themselves in case the man was a scumbag or violent.

What defenses are men armed with? "Don't stick your dick in crazy" I guess that works, but what is crazy? Well now we're right back to red-pillology as the only definer of women. And generally, after they've slept with a woman, everything that happens after, even the most nightmarish abuse and family terrorism, is viewed as something they brought on themselves. All they do is shut their mouth, get a lawyer, and say goodbye to half their assets and income.

This is true, but it begs the question. Yes, men and women have different foibles, but how do they compare? How do the standards for men stack up against the standards for women?

As WhiningCoil expresses above, the redpill perspective on women essentially considers them as men's lessers, baser creatures driven primarily by instinct. This is a perspective with strong cultural precedent, and its echoes persist to this day, even in aspirationally egalitarian societies. When feminists keep talking about wanting men and women to be equal, despite their equality before the law and the outright preference shown towards women by our cultural institutions, this is what they mean.

In this way, I'm sympathetic to both feminism and the redpill perspective; I do believe that women are to some extent more childish, instinctual, etc. than men, but I also think that this is a highly unfortunate reality, not something to celebrate or appreciate, and hopefully might be ameliorated by whatever means necessary, social or biological.

As WhiningCoil expresses above, the redpill perspective on women essentially considers them as men's lessers, baser creatures driven primarily by instinct. This is a perspective with strong cultural precedent, and its echoes persist to this day, even in aspirationally egalitarian societies. When feminists keep talking about wanting men and women to be equal, despite their equality before the law and the outright preference shown towards women by our cultural institutions, this is what they mean.

And that is evidence that feminists are either too incompetent (they aren't...) to understand the reason for this or are deliberately maintaining (or feigning) ignorance for social manipulation. The idea that men are by nature baser creatures driven primarily by their instincts (eg, "They think with their dicks.") is widespread in culture just as it is for women. Men are not seen as inherently better than women; people who control themselves and don't give in to their base instincts are seen as better than people who don't. Society expects this of men in a way it doesn't of women and in return grants them greater status for achieving it, as well as punishing them much more harshly for not. Feminists typically focus on eliminating the greater status granted men without eliminating (often rather reinforcing) the greater pressure nor the greater punishment.

I also think that this is a highly unfortunate reality, not something to celebrate or appreciate, and hopefully might be ameliorated by whatever means necessary, social or biological

Before jumping to such conclusions, have you seriously considered why nature saw fit to select this reality?

I have indeed done some pondering on the origins of femininity. I think my strongest hypothesis is that female neuroticism largely stems from the zero-sum nature of female intrasexual competition, with utility in childrearing being a highly secondary cause. Agreeableness and consensus-seeking seem to me as less of a socially useful trait and more an adaptation towards self-preservation around potentially hostile men. Others have argued for the social utility of women's agreeableness, but I'm still pretty sure that nothing particularly bad would happen if the agreeableness distribution among women was shifted, say, 30% of the way towards the male distribution.

I largely accept the axiom that the world would be a better place if women acted more like men, though I'm unsure of the optimal delta. There are legitimately complimentary aspects to femininity, but to the extent that women are in fact "like narcissistic children", it would be better if they weren't.

I do believe that women are to some extent more childish, instinctual, etc. than men, but I also think that this is a highly unfortunate reality, not something to celebrate or appreciate, and hopefully might be ameliorated by whatever means necessary, social or biological.

See, I'd just call that 'hating women'. I like women. I think it's good they're women.

Imagine someone suggesting that we somehow 'fix' children such that they just start as adults!

Would you then contest the assertion that women are fundamentally lesser than men? I think that @To_Mandalay is essentially correct in this thread about how women have always been considered lower on the Great Chain of Being than men, do you disagree?

I don't hate women at all, though I do empathize with women who seem to hate themselves like this poor soul. It seems perfectly reasonable to me for women to feel trapped by their biology, to despair that their ordained purpose is mere continuance of the species while the men drive forwards the transcendence of Man.

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Imagine someone suggesting that we somehow 'fix' children such that they just start as adults!

If we regularly expected children to be helicopter pilots, doctors and heads of state, then yes I think them acting like regular children would be a big problem.

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People usually don't want their children to remain children forever. That's called Down's syndrome.

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I intellectually understand the possible seduction value of treating women as narcissists/children. I broke into sexual success years ago through PUA, so I'm not unfamiliar with those concepts. However, my actual experience with the women who wanted to be with me longer than a one night-stand has not been that of being with narcissists/children. The women I've had long-ish relationships with have mostly been smart and decent people. Not without their problems, of course, and some of them were no paragons of mental stability, but neither am I, and they were decent... very far from this nightmare image of women as treacherous harpies. I'm actually probably more often the one who screwed up those relationships by being narcissistic/childlike myself, and/or by wanting to spread my wild oats. At least, it's 50/50. The women I've gotten to know, as opposed to one-night stands, I mean, they were often weird, but in the same way that I'm weird... neurotic, well I'm neurotic too... not totally rational, sure, but not any more so than I am irrational. I've also had some cool female friends. And as far as just sexual level stuff goes, I'm no Don Juan, it's not like I have hot girls beating down my door, but I've been with some really attractive women.

You say: "Treat them like narcissist/children" and it works... I mean... how do you go back? How do you compartmentalize that back away?

I just don't think of it in those terms. Treating them like narcissists/children bores me, it's not arousing or stimulating for me in any way. Even if it works, it's not my thing, it's something that I don't enjoy and doesn't turn me on. I've had enough sex by now, and have satisfied my old painful teenage virgin frustration enough, that now I'm at a point where I'm not willing to do X Y and Z like a chore in order to get to sex or romance. I'm into having fun. I personally enjoy a very minimalist type of seduction, so for me fun in that regard is about just trying to use eye contact and other kinds of body language mainly. But not all guys are into that, I'm all for every guy just doing whatever kind of flirting he enjoys the most. What I enjoy most likely doesn't maximize my success but whatever, as long as I get laid every now and then with attractive women I don't care. I fall in love with every woman I see more than a few times. Not in a simp way, I don't lie or compromise or pretend or put them above myself. And I've never had a woman who I was with for a while actually disrespect me or screw me over in any way that wasn't justified by my actions, so that's never been an issue. I fall in love partly in a painful way, because I tend to get attached. But also in an expansive way, I genuinely become interested in who they are as people. I dunno, I'm still in touch with a couple of my former lovers. It's nice. They're people. Different people than men, sure. But interesting people... I don't even think about things in terms of cock carousel or whatever. If a chick wants to fuck 40 guys in a year I'm like, cool, go for it. I don't want a girl I'm seeing to fuck other guys but if I'm not seeing her then my genuine reaction is like "awesome, hope you have fun fucking".

The red pill people don't seem happy or sexually fulfilled no matter how much sex they're having, they seem constantly angry and they seem like they hate the women they are fucking.

That's the beauty of the red pill. It treats women like they're crazy, and by acting like a red-piller you ensure that you only interact with the crazier women (as the saner ones self-select out of your way).

There are actually some foundational truths in RP mythos, although the vast majority of them apply to men and women (everyone likes people who are attractive and confident, if you have a lot going for you in life people will find that cool, etc).

As a teenager I actually started trying to write a short book of all the Red-pill truths I saw, while stripping out all the stupid misogyny. Then I got a girlfriend and stopped caring, and by the time we had broken up fully lost interest.

Amen. The core of RP ideology is that there are strong, gender-specific trends in what women like that you can change about yourself in order to be more successful dating: all women are like that is an overstatement, but its cousin "most women are like that" is spot-on.

Growing up, I took all of the mainstream advice to heart, which aligned with my natural instincts anyway: just treat women like people, as if they were a friend you liked a lot and that you'd like to become a best friend you have sex with. This, surprise surprise, led to complete failure before picking up lite red pill tactics (much too late in my 20s, alas).

So long as men like relationships and sex, they will work to understand what factors lead to relationships and sex. And so long as all women are like that, men will notice that and deploy strategies to navigate that.

Not my ideal world, but short of a commitment to lifelong celibacy, there's not much I could do about it. The ball's in women's court.

I like your perspective. Particularly this:

Viewed through the lens of purely analytic sexual gamesmanship, both men and women seem like horrible creatures whom no-one would really want to be with other than for a cheap temporary bodily satisfaction, an ego boost, perhaps money... just not for the joy of being with them.

That's what it feels like to read a lot of the more negativistic takes on dating, from both men and women. At some point I just wonder whether they even like the opposite sex in any sense whatsoever. I see so much talking about status and power and affirmation and sex, and almost nothing about a connection where you see yourself in the other and realize you're not so different as you thought, or the physical pleasure of a cuddle, or the joy of making your partner laugh after they had a bad day, or the calm peacefulness of a weekend spent living domestic life with your partner, or what it's like to look into someone's eyes and see them dilate and soften as they look at you. I would cut off my dick and throw it away before I gave up these things.

In particular, a lot of takes from men on the dating scene, even those I see on the motte, sound like they were written by people from a completely different planet from me -- men don't pair bond, men don't talk about their feelings, men are only interested in harem-building, men are only monogamous because women make them, romance is a game that men generate to get sexual access from women. I don't know to what extent this is just posturing, machismo, or a real difference in psychological experience. But those things just... don't describe me.

I guess I never went through a redpill phase. I certainly went through a phase where I realized that you do need to make your romantic intentions known early on with a woman, and trying to build a relationship on top of a friendship just doesn't work. But I only rarely encountered women who were "hooking up with alphas" as I was trying to date them; okay, maybe a couple times, but it was obvious pretty quickly that those ladies were emotionally troubled anyway, and a relationship with them would simply be unstable.

But I've also had women ask me out, women hunt me down or drop notes in my locker or use mutual friends to try and get me to ask her out, when I was back in school. In college I was asked out once, and had a few women who seemed eager for me to ask them out. Not every woman who's been interested in me has been my type -- but most of them were perfectly normal, stable people, and the relationships I've had, though fewer than perhaps I'd like, have been founded in mutual vulnerability and intimacy. I could always share my emotions with my partner, and we looked out for each other and cared for one another. When my relationships have ended, it was either because of a natural falling-apart (moving away, mutual loss of interest) or it was my fault. So the stereotypes of what male-female pairings are like, in TV sitcoms and motte posts and redpill guides isn't my experience of love.

I guess my few interactions with women who seem like the redpill stereotype involved me bouncing off them -- I don't play games, and I don't chase skirts. I don't sit for shit-tests and I don't like coquettishness. My yes is my yes and my no is my no. If women want to create drama for the sake of drama or engage in verbal sparring like a Jane Austin character, well, they're welcome to find this somewhere else. So I suppose my romantic style heavily filters against manipulation, and firmly towards well-adjusted, romantically decisive women. I intend to keep it this way.

I guess I never went through a redpill phase. I certainly went through a phase where I realized that you do need to make your romantic intentions known early on with a woman, and trying to build a relationship on top of a friendship just doesn't work. But I only rarely encountered women who were "hooking up with alphas" as I was trying to date them; okay, maybe a couple times, but it was obvious pretty quickly that those ladies were emotionally troubled anyway, and a relationship with them would simply be unstable.

But I've also had women ask me out, women hunt me down or drop notes in my locker or use mutual friends to try and get me to ask her out, when I was back in school. In college I was asked out once, and had a few women who seemed eager for me to ask them out. Not every woman who's been interested in me has been my type -- but most of them were perfectly normal, stable people, and the relationships I've had, though fewer than perhaps I'd like, have been founded in mutual vulnerability and intimacy. I could always share my emotions with my partner, and we looked out for each other and cared for one another. When my relationships have ended, it was either because of a natural falling-apart (moving away, mutual loss of interest) or it was my fault. So the stereotypes of what male-female pairings are like, in TV sitcoms and motte posts and redpill guides isn't my experience of love.

I guess my few interactions with women who seem like the redpill stereotype involved me bouncing off them -- I don't play games, and I don't chase skirts. I don't sit for shit-tests and I don't like coquettishness. My yes is my yes and my no is my no. If women want to create drama for the sake of drama or engage in verbal sparring like a Jane Austin character, well, they're welcome to find this somewhere else. So I suppose my romantic style heavily filters against manipulation, and firmly towards well-adjusted, romantically decisive women. I intend to keep it this way.

So now I wonder, are you one of those mythical, well adjusted, family oriented men who other mythical, well adjusted, family oriented women instinctively seek out? Or are you an oblivious alpha-chad who's mere presence is capable of making women act right? I have so many questions about your experiences, and how on Earth so many seemingly well adjusted women approach you. Or are you an unreliable narrator? How old are you? Do you go to church? Did you get married? Do you have a family yet? I'm so curious.

Cause I mean, the advice of "Just be yourself and don't tolerate women acting like that" isn't uncommon. And maybe it's regional, but after HS I never once encountered a woman who wasn't "acting like that". It's like after being released into the wild, all the good women got locked down or went to ground, and only the predators were out at night. Following the standard advice of "Be yourself and don't settle" was a recipe for being always alone. So instead your learn how to defang the predators.

And maybe it's regional, but after HS I never once encountered a woman who wasn't "acting like that".

This feels so bizarrely foreign, because almost every married couple I know, myself included, built their early relationship in a way that closely matches @urquan's account. This happened mostly in college, but with a smattering of post-college relationships as well. Just a lot of average-looking, average-quality people hanging out and doing random social club things, shyly getting to know a similarly average-looking person and asking them to a play or movie or something, eventually getting serious then either breaking up or getting married and starting a family in a more-or-less dual-career household. Nobody "acted like that," that I'm aware of. No first-date hookups, negging, harems, nude pic demands, findom, tradwifery, false or true rape accusations. Very rarely any cheating, even. The guys were mostly respectful, earnest and nice, the women were mostly honest and friendly. Some of those marriages got worse over time, but many are still doing OK.

I would really love to know where all these apparently horrible young singles (of both sexes) come from. Are people trying to date way above their league and getting toyed with as a result? Did all the helicopter parenting just raise a generation of unpleasant narcissists who will never play well with others?

The world has changed:

https://www.statista.com/chart/20822/way-of-meeting-partner-heterosexual-us-couples/

It’s unfortunate that a majority are now meeting in situations of initial anonymity (online + bars), which makes it hard for anyone to judge safety and makes performance utterly necessary. I wonder what the percentages look like in 2025.

Every time I look at that chart, it scares me.

It still leaves unanswered questions, though, because however cursed bars and the internet may be, it's not like they actively interfere with developing relationships by more normal means (do they?).

Nobody needs another rape-culture/ perving-at-work debate, so let's set aside the decline in school and workplace relationships, but that chart also shows an approximately 35% drop in the proportion of people who met through friends and a 50% drop in the proportion who met through family. Say in 1995, Ann's cousin might have set her up with his cute pre-vetted army buddy Jim, or Cathy might have invited her friend Dave to a board game night with one of the single girls from her softball league. Well, cousins, army buddies, softball leagues, personally compatible humans still exist, so what's happening to interfere with those connections now? Do Ann and the army buddy still meet, but now he thinks she's too fat or she thinks he's too short compared with the hotties they shop online? Do Dave and the softball friend still do board games, but now they're under-socialized and both kind of self-absorbed, so neither of them makes a move while still feeling offended at the other sex's lack of interest? Or what?

Say in 1995, Ann's cousin might have set her up with his cute pre-vetted army buddy Jim, or Cathy might have invited her friend Dave to a board game night with one of the single girls from her softball league. Well, cousins, army buddies, softball leagues, personally compatible humans still exist, so what's happening to interfere with those connections now?

Social media and the internet make entertaining yourself without interacting with other people trivial.

And informal clubs, softball leagues, board game nights, trivia nights, social organizations, religious services, all that kind of stuff have been in secular decline for decades in the US. Bowling Alone was written long before the advent of the smartphone.

And people have fewer friends, which means fewer connections, fewer friends-of-friends, and fewer Jims or Cathys to set up:

The decline in the number of close friendships is notable. In the past three decades, statistics reveal a drop in adults who report having ten or more close friends, from 33% in 1990 to just 13% today. More than half of Americans (49%) report having three or fewer close friends, showcasing a demographic shift in friendship dynamics.

Even the government has taken notice. They’re calling it an epidemic!

And many people don’t even feel this very strongly, despite feeling loneliness — parasocial relationships, internet videos, gaming, TikTok, weird Internet forums based on discussing culture war dynamics, all of these things can supply enough entertainment to make many people feel satiated enough to be complacent, with maybe one or two close friends you might see rarely. I can’t deny I’m a part of this, I last met up with friends a couple months ago and have spent most of my time with my family or my girlfriend.

But one thing that the internet can’t successfully fulfill is the unique pleasure of an intimate partner. Friends don’t cuddle you to sleep at night, or make love to you, or kiss you under the stars. Internet porn and fan fiction can maybe satisfy people a bit, but it’s not good enough.

I think this pull gets at guys more than ladies, it’s just my impression from having male and female friends that my single male friends have felt particularly lonely while my single female friends have been content to pursue their careers, or school, or hobbies, while letting romance come when it will.

The stats bear this out. Pew Research states:

Among men, those younger than 30 are by far the most likely to be single: About half of men in this age group (51%) are single, compared with only 27% of those ages 30 to 49 and 50 to 64 and 21% of men 65 and older. Women, by contrast, are by far most likely to be single later in life – roughly half of women ages 65 and older are unpartnered (49%), while those ages 30 to 49 are the least likely to be single (19%). Roughly three-in-ten women ages 18 to 29 (32%) and 50 to 64 (29%) are single.

Keep in mind, of course, that senior women are likely to be widows if they’re single, because men have a shorter life expectancy. But among non-elder people, young men have it rough. The stats are so skewed, though, you do have to wonder if this is where the “are we dating the same guy?” TikToks come from, and if some of those “single” men have a woman in their life who would be quite alarmed to hear that. But I believe that can’t fully explain what’s going on.

So young men are single more often than young women, people have fewer friends and less desire for friends, and intimacy is the big draw to get people to go out and meet other folks.

So, what happens when people hang out at those social organizations you were talking about?

The women who show up, and are single, get SWAMPED. Most people are meeting online nowadays, which has shifted the culture to one where in-person dating often feels quaint or unwanted. And even if these young women would like to make a connection at these events, well, there’s going to be more men than them and that’s overwhelming. That means that they will often find those environments frustrating — they’d like to meet in person, but also be able to enjoy whatever the actual purpose of the social gathering is without having to fend off 4 guys who all want her number. Hence, “GUYS ONLY WANT ONE THING…”

I confess I was that guy — you know, in an organization or club in college, asking out women occasionally if I liked them. I had little success. The one time it worked, well, it’s because she asked me out. And apparently I struck her as attractive when I met her; “I saw you and I knew I had to have you in my life” is her recollection.

So I guess I have a dual narrative: I’ve struggled with loneliness at times, I’ve been single more than I’d like, I have friends who are good, decent people who’ve struggled more than me, but I’ve gotten lucky a few times and sometimes women have seen things in me I didn’t always see in myself. I’m so grateful to my girlfriend — she was very brave, decisive, and persistent, and has always treated me with love and kindness. But I know not everyone has been lucky enough to catch someone’s attention the way I’ve done a few times.

So there are absolutely people who meet in “the old way.” I did. But it’s less common. And the sort of broad social connections that make the kind of matchmaking you’re describing possible have decayed.

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t's like after being released into the wild, all the good women got locked down or went to ground, and only the predators were out at night.

Ah, this reminds me of an effortpost I wanted to write. There is definitely something to this. After college, there is absolutely a group of women who totally vanish. Unless one encounters them at work or TJMaxx (or whatever place they use to sate their shopping addiction) or the grocery store, it's effectively impossible to meet them.

But I've also had women ask me out, women hunt me down or drop notes in my locker or use mutual friends to try and get me to ask her out, when I was back in school. In college I was asked out once, and had a few women who seemed eager for me to ask them out.

Which makes you very unusual. Most men have to chase. You're basically Terence Tao wondering how people can find calculus to be so hard.

So, similarly, I've also had plenty of people express interest in me. Enthusiastic, plentiful, sometimes even stalkery. Been asked out multiple times on the street in broad daylight, in fact; three months ago someone cold approached me on my way to work and told me I was really attractive. The thing is, they were all men. Which is fine: I'm bisexual.

But that same kind of ease is something I have never once in my life experienced from women. It was always a complicated process to get even the slightest time of day. And I think that's the difference: for some people, they've got to approach the process strategically and analytically, or they will never have any success.

trying to build a relationship on top of a friendship just doesn't work

Which is exactly the issue: many men do want relationships to form through the same process as friendship. Something organic where both people naturally recognize the value of the other person. And, for dating other men, it can and does happen exactly that way (though there are even simpler ways...), simply because baseline attraction is more evenly distributed. But, for dating women, getting over the attraction hurdle is a huge, difficult step, and TRP (at least in its lighter, non-neurodivergent varieties) is useful for understanding how to actually do that, even though the initial dating process remains entirely devoid of pleasure.

(A critical piece of context: I'm also 5'3", which explains why I have such a different experience between the two audiences. In my online dating days, when I as a test listed myself as 5'10", I got all the same enthusiasm from women as I did from men, and so I doubt it'd be necessary to rely on eldritch rituals to find success).

Which is exactly the issue: many men do want relationships to form through the same process as friendship. Something organic where both people naturally recognize the value of the other person.

Let me rephrase.

What I learned in that phase is that -- like you say -- attraction is something that you need to cross as the "first hurdle."

But my argument would be that men do the same to women: it's just that men are more visual than women, and it's not at all hard to create a vague spark of attraction in a man. I don't think I'm saying anything you don't already know -- if I read your post right, that's what you're arguing.

That said, I absolutely have had relationships form through the same process as friendship. It's just that the friendship began with us both having at least a mild attraction for the other. The friendship served as a soft courtship. But I absolutely believe that every time this was the case, a relationship could have started much sooner. But I liked how it went down; like you, I take no pleasure in the initial stages of dating.

Sometimes this happened because I was in a relationship at the time, but drew the attention of someone else (this has happened exactly once, let me not exaggerate), sometimes it happened because I wasn't sure of whether I felt like dating, sometimes it happened because I was literally an oblivious idiot and I didn't know what I'd done and I spent 4 months of high school thinking my crush didn't like me when she wanted me to grab her and kiss her.

But, on that note: I also 'won' the attraction by being, in some way, performative and high status.

Birds build nests to attract lady birds (insert LBJ joke here), fish build a wonderful habitat to attract lady fish, peacocks look like a color television advertisement to attract lady peacocks (or just put extended editions of The Office on the platform)... it just is the case that, in most sexually dimorphic species, males attract females by demonstrating high status in some way. I don't have any complaints about the reality of it; it is what it is, and none of woman born controls it or chose it. However people would like it to happen, that's how it happens.

But for me, it absolutely happened organically.

I would argue strongly that I'm less attractive than you -- I don't care if I set my height to 6'7", I wouldn't get the kind of attention you're describing on dating apps. That said, short men have a really rough time, and it sucks that you've struggled because of a baseball statistic. While I have maybe once or twice been asked out by a man, I strongly doubt that gay men would consider me a catch. I can't confirm that -- I'm from the bible belt, gay men don't exactly ask out strangers on the street.

But I have a secret weapon.

I love public speaking. I absolutely love it. And when I'm in a meeting, or discussion, about something I find interesting, I can command attention.

Now, be careful what you take from that. I am the world's worst smalltalker. I hate calling people on the phone. I will avoid talking to shopkeepers if I can. I feel anxious just thinking about introducing myself to a new person. Sometimes I'm so lost in thought that I don't hear what people are saying to me, and I'll just respond with whatever I think will move the conversation along. My friends and I once played a party game where we had to imitate a randomly-picked member of our friend group, and someone imitated me by sitting, silently, with his hands clasped in his lap. That's me. When I'm not speaking, you might confuse me for a piece of furniture.

But if you say, "hey, urquan, create a presentation on the economic problems of socialism in the USSR", boy am I already excited. I'm already thinking about all the strange memes and fun analogies I can use to explain Stalin's effort to rapidly industrialize. And I'm thinking about how I might be able to make people chuckle, and remember the presentation despite the dry concept.

When I held an officer position in a club in college, I used that to springboard a few fun lectures on relevant topics I felt like sharing. I don't think most of the other members loved it, but I don't care. I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it.

And do you know when I met my girlfriend? She came to one of these lectures. She came up afterwards, started talking to me, and wouldn't let me out of her sight until she got my number. This is by far the most interested in me a human being has ever been -- male or female. And her own recollection of the event, she told me later, is, "I saw you, and I knew I had to have you in my life." How's that for crossing the attraction barrier!

I'm not Terrance Tao. I'm Rain Man. I have some special abilities that can be quite attractive, to Miss Right, but it's not something I do with intention or structure. It's something that's only mildly under my control. And I have a lot of deficits -- I don't think anyone should be envying my social charm!

There was a motte post a long time ago that replied to people talking about social competition among women; you know, sorority girls, mean girls, female bullying in school, all that kind of stuff. And I loved the comment and have tried to find it many times, without success. It went something like this: "The women I've generally been friends with or dated have been rejects from that culture of competition. And I've seen the scars that competition has made on them."

I thought that was very wise. The women I've dated have universally not been "sorority girl" types. They're not the hot girls out there doing hot girl summer. They've just been average, kind of quirky, intelligent, and warm people. I can't say a bad thing about them. I feel like I found the crown of France in the gutter. "A good wife who can find?"

From the logical intellectual perspective, the simp is a loser, only leaving the house to work and otherwise wasting away in his goon cave.

I'd argue assigning the loser label is pretty far from the logical intellectual perspective. It presupposes that male social status (as per the standard of being able and willing to date) is axiomatically good without explicitly stating that axiom.

under what logic can the simp not be described as a loser?

Under the logic that winning and losing can only be defined in relation to criteria and the criteria of being successful in life are subjective. Yes, even the criteria that have to deal with reproduction and Darwinism and so on. These are all parts of the same reptile brain that makes the simp happy with his lot.

If you want an explicit ruleset that would define the simp as being better than the player, then "don't waste time and effort on getting the approval of others when a simpler lifestyle will do just as well for physical needs" is one. If only hunger could be sated merely by rubbing the stomach.

Uh, how common is gooning really?

Like regular masturbation, sure, real common. But I was under the impression gooning was some technologically driven different thing.

My question was about prevalence. Yes, any 14 year old has probably figured out regular masturbation but I thought gooning was something different.

Technically it means people keeping themselves aroused with porn without ejaculating for 30mins to hours

Gooning is a kind of self-pleasuring that revolves around entering a trance state (called the "goon") while watching multiple screens of adult content and avoiding climax by edging. There you go.

Used also as a shorthand for people who use porn to jerkoff widely in excess of what nature would allow.

Wow, so "gooning" is like synonymous with "edging"? In that case I'm not sure if I've ever "gooned".

I think the trance state is the main criterion. I doubt edging is required.

You can edge without gooning, but you cannot goon without edging

So say skibidi

Funny, my impression is that it was a drug driven thing. People being high would explain the repetition, the weird descriptions of physical sensations and how long they go.

And I think that would place them on the far end of consumption habits.

My understanding was that gooning is reserved for any particularly degenerate and indulgent forms of masturbation. Like when I think of a gooner, I think of someone for whom cranking it while looking at porn sitting in front of his computer doesn't work anymore, he needs to be watching 10 videos at once for hours on a multiscreen setup laying down in a reclining chair while vaping weed.

watching 10 videos at once for hours on a multiscreen setup laying down in a reclining chair while vaping weed.

I've always looked down on "gooning" as degeneracy of a high order but damn you made it sound kind of fun

I think I just miss smoking in the reclining chair I had before I moved out on my own

It is kind of fun. No multiscreen needed, just a weed vape, a laptop, 30+ tabs, and a few hours to kill.

It gets old pretty fast though (same with porn in general). I quit weed to get a better job and don't really miss it. Kind of a shame, because fake weed vapes are dirt cheap while getting bored and going to the bar 4+ nights a week gets expensive in a hurry such that I kind of need a side gig to help pay my bar tabs (Last time that happened it spiraled out of control such that I wound up being a bartender, a fun but very time and money intensive way to develop a friend group of mostly fucked up people.).

The thing that seems to be missing in your description of physical and social needs is essentially non-sexual/quasi-sexual physical touch. I could probably go without sex in life, but not being able to cuddle, or romantically kiss, or hold someone as they fall asleep, or just sit on the couch, or caress someone's back or arms... well, I'd find that hard to bear.

That's why you get a body pillow of your oshi

Not good enough, damnit, not good enough!

I have tried this, but it does not actually work. Maybe I need to upgrade my daki to a DHR7000 or something, but most fantasy centers around the closeness, etc. rather than just fucking.

I have no idea how people do it directly to pictures; I just lay on the bed and read them for the articles, so to speak.

well, I'd find that hard to bear.

Most people under discussion here barely experienced that. Don't known what they're missing.

Dating is an extreme act of delayed gratification. Many men do not really enjoy the act of seducing women, which requires enormous investments in time and effort, and generally putting on at least a little bit of act rather than just being comfy and normal. Many men enjoy the thrill and payoff of a successful seduction but that is different from the act itself.

I agree, but I think this is mainly a result of our modern techno-dystopia. No one enjoys swiping right on hundreds of profiles just so we can "take whatever we can get" from the bottom 1% who swipe back at us. No one enjoys being the orbiter/reply-guy on social media. No one enjoys fighting for the attention of the one semi-hot woman at a party/bar/club when she's surrounded by men jockying for her attention, with a 10:1 ratio of men:women. Noone enjoys doing our best to make witty conversation while she just stares into her phone (or even worse, texting her while she takes 48 hours to reply "lol") . Noone enjoys going into some women's space like a yoga class/book club/knitting circle and feeling the suspicious stares and closed-off body language. Noone enjoys awkwardly shaking our butts to shitty hop hop at the generic dance clubs.

What I do enjoy is if I can actually meet a woman IRL and have some sort of real connection. It could be dancing, a good conversation, sharing a meal, anything really, as long as I can tell she's actually focusing her attention on me and feeling something from it. But modern life makes it so damn hard to get even that... one time I was a cocktail bar talking to a woman who was not very conventioanlly attractive, but she was still fun to talk to. I was having fun until she mentioned that she was surprised how many men were trying to talk to her, including much younger men. I was like... "look around, you're the only woman here, and there's so many single men here. Of course we all want to talk to you!" The single women are all at home hiding out on social media and I have to pay them if I want even digital attention.

All that said, I still kinda like paying women to hang out with me and give me attention sometimes, just to have that kind of "great date" experience even if it doesn't lead to seggs. They're just way better at entertaining men than any normal woman. So maybe it makes sense for this to be the modern division of labor.

Saw a tweet that made the specific argument that men aren't really competing to be more interesting than other men for a woman's attention at any given time (sometimes they are, of course). He's competing to be more interesting than her phone. Which is a difficult lift. She's got a dozen apps on there for various forms of communication, another dozen for feeding video slop, and then probably a half dozen games to fill in the gaps.

Up against that much dopamine-hacking technology, what can a given guy sitting in front of her do or say that will actually get her to stop thinking about her messages, or her latest instagram post, or make her want to engage in conversation instead of scroll tiktok.

what can a given guy sitting in front of her do or say that will actually get her to stop thinking about her messages, or her latest instagram post, or make her want to scroll tiktok instead of engaging in conversation.

You might as well ask what a given woman can do to be more appealing for an average 2D aficionado than his endless, effortless, potentially AI-enhanced harem of 2D waifus.

You might as well ask what a given woman can do to be more appealing for an average 2D aficionado than his endless, effortless, potentially AI-enhanced harem of 2D waifus.

Oh, that's easy. Blowjobs.

The respective answer for faceh's question would be "just buy GFE from her onlyfans".

A girl with OF isn't going to hold my hand while we walk into Home Depot to pick out supplies for our weekend project.

...well, not unless I pay her an obscene amount of money.

I'd assume a companionship service to go to a specific public location would be not much more expensive than a regular escort (which seems to be the original source of the euphemism). But maybe handholding is just too weird for modern whores.

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I think guys like boobs enough to put down the phone if there's a real pair in front of them, at the very least.

Well - getting a pair of boobs in front of you while you're still secluded at home is, as they say, a coup-complete problem.

But the point I'm trying to make is - you can't appeal to the dopamine-hacked, at least not without significantly sacrificing your own preferences and incentives. They have to realize the error of their ways and make efforts to fix them.

They have to realize the error of their ways and make efforts to fix them.

And if they, "the the dopamine-hacked", collectively don't realize the error of their ways?

From AntiDem's Ask.FM account:

Once we develop artificial wombs, will there be any reason to keep women around? Should we exterminate them all?

I think it was Matt Forney who pointed out that all the talk about women having to compete with porn and 2D waifus was ridiculous. If, as a real, live, human woman with a beating heart and a warm bosom, these things are even the tiniest bit of real "competition", there's something desperately wrong and you fucked up royal. Women are supposed to be our help-meets, our comfort, our joy, our safe harbor from the bitterness of this harsh world. Modernity destroyed that on the theory that turning them into cold, mechanical cogs in the corporate/industrial machine would somehow make things better. Did it? Maybe it did add an extra 2% to GDP. Any sane society would declare that some things are not for sale, and give it all up to have our women back. But I fear they're lost. Degrees and exceptions, yes, but bottom line, I think they're gone, and I don't see how we get them back any time soon.

And the worst part is, I can't even bring myself to care enough about them to even be angry anymore.

As well as:

You don't really mean all that stuff about 3DPD, do you?

Don't I? Has anybody ever really liked 3DPD? The ancients believed that 3DPD were for procreation, but cuteboys were for love and pleasure. In fact, the ancients liked their cuteboys so much that the God of the Bible literally had to resort to threatening to roast them in a lake of fire for all eternity in order to get them to stop screwing cuteboys and to pay attention to their 3DPD wives instead. After that, some combination of strong patriarchy, social pressure, mythologizing (of the troubadour/romantic variety), and the abovementioned threat kept things going relatively smoothly for a good long while, but when deconstructors started breaking all that down for ideological reasons, an unintended consequence was that men started drifting away from 3DPD again, this time to internet porn and/or 2D waifus. It of course hasn't helped matters that feminism seems to have spent decades on a crusade to make 3D women as unpalatable as humanly possible. A couple of centuries ago, the strong constraints placed upon them by rigid gender roles had created a sort of 3D womanhood that was not without its charms. Now that they have been loosed, well... look at rates of divorce, and at birthrates. Men have "voted with their feet", so to speak. They have in some cases fled 3DPD altogether, and in others have fled any commitment to them.

You'd think this would send a message to 3DPD that maybe they should try to regain whatever charms they once had in hopes of enticing men back for more than some casual sex. But no - they seem to be doubling down on feminism, and headed down the Cat Lady Highway as fast as they can drive. Well, good luck to them, but I won't be along for the ride.

And from the comments of "Asia Is Not Our Salvation; It Is Our Suicide" by the same:

This article is full of the typical female inability to take any fucking responsibility whatsoever for anything they ever do wrong. Western women are such mannish, rude, petulant trash that their men have walked away and started searching for other options? It's the fault of men, or those Asian bitches they seem to like these days, or 2D cartoons, or Pornhub, or everything except the idea that you - YOU - fucked up. You want men to walk away from their Asian girlfriends or put down the anime body pillows? Then you - YOU - put in the effort to become the better option. You want a place to start? Here's an idea: stop bitching men out for noticing incentives and disincentives, and for taking a better deal over a worse one. That's not going to get your men to come back to you. Here's the thing - you can become the change you want to see, which involves effort, or you can just complain, which requires none.

Man, do you just bookmark every woman-hating rant on the Internet? I deeply regret learning today what "3DPD" means.

Man, do you just bookmark every woman-hating rant on the Internet?

Not at all; I simply remember them, then look them up at need. For example, I recalled that the first two were from AntiDem's Ask.FM page, so I trawled the cache archives (which list several years worth of question and answers) with Ctrl+F until I found them. The last one I saw reblogged on @Capital_Room's tumblr once, so I searched and, sure enough...

A good rant lives rent-free in my head.

I deeply regret learning today what "3DPD" means.

I aim to please.

I feel like I can do that, provided that she's sufficiently motivated to get off her butt and go out into the real world to meet people in meat-space. I also like to play with my phone when I'm sitting at the bar, but I'll put at away as soon as I meet anyone interesting to talk to. The real challenge is the women staying at home, using the phone as their sole means of communication... which is most women these days. I went to three bars tonight (fancy cocktail bars in a trendy neighborhood) and there was literally zero women there who weren't there as part of a date.

Yeah. I can't say for sure how much of it is just my own perception, but the time of a single woman going out by herself to places where she might get noticed and approached seemed to be literally over.

Its always a girls' night thing, or she's with a group of friends for a specific event, or maybe its a date she pre-arranged on the apps.

If you spy a woman sitting alone, wait five minutes and it'll always turn out she was waiting for someone. I've avoided some embarrassment by slowing my roll when I see them, even if shooting my shot was the 'right' choice.

In irl seggs is good and all but with the latest gooning technology I would argue that hardcore gooning actually gives more seggsual stimulation than the real thing.

Hard disagree. Sex has to be really bad before I would prefer to just crank my hog.

Also, why are you using algospeak? We're all friends here.

Hard disagree. Sex has to be really bad before I would prefer to just crank my hog.

Even in that case, you can easily satisfy yourself using hookers. According to quick AI search the prices ranges from $20 per hour for street hookers to around $150 for average escort to $300 plus for high end hooker in USA. For a price of your average car lease, any single male can have a different hooker every week, getting his body count to triple digits easily thus matching any redpilled macho. And we are not even talking about sex tourism, where you are a cheap flight away to some 3rd world country where you can enjoy orgies for really cheap.

The OP's point of course still stands - even if you satisfy your sexual desire, there is still the social aspect that many people fill parasocial relationships. Although even those are not the only options. There are hookers who act more like your lovers where you are something like a sugar daddy. They have stable clientele of multiple men with their own schedule, so you can visit regularly and get not only a sex but also massage or even homecooked meal.

To be frank I find this as highly distasteful and unsatisfying relationship but I used it only as an example. In the end there is not much more difference between people obsessed with sexual conquests or people who obsesses about masturbation or people who just chase hookers. The difference is only in degree.

According to quick AI search the prices ranges from

This is like saying "source: I made it up" except you asked a computer to make it up for you.

If the AI was searching then it's about as valuable as searching it yourself, which is how everyone learns everything now.

If they had AI guess with no search grounding, then yeah, that's useless

This is not true. AI search is not programmed to be critical of sources, so it becomes a pure garbage in garbage out situation.

On heavily SEOed queries, AI search is in fact much much worse than just asking the AI directly. In August 2025 I will not touch "grounded" AI with a 10 foot pole it's dogshit.

This guy asked AI for a "grounded" query and the AI happily cited a fake scam website front and center.

I just read that whole comment thread, very interesting.

It's been a few years (sad) since I grew anything and I forgot how awful the SEO was in the plant space, holy shit lmao.

The basil article was an infinite rabbit hole of AI basil articles linking to AI basil articles.

I don't think most humans are much better at detecting SEO slop, but that's not a very high bar.

Personally, I find AI search quite useful (both personally and at work) but I mostly use it as a results aggregator. I check the links it finds me, especially at work, my biggest fear is to confidently present something that turns out to be an AI hallucination.

So it's pretty great for that, it's basically like having an intern who Googles things for me, and I pick the results to look at in more detail personally.

So give me your sources. The AI gave me Gitnux and 2date4 love or Worldmetrics as sources. I don't want to research that stupid shit too deeply, if you have other numbers just send it. The point still stands, sex is relatively easy to purchase for almost any single male.

Whoa, at those rates, degeneracy sounds alright! I thought the average escort was like $500 judging by what Backdoor Backpage or whatever the hooker website is called, and then on that site, they were all covered in piercings and tattoos or were unshaven and all had descriptions about discovering themselves or something. Somehow your $150 average number sounds wrong, though.

That's very high. In germany in a legal bordello it’s 50-100 euros for half an hour.

Outside very limited areas, there's no such legal thing in the US. Though of course grey and black markets exist. But the prices there must be higher, to account for the risks. Probably not an order of magnitude higher, but still higher.

Even in that case, you can easily satisfy yourself using hookers. According to quick AI search the prices ranges from $20 per hour for street hookers to around $150 for average escort to $300 plus for high end hooker in USA.

This fails to "price in" the associated legal risks — reputational damage, arrest, fines, jail time.

This seems plausible from a kitchen table evo psych point of view: in the ancestral environment, all things being equal, the man who jumped at a chance to have no-strings-attached sex had a greater inclusive genetic fitness than the man who did not.

If this counts as "plausible" according to evo-psych, then evo-psych is even more of a joke than I already thought (I did not hold the field in high esteem as-is). No, a casual fling would not have been an advantage in the ancestral environment, because one or both would have been killed by the rest of the tribe, and they sure as hell wouldn't have pitched in to raise the kid.

A wise man once warned of crafting just-so stories, never do we ask "What does the world look like if this is true?" We can also ask "So, does the world look like that?" Our ancestral environment was not one in which Single Female Lawyers could get knocked up, yet remain sexy and self reliant; it was one in which chid rearing was insanely hard, and required the support of the tribe, who had no incentive to aid someone who couldn't be bothered to stay loyal to tribal hierarchy. It was also one in which the sexes were segregated, meeting the needs of the tribe as their sex allowed. Opportunities for surreptious coupling would be few and far between; a man and woman - who the tribe did not already recognize as coupled - would have arroused suspicions.

All this talk of evo-psych as applied to modern (emphasis on "modern" as opposed to "traditional") mating practises sounds like nothing so much as the never-ending attempts to square the absurdly high rates of obligate homosexuality in humans with basic evolutionary theory; perfunctory just-so stories that fall apart under the slightest investigation (something something "reasoning from first principles doesn't work for human interaction"). We know what kind of animal selects for female preference, and it doesn't look anything like human social organization. Even more, if we evolved for female preference, then why the hell is it failing so badly on the one metric that counts, human reproduction?

It should be blindingly obvious that humans short-circuited mating by means of social mediation, much like our simian relatives. This is far from uncommon in the animal kingdom; on the one hand, I can click on a Youtube video and watch the larva of a parasitoid wasp that has evolved an insanely specific method of feeding that allows it, without anything that could justify being called intelligence, to carefully eat only the parts of its host to provide nourishment without killing the host as long as possible. Then I can click on my "recommended" list and see a cheetah mother trapping a helpless foal, and spend hours watching her dumb-as-shit cubs play with said foal, lacking even the basic instinct to hunt. They literally didn't evolve the basic senses necessary to get food, they have to learn it from observation and trial-and-error, is it really so hard to imagine that humans didn't evolve mate selection, it's just something that has been passed down from generation to generation (see also farming, which isn't an evolved instinct in any human observed)?

People been farming long enough that we’ve evolved some instincts. Little kids will plant random stuff in the dirt as a form of play. And theres just a satisfaction from eating your own homemade fruit that doesn’t come from store bought stuff, even the fancy organic kind. Likewise people seem to generally like animal husbandry.

No, a casual fling would not have been an advantage in the ancestral environment, because one or both would have been killed by the rest of the tribe, and they sure as hell wouldn't have pitched in to raise the kid.

Woah. Here I was irresponsibly speculating how mate selection might have worked in the ancestral environment when I should have just asked you because you know exactly how it was.

Contrary to common belief, the ancestral environment was not the biblical Middle East. We can infer from the relative testes size of humans relative to other primates that women were unlikely to mate with different men during their fertile period compared to Chimps but probably still somewhat likely compared to Gorillas. Of course, there are all kinds of confounders -- the most important one probably is that with humans, female fertility is not obvious.

The existence of biological fatherhood explicitly seems to be a rather recent discovery made by early agrarian societies, probably in the context of domesticating animals, and gave rise to patriarchy. Different pre-modern societies have very different attitudes to fatherhood. I will grant you that a gene which made you bash the head in of anyone who fucked your wife (if you can get away with it) would probably have been select for, though.

From a genetic fitness point of view, cheating is a numbers game. As you point out, getting caught cheating in a society where it is against the social norms will probably severely limit the male's genetic fitness. On the other hand, fathering a child which will be fed by some other guy gets you a lot of fitness for basically free. If the likelihood of getting caught is high, the punishment is severe and your legitimate opportunities for procreation are plentiful, then cheating is maladaptive. If the opposite is the case, then it is adaptive.

For women consenting to cheating, the potential gains are much lower (unless her husband is infertile). In a society with little property and no Swiss bank accounts, any bribes were probably not worth the risk (if the society was strongly anti-cheating). The main reason would be that the guy she cheated with had a higher genetic fitness than her husband, which would benefit her child. OTOH, if ancestral societies had opinions about female infidelity, they probably had no sophisticated theory of culpability and consent. Telling your husband "Tribesman Urgh tried to touch me, tell him to stop" would be one thing, but if you were raped in the context of intertribal warfare, you likely had little to gain by telling your tribe about it.

It was also one in which the sexes were segregated, meeting the needs of the tribe as their sex allowed.

I do not think that they were segregated as nuns are from monks. Sure, they had mostly different roles, and at times these roles might have separated most of the men a day's march from the women. I will also grant you that their life was a lot more communal, so texting "honey I have to work late" while you had an affair in some motel was not a thing.

But the ancestral environment was also not as dangerous as a horror movie, where slipping away from the main group for a minute (especially to have sex) is a death sentence.

is it really so hard to imagine that humans didn't evolve mate selection, it's just something that has been passed down from generation to generation

I think a lot of basic sexual behavior is innate. If you raise teens without any sex education and give them the opportunity, they will sooner or later figure out sex on their own. I also think that basic sexual attraction is innate. Probably something on the level of "I am into boobs-havers".

A lot of specifics are then learned, as your brain matches the kinds of humans it sees to its rough templates. If high heels and red lipstick are a reliable predictor of the wearer being a sexually available woman, and your brain is wired to be into women, then you might end up associating that with this.

I also think that some things are mostly innate turnoffs, though. Facial asymmetry. Birth defects. Clear signs of sickness, or starvation.

I am sure that there is some primitive tribe where being small and weak is considered attractive in men, because there is some tribe for everything, but in the ancestral environment, muscle mass and size was likely capped by lifetime nutrition. So you are not selecting for giantism genes, you are simply selecting for "was able to secure a good calorie intake for himself", which is a very desirable trait, so I would suspect that there is a genetic predisposition towards preferring larger men.


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