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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24827 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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I think that "hard status" is a terrible name for that axis. "physical status" and "body-inferred status" might be better.

I also do not think your assessment of physical status is correct. In particular, I think that in a boxing fight between pre-crucifixion Jesus and Trump, I would bet on Jesus. Take away Trump's money and fame, and he would not be the kind of person who makes other men nervous and easily picks up women.

And social status is obviously contingent on the society you are considering. Plenty of cultures value Mohammed a lot more than Buddha.

I think your underlying claim, that there is a status part which is based on physical appearances, is correct. But where to draw the border between physical and non-physical seems contentious. Take starlet actresses, for example. Of course they are hot, but so are a lot of unsuccessful models on OnlyFans. On the other hand, their acting ability is not entirely divorced from their body in the way the ability to write physics papers is.

I think that "hard status" is a terrible name for that axis. "physical status" and "body-inferred status" might be better.

I had a really hard time naming the two axes. First I had "male power" and "female power" but it became so conflated when I began to imagine two different charts. Then I thought of calling "hard status" "power" and "soft status" "status" but it wasn't exactly right either. I kept changing it, ended up with "hard status" and "soft status" and thought it worked well enough to illustrate the point and just went with it.

And social status is obviously contingent on the society you are considering. Plenty of cultures value Mohammed a lot more than Buddha.

I said as much in another comment here, I wasn't really claiming and omniscient point of view in my ranking, things are highly subjective in general even as I try to disentangle something universal

I asked my gay friends what the chart absent the stated axes were and it became "who would you rather top" and "who would you rather be bottomed for". Not that reductionism is more common in gay circles, but this status differentiation mapping cleanly was somewhat hilarious. I bet if I had female friends who were kore racially adventurous I'd get a similar dynamic.

I didn't get the impression at all that this scheme was mainly about physical appearances. It started making sense to me when I rephrased it in my head as being about crude status versus sophisticated virtue. Crude status includes physical appearances, but isn't solely about it. It's also a bit of a reflection of Nietzschean master morality versus slave morality, and with a bit of an implicit judgment here that status by master morality is more natural and primitive and status by slave morality is more civilized and intellectual.

That doesn't really work either, with the statement that blacks have more crude status being obviously incorrect.

Take away Trump's money and fame, and he would not be the kind of person who makes other men nervous and easily picks up women.

Sure, maybe not today when he’s 79. But when Trump was a young man he was six foot four, fit, and had good hair. And he was always very confident, with a good deal of physical courage. Even if he were just an insurance salesman making middle class income, I don’t think he would have had any problems getting a date.

I keep meaning to make a Friday Fun thread screed about how Presidential hotness rankings are totally wrong because they only judge at the time the person was President. Gerald Ford was a male model who was on the cover of Cosmo for God’s sake!

Gerald Ford

link

You weren't kidding.

with a good deal of physical courage.

What makes you say that? The main thing we know about Trump's physical courage or lack thereof is that he dodged the draft.

Good on him tbh, I'm opposed to the draft on principle, unless every single guy in power who's job it is to decide if there will be a war or not, including the ones authorizing the military spending are right up there at the front, (and not at the rear).

Good on him tbh, I'm opposed to the draft on principle, unless every single guy in power who's job it is to decide if there will be a war or not, including the ones authorizing the military spending are right up there at the front, (and not at the rear).

Draft dodging can definitely show moral courage, but doing so in a relatively safe way doesn't show physical courage. In the specific context of a well-connected rich kid dodging the Vietnam draft, I would say it shows neither.

I am also opposed to the peacetime draft on principle, and the government and military brass ran the Vietnam war like a peacetime garrison operation for good but not sufficient reasons driven by Cold War grand strategy, so I count the Vietnam draft as morally equivalent to a peacetime draft. A draft in the case of existential war or grave danger thereof is an unfortunate incident of a state and society that wishes to continue existing, but the Vietnam war wasn't existential and wasn't treated as existential. But the chickenhawk argument you are making doesn't apply to the Vietnam draft - both the politicians who ordered the Vietnam draft and the generals leading the war had were WW2 veterans and most had been on the front lines. (There is some question about whether LBJ was ever actually shot at, but his staff job involved regular flight over hostile territory. McNamara was a REMF. JFK, Nixon, Laird, Westmoreland and Abrams were combat veterans.)

The contract between the generations has always involved old men who proved their valour in their youth but are too old to fight today's wars ordering younger men into battle. The ubiquitous Vietnam-era draft-dodging among elites broke that contract even if the draft was unjustified in that particular case. The breach of the social contract by the Greatest Generation leaders was sending the army to war with no idea of how they were going to win.

Would the women in power be up there too?

Ideally there wouldn't be any.

That he got shot and his reflex was to jump up and yell fight fight fight. You can't teach that.

Pretty sure you actually can. Not saying that it's the case with Trump getting shot in the ear, but...yeah, drilling a specific response to specific situations into people is something that can demonstrably be done.

Anecdotes and rumors. The fact that it gets mentioned in both positive and negative anecdotes about him makes me think it’s true. Muhammad Ali dodged the draft too, that doesn’t mean I would want to get in a fight with him.

Famous people's attractiveness is usually judged relative to the time they were most visible to the public. When people think Audrey Hepburn, they think Breakfast At Tiffany's, not her retirement years.

Joe Biden was actually very good looking as a young man, but that's not people's mental image of him.

But the end effect of that reasoning is that the rankings of the hottest Presidents just become a list of the Presidents that happen to have been younger when they served their terms: Kennedy, Obama, Clinton, and sometimes Bush II. Meanwhile the models and the movie stars are confined to the bottom just because they happened to be quite old when they became president.

Somewhere in the world right now, some unfortunate young girl is being forcibly married off to some old, toothless geezer.

Do you think it's any consolation at all that he was a real hunk several decades back?

This is happening in a society that is so culturally different as to make comparisons of that nature meaningless.

potentially yes if she can take solace in having very attractive children even though perhaps set back a bit by the age impaired sperm? I would like to be forcibly married to an old toothless rich woman, go ahead and do it to me if we need to run the experiment.

I don’t see how that’s relevant. We’re talking about Presidents and how attractive they were, not who is marrying Aisha in Goatfuckistan.

People care what you look like at the time you're most relevant to them, personally. That's just the way it is, and no amount of spamming them with Gerald Ford's cover shots will change that.

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