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I was following the latest flame war regarding the human mating marketplace on this board (see here and here, for those that are unaware) with mild interest and was considering posting some dudebro take on the matter by using as an educative example the story of the now largely defunct Christian men’s identitarian group in the US who called themselves ‘Promise Keepers’, of whom I learned a long time ago completely by accident. Then I realized this may not be the best idea, as I imagine only relatively few people are even aware of their (past) existence. So before I decide to proceed I’ll ask this very question: how many of you have ever heard of this particular sad bunch?
I heard of them back in the day, and have no memory of how they ended up. Definately interested in the effortpost.
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I went to a Rally with my father. No clue what year. Only thing I really remember was the sound of four thousand men singing was a very different experience than what I've encountered before and quite profound.
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Flame war?
I engage in no such inelegant and crass activities.
"Torch Duel" if anything.
Also, I've heard of them, from growing up in a church.
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Vaguely heard of them, no idea why you are calling them a "sad bunch". Tell us more about what they did or didn't do, or who they are, to be called sad?
Judging by how their org ended up, how they were treated and what happened to their aims and values since then, I think calling them a sad bunch is warranted.
As I said, I know little about them beyond the name, so a fuller account of "the rise and fall" would be better to read than a mere "this sad bunch". Let me add my voice to the chorus asking OP for a longer post!
Noted.
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How old are you?
I sort of object to your framing honestly, if you think you have an effort post in you about this, have at it.
As a child of the 90s, who grew up in a house where we attended church weekly, this isn't a thing I would have heard about by accident, it's a thing I would have needed to be pretty oblivious to have not heard about. (I'm trying to think if my dad ever attended an event, I'm not sure if he did or not, I'll put it at about 30% probability that he did).
For those that haven't heard of it, it was an evangelical men's movement in the 90s that was started by University of Colorado's football coach.
There was a stretch there where they drew large audiences at football stadiums.
If you're familiar with Tim Tebow's place in our culture, I perceive it being a pre-Tebow Tebowesque phenomenon (I'd actually be sort of surprised if Tebow's father had no interaction with Promise Keepers).
I find it sort of an interesting window into our culture's soul why people would seem to prefer it if Tebow didn't live up to his values.
That isn't my point. Either way, I'll probably do the effortpost.
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Deemed to be the wrong sort of values, though. Isn't that the problem? If they can catch him out saying one thing and doing another, then he's a hypocrite and can be safely scorned. If he turns around and says "I am leaving all that, it's Problematic and I have converted to being a good liberal Democrat", then he's a brand snatched from the burning and can be held up as an example that you, too, can leave toxic masculinity behind. If he remains as is and keeps living out his values, that's very uncomfortable for the rest of us and since that makes us feel judged, we can only mumble about how he is bad and that is bad and it's all bad and he should stop trying to impose the white supremacist theocracy on us.
Speaking of former sports controversial figures, whatever happened to Colin Kaepernick?
The Tebow hate had very little to do with politics. While he was vocally anti-abortion and his politics were assumed based on his religious affiliation, he never made any direct statements about Obama or anything like that, or even claimed to be a Republican. The religion thing is a bigger part of it, but still not as big as people make it out to be. He won two National Championships and a Heisman Trophy while at Florida, and was about as prominent a celebrity as exists in college football, which isn't quite the NFL but is still pretty big. Even when he was inspiring rule changes after putting Bible verses in his eye black, he still didn't seem to inspire too much hate.
When it came to the NFL, though, Tebow was an athlete, which in the pros is damning with faint praise. He had no special ability to play quarterback, but was able to be successful in college by relying on his natural athleticism. There's a YouTube clip of Ray Lewis and Ed Reed talking to rookies about the importance of watching film, and one of them says that in college they may have been able to run and jump their way to success, but in The League that wasn't going to work. Tebow was successful in college because he was a big guy who could plow his way forward on QB runs or out of a scramble, and played in a system where he wasn't expected to win games with his arm. He was regularly among the leaders in rushing yards among QBs in the top college ranks (and not too far from one of the top rusher's, period), and he led the SEC in all kinds of passing statistics, but pretty much everyone who saw him play could tell that his ability was limited. His footwork was terrible, and his throwing motion was so long it would make Byron Leftwich blush, resulting in high, looping passes that could work if the receiver was "NCAA open" but didn't have a chance at hitting the tighter windows in the NFL. He had no concept on how to read pro defenses. His decision-making was terrible. Even his rushing ability, his strong suit, was built less on speed and more on sheer power.
the NFL at that time was at one of its various low-ebbs when it came to dual-threat quarterbacks. The last one drafted of any consequence had been Michael Vick in 2002. The last one drafted period had been Pat White, the year prior. And though his time at West Virginia was successful enough that fans wore white in honor of him at their last home game, he only lasted one year in the pros, never completing a single pass. The tide would start to turn the following year with Cam Newton, and reach its crescendo after the success of Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson led every head coach to salivate over what could be done with a raw mass of pure athleticism. But that tide is turning now after the failures of guys like Trey Lance, Malik Willis, and Anthony Richardson. And Tebow had less obvious ability than any of them. After he graduated, there was talk that he'd have a future in the NFL as a tight end or maybe a fullback, but Tebow was having none of it. This had been suggested before, but he insisted on playing quarterback. Coaches had been trying to fix his mechanics since high school, but he could always fall back on his athleticism so he had no incentive to change. By the time he got to the NFL, these problems had become so ingrained that they were beyond coaching; even if he made improvement, if under pressure he could only be expected to revert to what he knew from muscle memory.
All that being said, quarterbacks are at a premium in the NFL, and in a draft class thin on QBs, Tebow was taken by the Broncos in the first round. He didn't see the field much in 2010, but the following year, with Kyle Orton being terrible, he was given a shot, and he made the most of it. That isn't to say he was good, exactly, but he won games. He'd pass for like 16 yards in the first half but the defense would keep the game close and Willis McGahee would get yards on the ground and in the fourth quarter he'd get a few good completions, march down the field, and win the game in the final minutes. He even won a playoff game, and though the Broncos promptly lost the following week, he now has more playoff wins than Justin Herbert, Andy Dalton, and hall-of-famer Y.A. Tittle.
In other contexts, this wouldn't have been a problem, but Tebow's existing public profile and relationship with the media did him in. If the same results were had by a nobody like and Easton Stick or Sam Ehrlinger type, the story would be about the defense and the running game and how they're winning despite expectedly poor QB play. If it was a guy like Duck Hodges who was working on a sod farm or something before getting the call to the big leagues, it would be a story about determination and never giving up. If Tim Tebow is the same person, except his personality is such that he's arrested for firing an unlicensed handgun during an altercation outside a nightclub, it wouldn't have made him more likeable, but the story would be about how he's a gritty guy who can take a sack and run for a first down on third and three.
But what doesn't fit is a guy who has won two national championships and a Heisman, who was drafted in the first round, who had a big enough public profile to do endorsements, to play so poorly and be rewarded for it by winning. He was already enough of a national celebrity by that point that whatever he did in a game was going to be newsworthy, and the Christianity threw the whole thing into overdrive. The fact that he was openly Christian wasn't the issue; there are plenty of pro athletes who have made their religious beliefs known. Phillip Rivers is also an Evangelical, and no one seemed to ever give him shit for it. But, aside from being a far better athlete, Rivers was also never as in-your-face about it as Tebow was. He went out of his way to make his religion a story, thanking God in every interview and genuflecting in the end zone. It became cloying, and in the light of the Broncos continuing to win in spite of his poor play, one could be forgiven for getting the impression that he was specifically attributing his teams success to divine intervention. Furthermore, he became a lodestar for people who cared more about religion than sports. His jersey was among the best-selling in the NFL. The people who wished him the most success, though, apart maybe from people in Denver, were those who weren't so much impressed with his playing ability as they were his evangelism.
Tim Tebow was hated because he completely upended puplic perception of what a pro athlete was supposed to be. If he had played better the religion would have seemed less important, and his success would be deserved. If his poor play cost his team games, he'd be another bad quarterback on a bad team and nothing special. Maybe Orton gets his job back.If it turned out his personal life wasn't as squeaky clean as he made it out to be, then the ensuing scandal would overshadow anything about his play or his religion, and the holy rollers who were buying his jerseys would be disowining him, and even if the Broncos continued on their trajectory, fewer people would care. But the right combination of things happened to allow religion to overpower sports, and fans don't like that. I'd talk about Kaepernick more, but it's more or less the same story, except with politics—a player with an existing public profile from (college, making the Super Bowl) ignites a national discussion about (religion, politics) far out of proportion to the player's actual ability. People have limited tolerance for these things being allowed to creep in where they don't belong, and to the extent that it's inevitable, they prefer that it at least involve someone whose value as an athlete justifies cutting them some slack. When the catalyst is a mediocre to awful player, and those most invested in taking the player's side aren't those typically invested in the game itself, things can turn ugly.
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I haven't but your comment was a very effective hook, and now I'd really like to read whatever thought you have bouncing around
You should tell the story!
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I remain perpetually confused as to how a group of Tough Minded Rationalists™, who believe in the invisible hand of the free market and facts over feelings, can be so concerned about birth rates.
Organisms that can adapt to their environment will reproduce. Those that can't will die off. So it always has been, so it always will be.
Why so much ire over nature taking its course? Any attempt to engage in large scale social engineering that would cause civilization to deviate from its current course in order to force it to align with an abstract values framework starts to sound a bit... socialist-y.
In nature, tough, fecund generalists invariably outcompete long established species in time of environmental chaos. Rationalists note that there is socioeconomic chaos on the horizon, they note that low birth rates are a contributing factor, and rationalists are not tough, fecund generalists.
This is an expression of anxiety about who the feral hogs of future society are. It’s quite reasonable to be particularly worried about that stratum’s biggest weakness.
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There's a decently convincing and certainly coherent argument that birth rates going too low, even if it doesn't extinct humans, renders us unable to maintain a technologically advanced civilization.
I like living in a technologically advanced civilization, and its our only hope for getting humans off this rock in the near future. Which I think is important. Any threat to this raises my ire.
Short argument: too many nonproductive elderly supported by too few young, healthy, intelligent, productive citizens means our most advanced technologies (i.e., those that utterly RELY on globalized trade and capitalist hyperspecialization) cannot be built at scale. Too much economic activity is devoted to keeping oldsters alive, there's not enough talent in the younger generation to go into the most advanced fields, or to even maintain the advanced capital we've built.
Any industrial and economic advances that depend on such techs shrinks and stagnates. Standards of living fall everywhere.
A microcosm of this is Russia, which 'cut off' from global trade and can only produce tech, including military tech, that it can design and build at home, with resources on hand. If they didn't have massive energy reserves, they'd be even more screwed than currently implied.
Germany is also experiencing this problem, from all appearances.
Maybe AI and robotics comes in clutch, or we make some other crazy saving-throw (artificial wombs, anti-aging tech, some unforeseen breakthrough in global peace and cooperation) but all else equal the predictable outcome of current trends is advanced civilization sputters and regresses, if not collapses entirely. No ignoring the numbers.
I talk about it at more length here.
Isn’t that fully generalizable?
Time and money spent on elder care isn’t spent on roads, farms, or a warm campfire. How far down should our current course take us?
I find it far more likely that there’s a control loop. Negative feedback. At the extreme end, it’s “I won’t starve to keep Grandpa alive,” but it doesn’t have to get that far.
I have no good answer to this particular question.
We can spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars squeaking out a few extra weeks/months of 'life' for a dying elderly person.
They will not enjoy this life, but they will be alive.
Or we can have some norms around end-of-life care that decide that its NOT appropriate to blow wealth that might benefit a younger generation on such diminishing returns.
We currently do not have any real traditions that allow the elderly to end their lives with 'dignity,' And the current instantiation of MAID is clearly not being limited to true "end of natural lifespan" cases.
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We had a discussion about this quite recently, and as then I want to argue that we have not figured out a way to maintain technologically advanced civilization while forcing high birthrates either. "We are going to die, better preemptively kill ourselves now" does not sound like an appealing policy platform.
I mean, are we saying "high" birthrates, or replacement-level, with maybe a small buffer.
Me I'm not going to say we need to politically mandate a 2.1 birth rate per woman, or require that every woman put out at least 2 kids or face expulsion.
But I think maintaining the 'nuclear family' as the primary economic unit of the country is so self-evidently good for such a country's stability and development, and for the happiness of its citizens, that any policies that might be linked to weakening that unit and reducing family formation should be viewed extremely harshly.
Problem we seem to run into repeatedly is that sans some kind of biblical mandate for family formation and buy-in from some large % of the population, there's just no compelling reason to individually prefer family formation over individualized hedonism in a world where raising kids is no longer critical to individual survival. Otherwise, you have to be high-conscientiousness enough to notice that the society you're living in needs children to continue functioning, so its ultimately in your best interest to keep birth rates above replacement.
Then there's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma issue: can you convince other people to have enough kids to keep the show running, whilst you instead defect and enjoy childfree life with all the joys an advanced civilization can provide you.
Cue the research showing fertility is higher across the board among the religious.
I get to see this happening up close. I have two younger brothers. The youngest has a wife and a 1-year-old kid now. The middle one is continuing with an extended adolescence, chasing every whim and indulging in various vices without much regard for anyone else. He can get a girlfriend with relative ease (currently has one) but is allergic to true commitment.
No prize for guessing which one has a more stable, fulfilling, happy outlook on the world. Then there's me, who really does want kids, and wants to continue to live in an advanced civilization, and considers the propagation of the human species to be a good thing in and of itself. And yet everywhere I turn I see the pillars upholding it all being chipped away, and very few seem to be willing to give up their own immediate comfort to try and address that fact, even assuming they realize there's an issue.
Is it? Most projections of the future that aren't AI doom or transhumanist utopia seem to make it clear that you will be dead quite a bit before society collapses to untenable levels. So unless you have kids in the first place, and thus create someone who will be dead a few decades later, how is it in one's best interest?
That, and the fact that a state that's strong enough to reverse course towards replacement fertility has no actual reason to stop at "just a bit of strengthening the nuclear family to keep us at 2.1", makes it look like it's all or nothing. And I'd rather bet on the side that's given us the advanced civilization I like.
Well, once again. No religious guidelines in place means no real guardrails on the conduct of the kings, either.
The Peter Zeihan prediction is that the effects will manifest sooner rather than later, as globalization breaks down, which will very quickly make production of advanced technology/products far more difficult. The order that allows large container ships to travel the seas unmolested is tenuous, and if countries get more desperate as their own economies slip, this order likely fractures.
This will probably lead to a reversion in living standards on its own.
We got the tiniest taste of how quickly this can happen with COVID restrictions shutting down ports.
I'm also going to make a concerted effort to not die any time soon.
Realize that this 'side' was a largely Christianized, largely Western European-derived stock, and what we're heading towards/currently have is VERY DIFFERENT from that along most dimensions.
We should be concerned about what conditions for building advanced civilization are also necessary and sufficient for its maintenance.
Did they ever? And even if they did, will they stop the kind of deep states upon deep states we have going on now?
This is, perhaps, the strongest argument in favor of fixing demographics now. Even then, the actual effect a currently childless person can have on reversing that is going to manifest 20-30 years later, when the children they've had ASAP grow up and become productive. So people have to believe in the sweet spot of "close enough that I'm gonna feel it, but not so soon that my potential children aren't going to be stuck in Mad Max regardless".
For a 50% increase from 80 to 120, at best. Anything further will probably have to rely on society-wide life extension methods.
We should. But if it turns out that the world I like is unsustainable in the state of it that I like, such as for example not relying on literal slavery and/or being race-segregated and sex-segregated and everything you're darkly hinting at, then I'd rather milk it for what it's worth.
See, people seem to read that into any ambiguity I leave in my writings.
But that's quite far from what I'd actually want or even suggest for society. I do not, in fact, think that we need to make blacks into second-class citizens, or strip voting rights from women, or created mandates for childbirths.
I'm mostly in favor of radical individualism, I may be the most nonracist person on this entire board, insofar as I consciously, deliberately choose to judge every single person I meet on their own merits, by their own behavior, and accept their words as truthful in good faith until proven otherwise.
But that runs smack into the reality that a lot of people are not well-suited to run their own lives and this is very detectable in the larger aggregate outcomes.
So when I look at broader statistics, I feel very comfortable discussing them as concrete facts about the world, and proposing the hopefully least intrusive intervention that might improve on the current equilibrium.
Western women are getting less content with life.
Young western men are getting lonely, discouraged, and angry.
A LOT of immigrants in the U.S. are a net economic drain.
Boomers are clinging to wealth and power well into old age, to the detriment of later generations.
Religious groups have higher TFR.
Non-White groups tend to vote for Democrats, Whites are the biggest racial bloc for the GOP.
Ashkenazi Jews have a significantly higher average IQ than the global average. All signs point to this being very genetic, partially cultural.
Kenyans are better at long-distance running than virtually any other group. All signs point to this being very genetic, partially cultural.
I find none of this distressing to discuss, there are many ways to divide up society to try and model the effects of various policies.
I literally just want to have a social order that grants people maximum autonomy, but also a culture that provides basic life scripts that young people can follow to produce generally good outcomes in their life if they're not particularly intelligent and agentic. Complete High School, Get Married, have kids is a pretty decent one.
And, OF COURSE, I want elites/politicians to have skin in the game.
The one thing that genuinely peeves me off is when I see people in positions of power/authority making absolutely DUNDERHEADED policy decisions, causing untold amounts of suffering or economic loss, and then skating off unscathed because they had no direct stake in the outcome/were poised to benefit either way.
So as you can imagine, I maintain an ongoing level of simmering disdain for a lot of our current political class.
Yep. There's an element of faith required, and that seems to be in shorter supply. People don't know what to believe in, what purpose to work towards, or what the 'point' of it all is.
If a king genuinely believed in an all-powerful creator who could and would punish them eternally after death, that would indeed incentivize 'better' behavior during their life.
That's all, just pointing out how the removal of a deity (and the threat of hell/promised reward of heaven) leaves us with very few tools for guiding human behavior.
Unless you're arguing that there is a hard limit on how long humans can live, ingrained at a biological level, I don't see this as discouraging.
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Aren't the transhumanist wing of the Tough Minded Rationalists the ones who wish to defy nature taking its course? So why be surprised they want to go against the tide of falling birth rates of the intelligent high human capital elite?
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I believe that in your rush to throw shade, you have confused rationalists with Objectivists and/or Social Darwinists.
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I've only ever encountered birth rate concerns in the predictable context of "p.s. they should get out of my workplace and onto my dick"-type sentiments, but I also remain confused as to why this whole weird part of the discourse cropped up, mushroom-like, seemingly overnight.
Tinfoil-hat read is that the whole fertility panic was deliberately astroturfed on Twitter as a way to lay the groundwork for "....so this is why we need to invest heavily in artificial wombs," with incels as useful water-carriers for the interim messaging. I can certainly think of entities who'd plausibly want to push that based on stated values, but speculating about end goals gets too bizarre to waste much time on.
Wasn't it 2021-22? A.k.a. when Substack and then MuskTwitter broke SJ's lock on the public square? Doesn't seem surprising that things would show up "out of nowhere" if they were being suppressed prior, and SJ generally considers birth rate worries a dogwhistle for racism.
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I think some people are under the mistaken impression that we are living much, much further in the future than we actually are. We barely understand how these systems even work, much less how to recreate them. It’s like Romantic era scientists thinking we’re a decade out from creating life because we got a dead frog’s leg to move by shocking it.
@faceh
Reject Bladerunner, RETVRN to Mad Max
Research seems to be further along than I would have thought, even if we're still talking "probably decades away".
Womb transplants are now functional, which surprised me as I expected this not to be feasible yet.
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I'm not betting on Artificial wombs arriving in the next 10 years. Or 15. 20 seems a stretch.
Which makes the extant supply of organic ones that much more critical.
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Aren't the massive immigration waves to the West being pushed as a result of the fertility crisis (Well, really the inability of the current population to support adequate pensions & pension-adjacent for the elderly)? It isn't exactly an unfathomable conclusion that the current rate of reproduction is too low and that a lot of the current incentive stack is essentially dysgenic. This isn't something that's just come out of Incel spaces, though the 'women's liberation is the core of the current issue' take
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I don't find it so tinfoil-hatty because I do believe artificial wombs need to be invested in. It seems like things that are meaningfully different about the West and made it good inevitably lead to things that make people find something better to do than coerce half of the population into being the means of reproduction and little else.
I think it's instructive that the debate has already baked in "coerce" and "means of reproduction and little else," though, which feel like complete non sequiturs. If women increasingly delay childbearing through (imho entirely reasonable) economic anxiety and difficulties finding a suitable partner, it's weird that people jump to "so dumb 'em down and marry 'em off by force, or if you don't want to, guess we'll just have to replace all y'all hoes with robot uteruses," rather than, you know, making it easier for moms to return to the workforce after staying at home through toddler years, or figuring out why young men are under-socialized, undermotivated and underpaid, or whatever.
I know plenty of mid-20s women who would love to find a kind, conscientious guy to have three kids with, followed by a nice Boomer-style dual-career middle age. I know absolutely no real-life girlbosses wishing someone else would pop eggs into a slow cooker so they could get back to those late-running meetings with Marketing. Thus, the fact that the discourse keeps presuming the latter rather than the former feels like an artificial move to guide the conversation to a place it wouldn't normally go.
Countries with maternal laws/customs have even lower fertility than the US though. The modern/western society didn't find an answer aside from going back to past patriarchy vs sci-fi solutions.
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This is one of those things that sounds great when you say it but in practice requires some extremely unpleasant political compromises. Are you going to...
The only thing that could possibly raise birth-rates non-coercively is for society to stop forcefully redistributing the labor of working age adults to unrelated elders. Removing social security and medicare would give people a much stronger incentive to either invest productively during their working years or have children to support them in their old age. There would still be a need for welfare, but it could be distributed as a UBI: flat cash payments to every citizen.
This seems like an unnecessarily fatalist take on an already very solved problem. We already have working structures to encourage people to enter the military while ensuring that their time in service won't work against their employment prospects when they return. Vets are also people who have not necessarily been gaining experience that's 100% relevant to the civilian workplace experience during their time away, but who have been building job-adjacent skills and demonstrating conscientiousness while away, as well as sacrificing pleasure to serve the greater good. I haven't noticed that mild preferential hiring standards for vets have caused every business to collapse, and employers aren't forced to give vets credit for more experience than they possess, just forced not to use their work gap to freeze them out versus other similarly-experienced candidates. It seems to me that most mid-20s professional women leaving the workplace to raise young children would be happy simply to reenter at the same step on the ladder, the way veterans get to; what I've seen in practice is that employers just arbitrarily won't even consider them, so they have a terrible time reentering at all.
If preferential hiring for returning moms seems like an unthinkable drain on productivity while you don't feel the same way for returning vets (notwithstanding high rates of PTSD, etc., etc. that make vets at least as empirically risky to hire), then I think that intuition merits some extra scrutiny. Is it possible that we don't really believe increasing the TFR is actually a contribution to the public good, the way bombing villages in Afghanistan was? In which case, it's a fair question why that same TFR would then require public investment in robot wombs.
Or is it possible that we don't actually believe that raising small children is a respect-worthy task for a talented person to spend time on, the sort of thing that should look good on a resume the way military service does? In which case, wouldn't the feminists be correct that people pushing momhood are mostly doing it as a way to demean women?
I thought usually vets are people who've served in the military and then moved on to civilian life, and, as civilians, they get casual nepotism from fellow vets and non-vets who have high regard for military service, but otherwise are hired based on their merits. Akin to, say, a company that's run by a mother or a non-mother who has high regards for mothers who might give casual nepotism towards a mother in terms of hiring, but otherwise judges potential employees on their merits.
But where I'm not sure how the comparison works is where vets generally aren't expected to take time off to go back to their military service, possibly multiple times and unexpectedly (well, with around 9 months of lead time, anyway). I think that, once they return to civilian life, vets are generally expected to keep working like a regular civilian. This can't be said for any given woman in a certain age range with respect to motherhood. A vet's ability to perform the job can be assessed before hiring and then, if they get hired, the employer can generally rely on them to behave like any other employee; in the case of potential mothers, that's not the case. Mothers who have aged out of birthing more children and have already spent their time raising them before they apply to the job, perhaps, is a better analogue. But those aren't the mothers that are under discussion.
There's also the issue that, as best as I can tell, there's very little empirical reason to believe that extra maternity leave would have any meaningfully positive impact on fertility. It certainly could, and we could try it out, but if the predictable happens and it has no positive impact, then it becomes an arbitrary handout that's basically impossible to revert, leading to high costs for no gain. Of course, there's the gain of mothers having more time with their babies as they grow up, which is a positive in its own right, but it's also a different issue than fertility and one that needs to be argued on its own merits separately.
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Unfortunately, it seems like replacing the shoggoth of Capitalism with a simpler, cruder social system or inventing artificial wombs is easier for people than things like
, even if I would prefer that too. Also, it seems a waste to not root for glorious transhumanist destiny in the age when it seems most possible yet.
In general, I think the debate has baked in coercion because many people in the debate have concluded that the reason for unmotivated young men is no steady gf, and no steady gf is because divorces and tinder. Which are large-scale enough factors that some coercion would be required to attack them.
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This is like framing America's obesity epidemic as "liberation". Technically correct, I suppose.
No doubt some liberated slaves were worse off for having the responsibility to earn their own keep they weren't used to.
I choose to give the western society credit where it's due: there is no such thing as famine anymore. That you have to put in a bit of effort to not grow fat is small potatoes compared to that. Also, it's a choice to let your food industry dump tons of sugar into everything or whatever it is that is wrong with American food industry.
I'm not comparing you to someone who claims that western society is good, because it provides abundance, even if that means you have to put in effort to not grow fat, or regulate the food industry.
I'm comparing you to the HAES / Lizzo's beuty enjoyers / fitness is fascism people. People who see fatness itself as liberation from oppressive forces like beuty standards, healthy diets and exercise.
Is your view that "fitness is fascism" people are to being in shape like the "I don't want to have to marry a man to make a living/have to marry a woman to obtain companionship and sex" people to obligate marriage?
Rest assured I don't think that being a 1000 body count fuckboy/slut should be the highest aspiration and the goal of all freedom-loving people.
Like the "there is no such thing as famine anymore" / "motherhood is merely the means of reproduction and little else" people are to it. People who didn't want to marry always existed and weren't a problem.
I'd say that this what your views lead to, whether you think they should or not, but the next step is likely going to be sexless rat utopia, so we won't even get the 1000 "body" orgies.
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Rationalists tend to worry about x-risk and the very long-term survival of the human race. Thus, HBD-believing fertility-rates-concerned rationalists' thinking goes that lower IQs might be selected for and boost short-term reproductive fitness in the short term, while preventing us from solving AI alignment or colonizing Mars or any of that good stuff, and thus drastically reducing Homo sapiens's chances of long-term survival.
(Of course, this is assuming one only values survival of the species and nothing else, which is true of very few rationalists.)
Look, I still remember how popular the opening bit of Idiocracy was with a lot of left-wingers all those decades back, well before "HBD-believing fertility-rates-concerned rationalists" were a thing. For that matter, I remember classmates from Caltech talking about how we needed "parenting licenses" out of mid-20th century sci-fi to keep the dumb, Bible-thumping rednecks from breeding too many future Republican voters, before we end up another moron like Bush the younger in the White House. (They also had either one of two explanations as to why this wasn't eugenics.)
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because they don't like that course? The invisible hand of the free market leads to plentiful goods and prosperity. Low birth rates lead to extinction. What's next "Why do you wear a jacket in the winter? Heat flowing from hot to cold is natural, and therefore you should freeze."? Liking one default outcome doesn't imply liking every default outcome.
Yup, that's a problem. Sucks that there aren't any nice solutions, but nature doesn't have to play according to our desires.
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It's about as confusing as a person wanting to get in shape, instead of being content to fill themselves up with junk food and whatching their health deteriorate. It would be nature taking it's course too, wouldn't it?
As for it sounding socialisty, there aren't that many devoted libertarians out there.
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Can't say I have. I vaguely recall something about a group calling themselves Oath Keepers (or Oathkeepers?), which may or may not be a right-wing militia organization?
These are completely different things- promise keepers was an evangelical men’s group which did standard evangelical things. Oath keepers is a veterans right-wing militia organization.
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Yes, they are a completely different group.
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My dad took me to a PK conference in the Silverdome back in the day. Mid-90s PK was booming. Not sure what you mean by "identitarian", but it was a paint-by-numbers evangelical men's movement. I was a very lost cause by then, but PK was as unobjectionable as a religious group that size is capable.
Identitarian in the sense that the group was founded on the members' shared identity as Christian men, not simply as Christians.
My recollection is that it was very liberal-coded and "complementarian" grading on the curve of evangelical christianity. Very much a normie American christian thing, which my more strict upbringing recognized as "not real christianity".
Are you comfortable saying which denomination you were raised in? That makes me curious.
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