This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
To extrapolate on my initial question about the reputation of the Promise Keepers organization:
Back in the days I remember reading a succinct definition on one of the Manosphere blogs that used to exist: the patriarchy is [in a broad and very simplified sense] a system where men are responsible for women and women are accountable to men. (More accurately, it’s a system where women are accountable to their fathers/husbands and men are responsible for their daughters/wives.*) When this system is dismantled as oppressive and outdated, as it has very obviously happened throughout the developed world already (contrary to the loud protestations of die-hard feminists), we inevitably end up in a social rule set where women are no longer accountable to men and men are no longer responsible for women.
As it was also observed on said blog, it’s safe to conclude if you have eyes and ears that society is generally OK with the former and doesn’t even think twice about it but is ambiguous at best about the latter. This ambiguity manifests in various attempts to compel men to claim responsibility for women one way or another**, and is exacerbated when there’s an ever taller mountain of evidence to observe that the brave new world of sexual equality and freedom is failing to materialize in the way normies imagined it would***.
One obvious consequence of this is that anti-feminist public figures appear. They include both men and women from the onset already, but anyone can observe that the only ones getting any positive attention are women, of course. And society is generally structured in a way that a critical mass of women advocating for something is perceived as a sign by men that it’s also safe and even beneficial for them to advocate for it. And since said women are generally promoting some murky concept that can best be described as a new positive masculinity****, you’ll inevitably see men’s groups appearing with the aim of promoting the same concept.
As far as I know, the Promise Keepers was just one of these and not even all of them had a religious profile, and there were/are many outside the US as well. Their common denominator is that they are nebulously pushing a narrative that rejects both radical feminism and rigid old patriarchal norms and endorses a new positive view of masculinity that is designed to appeal to normies, especially women, without antagonizing lipstick feminism (they claim no allegiance with PUAs, for example). As you can imagine, this is largely doomed from the start already for the simple reason that defining masculinity in any form would also necessarily entail defining (and thus restricting) femininity as well, and as you can imagine, that is today a big no-no. As I alluded to above, any message such groups carry is thus destined to be rather murky.
(On a sidenote, I even find the name cringy. “Promise Keepers” implicitly means that other men do not keep their promises, the scoundrels they obviously are. I guess the naming was designed to gain sympathy from single mothers. Then again, maybe I’m just a dick.)
Before I continue I should mention that the organization briefly had a sort of heyday in the ‘90s but has long been defunct in a practical sense, as many of you might have already noticed and commented on (I assume they still exist in the legal sense). That is no coincidence, and I’m sure the main reason is that their leaders made the most obvious rookie mistake there is in politics: when their opposition (in this case, some radical feminist talking heads) denounced them in the press for some made-up reason, they apologized. (Take this with a grain of salt though, as I’ve only read this claim on a long-gone blog.) They thought they need to apologize to some feminist loudmouths, even though their entire public image hinged on being as inoffensive as possible, which clearly renders any idea of publicly apologizing a really bad one (why would you want to give any impression that you need to apologize when you’re a bog standard church org?). Anyway, even if this incident didn’t happen the way I remember it or if it didn’t happen at all, I think the general point still stands: it’s clear that the Promise Keepers were treated with either indifference or scorn and ridicule by the mainstream media, and only found sympathy within their own culture war tribe / wagon fort. This is a general rule of society: a man making any complaints about women, no matter how indirect or mild, is a sign of low status. Or to quote a former Manosphere blogger: a man pointing out the pettiness of petty women is actually seen as a sign of he himself being petty. For further proof just look at what public image fathers’ rights groups and activists have; they are basically lepers.
(end of Part 1, I suppose, as at this point I’m just rambling maybe)
*In reality it went even further than that. It was generally expected of young men to keep socially undesirable men away from their sisters, and it was normal for said sisters to act as matchmakers for their single bothers etc. But that is largely beside the point here.
**Exhortations by Christian preachers and so on for single men to marry single mothers and gamers/slackers to man up, man-shaming in the media in general, the endless denunciations of “deadbeat dads”, the Bradley Amendment, affirmative consent laws, the Duluth model etc. are all examples of this, I’d say
***I guess this included the notion that promiscuous women will be able to live without sexual shame and that “average” women will have casual sex with “average” men because they actually want to have sex for the sake of it; then again, I’m just guessing (I’ll explain the quotations marks if anyone is interested)
****Believe it or not, a handful of sympathetic women did visit these Manosphere sites back when these existed, at least for a while; they generally agreed that while the post-patriarchal age means that women don’t need men in their lives per se, they still generally want [some of] them, and that it should be possible to be a functioning masculine man in a feminist cultural milieu still
I think there's a simpler explanation for the demise of the Promise Keepers than wicked feminist scheming: it's religion, Jake.
As a religiously-based and affiliated organisation, it was never going to get traction in the mainstream. And within its own little sphere, later on new fads came along and this faded. Anybody else remember the foofarah around Purity Rings and Purity Balls and the rest of it? They may still be going, but it's years now since I read shocked denunciations of the incestuous vibe of it all on social media.
Re: the Duluth model, I had to look this up and by the Wikipedia article it's been much criticised. I'd be a tiny bit more sympathetic about your complalnt there, save that I read this story in the news very recently. Ex-partner attacks woman with axe, sets fire to house, drowns himself. "Why this foolish notion that women are at risk from men?" you ask, and I point to this. Except for some guys who really are walking around with "I'm trouble" labelled on their face, how do you know that if you take up with Joe and then break up with Joe, Joe is not going to try and axe-murder you? It's a gamble!
I do. It did reek of Evangelical desperation to me, and very obviously seemed cringey. On a second though I think you're right about the Duluth Model in the sense that I do believe it's a sexual Marxist concept designed to benefit the oppressed class of women but I don't think it was meant to somehow compel men to claim responsibility for women. I should not have included it.
More options
Context Copy link
I have to say that while I'm sympathetic to part of this, things like this model likely contribute to a zeitgeist that overinflates the danger that women face and underestimate the danger than men do.
I recall trying to find statistics about intimate partner homicides years ago (using US data), and found that while women do get killed significantly more than men do in these situations, it was more on the order of male victimisation rate at ~60% of the female level (which seems to be already down from 75% in 1992, at least according to this), rather than orders of magnitude more. Looking at other developed countries doesn't help either, since while it isn't as close as the US, IIRC it's still "only" on the magnitude of, like, 20-50%. The statistical data doesn't fit with the far higher subjective concerns that women have with getting murdered by their spouses. (I found this in a brief search, which suggests a skew of 2:1 in female:male victimisation globally on page 14, but doesn't seem to distinguish between intimate partner homicide and other family-related homicide.)
I could be convinced that generally, murders aside, women are orders of magnitude more at risk of severe bodily harm than men do without dying, simply due to biology, but I'm not sure the data supports that women are astronomically more at risk than men are from intimate partner homicide than men are, and I think men barely think about their partners murdering them (at least compared to women thinking about the same).
Just today read a story in the news about a guy who poured boiling water on his sleeping wife and hit her over the head with a claw hammer. No further details as to why he did that, and he's awaiting a psychiatric report, but the general rule of thumb is: if you see a story about "partner attacked by current or ex-partner", it's female attacked by male. Women seem to attack children (see that murder of a child by the stepmother I mentioned on here before). Sometimes yes, it's the woman attacks the man, but mostly it's man attacks woman.
And it's hard to tell! Forty years married, then one night he pours boiling water on top of you! Very few people can foresee this happening if the person has otherwise been normal all their life.
Your link is interesting, thanks for providing it. Reminds me of the golden age of British murders, where women were as likely to bump off husbands as husbands to bump off wives.
On the other hand, this data set claims that for intimate partner homicide, it's majorly women:
The potential explanation for the difference in American spousal homicide sounds untested:
EDIT: [Another](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/104398629401000303 paper has an interesting hypothesis - class and race:
That might also explain the number of trans people killed by ex-partner/current partner in the list I posted before; the majority of the trans people on that list were BIPOC. If there are higher intimate partner rates of homicide among black Americans, that translates over for trans as well as cis.
I don't think we disagree, as from what I found men do kill women in relationships anywhere from 2 to 5 times as much, and in fact Wilson and Daly is one of the sources I cited; but given such a low base rate...
Which leads me to think that it might be one (or more) of men under-responding to the danger they're in, women over-estimating the danger they're in, or the self-defence clause is largely true and men really are astronomically less likely to be killed as long as they aren't violent.
For what it's worth, I think the third is almost definitely true to some extent, but I can't imagine it being the entire story, given that intimate partner violence in general also follows a similar trend, at least going by mainstream org press releases (something like 1:3 to 1:4 with likely significant male under-reporting); though there is an interesting part of the literature that contends that most domestic violence is reciprocal, and cases with unilateral domestic violence usually have the woman as the perpetrator, but still finding that violence causing injury (esp. severe injury) is still generally male-dominated, though again not to the extent that we usually assume it is. That aligns with my perception that murders and homicides aside, women are still more likely to be injured purely from biology.
(The review by Straus seems to suggest that actual cases of violence in self-defence are actually quite low:
so I wonder how the >50% self-defence stat for women comes from. Maybe self-reporting?)
Someone could probably do a systematic review on this. I can't imagine that the studies are generally high quality, though.
That is the question that remains to be answered. Along with what sounds like "things we don't want to contemplate" about 'greater chance of women killing men in domestic violence if they're poor, black and cohabiting not married" which is the kind of explanation that will ruffle one hell of a lot of feathers. It would be very racist to point out "white women don't kill white men in the same proportion as black women kill black men", for instance.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The reason it failed is it was one influential man's effort to get his single mother daughter married and a father for his grandchildren. First one was born in 1989, promise keepers was 1990. Once he was too infirm to carry the torch it withered away.
As fitting their genetics his grandchildren are NFL bubble athletes. So they have that going for them.
Based on Wikipedia I assume you're referring to T. C. McCartney.
And Derek (though bubble is stretching here) she had two players children.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A thing I don't think the 'manosphere' (loosely defined) has really grappled with, is men's role dismantling the 'patriarchy' (loosely defined).
" the patriarchy is [in a broad and very simplified sense] a system where men are responsible for women and women are accountable to men. (More accurately, it’s a system where women are accountable to their fathers/husbands and men are responsible for their daughters/wives.*) "
That works as a definition well enough.
For that system to hold, its a 2 way street.
A real question, culturally, do men want the responsibilities, or just the perks?
Its relevant that concurrent with Promise Keepers, we had elected Bill Clinton twice to the highest office in the land, JFK was considered the coolest possible politician, Joe Namath had been famous for going on 30 years at that point for being good with the ladies.
Culturally, men, held up that ideal as something to be aspired to.
If men are going to aspire to be cads, a feminism that decides that men aren't worth trusting the patriarchy to is a reasonable response.
My mental model of Promise Keepers, their main message was "hey men, be worthy of the patriarchy"
Promise Keepers as a phenomenon, it was always fighting massive cultural headwinds, it was founded with that express purpose.
Is it a failure that it's not still going strong 30 years later? idk, what's that half-life of these things? I mean Lilith Fair isn't still selling out shows, whatever Louis Farrakhan is up to, a million people aren't showing up in DC on the regular to hear him. These things peter out.
If some men took it to heart and actually lived better lives, I would say that counts as success, even if in 2025 the movement is a minor footnote in history.
I think that’s key. The church needs to teach men to do their part, even when women sin against them, and it needs to teach women to do their part, even when men sin against them. But it’s fine for a parachurch ministry, or a church’s men’s or women’s ministry, to focus on just one of these at a time.
I do think that such a ministry needs to be willing to frankly discuss the other side’s duties. But it would be odd if that were the primary focus.
It is kind of hard to continue with these duties in the context of modern economies. Setting aside how realistic it is for middle class/working class families to have only a single income, male physical superiority doesn't necessarily mean much from an earning power perspective anymore. Why must the male be the one that takes on responsibility/authority?
In the context of a parachurch ministry, the answer is straightforward: God designed the human sexes that way, and He has commanded us to follow that design. The Bible is pretty emphatic about this:
If I were to make a secular argument, I would build it on the distribution of temperaments in men and women and how they interact within this framework, and I’d refer to studies of different subcultures with different marriage norms, being aware of the biases in social psychology. But it’s much harder to make a normative argument that way, and there would be legitimate discussion to be had about when to strengthen traditional norms to benefit the average person and when to weaken them to benefit outliers.
When you believe that the Bible is God’s Word – and that’s the conviction the Promise Keepers were working from – then it has the right to make normative claims that human prudence does not.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Maybe. But not if all such are focusing on the same one; then you're just teaching that half to be chumps. And contrary to the GPs insinuation, it's mostly not men who are demanding perks without responsibilities, and insinuating that when talking about a group specifically called the "Promise Keepers" is especially bad.
...why? Are we going to take the People's Republic of North Korea on their word that their republic belongs to the People in a higher proportion than the ones not called that?
More options
Context Copy link
Sure. People are reluctant to teach women that they need to hold up their end even when their husbands sin against them.
In a culture that is so hostile to it, low decouplers – and most low decouplers are women – will hear that as, “He’s totally allowed to abuse you.” Some high decouplers will deliberately misinterpret it that way for rhetorical reasons. A pastor has the responsibility to distinguish the two and to break through honest misunderstanding where it occurs. But it’s difficult, and it’s risky, and too many shirk that duty.
That said, there are still going to be men who want to take the benefits without the responsibilities. Reminding them of their duties is noble work, as long as you don’t use it as excuse to ignore more common sins.
Edited to add the last paragraph.
Or that they need to hold up their end at all. Or that they even have an "end" to hold up.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This gets really complex. Feminism versus patriarchy definitely is not a woman versus men conflict. In many ways, women are used as proxy forces by powerful men. We saw this with metoo, accusations can be used as weapons to take out political or corporate enemies, with the accusations against ones allies (eg Tara Reid) conveniently not believed. One can see 1900s to 1980s feminism as a plot by alpha men to get hot young women in the office away from boyfriends and husbands (present or future) where the alpha men could bang them. One could see metoo as an effort by normie husbands to seize back their women from the bosses at work and normie dads to keep their daughters away from the frat boys at college. But it gets more complex because it kind of backfires as the false accusations against the normie gets believed while actual predatory seduction by alpha men gets ignored ( the famous meme is true https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hello-human-resources also an SNL skit with Tom Brady ).
And even in the 1960s to 1980s non-alpha men were psyopped and thirst-trapped into thinking that the sexual revolution would mean more sex for them, and so out of sin or out of ignorance they often did cheer on licentiousness in movies and among famous people.
Black pill on metoo:
Dershowitz faced an extended lawsuit from an Epstein girl supported by his rival Boies.
Boies in turn worked for Weinstein hiring ex mossad to stalk Ronan farrow.
It's all powerful men targeting their rivals all the way down.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think it was Deiseach who once pointed out that second-wave feminism was actually a really sweet deal for men and a poison pill for women, with all the "free love" turning out to be just fucking around without any responsibility, and all later feminism waves are just an attempt at fixing this giant screw-up without admitting to it. I'd nitpick that it only was a sweet deal for a particular kind of men, but otherwise agree.
We’re already seeing modern examples of this. I remember saying the exact same thing whenever the topic would come up in my social round table years ago. It always felt like pissing in the wind. This stuff isn’t rocket science. I really don’t know how so many people missed it.
Had an interesting thought.
"Consequence-Free Sex" is a great sales pitch on its face.
But then you notice that some of the 'consequences' of sex are in fact good, desireable, and constructive, and throwing those out is really losing something important.
So women thought they were getting all the pleasure without the risk of pregnancy, STDs, emotional investment, or risk of abuse... and didn't notice that this was costing them a lot of the emotionally fulfilling aspects of it.
It was a talked about phenomenon even during Victorian Britain that some women were just completely “whorish” in their attitudes. So you’ve always had licentiousness and the overwhelming biological drive of people in their youth. The question in my mind has one to do with its proper place and context. The sexualization and commodification of everything is bad for both individuals and society.
Fully agree with you on the last paragraph. It also reminds me of the old, funny bash dot org quote:
“It used to be about sex, drugs and rock n roll. Now all we have is aids, crack and techno.”
In reading some accounts of the culture of the '60s and '70s, it seems like there were a LOT of true believers who genuinely thought that free love, LSD, and rock music was going to save the world and fix everything. And a lot of opportunists who saw how they could exploit this sentiment.
And as the quote implies, turns out there are some downsides to each of those things. The drugs in fact ended up killing a lot of the musicians.
To hear some tell it, the Altamont Free Concert was the day (four months after Woodstock, the apotheosis of the era) that dream died/the illusion popped.
"Wow, turns out getting people hopped up on drugs at a free concert with a Biker Gang (paid in beer) running security DOESN'T result in a peaceful, money-free utopia." And like a number of recent culture issues, the death of a black guy was the precipitating incident.
Richard Nixon was... more right than wrong about hippies.
For my part I think it was fully doomed when the Corporations Co-opted their sentiment to sell sugar water. Note this was the same year John Lennon released "Imagine."
Virtually the entire atmosphere of the postwar period was like that in the sense that the west came out triumphant. In particular with the US overwhelmingly being the biggest beneficiary. And with that you saw an attendant shift in the social values of the population with the abundant wealth that was following in.
Being the person that tried to restore sanity and imploring them to think of the long-term downstream consequences would’ve made you the party pooper or puritanical boomer of the previous generation. But the conclusion of all this wasn’t hard to see. A lot of what people complain about today and are writing I remember having the identical thoughts about in high school. And it’s not because I’m some sort of enlightened genius and everyone else is an idiot. I’m simply someone paying attention.
Well yeah I can actually sort of understand the logic there actually.
"Hey we've got this brand new drug that heightens sensory experiences but has seemingly zero side effects! Miraculous! And all these extremely talented musicians innovating genres with meaningful messages! And contraceptives so we can have the pleasure of sex without the risk! Truly this is an age of wonders, we can surely solve the world's problems if we just unite around something we all have in common!"
Then sprinkle some marxism in there. Can't forget to mention Jonestown where a bunch of self-professed Marxist-Communists got froggy and killed themselves along with a bunch of kids. That was later in the game, though.
Oh, and the Manson murders. 1969-1971 really killed any presumption of 'innocence' in this culture, didn't it?
The extra layer of weird spirituality that permeated much of the hippie era was a bit harder for me to understand. Lot of cults in that time period.
Whatever mindsets of the 60's has been repeated in the current era, it seems to be a firmly secular movement this time around, although most here can point out how "wokeism" is just a secular religion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's not that they're "missing it," it's that they psychologically cannot allow it to be true. The villain, convinced of the righteousness of his cause, only to wail "Oh God, what have I done!?" when forced to confront that what he has done is truly evil, is a creature that only exists in fiction. In the real world, to actually admit that one's core identity is a lie would be a narcissistic inury so great that any cost must be paid to avoid it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Still buys into a hyper-agentic view of lecherous men and women as true sexual objects without desire or agency. If some top men plotted to give sexually inert women sexual freedom to satisfy their perverted male urges, it stands to reason that they also gave them the vote earlier, the right to vote and work, anti-harassment laws etc. If vague dissatisfaction with the current situation is evidence of failure, those things and more were all poison pills.
Agreed. A lot of women really enjoy having flings with high status men. Perhaps it's a poison pill in the sense that eating too many potato chips is a poison pill. But the same could be said about men who spend their days womanizing.
More options
Context Copy link
At no point did I claim that women have no agency. Quite the opposite; My view is that women happily pushed the movement forwards for as long as they thought it was good for them, and then changed course once they realised the issues with it. If anything, a point could be made that the women were the primary agents, while some men were passively enjoying the perks (which isn't even entirely wrong). Of course, all the later feminist waves are also introducing as many new problems as they are fixing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A more controversial red-pill, even among the red-pilled, but one I believe to be true, is that men are actually the more romantic sex and deal worse with promiscuity. Yes, men find it more enjoyable to sample new women and sleep with a different women each week. But men perhaps deal worse with seeing the women they slept with sleep with someone else...especially if they enjoyed a special connection. And since most men are not lotharios who can take pride in notch counts, but most men have dealt with very traumatic break-ups, on net, the sexual revolution has been bad for most men.
Byron had a different view of it, but then again he was Byron. From "Don Juan":
Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
’Tis woman’s whole existence; man may range
The court, camp, church, the vessel, and the mart;
Sword, gown, gain, glory, offer in exchange
Pride, fame, ambition, to fill up his heart,
And few there are whom these cannot estrange;
Men have all these resources, we but one,
To love again, and be again undone.
More options
Context Copy link
"Oh, I tell you, women are not the sensitive sex. That's one of the great delusions of literature. Men are the true romanticists."
I have that movie on-call, I really need to sit down and watch it for the full context of that quote one day.
More options
Context Copy link
To an extent this is actually true. I’m a person that more easily gets attached after sex. I don’t like feeling used.
Psychologically there are just different types of people. It’s easy to just “discard” someone you have no investment in. I’ve always been a very monogamous person. I’ve had experiences in my late teenage years going into very early adulthood through my social group and the milieu I was in, and not out of genuine desire. I’ve never found it fulfilling or enjoyable when reflecting on it. The best I’ve always had was in romantic relationships and I have never had any desire to experience the former again, even though I’ve had the opportunities available to me from my original social group. It always makes me feel filthy, like I have to scrub the shit out of my body; and I’ve always been somewhat paranoid of diseases.
Man. Same way.
I've gotten to the point where I can justify a fling with a particular sort of partner who is clearly never going to be able to commit to someone, as a means of physically satiating the desire.
But I have to be so emotionally distant about it that it is simply unfulfilling.
Repeated sexual intercourse with someone you genuinely care for and know their ins and outs and exactly how they respond... its better in ways that you wouldn't even realize if you've only ever had short-term partners.
"Intimacy" is poorly understood and seemingly underrated as part of the experience. Of course, sometimes you just want the dopamine hit that comes with banging someone hot.
Indeed.
Some of the best sex I’ve ever had comes from caring about the pleasure of the person you’re with and seeing their emotion and excitement in it. Wanting to make them happy and fulfilled makes the experience much better. People that haven’t experienced that just won’t know. All they’ll ever think is being with someone is just a glorified way of jacking off and that you can do it with anyway.
I knew a ‘lot’ of women growing up. Peers, sisters of friends, friends of friends etc. We were all a group and I still know a good number of them. I was never lacking in opportunities for a fling. That was just never my thing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I feel like Gay men and Lesbians somewhat disprove this. I think the possessiveness over women comes from scarcity and difficulty in accessing women.
How do gay men and lesbians disprove this?
Gay men tend to not be that possessive and often have open relationships whereas lesbians tend to be incredibly possessive.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There was also a rather simple factor at play in all of this. We know there was a big baby boom after 1945. In plain terms, every year that passed, the cohort that was born was larger than the one before it. Add to this that young men generally seek female partners that are 3-5 years younger than them. All this meant that there were roughly 13 or so potential mates for every 10 young men looking for a female partner in 1966 or so. A sex ratio that is imbalanced to such a degree inevitably results in loosened norms around casual sex even if that is not clearly incentivized by the broader culture, which it was.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Bit of a trick in this one. What are 'male responsibilities?'
I'd posit:
Almost any role men are expected to perform in society is one of these or a subset of these. Killing a spider in the house? 1. Tracking down and capturing a criminal? Blend of 1 and 2. Change the oil in the car? 4.
1 has been obviated by modern tech, and we prefer it that way.
4 is still a thing, but has been rendered pretty low status overall.
2 has been a nonissue in most places, especially the U.S., for a long time, and we prefer it that way.
3 DEFINITELY still happens, and we have systems in place to ensure it happens, but we have managed to mitigate much of the risk. And we prefer it that way.
But at any given time, if the need arises, men CAN be called upon to fulfill these responsibilities, to the death, if needed.
So the fact that most men haven't been called on to fight a war, kill a mammoth, or go down with a ship while the women and children escape doesn't change the fact that they could be called to do this at any time. And indeed, many of them spend a lot of time preparing themselves to jump into action even as the actual chances of needing to do so go down, since the impact of such events is still deadly and widespread.
So there's a disconnect. "Men don't live up to their responsibilities anymore" really means "men have managed to arrange a society that is mostly peaceful, robust against disaster, and produces more food than we know what to do with." And ignores "they also maintain readiness to take action to preserve this society if it is threatened" factor.
And this means mens' responsibilities are kind of invisible most of the time. So others (especially women) just assume men are getting all the perks whilst doing none of the work to earn them. Which might even be true... until its not.
This also explains why Firemen, Police Officers, and Soldiers still get some automatic cachet with women, since they signal themselves as a man who has actively sought out the male responsibility. Even though each of those jobs has only gotten safer/cushier over time for the reasons outlined above.
I do think its 'cheating' to suggest that women are excused from their obligations on the grounds that men aren't living up to their own standards, when the womens' obligations are relatively painless but very visible on a social level, and men's responsibilities are harder to perceive but extract a drastically higher cost when drawn upon.
So what seems to be the issue is that men DO maintain certain responsibilities... but thanks to successfully creating a highly advanced civilization, they've made it much less likely that they'll be publicly expected to perform those responsibilities at scale.
And yes, there are probably a lot of men who would reject the call to fight off an invader, track down a violent criminal, dive into floodwaters to save a child, or even to lift heavy equipment in the hot sun to construct a building.
And those that refuse those responsibility should, I say, be fairly ostracized.
But that's not really the question. As a man, I ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY want/accept these responsibilities.
With that said... I ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY want to minimize the chances of being called on to fulfill these responsibilities, by maintaining a civilization that is robust against such risks.
So bit of a contradiction there. "Yes, give me all the perks of maledom, and I will do my best to ensure that I am not called on to fulfill the responsibilities if I can help it."
But the problem I do keep hitting on, if you remove incentives for men to fulfill their responsibilities, and enough of them drop out of that role, its increasingly likely that the civilization they maintain will start to crumble.
I mean, maybe I'm the weird one but I don't think being hypothetically willing to do certain things is worth much compared to actually doing things. Would I kill a stranger to protect my wife? Sure. Do I think I will ever have to actually do that? Almost certainly not. Does that fact, like, oblige some gratitude or something on my wife's part? Create some responsibility to me? I don't think so. If it were a thing I actually had done, especially more than once, I would think differently but I don't think my hypothetical willingness generates much of an obligation on the part of others.
There's a CHH substack post that gets at a pretty similar theme (if anyone knows how to un-paywall substack articles let me know): You'll Kill Marauders, But Will You Change a Diaper?
The gist is that a lot of men seem to envision being a husband or father as entailing a lot of willingness to do violence and their contribution to these roles as being that willingness. This is, however, not a practical description of what is required to be a husband or father in a developed country. It's not to say that willingness is bad, but it is not something that is likely to be very useful.
And on that point I simply disagree.
If you are ever called upon to actually kill (or die) to save your wife or children, that sole act in itself functionally justifies the entirety of her gratitude for you, because the severity of the act is literally that large in terms of impact on your life and hers.
Even if I grant that we've rendered the present risk of having to do so to functionally nil (unless you go looking for trouble), if you have genuinely taken the time to mentally and physically prepare yourself for an act of ultimate violence or sacrifice, that risk is NOT guaranteed to remain low into the future and having an 'insurance policy' in place for such an event is is the wise thing to do.
Simply put, if you keep a fire extinguisher around the house for years on end, do you think "man why do I bother having this thing, housefires are a rare occurrence!" or, is it more like "I sure am glad to have this here because if my house catches fire I might be able to stop it burning down."
Have some gratitude for the fire extinguisher sitting on top of your fridge (well, that's where mine is) even if you never intend to use it.
Or, if you like, think of it as the equivalent of paying your life insurance premium every month. Hope to never to use it, still paying (in money, if not 'gratitude') for the peace of mind it brings.
The world is not, on the whole, a very civilized and safe place. And the only insurance policy one can have against the failure of civilization is someone willing to step up to fight the dangers. We forget and dismiss this at our own peril.
The gratitude is proportional to the possibility that the insurance provider might renege on the deal. A fire extinguisher basically can't, unless I failed to maintain it in working condition. An insurance company is... let's say "unlikely", although that varies per company and insurance types. Luigi certainly didn't believe, in the end, that it was unlikely.
But simply "being prepared" is not a visible thing. For good or ill there must be opportunities for the man to prove his willingness to fight for his family's safety in action, possibly in less severe cases than "kill or die", in order for the willingness to carry any water.
On the flipside, a woman might claim that she is fully prepared to stay by your side, in health and in sickness, for all life, but the divorce rate and indeed the possibility of no fault divorce speaks against her.
Correct, although there are visible signals a man can send, and a few of those are actually hard to fake!
More importantly, these are things a woman can sniff out in advance of committing to a guy if she wants to! Or she could ask her dad, who probably has the better insight into male worthiness.
Think, for just a second, what the approximate equivalent of 'failing to maintain' the relationship with a male partner might look like, though.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not sure what kind of obligations you are thinking of for women, but the first one that comes to mind for me is pregnancy and childbirth, and I would not describe that as "relatively painless". Sure, it's better now to have 2.1 children with an epidural instead of 10+, but I think it's still a more arduous obligation than what the average man in the west will be called upon to do in their lifetime.
You might need to recalibrate your perception of the sort of work the average dude has to complete in his life, and the pains they will suffer as a result of them.
Looking at the top, call it 20% of guys and assuming they represent all men is the EXACT issue that leads to intersex resentment, I think.
And just as modern society has relieved a lot of the risks that men are otherwise expected to deal with... it has also made the entire childbearing process less painful and FAR, FAR less risky for women.
(thanks to men)
So this sentiment doesn't move me an inch, although I'm on record with saying that bearing and raising children SHOULD afford a woman high status!
Hmm, I think it's definitely true the average (as in the mean) man does more dangerous and arduous work than the average woman. The workplace fatality rate for men in 2023 (that was the year I could find consistent numbers for) was ~7-8x the maternal death rate that year.
However, I'm less convinced that the average (as in the median) man does as much dangerous work. About 65% of men work some kind of management/service industry/sales job, and I don't think these jobs cause as much pain as birthing a baby. Even if the do, there's just as many women working them as men.
Not only that, but the workplace fatality rate for men exceeds the maternal death rate + the female workplace fatality rate by a huge amount. For example, I looked into the BLS numbers surrounding this a while back and the number of men killed during 2018 by occupational injuries caused by transportation incidents, contact with objects and equipment, falls, slips and trips, exposure to harmful substances or environment, and fires and explosions is 4,119 men killed. This excludes injuries caused by "Violence and other injuries by persons or animal" as that category includes deaths by self-inflicted injuries on the job. Even excluding that, the number of male deaths exceeds the number of women killed in ALL occupational deaths (413 women) AND maternal deaths (658 women) added together (1,071 women).
Just to give you a sense of how large that margin is, in 2018, the number of men killed in occupational-related transportation incidents alone (1,929 men) exceeds the number of women killed in all occupational deaths and maternal deaths added together.
Define "dangerous". Work is something you do for most of your life, whereas childbirth is a very transient condition (especially today). Management/service industry/sales jobs are highly disparate types of work with highly differing demands, the stressors encountered there definitely impact health, and just because women are as likely to participate in that large category of work does not mean they are subject to all the same stressors. It's been brought up fairly often in the context of the wage gap, but even within the same occupational categories your median man is likely to work more, take more strenuous and demanding jobs, and prioritise flexibility less, which results in women having higher satisfaction with their jobs (a consistent finding within the literature).
Occupational deaths do happen in these jobs; proper numbers are hard to come by but have a gander at this BLS list of fatalities by occupation. Deaths in private sector jobs under categories like "professional services" (585 deaths), "financial activities" (108 deaths), "information" (31 deaths), "administrative and waste services" (497 deaths), "educational and health services" (168 deaths), "leisure and hospitality" (253 deaths) etc collectively exceeded maternal deaths in 2018. No breakdown by sex is provided, but as mentioned in the previous section, women can only make up 413 of these deaths at maximum, suggesting a large sex disparity in mortality within these occupations. But even discarding that, the indirect health effects of constant stress results in elevated levels of cortisol over a long period of time, poor sleep, and so on, increasing risks of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, infections, strokes, etc. These kinds of pressures are endemic in many kinds of professional and service industries and is not a trivial source of health issues; for example WHO made an attempt at estimating the number of ischemic heart disease and stroke-related deaths linked to long working hours for the year 2016, finding that the worldwide number of deaths from long working hours was 745,000 from only these two causes of mortality. Men made up 72% of the deaths, and if you do the maths that means men represented 536,400 of these deaths and women represented 208,600. In contrast, worldwide general maternal mortality for the year 2016 accounted for an estimated 309,000 deaths. And there are undoubtedly more sources of death from long working hours than just those, and there are other job-related stressors which don't just amount to things like "death by lobotomy via a falling metal pipe". It is likely not the case that job-related mortality in even these kinds of management/service jobs is less of an issue than maternal mortality is for your average American woman of the same social stratum, and it is not the case that the prevalence of this mortality is the same between the sexes.
The costs of obligation manifest in many ways which aren't immediately obvious. In general I tend to think people overweight things that are obviously unpleasant but transient compared to stressors that cumulatively accrete over one's lifespan - and in general I think the latter tends to have a greater overall impact on health and wellbeing in spite of the fact that they're often overlooked as sources of mortality. Attrition is important; it's the difference between feeling intense temporary grief vs. clinical depression. Unexpectedly getting kidney stones, while more painful in the moment, would not impact my overall life as much as being stuck in a job I dislike. I have a sedentary job which sometimes requires me to work a lot of overtime and weekends during crunch time (in fact I did so earlier this month), if asked to make a tradeoff between spending large swaths of my life slogging away at an inflexible, stressful job and giving birth to 1.5 kids at any given point in my life I'm inclined to say that at least personally, I think the latter may be a superior value proposition. That's not to trivialise any of it, but I don't think this conception of unpleasantness actually aligns with how people experience it for the most part.
EDIT: added more
What it comes down to is childbirth and pregnancy are things men cannot do. So if you're weighing dangers or difficulties of men and women, you can assign an arbitrarily high coefficient to them and make the equation come out to "women suffer more and men are coddled" and men can do nothing about that. Checkmate, mistake theorists.
There's also the uncompensated Emotional Labor women perform in their personal and professional lives that aren't captured in misogynistic hate-facts involving trivia like number of working hours or deaths from workplace injuries.
Another amusing thing is the cottage industry of financial advisors that puts out content catering toward widows who suddenly have to deal with the brokerage and retirement accounts that their stupid husbands left behind after a lifetime of working. While some of it is out of self-interest to generate business, the "women have always been the primary victims of their husbands dying earlier" vibe is pretty funny.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Honestly, I wouldn't list any of those 4.
Here's a few real questions women have to answer,
If my husband gets a job where he needs to relocate, should I move with him?
If my husband get a job that requires long hours such that he's not able to handle a 50/50 split of familial duties (child care/chores), should I put up with that?
The answers to those questions don't revolve around physical strength, they revolve around 'can I trust him long term?'
'Can I trust him not to use up my fertility and then have a midlife crises and leave me for someone younger?'
That's what I would consider to be male responsibility, can I be trusted to put the welfare of my family ahead of my base impulses.
Well I did discuss that and I think the risk is overstated, and is certainly the wrong risk to hedge against. Allowing fear of this risk to dissuade you from partnering up is a sign of excess neuroticism. And 'ironically' excess neuroticism makes it more likely your relationship will fail.
It does appear that strengthening the marriage covenant (i.e. making the expectations and restrictions on both parties clear and strict) is a necessary preceding step.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Uh, you could have asked any chud what the man of the house's responsibilities are. It's to 1) pay the bills(as in earn the money to do so) 2) take the lead on security and safety issues, including those that are more annoying than dangerous(telling the salesman or political canvasser to go away) 3) do outdoor or heavier/more unpleasant chores(yardwork, taking the trash out, moving heavy objects) 4) provide final discipline for the kids(wait til your father gets home...). You might get some more awkward shuffling before admitting that women are supposed to cook and clean and take the lead on childcare and put her career second.
More options
Context Copy link
Management doesn't know what to do with a department that's "just a cost center, what does he even do, shouldn't we just eliminate the positions?". And once that happens, the consequences to a lack of maintenance usually don't show up for a while. Sure, they might be catastrophic, and often are, but that's future management's problem.
This is a common pattern across companies; it stands to reason that because the same people who end up managing companies also tend to manage a society more generally (something that is also a company, just a very large one, and when it fires people it tends to be more literal) societies inevitably end up sharing that failure mode unless something forces them not to be. In other words, any organization that isn't maintenance-first (or "isn't explicitly right-wing") ends up being wholly unable to do maintenance even when required (or "inevitably ends up left-wing", per Conquest).
Yeeup.
To take a direct example, Europe has gotten so far from the era where they had to worry about Russian/Soviet Invasion that they don't even maintain the basic military capacity to defend their own shores if there was ever a 'serious' outbreak of war.
This was brought into stark relief with the Ukraine war, but they still seem to work on the assumption that the U.S. will backstop things.
Russia's big mistake was attacking one of the few countries in Europe with a will to fight back.
It’s clear they did not expect them to fight back much. It would be the same mistake to assume that of UK-FR-DE in case of russian invasion of estonia, say. The 20th century has shown that seemingly placid people can get quite excited about war, quickly. Okay, maybe the italians wouldn't fight. Then again, that may be for the best.
More options
Context Copy link
In their defense, that's all the countries which border them except Belarus (which is already aligned). Maybe also excepting Norway.
How very coincidental!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, the one they'd specifically been antagonizing for a couple decades and thus was actually geared for repelling them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think your list is too anachronistic. In general, the role of men is to produce, refine, distribute and protect resources. All of these roles are still held by large majority of men, ranging from mining, farming, construction, infrastructure maintenance, police, army, manufacturing and virtually all the actually important things in the meat space. All of these things rely heavily on men with the participation ranging from 80% to 99%. And even then, the actual numbers are heavily obfuscated by specific support roles women do in these fields anyway. The same goes for STEM fields except medicine, especially engineering and other tasks. Despite all the feminist progress, the general gender roles did not change - men still do construction and police work, women are still nurses and care for children as teachers and nannies and they deliver nice sandwiches to men with a forced smile as waiters and so on. They perform similar jobs as they performed in 18th century, only with some modern systems muddling the waters.
In fact it is a very common argument around in manospohere: if tomorrow all the women disappeared, remaining men would do just fine until they die of old age. If it was the other way around, women would starve and die en masse within weeks or months. The society is still one huge resource transfer from men toward women and children - if women decide to have them that is - as it was centuries ago. But it is now hidden under jargon of rights and political process and largess created by cushy positions in government bureaucracy and similar jobs.
As an example - it is "easy" to be a divorced mother, if government forces men to still do their part of the marriage contract of supporting the family financially in form of alimony and child support, while women have no duties toward their ex husbands. In one sense seeing women in such a power seems like matriarchy, but she still relies on men for everything - be it her ex husband, or overwhelmingly male police force for protection of her person and her legal entitlements. I heard quite a convincing argument that this is still a patriarchy - women appeal to men to provide and protect them as usual, it is just that the modern patriarchy is benevolent enough to grant them their illusion of power and laughable notion of "equality".
But it is still an illusion - just because the patriarchy is benevolent toward women and oppresses fellow men, it does not mean it is not one such. Men always oppressed other men under patriarchy. Heck men oppressed other men in favor of women such as in Sparta, where women formed their own hugely powerful class of magnates called heiresses by inheriting wealth of their deceased husbands, or many other nations, where men risked their lives in war of conquest and subjugation only to bring slaves and jewels to entertain their mothers, wives and daughters. That is nothing new.
The thing is that if men collectively, or even in majority minority refuse to participate anymore, the illusion dissolves within days. We saw it recently after Afghanistan withdrawal, when Taliban warriors just leisurely waltzed in and subjugated women without any fuss, literally laughing at the notion of women's political rights.
Women are collectively incapable of putting up any resistance if men refuse to do so for them. There was never any female Spartacus waging war of liberation with her fellow Amazonians against oppression. All women can do is whine and appeal the patriarchy to entertain doing something about their position.
The key point there is the revolution. While law exists, social power controls physical power due to the police force. It does not especially matter if the ruling class has no physical power; they have social power, codified in laws, with which they can direct those with physical power to oppress on pain of that oppression turning upon them. This does, in fact, allow classes with social power to dominate classes with physical power nigh-indefinitely. Revolutions are the exception because revolution voids all laws - the pre-existing police force is literally defeated and can no longer enforce anything.
"Men are in charge, because the police force is essentially male" is an equivalent argument to "the proletariat was in charge in the 18th century, because the police force were essentially proles".
I agree with you. In the past we saw successful revolts, coups or revolutions. We saw peasant revolts, slave revolts, race revolts, class revolts or religious revolts. There never was a single violent feminist revolt in the history of mankind.
This is actually an internal critique of feminism with their obsession with power dynamics. Specifically that the notion of gender equality is laughable. Women simply do not have access to force, which is the purest application of power there is. Therefore ipso facto women are simply never going to be equal to men, because they rely on men to provide them with rights. Again, this is not negation of women having access to other forms of power such as persuasion, sexuality etc. It is also not an ought claim, that women ought not to have rights or anything like that. It is just a statement that as a class, as a collective, women simply lack this ability to enforce their own rights and thus they can never be equal.
I think this is a no-brainer. For instance if a parent shares his credit card with his child and he grants the child ability to spend on anything he wishes as he himself can, then the child is still not going to be equal, even if it seems that he has the same autonomy. Because parent can cut off the access to the credit, while the child can never do the same. The child can be a very good manipulator, he can be very vicious, but it does not change the fundamental truth of ontological inequality of the child being dependent on his parent for his perceived autonomy.
Again, it is feminists who created the gender dichotomy of men vs women, with men being the oppressors and equality as the end state. My main point is that sex based dichotomy is very, very different from other types of arbitrary dichotomies such as class, race, religion etc. Women are inferior when it comes to application of force, so they are never going to be equal using their own logic - which is preoccupied with power dynamics. In fact, many people are perplexed by this very narrow feminist view of history as battle of sexes. There are other views even discarding intersectional analysis of race, class etc. For instance a view, that men and women are not in opposition for power, but that they cooperated to overcome hurdles of nature, developing division of labor for common flourishing based on their different ontologies. The whole notion of sex being one of the intersectional axis of oppression is also very strange, as it has a completely different dynamics - every man has a mother and every women has a father. The experience is different from other dichotomies and differentiations, where the segregation can be much more pronounced.
Personally, it is not in my nature to wage some useless gender war. But if such a war comes to my doorstep by misguided people, I know how it will end.
My point is that while men as a whole could in theory do this, a man for the most part cannot actually do this because enslaving women is illegal. You are eliding a large co-ordination problem; for this to occur without massive bloodshed, all the men would have to agree on this and have common knowledge of their agreement, despite the various societal measures deployed in many nations to prevent that agreement and that common knowledge. Furthermore, they would then have to directly commit a lawless act by chucking out their women's rights laws (and in many cases women's rights constitutional provisions) outside the constitutionally-prescribed mechanisms, and yet still maintain enough regard for those constitutions and the rest of their laws to not immediately degenerate into civil war over what other laws should be chucked out (or dictatorship, as "the military is supposed to uphold popular sovereignty, not do whatever the guy in the big chair says" is also part of respect for constitutions).
Thought experiment: group A and group B live on an island together. Every member of group A has a big red button; no member of group B has such a button. If a day goes by with less than 10% of the buttons pushed, everyone who pushed a button has a heart attack. If a day goes by with between 10% and 95% of the buttons pushed, the island's volcano goes Krakatoa and everybody dies. If a day goes by with over 95% of the buttons pushed, group B are enslaved by group A. Does group A have any practical capability to use the buttons to enslave group B? No, not without some form of explicit co-ordination to make sure they all push the buttons on the same day. Even threats to push the button are empty without the ability to explicitly co-ordinate over 10% of group A.
Yes, if there were a civil war that boiled down to Men vs. Women, the men would win. But this does not mean that "men" can, in practice in a Western country that's not undergoing civil war, revoke women's rights. Orcus will stay on his throne, one bony hand clutching his terrible rod.
It has happened in the past, it will happen in the future and it is happening now. That is why I used the example of Taliban. They were able to put all women behind veils, remove them from political power and bar them from education without any fuss. It is impossible for women to do it the other way around - there never was such an occurrence.
Men can change laws, so that lawless action becomes lawful. It happened in the USA at least twice - the revolutionary war as well as the civil war, and there were many close calls. It is not impossible that this will happen again in some shape or form, especially if the society seems to be keen on pissing off young men of fighting age. As for other western countries such as in Europe, to me this seems almost inevitable. The changes in population composition will almost inevitably lead to some conflict and political reshaping in upcoming decades. Then it will become apparent where the actual power lies.
It is not necessary to coordinate on such a scale. Taliban only has maybe around 50-100 thousand of warriors with upper limit of around 200 thousand - if various local militias are counted. That is around 0.5% of total population of Afghanistan at best, and they were able to push that button. There were many such cases in the past, where key men were able to completely change the course of history: be it coups by pretorians in Roman Empire, Mamluk slave soldiers overthrowing their Arab slavers in Egypt etc. All it takes is a minority of men willing to apply violence, while the rest of the men are just looking on and abstaining from the fight. And again - there was never such a case in history, where couple of thousand of female warriors were ever able to do anything close to that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
But the parent CAN cut off access to the credit. Who is to say that men can take power back from women? It's true that they could do so if they mobilised collectively. But we don't know that they can do that, any more than dogs or birds, say, could all at once attack humanity. Peasant revolts don't prove anything because (as you note) women are integrated into every part of society.
Men did that in the past, they are doing it right now and they will do it in the future. I literally used the Taliban example just from couple of years ago - just 0.5% of population of motivated men were able to do as they please. They are no weak dogs or birds. If anything, it is women who are powerless like that unless protected by other men.
Yes, women are integrated into society in manner that men allow them to, in the same way men are integrated into society in a manner other men allow them. But it is always men and not women. That is the point.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That video was funnier than I expected. The laugh at 0:14s or so could serve as a great reaction gif.
The initial defeated, hangdog look of the interpreter/first Taliban character adds to the hilarity. Before the question cracked him up, it could have fit right into the Dick Flattening meme:
Then he and the squad realized the absurdity of the situation and corpsed the interview.
There's the classic trope that makes an appearance, where a Western girlboss obediently throws on a headscarf and covers herself up to appease Muslim men.
I'd watch the shit out of one of those cinephile YouTube channels breaking down the first 16 seconds or so of that video as a short film. So much subtext and worldbuilding in just a few seconds.
Funny how this could also be used to summarise the men without women vs. women without men Thanos-snapping thought experiment you described. The outcome of the first would be depressing but life otherwise goes on. The outcome of the latter would be a mass extinction event. Women's collective capability lies in their ability to get men to voluntarily or not-so-voluntarily do stuff for them.
The feminist counterargument would be that women are just as capable of surviving without men as men are without women, but if women aren't it's only due to subjugation and internalised misogyny from the patriarchy making them dependent on men.
I remain convinced that the probability of a minority of women managing to sustain themselves through existing agriculture and sperm banks is higher than men inventing artificial wombs in one generation. Even if men cooperate on that, as opposed to going Lord of the Flies on each other.
That's because stealing sperm from a bank is ridiculously easy while inventing artificial wombs is ridiculously hard. They are just two completely different problems, and solving one versus the other doesn't tell you much about the respective genders.
It does tell you which gender, should the other vanish, would be more likely to actually survive past a single generation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You had to do it. You had to make me link to The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal.
More options
Context Copy link
Yep, I remember one such a case, when the first all feminist cabinet in the world from Sweden dutifully donned hijabs while visiting Iran.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What anyone wants in a social system only becomes relevant when getting that without putting in the rest of the work becomes possible. If you allow men access to women without them having to become worthy in some form, yes men want that. If you allow women to get the benefits of being liberated without them having to contribute or even learn to be responsible for themselves or their families, they will do that. The way any society functions is to restrain human appetites. That way people do things that benefit society specifically to get the benefits.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I was a conservative Christian homeschool girl at that time. They were very pro purity, chastity, modesty, going from the "umbrella of protection" of your father to that of your husband, stay at home daughters, women as homemakers and not primarily as workers, etc. They were sentimental about couple who didn't get physical even when engaged, or had their first kiss at the alter. They were into "I Kissed Dating Goodby," and the idea of a courtship mediated by the woman's father. They talked like proper feminine women, so didn't say blunt things like "women are accountable to their fathers/husbands" most of the time, but did certainly teach it. Even in college, I went to a Christian Women's club hosted by the Baptist church about things like knitting something for your family while waiting for something to happen (and they taught us a bit of knitting), or making a nice healthy salad for your family, including soaking the lettuce in cold water, spinning it in a salad spinner, and serving it with avocados that don't turn brown while waiting for your future husband, because you've applied the proper amount of homemade citrus dressing to them.
It's interesting sociology, anyway. Lots of girls who never cut their hair and always wore denim skirts with button up blouses. I keep up on some of the grown women who emerged from that culture. My current favorite is Keturah Hickman, writing about such things as other Christian women judging her for her shaving habits, and her judging other Christian women for asking her to take her boots off in their home.
I had no idea she had a blog; I met her and her husband some months ago.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The strength of christianity historically has been its willingness to empower women due to the ease of extracting the fruits of that empowerment from them. Women being able to inherit property was an early core tenet of the catholic church, which they forced on most of Europe, because then they could then transfer that property to the priests. How do you think the church became a major landowner? Bequests from widows, divorcees and other women were a key source of income for the early church.
Of course, there isn't shit in the Bible that mandates any of this, but surviving religions come to have a theology that funds their continued existence. Christianity is a "topping from the bottom" religion, and as such has always had its core support among women. This is also why more masculinist philosophers have always hated it, from Aurelian to Nietzsche.
Gosh, who knew? Thanks for revealing the secrets of the wicked popish plots to me! Praised be the Reformation, for undoing such things! 😁
Don't get me started on why revolutions are always worse than the regime they replace. The most modern of Reformation schismatic sects is busy recreating the monastery system in academia, where holy men undergo sexual reassignment to become a privileged caste of eunuchs.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’m guessing you haven’t read much of the literature of the early church fathers.
I'm guessing more than you or anyone you know.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Hmm.
Let me suggest for conversation's sake that there's no reason PK failed that isn't explained by the same reasons that every other male-centric organization was either infiltrated or undermined in this period.
My contention is that martials arts might be the sole remaining bastion of pure, healthy masculinity left in Western Society. I become more certain of this every passing year.
All else has been skinsuited or crushed. The UFC is the only sports league left that doesn't even try to cater to women or push LGBT causes, and it revels in its appeal to the dudebro.
So perhaps the failure of PK was they simply had no 'martial' aspect or even any competitive spirits to it to keep men engaged and deter entryism.
How have the martial arts faired over the progressive era in terms of participation and seriousness of effort? I’ve been out of the loop for 15 years. For comparison, we are rapidly losing other skills like painting and drawing.
The UFC happened, and all heritage martial arts have either converged on the same core set of practices, or they've retreated completely into dance-moves or esoteric but untested claims of "real" effectiveness. No other trend is even remotely relevant in comparison.
Twenty to thirty years ago, in the average American small city there was a karate gym that taught karate and a taekwondo gym that taught tkd and a judo gym that taught judo and maybe a Kung Fu gym that taught kungfu. Now, if they still think of themselves as fighters, they've all converged on standup built around boxing, and all of them spend effort to teach grappling techniques largely derived from wrestling and BJJ. Or they've gone the other route, removed all pretense of fighting, and converged towards taichi. A lot of the distinctiveness of different arts has been lost to optimization.
More options
Context Copy link
That strikes me as absurd. Isn't the common worry that we're overproducing artists beyond all economic need? The Internet is full of portfolios, webcomics, and so on. You still have thousands upon thousands if you discount manga-style artists (and I don't think you should if you're worried about technical skills being lost; what they lack is originality, but the archetypal manga style still demands a solid handle on perspective, proportions, etc.). The professional art world is a mess, but that's a small fringe of elitists chasing esoteric radicalism off a cliff like they've been doing for sixty years, and has had no impact on the number of people capable of drawing and painting conventionally beautiful artwork. We have more of those than ever.
I do not include manga in the classical tradition of drawing or painting. Digital is a different discipline. I’m not at all concerned with the production of artists, but I’m quite concerned with the loss of the discipline itself. People making digital art by and large can not paint in the western tradition. The same holds for the western tradition of music.
If the results are indistinguishable, would it truly matter? But I don't think even this claim holds water. Plenty of Internet art-kids use ink, paper, paint and canvas. Those who go to art school certainly do. "Traditional art" (Internet-speak for "non-digital", not a statement of style or ethos) is a well-populated tag on any platform where artists congregate. Searching for the most recent post on X to use the tags #TraditionalArt and #Painting, I immediately landed on this.
If.
I have nothing against digital art, but it is decidedly distinct from traditional art.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The discussion gets more difficult because many manga professionals - notably the aged ones - still work on pencil and paper and only digitize for cleanups.
I agree that digital is a different discipline, but disciplines of pretty much everything at levels is being lost as people find them increasingly unneeded. Draftmanship used to be a core, necessary skill for engineers, which has since been replaced by familiarity with CAD software.
See also: the argument for how reliance on the internet has essentially outsourced knowledge to the smartphone.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’m sorry but I’ve never understood art beyond the complete ignorance and disinterest of an otherwise ordinary spectator. Abstract expressionism, realism, etc. at least American art; the likes of a Jackson Pollock or Barnett Newman.
I’ve always had an affinity for Socialist Realism and Roman or Ionian Greek (classical) art. But even then I just think it’s beautiful. I don’t have the insight or attachment a professional artist or architect would have, I suppose.
In what sense is “art” a mess today? I barely knew what the hell it was for the last two centuries and it wasn’t for a lack of trying.
More options
Context Copy link
I just went to the 97th Grand National Exhibition of the American Artists Professional League, which is an association for artists working in traditional, realistic styles. I would say about 75-80% of the paintings exhibited, particularly landscapes, were in the league that I could expect an internet artist to potentially reach. They're fine, but they're not special. The top stratum of paintings (mostly still lifes and portraits, some more dynamic scenes) were on a truly qualitatively different level. I have seen a lot of internet artists, filtered through imageboards and feeds that select for quality, and nobody is even close. These top-tier paintings were generally in the $2-5k range, so much lower than works painted in traditional styles I've seen for sale in e.g. London, that I can't imagine that all of these artists are in fact rare, innate, generational talents hidden by the zeitgeist (in fact, some of the most technically accomplished ones had pieces of clumsiness in the composition or subject choice that would be harshly criticized in an Old Master); I think they're just high-percentile artistic talent people who studied really hard and figured out some beautiful but realistic ways to paint stuff. And it's this level, the type of true old skill, that's falling away.
Partly, I think that's a function of the internet and economics. People are more willing to pay $5 a month for a stream of anime girls than they are to pay $5k for a physical painting, and these skills have fallen far less in, say, South Africa, where art is cheap but the cost of living for a middle-aged artist is even cheaper. And these skills are inherently meatspace-locked, not just in creating the art but in appreciating it. As I've said before, a physical painting is a totally different experience from an image on a screen. For instance, this was probably my favourite painting in the exhibition, and I would have purchased it instantly if it was for sale. But it looks like shit, honestly, on the website, because the screen loses the illusion of depth that makes the painting so compelling. I looked at that painting for quite some time and my brain couldn't but see it as a 3D object, even if I moved around it (this is the same with impressionism and abstract expressionism, you simply cannot begin to get them without having experienced their depth illusions in person). This is downstream from many things over the last two-three decades but such is life, we live in a society joker.jpg.
I am far less versed in visual arts than my partner is, but even then I recall seeing a few art pieces like this when I last went to an exhibit in Nagasaki; a painting of some cascades that really looked like like the water was jumping off the canvas, and a piece of a mortuary that I could practically feel the gritty texture of the dirt.
I can believe that the skill for working these small miracles is something that is slowly lost in the age of digitisation and mass consumerism.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Minor antecedent, but I was assisting with a 'local' tournament a few weeks ago.
The most annoying issue with working the tables that always happens is the inevitable student who pops up out of nowhere that wants to compete. We basically had to throw together a special bracket at one point where we basically said 'Fuck it, everyone who hasn't competed that WANTS to compete gets thrown in here, and if they don't show up, shame on them'.
So... it seems to be doing pretty damn well.
At the end of the day, martial arts is something you just can't fake. It's really hard to deny not being impressed when two opponents are going at it so hard that the damn tournament mat beneath them is getting shoved around.
Though I'd also say that the attitude of the people in charge helps, as well. Really dedicated martial artists, who've been at this for decades, are just a different breed. It's really interesting to see.
More options
Context Copy link
That's the reason Martial Arts has been able to resist infiltration, the traditions are strong and they DEMAND seriousness of effort.
You can't easily fake the 'seriousness of the effort' anymore. McDojos are still a thing, but thanks to the rise of MMA, there's an 'objective' measure of what works and what doesn't. "Oh you have trained in an ancient, secret style of martial arts passed down by a tribe of Eskimos for centuries? Cool. Take an amateur MMA fight and let us see how you do."
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is RIDICULOUSLY popular still. I literally drive past FOUR separate BJJ gyms on the way to my gym. Where I train Krav Maga and Boxing, but also offers BJJ.
You CANNOT fake BJJ ability.
So in short, you can't be an entryist in the MMA world without actually getting good at martial arts. And if you get good at martial arts, why would you want to then destroy your own hobby?
Likewise, there's not really any one central organization to infiltrate to overthrow everything. Even if a lefty ascended to the top of, say, the Gracie Family, there's a dozen other competing orgs that will just branch off if you try to turn it into another lefty political org.
And of course, the difference between the sexes cannot be papered over. "Girls are just as good at fighting as boys" blows up instantly when you see that a teenage boy can demolish all but the very-best trained women in a 'serious' sparring session.
So in short, its hard for politics to infect martial arts, you can't fake the skills, and it shows many lefty shibboleths to be flat out lies.
And its fun. So I expect it'll remain 'safe' from infiltration for a long time.
Unfortunately, Gracie combatives is taking over like a plague, bringing the mcdojo effect even to bjj.
More options
Context Copy link
That may be a factor to be sure, but it occurs to me that the big professional sports demand seriousness of effort. And yet we all kinds of Leftist posturing there, perhaps the biggest example being the establishment of the WNBA.
I agree that this is probably a big factor. I think infiltrators look for juicy targets. Organizations with a lot of money and/or social status. So if a sport is fractured, it's much less vulnerable.
More options
Context Copy link
You can try. And fail, hilariously.
There is an ongoing theory that BJJ is fake in the sense it doesn't work against someone unwilling to engage in BJJ with you. Although I think that only counts with regard to the sport aspect.
That's kind of the rub with figuring out how good someone is at real real fighting. You can't practice that without someone at risk of maiming or death.
And a "real" fight is chaotic so there's an irreducible element of chance involved.
The secret to winning fights is mostly "bring more guys, with better discipline."
Add to it that "winning" a fight might well send you to prison. We all live in civilization with cops, prosecutors and judges, and we all know that they salivate at the chance to drop a book on law abiding white person defending himself from criminals (especially law abiding person who is busy online on extremely extreme extremist forum).
This is why serious trainers will tell you: "I am not going to teach you how to "win" fights, I am going to teach you how to get out of fight."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, it's probably not that helpful in a boxing match, but this is trivially true. But that's like saying guns are useless in the military because of drones- sometimes different things solve different problems.
Yep, but it is worth asking what problem Jiu Jitsu solves and how common that problem is.
Arguably the way its practiced has so many constraints that in practice it fails if any of those constraints are violated.
If you're fighting a guy who boxes, is not wearing a gi, on a concrete surface, and he may be carrying a weapon, I dunno if its reliable.
Excellent conditioning though.
That said, wrestling (specifically Sambo) seems to dominate everything in a 1 v 1 context.
isnt wrestling similarly confined by sportsmanship? For instance i would imagine most holds would be easier to get out of if gouging the at the grappler's eyes was an allowed strategy or pocket knives were allowed in the sport.
outside of some form of codified decorum the half drunk guy with a gun wins more martial contests than all the other combat disciplines except sober guy with a gun
More options
Context Copy link
The paradox of BJJ is that it is effective self defense because you can practice it constantly and competitively at full(ish) speed and power, but once you are practicing it constantly and competitively at full(ish) speed and power you are practicing increasingly esoteric techniques and positions to defeat other BJJ practitioners practicing at full speed and competitively.
Sure, you don't want to roll around on concrete, but if you're training grappling you are in all likelihood going to be the one making that choice for your opponent.
The aspects of BJJ that are effective for self defense against an untrained opponent are going to be the wrestling aspects with a couple super basic easy submissions thrown in. Throw a guy who doesn't train in grappling in there and he's going to be drowning. But those aspects aren't really trained as much in class, because in class we're mostly trying to beat up each other. My BJJ game if I had to fight someone untrained would be to look for throws or standing armlocks, or more likely just fall back on straight counterpunches. But in competitive BJJ, my A-game is built around bottom half guard, which I would essentially never find myself in during a fight at the Linc.
Sometimes our coach wants to talk about the "self defense" implications of how to pass somebody's De La Riva guard in a streetfight, and I joke that if I get into a bar fight and some guy tries to throw a De La Riva guard on me, I'm going to stop and say "Whoa, no way, I do jiu jitsu too, where do you train bro? Do you know Dan? Because Dan is like my best friend! Oh shit no way let's get a drink, why are we fighting anyway?"
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What that video shows is a guy who knows nothing about BJJ starts off getting trucked by pretty middling BJJ folks. Then he gets trained up by someone pretty good, at BJJ, and then he demonstrates that against an opponent with very low stamina you can win in BJJ by basically ignoring the rules of the sport.
But MMA hasn't embraced BJJ so much because they are idiots, MMA has because 1v1 combat is messy, and BJJ has a lot of techniques that are good at dealing with messy situations. In a standup situation there's no point of it, yes, but most fights don't end when you pass an arbitrary sideline, in fact, that is one of the great things about MMA's realism is the cage shows how fights actually happen, when people are pinned in by obstacles (sometimes a mob if we are being honest). The standup prelude the the ground phase is also common in real fights, but real fights rarely get decided by a nicely placed uppercut or roundhouse. Most of it is suckerpunches, and surviving until a fight is broken up. MMA asks the question as to what you should do if bouncers and beer bottles don't exist and you get in a fight. A big part of that is on the ground, wrestling and BJJ generally are thought to have decent answers.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Hm the Netflix series Cobra Kai has me assuming martial arts has been infiltrated too. But that's fictional and not much to go on.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm in a running club. It's kind of interesting how it stratifies.
Tier 1. Exclusively extremely younger fit dudes that win sprint races. Coach has completely different conversations with them.
Tier 2. Younger fit dudes and extremely fit middle aged dudes that win distance races, and some extremely fit younger women that win their category in distance races.
Tier 3. Middle aged fit dudes and younger fit women. Maybe we win our age+sex age group in some races. I'm in this group.
Tier 4. Obese dudes, not very fit dudes, thinner women.
Tier 5. Obese women.
Even though we're in a very blue town the vibe of the club is... not overly political! The most political thing we did was try to organize a food drive for people losing SNAP benefits.
Running is for everyone and you don't have to be competitive to enjoy it but it's pretty clear the young fit dudes are on a different plane of existence and we all know why.
No amount of hugboxing will get you a top 5 10k time if you don't put in the work and don't have genetics working against you.
The coach is not based enough to flat out announce the single best way to improve your running performance is to lose weight. But he will admit it in private!
There's a bit of a funny story at my dojo my sensei likes to tell from time to time.
Years ago, his sensei was teaching. At the end of the class, his sensei turned to one of the female students, and promptly said '(Female student), you're getting fat!' In front of everyone. Not giving a fuck.
Cue strangled reply from said female student. Who then promptly lost weight in the coming months.
Morale of the story is... I dunno, get an old japanese guy to teach your running classes or something.
I think it's silly to extrapolate morals from a cute anecdote with no information. It's not at all obvious what effect the sensei's comment would have had
More options
Context Copy link
Which martial art do you practice?
Shotokan karate.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Interesting but not surprising.
What's really funny is now GLP-1 drugs have made it a simple matter of adhering to an injection schedule, so these difficult conversations need not happen. Someone just loses a bunch of weight out of 'nowhere' and their life quality and performance improves, everyone cheers, and then nobody has to acknowledge that being fat just sucks in about every way no matter what you do.
Martials arts well, as they say "weight classes exist for a reason." There's a bit more dimensionality to it, but simply put you will never EVER find a woman who can beat a man in her weight class without the guy being severely handicapped.
Could you adjust the weight classes for women's baseline higher body fat percentage?
More options
Context Copy link
I assume you mean at the highest levels of the sport. Female black belts can absolutely wreck even fairly experienced dudes with 50 pounds on them when it comes to grappling (not as effortlessly as a male black belt their size would, but still).
Well, are we starting with grappling or does the woman have to take him down?
I guess I can clarify, if 'dirty' tactics like eye gouges and groin strikes are on the table, then size isn't an insurmountable factor.
Problem is a dude can win literally by just dropping all his weight on her and holding her down.
If you think you can win by just dropping all your weight one someone, it’s obvious you’ve never done submission grappling in a serious way. If someone with 50 pounds on me just drops their weight on me without any sort of skill behind it, I’ll be choking them in 30 seconds.
Takedowns are harder given a weight difference because wrestling is harder to do across weight classes than submission grappling is. I’m less confident that a very experienced woman could beat a dude who outweighs her and has a moderate amount of experience from the feet.
There's a point at which technique ceases to trump size and strength.
I should know, I've been training techniques for damn near 10 years, and I've got one buddy with ~40 pounds on me who can still ragdoll me at will if he decides to/I don't execute the technique perfectly. I can beat him at striking, though.
Look at Connor McGregor attempt to fight The Mountain from Game of Thrones.
I have yet to see any 'convincing' demonstration of a female submission artist defeating a male of similar size who did not want to be submitted. I will grant it can happen, but it is probably a fluke.
For demo purposes, it is hard to override the male instinct to 'play nice' with women so as not to inadvertently hurt them.
Thus, I think it is far, far better to not feed female ego on this point and just tell them straight up "your attacker will probably be a male, and probably be larger than you. Give up any hope of beating him on skill or strength and just CHEAT LIKE HELL and beat him on brutality." And carry a weapon and train with said weapon.
That’s not been my experience. I’m actually pretty shocked you’ve never encountered a tiny male Blackbelt who can beat up guys a lot heavier than him with ease. The toughest instructor at the first gym I went to was 130 pounds and would thrash everyone, 230 pound blue belts included. I personally am not that good, but I’m a little on the lighter side and will fight relatively evenly with guys 40 pounds heavier and at similar experience levels all the time. There are similar guys at most gyms though not always to that level. MMA training usually doesn’t bring people much past purple belt level bjj skill (I’ve heard I don’t train mma), so if you are doing striking as well there is a chance you’re just not encountering as many full grappling specialists.
Finding women with that level of skill is a lot less common, so it’s not that surprising if you have never met one. I’ve had to move around a lot which has exposed me to a lot of gyms and I only encountered one with women at that level.
In terms of advice to give to women, I completely agree with you. Getting to that level requires talent and sustained effort over years. If you’re not going to seriously pursue becoming at least semi-pro there is no way you should plan to be able to beat men in fights, and even then it has to be s a specific scenario. Thinking you can beat a man is almost always delusional, and if you can do it you’ll know because you’ll have done it a lot in the years and years of practice it took to do there. Non freaks of nature should just buy a gun.
More options
Context Copy link
I realize it's my youtube algo, but it's funny because like three videos suggested next to it are "LMAO DUMBASS BODYBUILDER GETS MOGGED BY TINY BJJ BLACKBELT"
I was explaining to one of the girls I train with that we (all the male white belts) are all terrified of rolling with her, because there's no winning. If I win and tap her too quickly, I'm a dick who's trying to stunt on a girl. If I lose and she taps me, I just got beat by a girl. The winning move is to use very little strength and perfect technique string together a really technically compelling flow roll. I'm being called on to do this more by my coaches ("We need someone experienced to roll with Sydney because she's new, roll with FiveHour!") and while I'm getting better at it I kinda hate it. What I've started doing is closing my eyes and rolling by pure feel to try to develop better instincts.
I think part of it is that we just need to acknowledge that for self defense purposes, we are mostly talking about different things.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Which MA? Because this is just like not true in Judo or Wrestling. And while I am less experienced with BJJ and combined striking full MMA styles I would think Male + 50 Lbs + mild experience is insurmountable. Even in all male rooms 50 lbs is a lot, and 50 can make up for inexperience if the lighter guy isn't a much better genetic athlete than you. My primary combat sport was wrestling way back in HS. I'd willingly give up 50 lbs to any female wrestler age 18 vs me at 18. It would not be close. As a pretty good wrestler, I could sometimes take on guys 50 lbs more, but they would be typically pretty inexperienced, or just bad at sports. My best friend and I started as freshman at the same weight. I won the starting position and consistently beat him that whole year. In the offseason he grew a shit ton, and I did not. Next 3 years he consistently beats me with a 20-35 lb advantage. Muscle is pretty good.
Give an athletic guy 2 weeks and 50 lbs, your black belt is not going to get you far as a lady.
Bjj is what I’m thinking of. Of all the options, it is probably the best at letting skill overcome weight differences. A 120 pound woman needs a specific style to beat a 170 pound man (extremely high tempo position switches and constant attacks), but there are women who have that level of skill out there. It is very hard, and they essentially have to be at the level of high level competitors to be able to beat male hobbyists who outweigh them, but I have experienced it and watched it.
What I am seeing from you description is that high skill + top 1% athlete defeats 50th percentile fat guy. That isn't interesting.
You're really underestimating female bjj practitioners. I'm fat at 6'1" 245 lbs, but I think I'm pretty convincingly 80th percentile or higher at fighting compared to men in my age cohort thanks to previous martial arts experience. But the (short, fat, female) purple belt at the jiu jitsu gym I joined still beat my ass on the rare occasion that we fought. Multiplying it out a female jiu jitsu purple belt is probably far rarer than 1%-- relative to women her age, I'd guess she's at or above the top 0.01% in terms of fighting ability-- but the interesting result is that it's not athleticism, but technique that puts her over the edge.
More options
Context Copy link
The dude doesn’t have to be fat. I would consider myself a decent submission grappler and I’m not fat, but I will lose to this kind of woman.
I would say this is interesting, because it informs how realistic things like Hollywood movies with a female action star are. A tiny woman kicking the shit out of a bunch of dudes: pretty unrealistic. A tiny woman hitting a picturesque flying triangle, actually a little more possible (well maybe not because flying triangles don’t really work, but that’s what passes for grappling in movies). It’s a proof by contradiction that “no woman can beat a man” is false, which seems to be the position that some people are defending.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
FWIW, I have gotten consistently beat by skilled BJJ women who were slightly lighter than me, with me having only very rudimentary grappling skills. But of course that was with a pure grappling ruleset.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
hollow laughter
I wish it worked like that. I'm on one for nearly a year now. Helps with the blood sugar levels, but nothing about weight. I'm around the same weight as ever (and it takes me effort to maintain that and not balloon up).
The magical "you won't feel hungry, you will feel full, it helps with all sorts of willpower, weight just drops off" results? I'm not seeing any of them.
Never have with any drugs that were supposed to be "and a side-effect is weight loss". One time I was on some medication and the doctor laughingly said "one patient I prescribed this to lost so much weight, he had to come off it". "Won't be a problem with me", I replied, and it wasn't, because no. goddamn. drugs. stop. me. feeling. hungry.
The only time, the only time, I lose even a small amount of weight is when I am literally too sick to eat anything and it's hard even to keep down water. Again, for one of those times, I went to the doctor (for antibiotics) and they did a routine blood sugar test because I had all the shaky symptoms, and the nurse made me eat something to bring up my blood sugar because it was too low to measure. In fact, I couldn't even eat the chocolate biscuit she gave me, so they had to dig out an energy drink.
I still remain embarrassingly fat.
The drugs don't work, indeed.
I am glad that you and others replied with something to this effect. My mom and my aunt are both on Wegovy, and neither of them seem to be losing weight. Mom gets horrible nausea from it a few days after each shot, so she'll sometimes skip injections. I expected a lot more out of them from what I was reading self_made_human claim about them.
Ideally, perhaps this enables long-term research to separate out multiple causes of weight gain / aberrant appetite by analysing differences between those who respond to GLP agonists and those who doesn't.
More options
Context Copy link
Well, "miracle cures" aren't, by and large (except maybe in the early years of antibiotics when it was the Silver Bullet that cured damn near everything, and then eventually we got drug-resistant strains).
For some people, it will work fantastically. Cuts down hunger, makes you feel satiated, weight comes off, general boost to willpower, even claims that it's an addiction cure for smoking, drinking, lack of moral fibre, and so forth. For most people, it'll help. For some people, we'll be there looking at all the "no excuse to be fat now that GLP-1 drugs are there" posts and wanting to drop a flowerpot on poster's head. Definitely it's helping with my blood sugar levels, and since I got prescribed it for Type 2 diabetes that's the main concern. But the main weight loss is from the initial "this will have you running to the bathroom every five minutes until your digestive system adjusts", for me at least. Nausea and diarrhoea mean no eating, and naturally no eating means water weight loss, which shows up on the scales. As for your mother skipping injections, either try and keep on a regular injection schedule even with the nausea until it passes (and that will take a few weeks), or if it doesn't pass, ask to be put on something else.
The major effects are supposed to be "this slows down digestion, that means food passes more slowly, that means you feel fuller for longer and so won't eat as much". It's had a very weird affect on my appetite. Yes, when I sit down to eat a meal, I don't eat as much as I used to before (I will leave food on the plate instead of eating every scrap). But then half an hour to an hour later, I'm hungry again. And I'm constantly grazing. Small bits here and there (a bowl of cereal, two slices of toast, some cheese, some sweets, so forth) but small bits add up.
Mainly I'm maintaining my current weight, so not packing on more pounds is good, but not seeing the magic weight loss yet. Though I'm on Ozempic and not at the maximum 2mg dose yet. Maybe when my doctor moves me up to that, there will be a visible result? Or maybe not. I'm not holding my breath hoping for a miracle.
As ever, the only thing that works is cut out all junk and snacks, cut down on carbs, eat much fewer calories in total, and exercise for muscle toning and retention.
She's been on it for 1.5 years and she's at 1.7 mg a week. The nausea is still there for a couple days after each injection. But she does keep going off of it for eating events, her birthday, for going to a Brazilian steakhouse, for going to the State Fair and eating a ton of street food... I do wish she would stop doing that so that we could see if it can actually work. But she says her weight is trending down, despite this.
Yeah, if you stop taking it and go on eating binges, that defeats the entire purpose. That is the psychological element of weight loss, which gets ignored in the simple "calories in, calories out" model: if someone wants the gratification and pleasure of eating a ton of stuff and won't take the medication for fear that "but I won't be able to eat all the different things I want to eat", that's not a problem of 'is the drug working to stop you eating so much?' because plainly it is (even if it stops you by making you throw up).
That is the "it replaces willpower so you don't have to consciously think about reducing food intake" glowing review that people like to share, and it's the exact thing that is not happening in your mother's case.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As someone who is taking 2mg of Ozempic weekly (for diabetes, which it is helping), I can tell you that unfortunately this isn't true. It still depends on the person. Obviously some have success, but not all will.
The good news is that there's now billions of dollar pouring into this particular area of research to find more and more effective options, so I'd expect they'll find one that works for your case relatively soon.
But I am very sympathetic to the feeling that the 'miracle drug' isn't helping.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
...
More options
Context Copy link
In my opinion, the real question is what happens if the club comes into a significant concentration of social or financial capital. So for example, what happens if a wealthy member of the club dies and leaves $5 million to the club for construction of a nice facility. How long after that will people start joining the club and demanding "equity"?
I think that there are a lot of institutions out there which don't get infiltrated and captured mainly because they don't have anything worth looting.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Between dream and reality
People say life is like a book. Isn't that a very apt comparison? Everything fits perfectly. People are the characters and the history between them is the plot. But isn't that comparison backward? People and their lives exist first. Only after a while did books come. And after books, films. And after films, video games. Each an imitation of life. Yet each becomes a mold that shapes life
Books were not humans' first attempt at simulating life. Before it there were stage plays and songs. Actors moving, audience watching. A festive atmosphere where people laugh and cry together. Stories were very much alive. And just like life, they are always changing. When the audience rebukes the bard, telling him the development is nonsense, a new version shows up. When the audience complains, bemoans having to listen to the same thing again, a new version shows up. When the audience listens to another bard, a new version shows up. A story lives many lives.
But with the introduction of books, stories can now be singular. There can be just one author and one version. The pages remember. The beginning is set. And so is the ending. The story is already finished before you read it. Life comes before books. But life is like books. I see life as a book. Books have a determined end, so life has a determined end. One life, one book. As many books as there are lives. The books are stored in a library, surrounded by fog. Rumors said it contains all books in existence. The books were there before I came, and it will be there after i'm gone. I see books but see no authors. I see effects but don't see causes
Is life a book? Or is it a film? To read a book one needs to be literate. To watch a film, one also needs to be literate. Film literacy is a thing. In the book Gutenberg's galaxy, McLuhan presents the case of the Africans and the chicken: where when shown a slow-motion health-education film (a sanitary inspector demonstrating how to clear standing water), many viewers only reported seeing the chicken that flitted into a corner of the frame — not the man or the broader narrative. He writes "African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film". The African audiences see the events, but not the plot. The illiterate man sees a dirty stack of paper, but not a book. An educated man sees a book, but not a dirty stack of paper. The stack of paper has been hidden. Likewise, an educated man sees only the plot and not the events. Outside, to live, a living being eat, and sleep and shit. In films, characters eat and sleep and shit in service of the plot. He is drinking milk! This shows he is a psychopath. He is shitting. His son will come in and shoot him to death. This shows even the mighty one can meet such a lowly end. Life comes before films, but life is like films. The educated man sees not the events but the plot. Every action becomes a statement to the invisible audience. What you eat, what you play, who you meet, where you go.... in 1998, Truman could rebel against the show and move to reality. But where would modern humans go, when reality is a film now?
Or is it a game instead? Books and films, there are no places for you there. You can't influence the plot, you can't influence the outcome. Just a passive observer. But in games, it's different. You are the player. You can act. The only being that can, in fact. Salvation or destruction, it's all up to you. Yet the story is still not yours. The player is not the protagonist. You merely inherit his or her fate. How would the game look like from the perspective of the protagonist's friends and family? How would it feel to wake up one day to see your friend changed, doing one impossible task after another. Yeah, it's good that the world is saved. But that being, is it still your friend? If a game has no choice. Then it's the same as a book or a film. The future is not yours, for you have no said in it. But even with choices, you don't decide everything. Before you arrived, some choices must have been made. The choices were not made by you, so it must have been made by another being. That being vanished when you arrived, leaving you with a past that you did not create. What makes you you? Is it the past or is it the future? Do you even want to be you? A common pondering. Isn't the popularity of transmigration, regression, reincarnation, multiverse... stories the proof? Life comes before games, but life is like games. One life, one game. Holding one, I yearn for another.
One can read many books, watch many films and play many games. Yet one can have just one life. How then should such a life be led?
It would be uncharitable of me to simply point out that you're being sloppy in your thinking and leave it at that. But unfortunately, as far as I can tell, that is true. There is a kernel of truth here, but it's not a particularly new or non-trivial observation, and the bulk of it doesn't stand up to scrutiny when we going from playing word-games to considering what those words mean.
Let me explain:
You seem to think that the medium really is the message. Or, to steelman things, that media shapes our perception of our lives. Uh... That bit is true? I strongly wish I had a copy of that meme where some Twitter wag points out that when humanity invented the wheel, we imagined the universe as a wheel, when we invented clocks, the universe became one of clockwork, and when we invented computation, the universe became increasingly interpreted as one of computation.
Edit: Here you go, found it. https://old.reddit.com/r/sciencememes/comments/1jh25uw/5_minutes_after/#lightbox
Here's the central confusion, and it's worth stating it plainly: you keeps mistaking "X is a metaphor for life" with "life is literally X."
For a start, the "paradox" isn't paradoxical. The essay keeps returning to this idea that it's weird or significant that "life comes before books, but life is like books." This is only strange if you forget how similes work. Of course the thing being compared to comes first! We compare unfamiliar things to familiar things, and we create the familiar things from the unfamiliar template.
The fact that we can say "a neuron is like a computer" doesn't mean neurons are secretly running Windows 11 in your basal ganglia. It means we have computers now, and they provide a useful conceptual model. Your "paradox" is like saying: "Whales existed before nets, but now we say 'the net is like a whale's mouth and its filter feeding.' Isn't it strange how the whale came first but now the net defines our understanding of the whale?" No. That's just how language evolves.
I get the feeling that you consider this a deep ontological discovery when it's actually a banal observation about metaphor. You can tell because you never actually derive anything from this "paradox." There's no syllogism like "Books have property X; life is like books; therefore life has property X." Instead, there's just a vague sense of spooky symmetry, like discovering that the word "dog" spelled backward is "god" and deciding this reveals something about canine theology.
The bit about African audiences and the chicken is doing a lot of unearned work here. Yes, film literacy is real. Yes, different cultural contexts produce different ways of seeing. But the leap from "Africans in mid-century educational films noticed different things than Western audiences" to "educated modern humans are trapped in a film-plot prison and can't see reality anymore" is what I can only call an exceedingly ambitious framework.
First, the McLuhan anecdote is more complicated than presented. The original context was about audiences unfamiliar with cinematic conventions, not some profound statement about Western alienation from reality. When you show someone their first movie, they don't yet know the grammar. They don't know the significance of close-ups, cuts, tracking shots. They're seeing moving images, not narrative. This is a literacy issue, not evidence that literacy itself is a prison.
(I would bet my net worth that the flourishing African movie industry in the present day is not plagued by an epidemic of utter incomprehension. They watch movies just fine. Literacy is an acquired trait.)
But here's another problem: the essay uses this as a Just-So story about naive perception versus educated illusion. The African audiences see events (a chicken!) while the literate see plot (sanitary education!). That is really not how things work.
First, if you show me a boring instructional video and there's a random chicken in the corner, I will probably notice the chicken too. Not because I'm "film illiterate" but because the chicken is the only interesting thing happening. My "literacy" doesn't make me stop seeing the chicken; it just means I can also track the intended message. The dichotomy is false.
The implication is that these poor naive Africans, untainted by literacy, see the real world while we educated Westerners (for a very generous definition of "we" or "Western", given that this is my critique) are trapped in our symbolic prisons. This is just noble savage mythology with extra steps. Maybe the audiences were bored. Maybe they were resisting missionary-style health propaganda. Maybe McLuhan was just wrong. You don't stop to ask such questions, you're just using them as a prop for a point about how education = blindness.
The universe, and thus life itself, is deterministic at macroscopic scales, or close enough that I don't care about the difference. But just because events and their outcomes are pre-determined doesn't provide any additional power to alter them, or change the subjective experience of being a computationally bounded agent working under conditions of uncertainty.
A sorting algorithm still has to sort the array. That task gets no easier even when we know precisely how it works, or what the sorted outcome should be. Your mind can't just skip to the end either.
You seem to think there's a library somewhere (the fog is a nice touch, very Dark Souls) where "your life" is already written, and this is somehow proven by the existence of libraries with books in them. But this is just more spooky existential poetry. You've come to a correct conclusion with an invalid argument, or rediscovered the Library of Babel. You could equally say "Life is like an improv show; improv shows are unscripted; therefore life is unscripted." The metaphor is not the territory.
This is framing predictive processing as a delusion. Our brains are prediction engines. We ignore the "dirty stack of paper" (the raw sensory data) to perceive the "book" (the meaning) because that is computationally efficient. You're treating this efficiency as a tragic loss of contact with reality. It’s not. It’s the only reason we aren’t catatonic from sensory overload. We don't see "plot" because life is a movie; we see "plot" because brains are causal inference machines.
Or, in another sense:
The educated man sees both. He acknowledges the stack of paper (the medium) but possesses the additional software to decode the symbols upon it (the message). For most practical purposes, the message really is more important. Both of us are engaging with written text, as opposed to parsing the specific arrangement of pixels on a screen.
Reality isn't a film. That aside, behaving like you are being watched is a rational response to actually being watched! Gen Z in particular lives and dies through their phone and social media, we've got better panopticon surveillance than the Truman Show did. Curating one's personality and behavior makes sense, given that the thoughts and opinions of others can meaningfully impact your life. The only issue is going overboard and becoming a slave to public perception. But becoming some kind of schizoid who doesn't give a fuck what they're recorded as saying or doing is just a mistake in the opposite direction.
This is just a description of being born. Every human being "arrives" in a world where choices were already made (by parents, history, genetics, some butterfly farting in the Mesozoic). You inherit a genetic "past" you didn't create. Framing this as a unique failure of the video game medium ("The future is not yours"), when it’s actually just the fundamental condition of existence is a tad bit unfair. God knows I'd love it if video games were truly open ended with maximal player agency, but that's a possibility for the near future. You can't really draw any real conclusions from noticing that the medium is restrained by the limitations of human effort or even computational feasibility on existing hardwares and budgets, any more than them once using 8-bit graphics says something of real importance about the human condition.
"People like stories about transmigration and regression, therefore they must be unhappy with their own identity." This is a speculation presented as a proof. People also like stories about murder, but even the average True Crime Wine Mom doesn't actually want to be murdered. The popularity of a fantasy genre might indicate escapism, sure, but it might also indicate good marketing, or cultural trends, or just that reincarnation is a cool magic system. The essay treats the most surface-level pop culture observation as deep psychological evidence.
Life is not a book (it has no author). Life is not a film (there is no external audience, only peers). Life is not a game (there is no win condition, only continuation or cessation).
You're staring at a map, noting that the map is made of paper, and then worrying that the territory might be made of paper too. It’s a poetic thought, but as a rigorous analysis of reality, it’s hopelessly confused. We don't need to worry about whether we are "literate" enough to read the plot of our lives. We just need to realize that the "plot" is something we invent in retrospect to make sense of the little bit of signal buried in all of that noise.
(This is why I'm a card carrying member of the Rationalist community, and why I refuse to read Continental philosophy. It helps to be immersed in a tradition where one's expected to speak plainly, and to refrain from the use or abuse of simile and metaphor any more than strictly necessary. Otherwise it's easy to end up making superficially striking connections and tie yourself into a knot)
Nitpick, since I don't think it matters for your philosophical point, but the difference can be huge. I know the "butterfly farting in the Mezozoic" thing sounds like a silly metaphor ... but it's not silly, and it's not even a metaphor. Microscopic perturbations changing macroscopic weather (in weeks of time, not just eons) is a straightforward consequence of "chaotic dynamical systems exist" (not in a two dimensional state space or lower, but easy to prove with three dimensions) and "the weather is a chaotic dynamical system" (not actually proven, but Lorenz's first three-dimensional system demonstrating chaos was something of a simplification of the real sextillion-Avogadro's-number-dimensional system, and we're pretty confident the more complicated one actually is more complicated). A butterfly changing the course of a tornado was literally an example Lorenz used in his talks. Chaotic systems can be deterministic (except in the sense that we can never accurately determine their output because the cost of doing so increases exponentially with simulation time), but if you combine a deterministic chaotic system with a stochastic initial perturbation, that perturbation grows exponentially until it's the size of the attractor and the whole macro state depends on it.
More options
Context Copy link
Replying only to let you to let you know you're responding to a filtered comment.
Thanks for the heads up. I've let it out of the cage.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Found it in video form.
Thanks! Funnily enough, I'm already subscribed to Burial Goods, but didn't know he'd done voice work for this specific meme.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
...
That is ... not exactly BS, but somewhat distorted. The only reason the war in Ukraine is as it is - is because no air superiority exists on the Ukraine side. In a large scale conflict Nato vs Russia we will have orders of magnitude more jets than Ukraine has and probably enough to make sure that Russian airforce won't be able to lob KABs at their leisure, their Geran launch sites will be exposed, their fiber drones C&C will be easier to neutralize and we will be totally free to conduct as deep strikes in russia's territory as we feel is needed with whatever weapons we have in our arsenal.
So don't rush drawing a conclusions about what the nature of the war is. Ukraine has been fighting with limited resources, some of them with strings attached and Russian airforce is far cry from the USSR numbers - and russians don't seem to be able to mass produce them.
And completely automatic jets are at least some years away.
...
Hey, at least we'd get a chance to test my personal conspiracy theory that the US has at least 10x as many counter-ballistic missiles as it has advertised.
I have literally no evidence of this, but it seems like it'd have been a pretty obvious good idea to have done quietly years ago (and not a good idea to advertise the end of MAD), and would maybe explain why we were so open to using them in Israel earlier this year.
This was the only thing that made sense to me given:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't know, is the NATO:Russia air advantage much bigger than the Russia:Ukraine air advantage? Being able to lob KABs is one thing, but Russia at no point dared overflying Ukraine freely, because the economics and optics of losing even one manned plane every now and then because an AD launcher was successfully hidden in a nondescript warehouse somewhere are too painful. The dynamics of a hot war with the involvement of the entirety of NATO would of course be different, but despite everything it seems implausible to me that they would look like the comfy desert turkey shoot war that NATOcore acolytes live for.
(I would also expect that the opening move after a NATO entry into the war is that at least all the NPPs in Ukraine - and quite possibly also everything in Europe east of the centerline of Germany - get blown up, since the only thing that kept them safe so far is Western sensibilities. As for what effect this would have on warfighting capabilities, I honestly can't tell - do we have contingencies to maintain our economy if there is actually no energy grid? Would the sudden need to cook on an open fire in your block's courtyard shatter Europe's heiwa-boke and result in rapid return to WWII-era buff doge form, or a quick noping out and licking of wounds?)
The critical difference is the ability to assert mutual air denial via active air defense systems.
The Russian airforce dared to overfly Ukraine for about a weak, but stopped because even the rare active-detection radar system was enough to get good aircraft shot down, while Russia lacked the sort of EW / counter-emitter capabilities to suppress those air defense systems. However, this was a mutual paradigm- Russia couldn't intrude, but Ukraine couldn't either, and both stayed behind their lines in the air-defense bubble.
The issue is that NATO has a lot better tools to conduct suppression of enemy air defense (SEAD), most notably stealth aircraft that aren't so vulnerable to that sort of 'pocked AD' strategy. You turn on that sort of active radar, you (generally) still don't detect the aircraft for a weapons lock, but those weapons it has can lock onto you. Once high-altitude air defense systems are cracked, you can 'simply' fly over the lower air defense systems, use the gravity advantage to extend the range of your strikes, and progressively widen your air operation area to progressively strike more things.
It's not as absolute or one-sided as that, and it's certainly not a turkey shoot setup. Russia has absolutely invested a lot in mitigating those sort of stealth investments. But the Soviet anti-air concept that Russia inherited was much more of a 'buy time for the ground forces to win' model, as opposed to 'we have nothing to fear.' With time, you can take care to gradually peel back a defense envelope and act within the safe margins, which is exactly what we see in the current environment with the Russian glide bombs. However, the NATO countries have much better air penetration options, and air munitions, than the Russian airforce whose design purpose was to keep the NATO aircraft delayed by days/weeks/months so the army could run over the ground defenders and then get entrenched.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I feel we end up talking in circles discussing casualty estimates that are wide apart, but I'm always interested in the pro Russia (Ukraine skeptic? How would you define it?) side.
Based on the above, would you suggest Putin should sign up to Trump's deal?
Sounds like everything is going all to plan for him based on your assessment, NATO support totally failed to help Ukraine and so annoying the US doesn't move the needle on the conflict, and the Ukrainian army is basically gone based on the estimate above if true: why accept a deal today (even if you're going to break it soon) if you'll win tomorrow?
Of course, Putin could be not really serious about the negotiations and is just running the clock/trying to drive a wedge between the US and Ukraine (which is my opinion too). But based on the pro Russia narrative, the USA doesn't have the power at this point to do much to Russia? US stocks of relevant systems are depleted or earmarked for a fight against China, sanctions aren't working, and past shipments of kit did little. Is that about right?
What would you suggest to Putin? Hold out till you can roll all of Ukraine and dictate terms? What should they be? One poster a few weeks ago suggested annexing everything Ukrainian east of Poland as a demonstration of Russian power, do you think that's the most credible outcome based on the fact that Ukraine is on the ropes in your assessment?
...
I actually do think that a million Russian dead is clearly too high for the same reason that half a million dead Ukrainians is too high: we would see the evidence everywhere in both economies if that were true. For example, this interview with Russia's former deputy energy minister was a year ago but seems credible where he pushes back on Russia taking a million people out of the economy not being likely at that point https://frontelligence.substack.com/p/war-deficits-and-the-russian-economy . No disagreement there, where we differ as I understand is that I would guess Ukraine is taking 1 casualty for every 2 Russians (which could be an issue, given the 1:3 pop ratio), and you assume it's actually something like 10:1 in favor of Russia? For example, I think this is fairly credible https://frontelligence.substack.com/p/desertions-and-loss-ratios-trends, which was in spring this year, and estimated that Ukraine was trading at 1:1.8, which in itself is not enough to be a central theory of victory for the same reason, they need Russia to run out of money or will or something else before men at that rate if Russia can keep recruiting. Not sure what @Dean 's opinion is, I do not want to put words into their mouth.
I actually do bet on Polymarket, and have been making good money versus those bullish on Russia by putting bets on "no" across a spread of markets where Russia takes city X by date Y. When I win I roll the original sum over and take the winnings, some I lose when the point eventually falls but I'm $5k up on $5k in just over a year thanks to Russia under performing their expectations. https://polymarket.com/event/will-russia-capture-all-of-pokrovsk-by-september-30?tid=1764080674035 Pokrovsk has been particularly good so far, so close but so far for so long. There isn't a market for casualties exactly because it's kind of impossible to resolve (our problem here), plus possibly Polymarket thinks its too spicy, but I would be very interested if there was one. I might bet.
Thanks though for your thoughts on the war, it is very interesting to hear, we disagree but I would guess fundamentally we're all just observers trying to understand. I find this conflict interesting from a cultural perspective: there are two narrative bubbles that are often a bit surprising, and we will have to see where the chips land in the end. I would personally would be surprised if Russia takes Kharkiv or anything past the Dnieper full stop even if the war runs through 2026, and would bet on Polymarket to that effect, but lets see.
Side note, how do I embed links? I look like my father using emails here.
...
More options
Context Copy link
Comments here, like on Reddit, follow Markdown formatting.
More options
Context Copy link
Embed with [text](link): text.
Nice post, too. I always appreciate it when someone plays the
adult in the roommarket rationalizer on predictions.Thanks a million, that makes a lot of sense.
Speaking of Texas in your tagline and the Ukraine conflict, did you hear that Mary from Texas Oblast may not actually be from Texas? If twitter always showed locations I bet the bot/shill account founders would have used VPNs and they would all be US/European, not showing locations and then suddenly changing it created the perfect storm of hilarity.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Same as Reddit: surround the hyperlink text with [square brackets] and immediately follow it with the (URL in parentheses).
More options
Context Copy link
I wonder if we're seeing the sort of issue that historians have in assessing ancient wars, where a lot of people just stop being counted in the official population numbers. That doesn't necessarily mean they're dead. I imagine there's a lot of men, especially on the Ukrainian side but also in Russia, who would prefer to not let the state know that of their existence right now. Obviously it's better overall that not as many people are dying, but from the state's cynical view it's sort of the same whether they're actually dead or just unreachable.
More options
Context Copy link
Thank you. I appreciate not being assigned a position I've never taken.
My position for some time (years) has been neither side is running out of manpower in an absolute sense. The somewhat less than 2-to-1 in favor of Ukraine is reasonable-ish, with emphasis on swings on which part of the front when. When Ukraine does localized counter-attacks over time, such as trying to delay the fall of defense line that has gotten supply-interdicted by fires (drone or artillery), it's worse. When Ukraine is doing 'generic' line defense, it's higher. Per-capital casualty rates of national populations aren't really relevant, since neither side is being limited by the size of the population per see, but rather political considerations for accessing significant parts of it.
In Ukraine, this limitation the political willingness to draft the younger age cohort to fill the infantry with more fit bodies. This is bad, and people can feel free to add more emphasis if they like, but it's not the 'there is nothing left' metaphor either. Every year of the war, an entirely new year of potential conscripts leaves the protected age bracket, and when you compare that number to casualties per year, the number of potential 'new' conscripts far outnumbers the casualties by a large degree in absolute terms. The issues are separate about opportunity costs and so on, so the decision on what to prioritize is a political / policy decision, not a physical limit. Bad politics or policy can and do lead to bad results. But this is also not as bad in the same way / to the degree most people might conceptualize, because the Ukraine War- and particularly the drone dynamic- has changed what sort of 'fit body versus support force' ratio actually is, in ways that military science, let alone social understanding, haven't caught up with. A few years ago, a 'healthy' infantry-drone balance might have a drone user per platoon, with X platoons for Y amount of territory. Now we are looking at multiple drone operators per squad, with Z squads per Y' territory. Whatever the ratio 'should' be, the amount of infantry 'needed' for a certain level of frontage is changing. Ukraine can simultaneously not have enough, and people have outdated / over-inflated assumptions of what 'should' be.
In Russia, the limitation is the economic willingness off older age cohorts to take volunteer enlistment bonuses. Russia tried to leverage its population via a conscription model in the first year of the war, and it went so badly that somewhere between half a million to a million Russians left the country in the first year, and Putin preferred to pay significant other material and other costs to avoid a reoccurance. This works as long as the Russian volunteer base is willing to take the offered salaries, but the issue with market-rate enlistment bonuses are you actually have to pay them, and any model that relies on pre-saved money to fund deficit spending to avoid other issues will, eventually, run out of pre-saved money. Market-rate military expenses are fickle as well as fiscal, and are prone to spiking when shortages occur, such as if fewer people want to volunteer because parts of the contract bonuses (such as regional government bonuses) are cut for fiscal constraints. Difficulty does not mean absence, and Russia has already gone through various long-term costs to provide the short-term funds to meet needs, but shell-games come with tradeoffs and the functional recruitable base is not a simple total-population-size ratio between Russia and Ukraine.
This all matters because much of the discussion about casualty ratios is applied to total population sizes (Russia is X times bigger, so Ukraine needs an Y kill ratio to compensate). This misses the manpower limitation on both sides, and that casualty ratios matter more as a factor of the relative recruitable bases, which are far less clear / even less consensus.
This is approaching my position, but with a whole lot of context / framing that would take a rather long post in and of itself.
In so much that I present a definition of 'victory' for Ukraine, my inclination has generally leaned towards 'terms that are sufficient to allow Ukraine to deter yet another continuation war by Russia.' As a result, my general stance since the first two years of the war have been that victory in the war is more about the final terms than the terrain.
(The 2022 invasion is arguably the 3rd continuation war since the 2014 Crimea incursion, which was followed by the Nova Russia campaign and then the direct intervention when that failed.)
By this standard, the 'peace terms' offered by Russia in the first month of the war would have been a loss as they were basically disarmament demands that would have reduced the Ukrainian army to fewer tanks than the Ukrainian army lost in the next year or so of actually fighting the war. The Ukrainians would have 'won' more land in the short term, but at an extremely high risk of Russia just reorganzing and launching another mechanized invasion that Ukraine would likely have been unable to resist without a reoccurance of the 2022 fuckups, which would have led to the strategic defeat. By contrast, while Ukraine has taken [insert McBigNumber] casualties in the three years of war since the invasion, in the process it has largely depleted the Soviet strategic stockpiles of tanks / ammo / etc. that were what allowed Russia to replenish mechanized formations. Now those reserves are largely gone, and so even if Ukraine loses all of the Donbas and the fortress belt fighting rather than merely turning over uncontested, it's still a 'better' [victory] than if Russia still had the perceived mechanized invasion capacity it had a few years ago.
Similar points exist in other aspects of deterrence credibility. If the war had not continued, the limits of the Russian ammunition stockpiles (since supplemented by purchased North Korean munitions) would not have been so clear to all, and thus strengthened the Russian negotiating leverage were Russia still at 10-to-1 artillery advantage as opposed the more contemporary 3-to-1 estimates. If the war had not continued past the first month, Russia might still have had a unilateral advantage in terms of its long-range strike capability of operational stockpiles of cruise missiles, and Ukraine would not have gradually increasing its own long-range strike campaign credibility to the point where it now routinely hits highly-visible, and budget-significant, Russian infrastructure. Had the war ended sooner, when Russia was still aggressively using Soviet AA missiles against everything it could, the deterrence narrative might have been stuck on the question of 'has Ukraine / the West run out of air defenses,' rather than flip that to 'if Russia struggles against these drones, how safe is it against NATO airpower?'
None of this is to say that Russia hasn't advanced its own capabilities in various areas over the war. Drone warfare is absolutely a thing. But deterrence isn't about 'can the attacker win,' but rather 'can the defender make it not worth the cost.' And in that sense, and for that purpose, increasing Russian costs now, in the present, shapes Russian future cost calculus later, when Russia (particularly Putin) might try again.
This is an attritional struggle, but it's not an attritional struggle to 'win' this war in terms of 'Russian military collapses and Ukraine regains territory.' While I'm sure the Ukrainian public would love it if some sort of Russian balance of payments default led to the Russian army leaving the field or mutinying in mass and marching on Moscow, that's neither likely or necessary. Rather, the war is an attritional struggle that seeks to add enough military and economic and political-will costs such that even Putin will think about starting another invasion, and go 'I'd rather not.'
And in that context, the attritional goal for Russian infantry and such isn't 'there are literally not enough men to fight,' but rather 'future!Putin does not want to pay the costs he'd have to to get enough men to fight.'
That could the direct economic costs to the Russian state budget and fiscal planning if he has to pay market costs. That could be the political costs if Putin in this war has to supplement the volunteers with conscripts. That could be the material costs, if Russia feels it needs to replace the stuff it already lost in this war before it tries again. That could be reconstitution costs, if the survivors of this war decide they'd rather not join the next war because they got their signing bonus and intend to live with it. It could be any or all of these, so long as the sum-total is enough that Putin, when he's out of sunk-cost-fallacy mode, would rather not try.
But all of this framework derives from a theory of victory that doesn't really define victory in this war in terms of territory lost or gained, or even Ukrainian casualties.
...
More options
Context Copy link
...
If the Russian goal was 'Ukraine isn't a US proxy' then they could have just not invaded in the first place. The idea that the invasion of Ukraine was really Russia defending itself against the US is a bizarre fantasy. The goal was conquering Ukraine to eliminate it as a sovereign state, and to eliminate the identity of the Ukrainian people as distinct from the Russians. Putin literally wrote an essay on why the invasion was justified, it's nothing to do with America.
Russia is against Ukraine joining NATO because NATO membership might prevent Russia invading again once it has built up more strength.
...
What do you mean by that? Can you elaborate?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's no more bizare a cope than the idea that refinery repairs are a trifling expense in the midst of a war that was draining reserves even before primary income sources started going boom, or that progressively smaller relative material advantages negate manpower limits.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That makes an awful lot of sense from my point of view, and I would update my position wherever it differed before to what you've just said - that was a really good summary.
One thing we have discussed less in these threads is the economic pressure Russia is under - selling gold reserves, burning through its foreign currency, losses to its refining capacity and tightening sanctions all seem to be having a rising impact, though it's really hard to judge exactly how much. Putin seems willing to pay a very high cost to make this invasion seem a victory to the domestic population and pro Russians worldwide, possibly as the consequences of embarrassment are possibly deadly, but like you say the really important thing is if the costs are high enough to swing his calculus for another round.
I also find it really interesting how Russia's tank storage is basically empty, Uralvagonzavod is cutting employees by 10% despite the presumably desperate need for equipment, and there have been several strikes on Russia's airforce this year and even this week, hitting vital airframes that they no longer even produce (some of the industry was in Ukraine for a start).
Ukraine is definitely proving a tougher nut to crack than anyone thought, and it's already one of the strangest and most embarrassing wars for what claims to be a major power that I've ever known. 0.2% of NATO GDP spent annually in a proxy war to wreck pretty much the entire stockpile of Soviet equipment would be paid in a heartbeat by the Reagan era Republicans I assume, from my point of view the Ukrainians can keep the change if they want to keep fighting.
Well, if you like a contribution enough, you know what to do with it.
I will carry your point about NATO GDP a bit further, though. The economic implications for NATO go beyond even that. It isn't '0.2% on top of normal.' That 0.2% spent going to directly shape what the new-normal in the future is, since future defense spending will have to adjust to what is needed, not what used to be needed. Any critique of 'it's unreasonable to spend so much to help Ukraine fight Russia' can be fairly asked to state a position on 'how much spending is reasonably needed to fight Russia without Ukraine.'
A lot of the NATO defense spending discussion is framed in media in terms of 'Europe needs to spend more to catch up to Russia.' There is truth there, but it's not the entire truth, just as another refrain- 'we need to create capabilities the Americans may withdraw' is a part-but-not-whole of the truth. An additional element is that a lot of the NATO spending European states need to is to just dig themselves out of the hole of the post-Cold War defense cuts that lowered their various institutional, not just military, capabilities. Resolve deficit capabilities in things like administration, communication architecture, procurement agencies, legacy system commitments, and so on, and then you can better modernize the actual hardware in inventory and try to train new people to actually match the Russian threat once ignored / discounted.
But if part of spending requirements is 'resolve the deficit' and another part of 'match the adversary,' how much you need to spend to match the adversary depends on, well, the adversary's capabilities. Which, a half decade ago, included a Soviet Union's worth of stockpiles of ammo, reactivatable vehicles, and weapons. 'Reasonably sufficient' defense spending to reasonably counter such a threat had to be able to match / overcome both [ongoing Russian military industry from the current economy] and account for [the vast reserves of Russian reserve material]. And that was a huge amount of capacity, the sticker shock of which contributed to the European defense spending paralysis, since it's easy to be dwarfed by the magnitudes involved. Russia lost more tanks in the first year of the war than most of the major EU NATO members had total. To 'match' that, you'd be talking trippling or quadrupling tank orders.
But that's if you have to match the Soviet stockpiles. Now that much (though not all) of that Cold War inheritance is squandered, Russia is increasingly dependent on [modern economy funded production], as opposed to [inherited mountains]. And Russia's [modern economy funded production] is far, far, far more practical for the European states to match or keep up with. When you take away Soviet stockpile reactivations, which is how Russia gets 'more than 1000 tanks produced* a year' over the war, back in 2020 Russia was producing around 200 new tanks a year.
It takes a lot less NATO expenditures to overcome 200 tanks a year compared to 1000 tanks a year. Or to overcome 10,000 missiles that have been shot rather than still could be shot. Or suppress a black sea fleet that's already on the sea floor.
None of this means there isn't a great deal more spending to be done, or that the NATO countries can coast without spending. The Europeans have decades of investment deficit to make up for, everyone needs to modernize for drones, and that's without other competing priorities. The Russians may have a smaller economy than many European nations, but they have a significant head start in certain relevant sectors.
But it is magnitudes easier- and cheaper- to keep up with someone who can't out-spend you rather than to try and catch up with someone with a seemingly insurmountable lead who still continues to spend.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The articles about stunning and brave Ukrainian girlbosses taking over the coal mines and shipyards because all the men were... uh.... somewhere else started popping up like a year and a half ago.
https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/g-s1-40964/in-a-workforce-transformed-by-war-ukrainian-women-are-now-working-in-coal-mines
https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/11/12/as-ukrainian-men-head-off-to-fight-women-take-up-their-jobs
Ukraine's workforce is clearly under pressure, but adding 5% of women to a mine/industry (from what I read in your article there) is entry level mobilization shit surely? In the UK in WW1 or WW2 we would call that a Tuesday, and the UK wasn't under a manpower collapse in either war.
Again, Ukraine is clearly under pressure, but if 1 million were out of action from deaths/wounds it would look like the Ukrainian military not existing and Russia strolling forwards, which is not the case (Pokrovsk has been contested for over a year now, and within walking distance of the pre war lines).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm still overwhelmingly globohomo, but let me channel the other side.
What is the realistic amount of success Putin can expect? Even if Ukrainian frontline finally collapses, the rate of Russian advance reaches 10km/day, Zelensky is deposed and the provisional government capitulates, it's super easy for the EU to recognize some Ukrainian government-in-exile and keep Russia under sanctions.
Is this better or worse than a negotiated peace? Depends on its terms. Every article in a peace treaty should be viewed through a very specific prism: how is it enforced, what will happen if one of the parties violates the terms of the treaty? It's like buying drugs from a dealer you don't trust.
Anything that goes "will be determined via additional negotiations" is a massive trap. Given that Russia currently has the initiative, any ceasefire agreement has to be sweetened with something concrete and immediate.
In general, if I could guarantee the original 28-point agreement would be implemented by all parties in good faith, I would suggest signing it. It's not a massive win, but a massive win is already impossible. But since it will be interpreted in bad faith, to the letter of the agreement, by all parties, I would advise examining every letter of the agreement with a magnifying glass first.
One of the consequences of propaganda culture that I think is not discussed enough is how having too effective control of public opinion in your camp can actually work against you in contexts where treaties have to be made. Similarly to the concept of "right to be sued" I have seen in the context of trade agreements, being able to assert that some party will judge and appropriately punish you should you violate the terms actually gives you more freedom to offer terms. In the case of international agreements, when the world police (US) has a stake in the game or is aggressively indifferent or both, the only one that could stand in judgement whether a treaty is being adhered to is public opinion (which could enforce its judgement by boycotts, protests or simply non-cooperation when a treaty party needs the general public to cooperate e.g. by enlisting to fight in the military or maintaining social exclusion). However, this does not work if a treaty party has the part of the public it is sensitive to (usually its own populace) around its finger to the point that it will always be able to convince it that it is in the right. In this way, Russia has crippled itself long ago, and the collective West has by now followed suit.
More options
Context Copy link
I’d say one destructive consequence of the Versailles ‘Treaty’ is that the notion of any great power terminating a war through a just and negotiated peace treaty has become a laughingstock. It’s no wonder no great power has ever waged war under such delusions since 1919. Everyone fights to win or to the death. If neither option is on the table, you get a trainwreck of a ‘settlement’ like that in Korea.
The historic critiques of the Treaty of Versailles regarding Germany were themselves derived from the terms Germany imposed on France beforehand. If there's any historical denunciation to be had for ruinous reparations as a way to peace, it well predates WW1.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
First - no ceasefire ever. Just work on the treaty. Hammer Ukraine until they relent on this point. Second - take only majority Russian territories. Third - Ukraine is forbidden to be in military alliances, but allowed to have whatever and how much they want of conventional forces. No foreign peacekeeping force, but are allowed generous amount of observers/trainers as long as they are not affiliated with NATO. Also allow security guarantees. Fourth - give USA and EU the frozen assets to reconstruct Ukraine in trade for sanctions lift. Not Ukraine. They are allowed to draw for them for paying EU and US companies that do work there. Fifth - Create international company that gets ownership of the gas transit infrastructure of Ukraine with ownership split between Germany Italy and couple of other countries. Ukrainians will squeal like pigs, but bribing parts of EU is always a good idea. Sixth - offer Ukraine discounted hydrocarbons for couple of years. Seventh - make Ukraine take blame for Nordstream and make them pay reparations to Germany that will be used for rebuilding it. There is not a chance in hell of Ukraine having the money to pay, but a nice pressure point.
For casualties - I would say probably parity. Ukrainians having favorable ratio before 2025 and giving more from Kursk onwards.
Russia is hurting now so it actually needs peace.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Has anybody covered the whole proposed ceasefire situation at present on the Motte? Can't remember seeing it in last week's thread
Probably not going to happen. The European proposal is delusional. The Russians probably don’t have an actual interest in ending the war at this point and their own proposal is only being made because they know that Ukraine will refuse.
Why is it delusional? What I mean is, what has the state of the war to do with Europe's willingness to concede anything? Say countless Ukrainians are dead, and the Ukrainians are nearing collapse. Not Europe's problem. I wouldn't even give russia a guarantee that Ukraine not join nato. All the pressure is on ukraine, and russia. Europe will just go along with ukraine’s decision. All the leverage europe has over russia (sanctions, confiscated assets) has been gifted to ukraine, to do with as they please. I have no idea why everyone acts like europe is the one who gets to decide to keep fighting.
It is Europe’s problem, or at least they feel it is. That’s why they got involved in the first place. There’s a big strategic difference between Russia controlling Donbas, and Russia controlling Ukraine all the way to the Polish border.
But why?
Anyway, I don’t think Europe was thinking about this as logically as you are, I suspect they just don’t know how bad things really are.
I assume the Ukrainians know more about how much more they can take than us comfortable westerners.
This is what the EU should say, according to you: "Okay, Ukraine, thanks for all your sacrifices defending our sphere from an aggressive rival power, heroic stuff, but based on our 2000 km away expert analysis, you're going to lose everything momentarily, and this hypothetical outcome would be embarrassing for us. So to give you the proper motivation, we're going to cut off aid until you sign a terrible deal where you keep some rump state."
Does that make sense? Or does this EU sound like it’s being fed lines by russia?
Because the better the deal ukraine gets, and the least russia gets, the better it is for us. While we do care about the well-being of ukraine, we also care about damaging russia, because russia is an enemy and a threat. If ukraine wants to keep on fighting, and russia takes some more losses, that is fine with us. We're certainly not going to pressure our vassal to sign a deal favourable to our enemy; that's not how any of this works.
Everybody kinda conspires to ignore the agency of the ukrainians; trump and the americans always have main character syndrome, while putin’s entire ideology, and his main reason for the war, dogmatically depends on ukraine’s lack of agency. So Putin keeps trying to talk to trump, who doesn’t care besides the vanity boost of ‘ending another war’ and certainly doesn’t control zelensky, or the europeans, who have no concession to give to him because they are not hurting, and also don’t control zelensky.
No, what the EU should say is: "it looks like the amount of aid we're giving you is not enough to stalemate Russia completely. We don't want to give more, so tell us which option you prefer: we can just let you keep on grinding and waiting for a black swan or you tell us how much you're willing to give up to stop the war sooner and we'll try and get Russia to accept the smallest amount of concessions possible. It can't be 'nothing', because that's just the first option in disguise".
Instead, it's always the first option is disguise, which makes the EU look either idealistic, stupid or callous, depending on how you want to interpret this.
Should we increase aid to Ukraine? I think so, but I'm not in charge. So based on current realities, I can… still not do anything. Again, what are you suggesting I do, concretely? That I ‘advise’ ukraine? Fine, I will tell them that based on the august opinion of russian and american commenters, a total collapse of their frontline would be bad for them.
And having been so informed, what am I supposed to do if they prefer continuing the war to accepting russia’s terms? Force them against their will, ‘for their own good’, to accept the terms? Withdraw support, threaten war maybe? How much am I supposed to sacrifice to harm my own ally so that my enemy can get good terms?
I'm all for that. But this is achieved by increasing pressure on Russia, not Ukraine. For example, we could be far more open to threatening putin with war, like sending 'peacekeepers' to lviv, for 'security purposes'.
But I appreciate the chutzpah of a russian trying to reframe europe’s unconditional support for ukraine as somehow morally responsible for ukrainian deaths at the hand of russia.
Maybe after we threaten to withdraw support and zelensky tells us to go fuck ourselves, putin will decide he wants all of ukraine anyway, which is far easier now that ukraine has less equipment. I don’t believe putin wants peace. I don’t even believe he wants peace on the terms he just proposed. It’s all a charade for trump’s benefit, putin and zelensky playing hot potato.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There was some discussion. I think the consensus was that it was a joke, and people were arguing over which side ought to take it seriously.
More discussion from last month. Personally, I think that analysis still holds.
There’s also the Transnational Thursday threads to consider.
More options
Context Copy link
Well, here's a quick summary:
That's about where we are. Right now, all we know is that it's a 19-point proposal now and the question of frozen Russian assets has been dropped from it. Presumably, the most sensitive points (Donetsk oblast withdrawal and NATO (non-)membership) will be discussed between Zelensky and Trump.
The most likely outcome is that Trump is once again not able to get off Mr. Bones' Wild Ride: he can't force a ceasefire through but can't wash his hands of the war either. A few more Ukrainian towns are turned into rubble, let's meet again in three months.
Yes, either Zelensky/Rubio will be successful in convincing Trump that completely unrealistic demands on Ukraine's behalf should be added, in which case Putin will reject it and the neocons will push Trump for more sanctions. Or Z fails and Trump has an excuse to finally bail and pull intel and support, dumping it on Europe. Either way the war continues and the outcome is the same, just the timeline changes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The main problem isn’t the drones, it’s the massive imbalance in tube artillery. HIMARS systems are neat but they are vulnerable to counter-battery fire and can’t substitute for Russia having ten times as many standard howitzers. NATO’s main advantage is air power, which is politically untenable to deploy and logistically untenable to give to Ukraine.
...
I can't find anything on this, and I severely doubt the Ukrainians would state this.
The contents of the article don't corroborate the claim made in the caption of the hyperlink. Do you have any evidence to support the claim that Russians had several times more drones in 2024 or that the Russian drone program is "overwhelming" or that anyone on Ukraine's side actually claimed this?
...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What makes them more vulnerable? Aren’t they supposed to be “highly mobile”?
This is a genuine question. I don’t fully understand how they’re utilized compared to traditional artillery. I know the U.S. is converting some howitzer battalions to HIMARS; they cite improved long-range lethality, which makes sense for the intel-heavy approach to fire support. But that’s not really a privilege enjoyed by Ukraine, is it?
Drones. Russia has finally been able to amass enough recon drones that HIMARSes have to keep well away from the line of contact. This subtracts a couple tens of kilometers from the GMLRS range, allowing Russian logistics to edge closer to the line of contact.
More options
Context Copy link
The fact that most of your artillery strike capacity is reliant on the survival of four vehicles. You lose one of those, now your strike capacity is down 25 percent (not a perfect figure since the Ukrainians do have some tube artillery of their own too, but you get the idea).They used to be pretty resistant to counter-battery fire due to their mobility, but the Russians developed better ways of tracking and eliminating them after a year or two. That’s why you don’t hear a lot about them anymore. There are only about 400-700 HIMARS systems in existence and the rumor is Ukraine has gone through about 75-100.
HIMARS ammunition capacity is a problem too. Plus the Russians got better at distributing logistics so there aren’t as many huge ammunition depos within strike range. HIMARS only carry about 4-6 rockets, and are best suited for strikes against a few large key targets, not doing 40 artillery strikes a day against small infantry positions for weeks at a time. French Caesar systems and other similar systems have the same issues. Intel isn’t much of a problem since they get live satellite coverage from US systems.
The few sources I saw showed closer to a 1:1 ratio on replacement. I’m not sure what effect that has on volume of fire. Sure, the HIMARS are only tossing 6 rockets each, but they’re much larger warheads than even the 155mm shells.
I agree that they’ve got to lose out on sustained fire, especially given the cost per round…but that’s a separate issue from vulnerability to counter-battery fire. Shoot and scoot should be much safer than setting up one of those monster cannons, right?
Sure, for each individual unit. But Russia has 4-5 thousand individual artillery pieces in the field, including around a thousand to fifteen hundred that are also self propelled (though not as accurate). Ukraine has 1500 tube artillery plus a handful of western MRLS systems. So individual Russian artillery pieces and systems get destroyed too, but it’s not going to change the overall disparity in volume of fire.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not an expert, but it sounds like this isn't meta anymore in this war
counter battery radar seems to not be as strong/precise as "you have 2 minutes after you shoot before the place you shot from explodes". This could be a "lol Soviets" issue, or maybe a limitation of the systems in practicality. I also wonder if emitting as a counter battery radar is dangerous. So there isn't profound pressure to move after firing.
scooting is really really dangerous. The prevalence of ISR drones means ripping down a road is very dangerous. They might not find you if you pop out, fire, and pop back into your hide sight. It's much more likely they'll find you on one of the handful of roads in the region, which they're likely watching regardless. Plus your hide site can be hardened against drones.
More options
Context Copy link
...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Crude translation but this is pretty brutal. I swear I've been reading articles like this for the last year where the NATO trainers go 'drive around the minefield lol' or similar. Nothing seems to be learnt, it's very slow going. Later in the article they say 'oh the Ukrainian command never said anything was wrong with our training, we totally include drones' but it's always the military officials talking, not the soldiers journos are speaking to on the ground. It is warming me to the '140 million population Russia poses a threat to 600 million population Europe' idea we see so much.
Inertia is definitely proportional to the size of the bureaucracy. Be glad that NATO hasn’t discovered Agile methodology.
On the other hand, the Russian MIC hasn’t covered itself in glory. They’ve got a significant head start. I would expect that to disappear within a few months of an open (non-nuclear!) conflict with Europe, if only because of massive casualties leading to rapid NATO turnover.
If I was NATO enemy I would pray for them to discover Agile. They would defeat themselves before reaching the battlefield.
So far the whole Agile/Scrum and similar silver bullets industrial complex is roughly split into 3 parts - grifters, useful idiots and just idiots. Sorry - there is tiny sliver of people that work in small companies and teams - but there agile comes naturally.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link