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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26595 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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Compact published a quite thorough analysis of the discrimination millennial white men have faced since the mid-2010s, focusing on the liberal arts and cultural sectors. It does a good job of illustrating the similar dynamics at play in fields including journalism, screenwriting, and academia, interviewing a number of men who found their careers either dead on arrival or stagnating due to their race and gender. It's a bit long, but quite normie-friendly, with plenty of stats to back up the personal anecdotes. It also does a good job of illustrating the generational dynamics at play, where older white men pulled the ladder up behind them, either for ideological reasons or as a defense mechanism to protect their own positions.

A great quote from near the end of the piece that sums it up:

But for younger white men, any professional success was fundamentally a problem for institutions to solve.

And solve it they did.

Over the course of the 2010s, nearly every mechanism liberal America used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian lines.

Edit: typo

A response from Jeremy Carl on his substack The Course of Empire.

Skipping to the conclusion:

There are many good things in Savage’s article, and I always welcome it when anyone shines a fresh spotlight on the discrimination against White men that has been going on for years. And to the extent he opens up some eyes that are not already opened as to the reality of the discrimination that young White men are facing in 2025, I give a hearty two cheers for him. But neither Savage nor his piece are yet deserving of a third.

The establishment that denied opportunities to Savage and his millennial and Gen Z White male cohort are not, as Savage seemingly implies, basically good people who unfortunately had the single moral or intellectual flaw that they happened to discriminate against White men. They are horrible people, people who are totally unworthy of controlling the commanding heights of our society. They are moral monsters, racists, sexists, and intellectual cowards. And they, and the corrupt institutions that they have run for decades, must be either reformed completely with their incumbent leadership ousted—or else destroyed.

Savage has done a real service by thoroughly documenting, with the latest data, just how detestably hostile to young White men our so-called “elite” institutions have become. But until he and the fellow White male “moderates” and IDW camp followers he profiles rid themselves of their deadly desire to make excuses for their abusers, they will unfortunately be of limited help in solving the problems Savage so ably outlines.

Facts and data are wonderful things, but courage and conviction are more important still.

And even his the article’s final sentences are timid questions rather than confident declarations.

So there is some vitriol out there.

JD Vance has retweeted it. Looks like this essay will really go viral.

I agree it is racist. I agree there is rank hypocrisy. I agree DEI aware hiring is tantamount to gay/race grifting.

But isn't the fully based response that, ideally, you actually want shamelessly sexist/racist hiring in humanities jobs that produce cultural products for the US and for the world? You want people who intimately understand the demographics you're selling to. A team of 99% white male writers is probably not the best way to go if there are black women who might buy your product. It might not even be the best way to go at 50% male writers.

As long as you're not hiring less qualified people to meet a DEI quota, this is the right move.

Also, isn't there so much insane overproduction of talent in the humanities already? I fully believe you can limit yourself to black lesbian female artists and writers only for a wide breadth of jobs and ship. You'll explode spectacularly if you try that in a hard science, but humanities? Probably fine.

Black americans are a tiny portion of the global population and black americans are not going to appeal better to Indians, Philipinoes, Egyptians or Romanians. If anything they will do worse.

A team of 99% white male writers is probably not the best way to go if there are black women who might buy your product.

Not the first time I've seen this claim, and my response is the same. If you think white males have a lot of money, you're going to tailor your product to them.

The alternative is that you think there are a lot of suspiciously wealthy black women, in which case this argument might hold water and it's worth throwing away the white male audience to cater to black female money.

Does it 1:1 trade white men in the audience for black and female audience though? Some of the white men may complain about the black elves and all of the girlbosses in Starfleet command but they still buy it.

Nothing in sales is ever 1:1. However, ask Jaguar how their rebrand went.

Counterpoint: people have been complaining about woke garbage and DEI and ESG capturing corporate America for at least a decade now but the S&P 500 has been racking up ATHs the entire way.

(I would love to see a counter-factual world where there was no DEI and ESG and press play and compare the S&P 500 in that world to this one though)

I too would love to have a Multiverse Viewer, but I don't think the stock market is a particularly good measure of economic performance.

But isn't the fully based response that, ideally, you actually want shamelessly sexist/racist hiring in humanities jobs that produce cultural products for the US and for the world?

If they can make the case that there's a bona fide occupational qualification to be a certain race/sex/etc., then they can get their exception to civil rights laws, just like anybody else can. Actually, race can almost never be used in that way (the exception is for actors). Also, customer satisfaction doesn't count.

I'd sure like it if they took the fully-based approach. It would have stalled them for a decade or so as they tried to get new legislation passed, and optimistically we could have had a clear public debate about the merits of sex- and race-based discrimination.

But isn't the fully based response that, ideally, you actually want shamelessly sexist/racist hiring in humanities jobs that produce cultural products for the US and for the world? You want people who intimately understand the demographics you're selling to. A team of 99% white male writers is probably not the best way to go if there are black women who might buy your product.

Japan seems to get by with many 100% Japanese writing teams for works that are internationally popular, including with American blacks they should be even more distant from.

And by contrast, the sexist/racist hiring for production of cultural products in the US has resulted in an astonishingly massive drop in content quality across the entire entertainment sector, and several of the most notable entertainment disasters ever seen.

What do you have in mind? What exemplifies this massive drop in quality?

I don't consume much movies/tv shows/pop culture these days because most of it doesn't appeal to me but I figured that was mostly a result of my own aging out of the main age demographic.

Concord is the example currently passing from myth into legend. A reported development cost of $400 million and most of a decade in development. The result:

Upon release, Concord failed to exceed 700 simultaneous players on Steam. Will Nelson of PCGamesN noted that compared to Helldivers 2, a multiplayer game released by Sony in the same year, Concord's player count was much lower than the 400,000 Steam players Helldivers 2 attracted at launch. Nelson attributed Concord's poor performance to a lack of uniqueness and a high price while competing in a heavily saturated market dominated by free-to-play games like Overwatch 2 and Valorant. One week after launch, on August 29, the game had 162 simultaneous players on Steam. It was estimated that less than a week after release, the game had sold a total of around 25,000 units, with sales of 10,000 on Steam and 15,000 on PlayStation.

Due to the magnitude of its commercial failure, it is cited by various publications, including The Guardian, PC Gamer, ComicBook.com, and Insider Gaming, as one of the biggest failures in video game history.

There's been a fair amount of competition for that title in the triple-A games market.

More generally, pick a popular media franchise and check how it's done over the last decade. The Witcher, Rings of Power, Wheel of Time, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Marvel, DC, superhero media generally. Willow got a revival as a streaming show that did so bad it's been literally scrubbed off the internet. Aliens, predator, terminator are in a bad way. Arguments over whether woke media were the future or a dead-end used to be quite frequent here, with reds generally arguing "get woke, go broke" and blues arguing "this is what modern audiences want". It seems to me that we don't have those discussions any more because the observed market outcomes have more or less settled the question. In fact, I would argue that the drop in quality has become so egregious and so widespread that it has had a measurable impact on customer behavior across the media landscape, with customers becoming significantly more reluctant to give new content a chance.

Arguments over whether woke media were the future or a dead-end used to be quite frequent here, with reds generally arguing "get woke, go broke" and blues arguing "this is what modern audiences want". It seems to me that we don't have those discussions any more because the observed market outcomes have more or less settled the question.

Okay, Concord is one among several examples of the super-woke productions crashing and burning.

But the market has more or less said, as far as I have seen, that it tolerates a lot of blue/woke design choices though? "Body type" instead of sex in character creators, a strange amount of lgbt and dark skinned and girlboss characters, etc. You don't see many categorically 'based' games getting major budgets or publication, unless they all just escape my attention. Most forums and games journalists are pretty much onboard with the US Democrat/progressive tenets, even outside the US. Yes, there's the chud gamer stereotype who is not entirely unfairly labeled misogynist etc, but they don't get to do the decision making at the top or anything.

As for customers not buying a lot of new games or consoles anymore, that's gotta be partly down to the economy and due to publishers playing it too safe instead of creating anything very creative most of the time? They've been re-heating old formulas for too long.

But the market has more or less said, as far as I have seen, that it tolerates a lot of blue/woke design choices though?

You cite a bunch of correlated factors on the production end, all of which are accurate. It is indeed true that if all the major studios and all the major media outlets all adopt an ideological tack in the same direction, the industry as a whole will indeed move in that direction.

But then, consequences.

As for customers not buying a lot of new games or consoles anymore, that's gotta be partly down to the economy and due to publishers playing it too safe instead of creating anything very creative most of the time? They've been re-heating old formulas for too long.

There will always be excuses for why failure is the fault of nebulous outside forces and not the deliberate decisions of those in positions of authority. These excuses are not going to get Doctor Who another season. Take Star Wars in particular; they've just had a major triple-A game release within the last year or so. Searching for "star wars outlaws sales" gives me the following summary:

Star Wars Outlaws has sold approximately 1 million units since its release in August 2024, but it underperformed compared to Ubisoft's expectations. Despite receiving generally positive reviews, the game struggled in a competitive market and faced challenges related to the Star Wars brand's current popularity.

...Why would it face challenges related to the Star Wars brand's current popularity? Isn't the whole point of the Star Wars brand that it's about as close to universally-popular as you can get? Well, not any more, apparently.

They've been re-heating old formulas for too long.

Marvel released 21 movies leading up to Endgame, and I watched most of them. I watched I think two movies post-endgame. I'll never watch another marvel production again. I do not appear to be alone in this decision. Why is it that 21 movies = massive success, but 23 = dismal failure?

Is fairgames a reheated formula? New IP, in a genre that's not too overdeveloped. Obviously they had enough faith in it to invest in that trailer. How's it doing? Not so good.

Bungie made a money printer with Destiny and Destiny 2. It's now in serious trouble. Destiny 2 is my hole, it was made for me! I got in as free-to-play, spent increasing amounts of money on DLC, evangelized the game to other players. When the Lightfall DLC dropped, I went all-in and paid a hundred bucks to pre-order the whole expansion package. How'd that go? ...I quit Destiny for good. A lot of other people did too. Bungie's done massive layoffs, game quality has dropped into the toilet with tons of bugs and bad design choices.

But it's cool, they've got a new game coming, a revival of their classic Marathon IP. It's now been delayed, its lunch has been pretty thoroughly eaten by Arc Raiders, and its current trajectory is pretty clearly toward total failure. Sony paid 3 billion for this company, right about the time their output turned to literal shit.

More broadly, was Tolkien overdone? Was Wheel of Time overdone? You're telling me there wasn't actually a market for big-budget fantasy TV, after the dismal collapse of Game of Thrones? Witcher was shaping up to be a hit; why did it implode?

If tentpole IP is a bad investment, why did everyone invest so hard into it, and where's the better path forward that they're missing?

Is fairgames a reheated formula? New IP, in a genre that's not too overdeveloped. Obviously they had enough faith in it to invest in that trailer. How's it doing? Not so good.

I'm not sure they thought through the economics of anyone who would approve of this trailer likely being a proud pirate.

You have good points.

I'm just wondering when all this customer/sales feedback will result in actual changes for the better in what output we get from the corps/devs. They should have received the message by now, right? That's why I'm not very optimistic.

More comments

A team of 99% white male writers is probably not the best way to go if there are black women who might buy your product.

Why do we keep getting teams of trans lesbians of color then? They represent a very tiny slice of the public. And honestly, Don Draper or any of his real-life pasty-white 1950s counterparts could sell to black women better than they could.

Also, isn't there so much insane overproduction of talent in the humanities already?

There's overproduction of something. I wouldn't call it talent.

Why do we keep getting teams of trans lesbians of color then?

Because there are lots of all-male teams by default, and the ones which self-define as trans lesbians don't get cancelled for being all-male?

Why do we keep getting teams of trans lesbians of color then?

Because of the gay/race grifting I talked about earlier.

Those blaming old white men or women have lost the plot IMO. For around a decade, anyone consuming the news was exposed to stories designed to increase concern and love for minorities while increasing only disgust and anger at White men. This was done through daily news consumption which acted as a series of repeated trials, not dissimilar to how a psychologist can train a reflexive emotional behavior in an animal when a neutral stimuli is repeatedly paired with a conditioning stimuli. These repeated trials or iterations were variably scheduled and cross-contextual, by changing the subjects and locations but retaining the same desired response, to maximize the strength of the reflexive behavior. They used emotionally-potent stories to enhance this response, because the pitiable and unusual increases the strength of the memory. They also, perhaps unknowingly or perhaps knowingly, structured these trials like the “misinformation effect” studies, where a person who remembers an event in detail before learning new information about the event will have his memory of the event altered to encode the new information over the old. This was done using the typical format of “you might have heard… here’s why you’re wrong”, and “the rumor… debunked”.

The people who ran the news at this time, and organizations like the SPLC and the ADL who policed the news, effectively brainwashed the public into hating White people and loving minorities. Brainwashing is a real thing. It’s not just a movie trope, it’s an actual phenomenon. If you were to enter North Korea, the citizen’s reflexive response to hearing about America or capitalism may be the same as a 2016 liberal girl’s response to hearing about White men, and this was inculcated in the same exact way, which is repeated trials where something is paired with an emotionally potent “conditioned stimuli”. Except actually, the 2016 person’s response would be stronger because they received more trials.

You wouldn’t blame your sheep if they were eaten by wolves, because they are sheep, they can’t help it. Similarly you shouldn’t blame the average American for falling victim to a highly sophisticated decades-long propaganda operation by those they were supposed to trust. If you always saw through it, congratulations, you’re a news-obsessive or an autist or really neurotic or are just built different. But the average person isn’t like you, they conform to their social superiors. This is the usual mode of human living. You cannot change the fact that most people are conformist, you need to make sure that the people who control how the public is molded are not evil or stupid.

you need to make sure that the people who control how the public is molded are not evil or stupid.

The question is how? And don't say "vote".

You can plan ways to influence billionaires who will go on to buy platforms and pay for influencers; Elon’s purchase of x demonstrates the efficacy of this strategy. That is the only “mainstream” solution because everything in culture is ultimately decided by a billionaire. You actually need one of your billionaires to own a platform before you can even create counter-propaganda, because as we saw in the 10’s, anyone trying to combat left wing propaganda with their own propaganda would be banned upon getting too popular. And it really is just a propaganda war, because (1) the activist Left’s insistence on highlighting their views from the PoV of a pitiable minority is indistinguishable from the conscious development of propaganda, because it’s just as predicated on influence eg exaggeration and sympathy; and (2) the effective way to combat propaganda isn’t “telling the truth”, as that doesn’t lead to engagement and influence, but actual propaganda or counter-propaganda, otherwise you just lose. You might say, “but can’t you still boycott?”, but no, because the only place people find out about boycotts and are reinforced to boycott is on social media. Which is owned by a billionaire. Even if you have a zealot running social media, as in the case of Gab, no one is going to join it unless they see reason to join it which again requires propaganda in the dominant social media ecosystem.

What I think is the more resilient longterm solution, though it would require decades of development, is the formation of a parallel culture built upon rituals and stories of allegiance which create an abiding in-group preference. This would just be taking the most powerful civic and religious rituals of Western history and tailoring them so that they create a in-group preference among adherents whilst inoculating them against those myths of progressivism that inevitably lead to ruin (“everyone is the same”, colonialism, racism, slavery, stolen land — these need to be reproved before someone starts hearing about it in their teens). Only this is enough to combat the influence of algorithms and social media. Theoretically with the right “cultural-ritual infrastructure” you can develop a perfectly fine parallel community which will run on indefinitely.

I don’t think there’s another solution.

The answer is "Vote, but do it like they voted for Mussolini and for Hitler.". Which is to say: With a well-coordinated mass movement that actually represents the immediate political will of a vocal plurality of the people.

If that is no longer possible, then the people are indeed no longer fit to be the sovereign but simply the substrate of the state. A democracy or republic in name only; in truth an oligarchy or, if not even that, then some novel entity guided entirely by impersonal processes rather than any individual or collective human will.

To me at least, that's what it felt like we were doing during the three Trump campaigns. Never in my life did I expect to be involved in such a polarizing political environment, but the cause felt worthy enough that I made sacrifices to endorse it. I'm sure others experienced the fractured relationships, social ostracization, and professional hazards that came along with supporting the man who seemed to be the only one willing to stand up against the zeitgeist.

And then you get stuff like this and you just kinda throw up your hands and realize you've probably been duped once again.

I agree with @FiveHourMarathon below. The reality is that many of the prime drivers of racial and gender affirmative action were old, largely white, men in positions of economic and in some cases political power in many of these institutions. There was some pressure around board seats or gender reporting, particularly in parts of Europe. But the majority was not forced.

There are two motives here, both obvious.

To a smart old man, a young, highly ambitious man is competition in a way a young, even highly ambitious woman is not. The woman probably won’t make it to the top; even today, when big law new hires are gender equal and have had many women for a long time, 75% of new partners are men. In finance, probably 75% of new managing directors this year are men, too, (apparently 73% at Goldman), more at some places. Race is an additional variable; because of longstanding stereotypes eg. about how personable Asian applicants are, or implicit beliefs in other details, Mr Editor in Chief might not see James Wong or James Chukwu as as much competition as James Williams or James Goldstein (and make no mistake, in publishing/media/film/arts, a lot of the ‘white men’ shut out over the past decade who would previously have found a place in the business were Jewish). The boss may well be wrong. But his belief is there nevertheless. Creative businesses are those in which youth is often prioritized; a senior director in advertising has seen 28 year old guys replace 55 year olds because they have better ideas, are younger, hotter, and cheaper, before.

The second motive is sex. Well, not necessarily sex, but men enjoy and have always enjoyed the company of pretty younger women. In 1975 you had to deal with the sweaty young men who worked for you because that was who the firm hired. In 2020 you could become ‘executive mentor’ to a bunch of pretty, 28-32 year old Asian, Indian and white women under the guise of “equity and inclusion” and be praised for it. What’s more, none of them had the chutzpah to book coffee with the head of division and pitch that they can do your job for half the pay.

An underhanded competition between old men in power and younger versions of themselves isn’t the only story of the woke era, but it is one of them.

I have thought on the hypothesis that Older males are acting in ways that inhibit up and coming young bucks because they instinctively(?) view them as competition for resources and, yes, mates that could unseat them from positions they very much feel they have earned and are entitled to keep.

Is it purposeful but maybe not 'intentional' behavior, throwing up obstacles for up-and-comers, giving them half-baked or outdated advice, and gleefully implementing social policies that systemically exclude such men under the veneer of 'equality', all in the name of keeping those possible competitors from threatening their current grasp on power.

I can think of multiple events in the Bible, for instance, where an older male in power seeks to inhibit or literally kill a younger upstart 'rival' to keep him from unseating him. You know why Saul wanted David (i.e. the dude who slew Goliath) dead? There was a literal prophesy that David would be king. And Saul wanted his son to be King. Even though his son liked David. Oh, keeping things relevant to the season, Jesus' birth caused King Herod to slay every single male under age two in Jerusalem for fear of being unseated decades later.

I could see this dynamic playing out writ large on the civilizational scale.

But there's little research on this point, and I don't think anyone has admitted to feeling this way or using this to guide their decisions, so I don't feel I can prove this with any strength.

Part of the evidence I've seen in favor of this hypothesis is that nepotism is still clearly a way to get ahead for white males. Note that I do not consider nepotism inherently a bad thing. That is, older men still clearly favor their progeny for advancement, they aren't throwing their own sons to the wolves... but it would then stand to reason that they are being much more suspicious of males they aren't related to and would feel fewer qualms about kicking out the ladder that those kids might use to advance.

Being a little bit petty, notice that Alexander Soros gets to be the heir apparent of his father's massive empire. The same father who has spent B-I-L-L-I-O-N-S of dollars implementing the exact policies and pushing the exact ideas that led to the issue the OP article identified.

It would stand to complete reason that George Soros might elevate a proud woman of color to take over his empire. But he chose his own male child, and said son, despite claiming to share his father's priorities, happily accepts. WHAT GIVES? (This is not an antisemetic dogwhistle, for those who have already instantly thought along those lines.)

So yeah, there's the real possibility this is all just an evolutionary arms race with the genes that favor their own kin implementing a cultural superweapon to generate an advantage in the great game of environmental fitness.

In 1975 you had to deal with the sweaty young men who worked for you because that was who the firm hired. In 2020 you could become ‘executive mentor’ to a bunch of pretty, 28-32 year old Asian, Indian and white women under the guise of “equity and inclusion” and be praised for it.

Just had to watch out for MeToo accusations. I noted that some evidence against my hypothesis is that older men were still getting sniped with being sex pests, and no matter how much power they had this was often enough to get them removed and unable to return to their former glory.

You can ascribe some of that to intra-elite competition.

Plenty of young dudes caught up in it as well, but if this were an 'intentional' play by older males to thin out the competition, it surely backfired on many of them, and hurt their overall ability to use their own power to procure sex from young women, which they certainly would not prefer to happen.

This likely also plays into the whole Epstein debacle, but I will leave that aside.

Also even with the current filters on straight white men, the ones that have the right combination of connections and genuine merit to actually get through the adverse hiring are likely going to be flat better than their competition.

The reality is that many of the prime drivers of racial and gender affirmative action were old, largely white, men in positions of economic and in some cases political power in many of these institutions.

Most feminists are not men. Most race-hustlers are not white. These are just-so stories which just happen to place all the blame (and all the agency) on the designated enemy... old white men.

No, but in 2016 when woke started, most executives in American companies (probably at least at 70% of them) were white men.

Woke did not start in 2016, though it may have adopted that name at that time.

I'm pretty sure most executives were white men prior to 2016 too.

I think the article fails to bring up the most important factor: journalism, screenwriting and academia are all incredibly oversaturated and the number of people wanting to go into those fields massively outstrips the demand, and on top of that, the first two are rapidly shrinking fields, while academia is producing more new grads than ever competing for the same few spots. The old GenX/Boomers at the top are obviously going to want to hold on to their share of a shrinking pie, and let's not kid ourselves, merit was never the primary consideration when it came to hiring writers before either.

I was in a Ph.D program in 2014, hoping to go into academia, and I ended up dropping out because I could see that there was no way forward. I know it's a tournament profession and my odds were never good, but once I was inside it became apparent that it was in fact literally hopeless.

I ended up going into technology, because it was the only sufficiently merit-based thing I could find in which I could sort of force open the door. Even there, I think I got a senior role just in time, as I hear the entry level is very very bad these days. I've had conversations with my wife about what we might advise our future children to do with their lives, and I've mentally prepared to tell them that certain dreams are just impossible, and some things can only ever be a hobby for us - even though there are other people who will be able to dedicate their whole lives to them. Maybe it's been a good thing, in that I was forced to keep some things I love as just a hobby, and so I never got burnt out on them by trying to make them a career.

some things can only ever be a hobby for us - even though there are other people who will be able to dedicate their whole lives to them

This has always been true. If you really want to make a career out of something like painting, this has been true for basically all of history.

Basically most art and artisanal crafting (woodworking, etc) falls into this bucket

Edit: to be clear I'm not denying the rest of this, I'm just saying I grew up knowing that a significant number of interesting career paths were cut off due to lack of strong economic viability, thats not a new issue

I don't dispute that, but it also doesn't engage with the article's thesis: that there was a window that was previously open for white men to participate in these culture-making activities, which has been closed artificially. Of course it was never the case that everyone could e.g. write for The New Yorker - there were always too many people who would like to. But the premise before, and the ideal for which we should aim, was that whoever could do it best could get the role, regardless of their identity; and now identity is an impassable barrier.

Previously, the parental advice would have been: "It's great if you want to try and become a journalist, but try and build some hard skills as a fallback plan because it's hard to get a job in that." Now it's, "Don't try to become a journalist at all, the field is actually closed to you."

I don't dispute that, but it also doesn't engage with the article's thesis

So fair, I was really just commenting on that isolated thought

The piece addressed this point as well. Based on the stats white men did not migrate into other high-status fields like medicine, law, and tech, likely because of the same discriminatory hiring practices.

The white men shut out of the culture industries didn’t surge into other high-status fields. They didn’t suddenly flood advertising, law, or medicine, which are all less white and significantly less male than they were a decade ago. White men dropped from 31.2 percent of law school matriculants in 2016 to 25.7 percent in 2024.

The shift in medicine has been even more dramatic. In 2014, white men were 31 percent of American medical students. By 2025, they were just 20.5 percent—a ten-percentage-point drop in barely over a decade. “At every step there’s some form of selection,” a millennial oncologist told me. “Medical school admissions, residency programs, chief resident positions, fellowships—each stage tilts away from white men or white-adjacent men… The white guy is now the token.”

Nor was tech much of a refuge. At Google, white men went from nearly half the workforce in 2014 to less than a third by 2024—a 34 percent decline. In 2014, at Amazon, entry-level “professionals”—college graduates just starting out—were 42.3 percent white male. These were the employees who, if they’d advanced normally over the next decade, would be the mid-level managers of today. But mid-level Amazon managers fell from 55.8 percent white male in 2014 to just 33.8 percent in 2024—a decline of nearly 40 percent.

Ding ding ding.

And then there's the added problem of "oh, and any other field you might want to try could arbitrarily be closed off to you if it ever becomes lucrative and high-status enough for entryists to target."

Professional painters exist, and I don’t even mean housepainters(which anyone who isn’t visibly high when inquiring can get). Portrait artists have no control of the creativity of their profession, is all.

I was in a Ph.D program in 2014, hoping to go into academia, and I ended up dropping out because I could see that there was no way forward. I know it's a tournament profession and my odds were never good, but once I was inside it became apparent that it was in fact literally hopeless.

Yeah I had a similar path, wanted to go for a history PhD but all my professors told me it was hopeless as a white man. I also went into a tech startup, and we crushed it, then I got fired two weeks before my equity would've vested despite far surpassing all the goals in my initial contract.

I try to keep the light in my heart alive, stay focused on Christ, etc, but damn I am fucking angry. I have to say. I wish there was a more constructive movement to end this shit, very sad to see that so much of the dissident right is just pure vitriol.

I also went into a tech startup, and we crushed it, then I got fired two weeks before my equity would've vested despite far surpassing all the goals in my initial contract.

I try to keep the light in my heart alive, stay focused on Christ, etc, but damn I am fucking angry

Bruh, you basically got Saverin-adjacented. I think Jesus would understand if you considered pursuing legal action or going on a revenge arc.

I ended up fighting for a decent settlement that was close to a year's income. Probably the better option all things being equal given that the CEO is insanely paranoid and pushed out everyone that did real work in the company. The CTO had it worse than I did but can't talk about that publicly.

Either way, given your posting history on here you're not exactly someone I'd ever look to for moral advice, tyvm.

I didn’t say anything about “moral advice” or advice in general.

For in general, when it comes to advice, I prefer giving, receiving, or neutrally reading effective rather than “moral” advice, whatever “moral” advice may be. Come to think of it, people who immediately reach for phrases such as “moral advice” or “stay[ing] focused on Christ” tend to have a pretty good track record in recent times of losing gracefully. A follower of my posting history might be aware of examples such as forgiving one’s son’s murderer, washing the feet of those who hate you, conceding the supposed non-negotiability of marriage being between a man and a woman.

I’m glad you were able to at least partially subvert the track record and recoup some of your deferred compensation; ywvm.

Indeed, we have very different views of virtue. You're rather Neitzschean I suppose. It's a shame, you could be quite a force if you used your powers for good.... ;P

I always find myself thinking about how people in our position handled this drastic narrowing of our scope of opportunities. I was very influenced by Rod Dreher's Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies, as well as Aaron Renn's The Negative World, which, rather than addressing the racial and gender aspects of this, deal with the anti-Christian nature of the current cultural moment; all of these books, in different ways, basically advise you to focus hyper-locally, to keep your internal locus of control alive, and build what you can in the little domain that you are actually able to influence. So I've done that. I've just been elected to a two-year term on my church's leadership board; I managed to get published in a little local history anthology by a small press; I settled down, bought a house in the Midwest and am trying to start a family.

Still - it's painful that we'll never know what we could have done if we were born into a different reality. I had dreams of being a popular novelist. I probably don't have the ability, but because of the cultural headwinds, I also gave up on that before I tried to reach my maximum potential. You might have been a great professor, or maybe you would not have; but people like us, with even greater ability than us, also got pushed into paths where their potentialities are never realized. I am reminded of Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk, a mid-century novel about a girl who dreams of becoming an actress, and ends up shattered by the experience of continual failure. (And of course by encounters with an infamous cad.) Her outcome: a quiet, happy suburban life, but one in which her initial dreams are forgotten. She makes her peace with that, and I've mostly made my peace with what I couldn't do, and of course I can console myself by saying, "Well, that was just my attempt to be special, and I probably wasn't special anyway in the end." There are failures and mediocrities in every generation, but I would've at least liked to try on a more level playing field. Part of this is just growing up, but obviously part of it is that we were frankly cheated out of a fair shot; and it's only so much compensation to say, "Well, I made a great network engineer."

Hey friend, just wanted to stop in and say I'm doing the same thing. In my twenties I had the dream of being 'significant', but have realized just how much pride was caught up in that. Much more healthy and virtuous is to be a part of your community first, and then if you do good there perhaps you will have expanding influence as a result. To that end I've abandoned my goal of being some kind of auteur, and instead got married, just become a deacon at my church, and am currently working on starting a local small business.

Still - it's painful that we'll never know what we could have done if we were born into a different reality.

I thought about this phrase a lot, and in the end, this is yet another poisonous secular idea seeped in the water you drink. In Christianity there is no such a thing like being born as some other person - as other gender, in other time or other place. You were created as a unique soul by God and it is what it is. It reminds me of the conversation penned by Tolkien where Frodo laments:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

If you don't like Tolien, then look at the Book of Job. In a strange sense Christians are more grounded in here and now, and secularists are more entangled in strange mysticism. Be it Rawlsian idea of how everybody is an immortal soul flying around the Earth waiting to be materialized, presupposing the moral structure from this mystical tought experiment. Or transhumanists raving about uploading their soul and making themselves immortal, or of course transgender activists who literally claim that their souls were materialized in wrong body. All of that is nonsense.

That's because liberal secularization peddled self-actualization as the goal of existence. It was super easy to sell, because everyone dreams of better. "Sometimes you just suck and sucks to suck" isn't a great sales pitch.

Indeed, you get it my friend. I also just took on a leadership position at my local parish, and am volunteering in a broader capacity with my larger church body.

I think that the best we can do is simply bide our time, spread awareness, and grow our social capital, our virtue, while supporting our side of the culture war here and there. Store up treasures in heaven, where moths can't destroy and thieves can't steal.

If it helps, I do think that there's a lot of angry underemployed highly skilled men floating around right now, just waiting for a chance to do something. Trump is old and there's no clear successor, so there's a big power vacuum right now. X is a great organizational space. It feels like we've got the chance to do something now. I just don't know what.

Some form of DOGE would be a good thing to do. Given how fast it was crushed, there are a lot of money (tens of billions at least, maybe more) that basically are stolen from the budget, and it enables huge number of people to do damaging activism full time, without any resource constraints, while the opposing side has to balance having day job and family and mortgage and all the normal dependencies and vulnerabilities. That's like fighting a professional boxer while trying to cook a meal and care for an infant at the same time. No way you wouldn't lose badly. Disrupting this process would make a huge impact. Even just revealing the details of this - and consistently making it the focus of the discussion - would make an impact, most normies have absolutely no idea how much of the crap they are paying for from their own pockets. A lot of this information is out there, just buried in terabytes of forms and reports. Some of it is non-public, but can be revealed if there's sufficient energy dedicated to it. But except for a handful of people, not a lot of politicians, even from the conservative side, take any interest in that. Partially because they have their own, smaller, grifts, which could be disrupted by revealing and stopping all the massive grifts.

My impression is that the federal government is actually reasonably efficient, at least in the sense that the money goes to the thing it's labelled for, which is why DOGE failed. What we really need is 50+ DOGEs for every state and local government, that's where the real waste is. See for example: the latest scandal with food benefits in Minnesota.

in the sense that the money goes to the thing it's labelled for,

Only in a very broad sense, e.g. if the money is labeled "covid subsidies", it is going to somebody who claimed they need a subsidy because of COVID. But whether they actually need that subsidy, whether they should be in the front of the line for that subsidy, and whether their claim has any relation to reality, and whether they are actually going to spent the money to the cause they promised to spend - all this is controlled very weakly. And the leech networks have long adapted to the weak controls and learned to extract money by saying the correct "open Sesame" phrases, after which they get access to streams of money.

That said, I absolutely agree that state and local money need the same treatment.

It's what Paul Krugman called "An insurance company with an army". So outside medicare, medicaid, social security, defense, and interest payments, there's just not much left to cut. All those individual fed programs that sound suspicious like "covid subsidies" just don't amount to much in the grand scheme of things.

Medicare, medicaid and SS also give some opportunity for grift, and so does defense budget (I mean, if climate change is a threat to national security, we can finance climate change projects through defense budget, right? And if racism is a public health issue, we can finance DEI programs via healthcare budgets as well) we still have almost a trillion dollars in discretionary non-defense spending. It is true that solving the budget balance without addressing mandatory spending is not possible. But I am not talking about solving the budget yet, I am just talking about cutting off the most aggressive leeches, and thus forcing them to at least play on equal footing. My point is not about solving the budget - that can come later - but about denying the enemy the resources which should be either deployed to more worthy causes or returned to (or not taken from) the taxpayers. If the Left wants to donate to their favorite causes, they are welcome to, but without the help of the IRS.

And even Krugman (who one can usually rely on distorting the reality as much as possible to benefit The Party) admits this:

Oh, and the federal government has been providing aid to state and local governments, largely to limit layoffs of schoolteachers.

The schoolteachers part is most likely a lie (I didn't check but I know who Krugman is) but the preceding part is true - significant chunk of federal money goes as "aid" to local budgets, where it is rerouted - either directly, or through a basic fungibility trick - to various pet causes. Establishing transparency and control over this would do the conservative cause a lot of good - but they are doing virtually nothing about it.

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My personal push would be to form a unified group that pledges simply to withhold tax payments while this particular discrimination regime is allowed to continue.

Needs to be enough buy-in that "they can't prosecute all of us" is a legitimate factor. And ideally pool funds to pay for attorneys for those who do get tried.

Yes, there's like a dozen ways the state can crack down on this, but that would actually force them to cross those lines OR negotiate.

It's harder to disrupt or de-legitimize such a group compared to one that threatens violent martial resistance. Hence why this approach would probably beat forming an informal militia.

This is nuts! Law fare is the tried and true way of damaging US institutions to effect change.

Who is going to pay for the lawfare?

Peter Thiel of course! There is always some rich white guy with an axe to grind in practice.

I think you'll find that it's quite easy for the IRS to take your tax money. They don't even need to win a trial, they can just take it directly from your bank with a tax lien and force you to contest it. Unless you're talking about money laundering, but then that's a lot more complicated and a serious felony.

Not more serious than armed insurrection, of course.

What does this look like? W2 income is already automatically taxed for e.g. FICA and to some extent income tax. And the government has plenty of well-exercised sticks to get compliance from both employers and employees.

The only way I can plausibly imagine this working is men going NEET en masse, and that may arguably already be happening. But it's unclear to me what change an army of NEETs can effect.

The only way I can plausibly imagine this working is men going NEET en masse, and that may arguably already be happening. But it's unclear to me what change an army of NEETs can effect.

Yeah this is the "lying flat" movement in China, which is spiritually corrupt imo.

Personally I prefer a strategy of working a low-effort job, enduring relative material poverty, and putting more effort/energy into building social capital, virtue, and an awareness of the problems.

very sad to see that so much of the dissident right is just pure vitriol.

There needs to be more vitriol. You can't just ask nicely not to be ethnically cleansed. The people you are up against have recently and openly learned they can just murder you, your children, and your representatives and suffer virtually no political consequences.

Vitriol is a start to what you need to do.

I am also of the vitriolic right, but IMO it behooves us to keep in mind that yours is the exact same rhetoric used by the left to valorize rioting negroes and palestinian combatants and all manner of domestic terrorism and social engineering.

"Our enemies are maximally evil and we must therefore maximize our aggression against them.", right or wrong, cements the conflict as absolute. It paints a glowing red target on you in the eyes of all who previously were only leery of you. It is exactly why the woke left has passed its peak and people are now waking up to the facts that no, western civilization wasn't a sexist racist theocracy and needn't have destroyed itself through mass immigration from the 3rd world, even as it is too late.

I'm not saying there's no conflict. I am myself strongly in favor of punishing my political enemies no matter what breaks in the process. But for anyone who still believes in saving, protecting or building anything - infinite vitriol is poison, and will destroy your cause.

Saving, protecting or building should only come after the enemy is defeated though, through vitriol and aggression. Otherwise they might destroy what you were building and protecting.

Ah yes, once the final victory has been won and the spectre of the enemy ideology is banished forever from the world. Once every actual enemy has been killed and every potential enemy lobotomized and all information pertaining to the enemy ideology has been scoured.

You know, it would be so inconvenient if the enemy were made of the same stuff as us, from the same peoples and families, and a straightforward victory weren't possible. Good thing the enemy is easily identifiable and irredeemable monsters who are completely separate from us.

Seriously though, what would a defeat of the enemy look like, to you?

Seriously though, what would a defeat of the enemy look like, to you?

I can name some examples now that you asked. For one, violent criminal “refugees” from the MENA region getting arrested and deported. Not being “ordered to be deported”, which is very obviously a BS measure intended to deceive NPCs, but getting deported i.e. physically removed. Or cutting aid to Ukraine. Or not suppressing the fact that COVID “vaccines” have caused a massive number of early deaths. Should any of those actually happen, I’d be saying that roughly 30% of the work is done.

Good thing the enemy is easily identifiable and irredeemable monsters who are completely separate from us.

Most of them have in fact made themselves easily visually identifiable already, through public statements and also forms of body modification typical of leftist 'spiteful mutants' (h/t to the Jolly Heretic).

the fact that COVID “vaccines” have caused a massive number of early deaths.

Do you have solid sources backing up this claim?

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I am also of the vitriolic right, but IMO it behooves us to keep in mind that yours is the exact same rhetoric used by the left to valorize rioting negroes and palestinian combatants and all manner of domestic terrorism and social engineering.

All that worked for them. It's still working for them. The woke left hasn't passed its peak; it's just currently in a tactical retreat. In 2028 the Democrats will have a trifecta and their woke vanguard will bring everything back on Day 1, because they have no scruples about the procedural and institutional barriers they use to stop their opponents. They'll "just do things" and there will be no Chicago judge to stop them, nor would they stop if they were told. And if there is resistance, the riot machine gets turned back on.

We'll see. Maybe in America. I expect some changes have already commenced that will manifest over the coming decades, and the political divides of those will not map cleanly to those of the past decades. Demographics remains destiny, and destiny is already happening. There will be a successor ideology to "woke", but it won't be the same - the causes the "woke" were married to are largely discredited in Europe, even as the old guard sticks to them. The young ones have seen them fail. Lockdowns, maximized mass immigration, feminism, tolerance, democracy. The generations growing up right now will find different causes, any alliances with old "woke" will be of convenience rather than conviction. And the biggest bloc of all in Europe will be Muslims - we'll see how that changes the political landscapes. At least that's my prediction.

So, back to America. Maybe it'll be as you say. Maybe a hot culture war or the ethnic cleansing of red-blooded Americans is inevitable. We'll see.

The guy who killed Charlie Kirk is suffering the consequences. He will likely be executed. What more do you want? Random innocent people to be punished as vengeance? People getting shot by random crazies is a fact of life in a free society, and the only person responsible is the killer.

He will likely be executed.

That is very far-fetched.

Yes, the left traded a pawn for a knight or a bishop. Maybe even a queen. They don't seem too upset about that trade, and in the meantime they are winning elections, and their base is crying out for more political murders.

"Oh" you might say "But after Charlie Kirk was killed, thousands of chapters of Turning Point USA were founded!"

First, we'll see how that pans out, and second, the left decided they can murder those too.

Meanwhile almost every single popular conservative is afraid to appear in public because the left will murder them. The right has almost zero ground game because the left will murder them if they do.

It's a winning strategy, and I think we need more of it. Making journalist, judges, legislators and administrators fear for their life in public is a proven strategy.

The right has almost zero ground game because the left will murder them if they do.

It's a winning strategy, and I think we need more of it. Making journalist, judges, legislators and administrators fear for their life in public is a proven strategy.

This looks like fedposting. I get that it is mostly a criticism of the left for actually engaging in political violence, and I'm hoping that there is a degree of sarcasm in it. 3 day ban.

Last time (7 months ago) you got a short ban for something that looked like fedposting you insisted it wasn't fedposting. We gave you a light one day ban at the time. Back then I wrote this in the thread:

As far as I am concerned fedposting is one of the few existential threats that this board faces. The other two are zorba kicking the bucket and a democrat party crackdown on free speech on the web.

One day bans are minor and basically nothing. That is us saying "yes really, this is a rule we will enforce, don't do it". For anything resembling fed posting I'm also willing to hand out bans like candy. Don't fucking do it. We can choose to be lenient when it is just the rules we care about enforcing. But this is a rule that the world will enforce upon us if we don't self police. Be annoyingly verbose and add a bunch of disclaimers if you insist on doing it. We still might ban you, because again we aren't really the ones making the rule on this. Sorry it sucks, I don't like it anymore than you do.

So to reiterate: do not fedpost. Do not jokingly fedpost. Do not look like you might be fedposting.

Can we please wait until there's at least a suspect in custody before using the Brown shooting to support your narrative?

There is no "strategy", it was one guy. If polemicists weren't taking security precautions for their public appearances until now, that's on them. Democrats had a Minnesota state rep shot and you don't hear us complaining about stochastic terrorism or whatever. That risk is part of being a public figure, especially in highly tense political times like we're in now.

Nah, there are some people explicitly and publically advocating more of this - Destiny's "you need conservatives to be afraid of getting killed when they go to events", for instance. I'd call that a strategy. It's not a strategy "the left" as a whole is pursuing, though (the Democratic Party certainly came out against it).

Yes but this sort of hate-fueled rhetoric is just inaccurate which turns a ton of people off. Democrats lawmakers/elites are not openly murdering conservatives, poorly adjusted criminals and depressed schizos are. I understand that there's a strong argument to be made that the Democratic governance LEADS to these murders, but you have to actually make that argument!!

When you say things like

they can just murder you, your children, and your representatives and suffer virtually no political consequences.

This loses you the moral high ground, and the fight when it comes to normies. You're being taken in by your rage and making strategic mistakes. It's not just that it's factually wrong it's that it's a losing strategy.

I'd agree that OP is indeed incorrect. The corrected statement should be this: they can just advocate for murdering you, your children, and your representatives and suffer virtually no political consequences.

This loses you the moral high ground

How so?

Have you read Howard Thurman? I think his brand of nonviolence and his take on the "hounds of Hell" might interest you.

Yes but this sort of hate-fueled rhetoric is just inaccurate which turns a ton of people off.

Democrats have been almost pure delusional hate-fueled rhetoric for most of my adult life, intensifying into cancerous ferocity over the last decade, and it doesn't seem to have turned anyone off on general principles.

This loses you the moral high ground, and the fight when it comes to normies.

No, it seems like that's just media dominance and message control. If you refuse to ever tolerate or acknowledge validity of criticism of your own extremists, you apparently can just brazen out the moral high ground.

Democrats have been almost pure delusional hate-fueled rhetoric for most of my adult life, intensifying into cancerous ferocity over the last decade, and it doesn't seem to have turned anyone off on general principles.

Trumpism, and Musk becoming pissed off enough to buy Twitter, seem the obvious examples. Well, no, the more relevant examples; the most obvious example, in context, is this board.

The rhetoric of pro-Israel politicians is a great example of this point. Randy Fine can talk about how beautiful it is to see dead babies and call for the extermination of Palestinian children all he wants and the DNC aren't even willing to mildly chastise him, let alone pass a condemnation of him like they did for Nick Fuentes.

Look up Jay Jones again.

You are point of fact wrong on every point.

Let me put that another way. Ten years ago everyone knew white males were being discriminated against. Say it then and people like you would accuse me of "giving into hate and losing the normies". Now that it's fait accompli, all the institutions have been lost, white family formation is in the toilet, and our country is lost, people are coming out of the woodwork admitting "Yeah, we did that shit". Articles like the above are allowed to be published. But it's too late, there is no reversing it.

And I'm sure in 10 years time, there will be another slate of late admissions "Yeah, we did permit the ethnic cleansing of white people. Oh well!". And when the actions required to make the survivors whole are proposed, people like you will once again wring their hands going "Woah, woah, that's too scary, you'll lose the normies!"

The normies need to be radicalized. And attempts must be made 24/7 to see that they are brought on board with saving themselves. If you are afraid of losing them, you are failing in your moral duty to save them.

This is way too defeatist my friend. While we yet draw breath there is hope. We absolutely can and will reverse this evil and corruption. Far mightier empires have fallen throughout history. It may seem impossible now, but things change gradually then all at once.

I've been seeing the normies get more and more radicalized my entire life. I think we're on a good trajectory.

This is way too defeatist my friend. While we yet draw breath there is hope. We absolutely can and will reverse this evil and corruption. Far mightier empires have fallen throughout history. It may seem impossible now, but things change gradually then all at once.

There is nothing actionable here.

I've been seeing the normies get more and more radicalized my entire life. I think we're on a good trajectory.

The normies have indeed become more radicalized. For the left, as we saw in the Great Awokening of 2020. Every once in a while they get a good look at their destination (e.g. Sam Brinton transing their kids) and recoil, but then they go right back. And the "adults" on the right preach doing nothing, and when the more action-oriented on the right start acting, said "adults" are more horrified by them than by their leftist counterparts.

Just a reminder that whites have the stablest TFR in the US, it's actually slightly ahead of the black TFR, that US immigration is more white than black, and that whites of any age are the most likely to be married. Your blackpill on white people is not true, although white demographic decline is still likely.

US immigration is more white than black

Are you sure about that?

You're not wrong, but what use is it to have a bunch of radicalized red tribers if there is no plan for them to fight back? As far as I can tell, the "The Republican Party is Doomed" article still holds true today. Without control of any important institutions, there's not a lot you can do.

You can always destroy those institutions instead of trying to control them. Those can be rebuilt later according to different designs.

"The Republican Party is Doomed" is still written by a man that conflates certification with education with job security with meaningful skills, and who today has yet to confront or recognize a very simple flaw downstream of what that means:

There is not some deep physical law that educated young professionals are the source of administrative or executive power in this world. They have been favored for the last seventy years because (outside of academic-enforced Curleyism) they were competent, not just in systems that they created, but in their ability to manage and adapt to the world.

The average college graduate today struggles to use a screwdriver, and increasing numbers struggle to write or comprehend an essay; a far broader group have actively rejected even the ideals of meaningful understanding of reality. Teacher's unions have begged and striked to require increasing levels of education that you and I know does absolutely shit for their actual capability, and they're unusual for anyone studying it, rather than it being a problem. If you throw the mandate of heaven in the trash, it ends up in the trash.

That's not necessarily a good thing! Obviously there's the big grifter problem, where once you realize that the TV-show grifter and the PhD are equally unknowledgable about 1800s history, you have the problem of distinguishing what randos do have anything. There's a lot of infrastructure and cash that's hard to replicate outside of academic or industrial settings, and the resulting processes not getting done because those settings are so hostile to you they'd rather burn cash and credibility, and just no one trying, doesn't change much.

More broadly, there are still places that have keep some undercurrent of adherence to actual skill or knowledge that's hard to develop elsewhere, with some interest in actual capability, whether or not they've been skinsuited by politics. There's a far broader scope where the things they teach aren't deep knowledge or skills, but they're the teacher's passwords necessary to get anywhere today. FCFromSSC-style "iterated harm-seeking" is going to be very interesting in the !!bad!! sort of ways, when applied here.

I don't think you can avoid plans happening, as people get radicalized, as someone who has even an inkling of what that could looks like, and very many good reasons to wish it wouldn't happen.

More seriously, there's a lot of options radicals have, many of which do not require vast planning or coordination, only common knowledge.

Some of those options aren't bad. If, as a completely random example, the left will be murdering political enemies with impunity or the police and prosecutors will just look the other way when someone on the right gets his or her face punched in... well, I was on team Pink Pistols when gay guys getting bashed was a non-zero risk. I'm not abandoning that because some people insist it'd be better if I were beaten than their brownshits shot, and if they've never said the name "Paul Kessler", I'm not going to even care. There's a functional moral and legal principle, here.

But the majority of options are bad, and they're still going to happen. There's some subtle stuff, like what happens when we it becomes common knowledge the Civil Rights Act doesn't and hasn't realled since its inception, and every jury the least competent lawyer in a red or purple state can manage will nullo your prosecutions, and any lawyer slightly above that Platkins out any attempt to Uno Reverso by getting jurisdiction in a blue state first.

And then there's an actual horror stories.

Remember Malheur? Two years ago, if it happened again, common knowledge had already become that people committing actual terrorist arson against federal police didn't get a 'mandatory' terrorism enhancement. Today, there is basically nothing the nuBundies could say that would cost them political support, and until and unless they literally shot -- not shot at -- federal officers, they'd still have behaved better than anti-ICE groups. That includes literally dropping heavy rocks onto the front windshields of fast-moving cars and people, or running for a national office with a nazi tattoo.

But don't worry, without a college diploma, Red Tribers won't drop rocks. That's a fancy-boy edujumacated physics problem. Electricians, machinists, plumbers, gun nuts, maintenance employees, firefights, construction workers, no possible relevant domain expertise. or at least none I'm willing to discuss publicly

Remember when FEMA decided that they weren't going to provide support to houses with Trump political signs? Ah, without the proper cred-en-tialis there's no way some Red Triber would end up walking door to door or considering neighborhoods dangerous based on matters tangentially related to politics. They'll just be a ton of people doing work requiring hands-on expertise, to serve people they hate and know hate them, with ready and long awareness of normal and subtle failure modes. No way they might be in evacuated neighborhoods before most residents return, with easy arguments to defend any place they could be at all.

Remember some of the California trans sanctuary laws? What do you think happens when the mainstream news reports a father just now kidnapping his son, the federal marshals heroically rip a long-pregnant early teenager from their parent's arms the next week, and no one can talk about what the kid's current gender presentation or who assaulted him to start with? Do you think there's anyone who can argue Loudon County a success case for gradual stepwise moderation? Do you think people need a medical doctorate to notice the difference between a week and twenty-one weeks? A historian's degree find every single person with their name on public record for those orders?

These don't require a plan. Many of them don't even require explicit coordination beyond listening to the news, sometimes even only listening to news reporters biased against them. They're not even indicia I think are particularly likely -- since I don't want this to happen, I'm not going to meme my way into disaster.

But think for five minutes, hard, about what thirty unrelated bad actors might individually want to do, just repeating the greatest hits of the last five years.

Then consider how much post-Civil Rights Act civility may have depended on how difficult it was to ensure an attack would hit the 'guilty' and not hit the 'innocent' -- as the charcoal briquettes rant highlighted, the Oklahoma City Bomber very specifically choose to burn children to death among others -- and what signal hearing "Kirk deserved it" jokes and 'jokes' from their neighbors have sent.

I would like it to not be this way. I don't see many people actually arguing it isn't. Only that it shouldn't be.

I’m sorry, but I can’t help but think this is over-optimistic nonsense.

I don't think you can avoid plans happening, as people get radicalized, as someone who has even an inkling of what that could looks like, and very many good reasons to wish it wouldn't happen.

“Plans” will happen, sure. Lots of stupid, counterproductive “plans” by idiotic “lone-wolf” actors — a large fraction probably egged on and guided by undercover Feds into the least effective courses possible.

More seriously, there's a lot of options radicals have, many of which do not require vast planning or coordination, only common knowledge.

Not effective ones. This is an illusion created by the apparent effectiveness of left-wing supposed “lone-wolf” radicals. who are really just the visible end of a vast, less visible organized apparatus — read David Hines, or Curtis Yarvin.

Some of those options aren't bad. If, as a completely random example, the left will be murdering political enemies with impunity or the police and prosecutors will just look the other way when someone on the right gets his or her face punched in... well, I was on team Pink Pistols when gay guys getting bashed was a non-zero risk. I'm not abandoning that because some people insist it'd be better if I were beaten than their brownshits shot, and if they've never said the name "Paul Kessler", I'm not going to even care.

Sure, you can say “better to be judged by twelve that carried by six” or such, but when the choices are:

  1. Take a beating from the “brownshirts,” and maybe get crippled or killed, or

  2. Shoot one or more of them… and get tried in Federal court for murder and “hate crimes,” inevitably convicted and sent to Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for, if not life, then decades; where the guards, having been informed that you’re an evil racist homophobic transphobic white supremacist Nazi Klansman who should die behind bars, pass this on to every non-white gang in the prison, at which point you eventually end up getting shanked to death if you’re lucky, but more likely cornered, repeatedly violated, and then beaten to death (just like you were trying to avoid to begin with); all while the guards look the other way.

How many people do you think will really pick option 2?

But the majority of options are bad, and they're still going to happen.

Mostly when the state allows them to happen, because it’s convenient to let them happen as an excuse to crack down further.

There's some subtle stuff, like what happens when we it becomes common knowledge the Civil Rights Act doesn't and hasn't realled since its inception, and every jury the least competent lawyer in a red or purple state can manage will nullo your prosecutions, and any lawyer slightly above that Platkins out any attempt to Uno Reverso by getting jurisdiction in a blue state first.

This is unintelligible. Beyond the grammar errors — “when we it becomes”? — I have no idea what this means.

Today, there is basically nothing the nuBundies could say that would cost them political support

And that “political support” is useless.

they'd still have behaved better than anti-ICE groups. That includes literally dropping heavy rocks onto the front windshields of fast-moving cars and people, or running for a national office with a nazi tattoo.

It doesn’t matter how much right-wing radicals have “behaved better than” various leftist groups, because what decides punishment is not the level of “bad behavior,” but “who, whom?” Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi, as the Romans said.

Left-wingers can drop rocks. Red-tribers can’t and won’t, not because it’s “a fancy-boy edujumacated physics problem,” but because they’ll be destroyed if they try. They won’t get away with it like the other side does. Anyone on the right who so much as tries will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Their “associates” — their friends and family — could be prosecuted too; or failing that, cancelled, fired, blacklisted, debanked, attacked by “brownshirts,” burned out of their homes, etc.

If your “people doing work requiring hands-on expertise” try anything, they’ll be caught by the omnipresent surveillance we live under, and completely crushed by the invincible Leviathan of the state.

Remember some of the California trans sanctuary laws? What do you think happens when the mainstream news reports a father just now kidnapping his son, the federal marshals heroically rip a long-pregnant early teenager from their parent's arms the next week, and no one can talk about what the kid's current gender presentation or who assaulted him to start with?

I’m not clear on the scenario you’re vaguely gesturing toward here, but the answer to “what do you think happens?” is “nothing,” because nothing ever happens. Red tribes grumble, and mutter “somebody aught to…” and “next time, we’ll…” and then roll over and take it. I’ve watched my parents, my friends, my neighbors do exactly this my entire life.

Do you think there's anyone who can argue Loudon County a success case for gradual stepwise moderation? Do you think people need a medical doctorate to notice the difference between a week and twenty-one weeks? A historian's degree find every single person with their name on public record for those orders?

What difference does any of this make?

But think for five minutes, hard, about what thirty unrelated bad actors might individually want to do, just repeating the greatest hits of the last five years.

First, there’s what these bad actors might want to do, and then there’s the separate question of whether they’ll actually try to do it. Very unlikely, I say. Too comfortable, too much to lose — and smart enough to see that their odds of getting away with it are too low. Then, even if they try, there’s the odds they get away with it. Which, again, one can see are abysmally low.

It’s not “right-wingers are too stupid and lack the edujumacation and proper cred-en-tials to strike back” — it’s that we’re too weak and disorganized, and the enemy too strong and organized, for any of this sort of thing to ever work (that is, at anything but being counterproductive).

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You're not wrong, but what use is it to have a bunch of radicalized red tribers if there is no plan for them to fight back?

There was no plan, and Charlie Kirk is still dead, the power he wielded in life shattered into a thousand pieces and scattered to the four winds.

You can make a pretty big impact without a "plan".

You can make a pretty big impact without a "plan".

You can if you you have the tacit, hidden backing of a vast, powerful, organized apparatus behind you. If you don't have that, though…

Our conception of deep evil was some grainy photo of 'no blacks or irish need apply' while our job portals said 'no white men need apply'. People will soon forget, like they always do. "It was just a few seminars, and I was largely against it". If they let you have a job at all, they demanded these professions of faith where you had to confess to being a worm. No humiliation was seemingly enough. I'll remember how brazen they were.

I hold women responsible for this. Even those who did not actively support it. It's not morally neutral to accept a promotion someone else was blatantly, unfairly shut out of. Part of my disagreement with the far right on female promiscuity, aside that I fundamentally don't care about it, is that it enshrines a woman's sex life as the only expression of her morality. The far right/trad right is completely helpless because women have all this power now, and rightists have no way to acknowledge it and hold them accountable. "they're ..they're.. sluts.. and the perverted men make them do things.. they're having sex and..." I'm sure that's it, buddy.

I'm not sure what you would expect a woman getting a promotion in that instance to do. Are you expecting them to take a principled stance and deny a better livelihood for themselves for cultural reasons? They'll just hire the next woman in line.

Ah yes, the classic cafeteria tray argument that if they refuse to do the evil thing, the next guy would do it (or girl in this instance). I gotta say, I've always been schocked by the near-complete refusal of people here or in /r/slatestarcodex to sacrifice a single dollar for morality ( 'cultural reasons', lmao) . Maybe they deserved to crawl for their DEI masters. Yes, I expect them to turn it down.

Usually promotions come with a multiple dollar increase, not just a single dollar.

Yes, I expect them to turn it down.

For what reason?

“What troubles me is that a lot of thriving white millennial men have had to follow the Josh Hawley path, where you have to leave liberal America,” an old friend, the father of two biracial children, told me. “I don't want to do that. Liberal America is my home. But if everyone says, this is not the place for you, what are you supposed to do?”

Can anyone clarify this part please? I don't know who that Hawley guy is, and according to Wikipedia, he was never a liberal.

Apparently Josh Hawley wrote a book called Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. According to AI, in this book Hawley extols more conservative path for men, rejecting "epicurean liberalism" and embracing masculine roles and archetypes such as builder, warrior, father etc. So I think it is a lament that liberals reject men and masculinity, and thus shove men toward more conservative path in order to succeed.

warrior

Semi off-topic (but CW):

The word 'warrior' to refer to a member of the armed forces of a democratic state is, as kids say these days, Problematic.

ACOUP:

a warrior is an individual who wars, because it is their foundational vocation, an irremovable part of their identity and social position, pursued for those private ends (status, wealth, place in society). So the core of what it is to be a warrior is that it is an element of personal identity and also fundamentally individualistic [...].
[...] So the core of what it is to be a soldier is that it is a not-necessarily-permanent employment and fundamentally about being both in and in service to a group.

Angry staff officer:

Warriors came from a specific class of people, those whose lives were dedicated to violence – not violence for a specific end, but often just violence for violence’s sake. Warrior classes were – and are – often propped up on the backs of the people, the people they are supposed to be serving. They are supported by the state, segregated into a specific class, and essentially become diametrically opposed to a democracy – since democracies do not easily finance the exorbitant cost of keeping up a bunch of entitled elites.

The closest we have to a separate warrior class -- people who see themselves as permanently apart from the broader society, for whom to engage in violence is a fundamental part of their identity -- these days are probably criminal gangs (or especially corrupt police departments, if there is a difference).

The word 'warrior' to refer to a member of the armed forces of a democratic state is, as kids say these days, Problematic

Agreed, which kind of makes the point. You may aspire to be let's say a warrior of Christ despite degenerate "epicurean liberal" consensus. I think it captures the ethos of masculinity - to be disagreeable toward degenerate ideas despite it being unpopular to an extent, where you are willing to be martyred for it. It does not mean that you will commit violent acts of terrorism of course, but some bravery and confidence in righteousness of your worldview is commendable. You can maybe start with unabashedly saying blessings before eating your lunch in Google canteen. Very warrior like behavior.

Agreed, which kind of makes the point. You may aspire to be let's say a warrior of Christ despite degenerate "epicurean liberal" consensus. I think it captures the ethos of masculinity - to be disagreeable toward degenerate ideas despite it being unpopular to an extent, where you are willing to be martyred for it. It does not mean that you will commit violent acts of terrorism of course, but some bravery and confidence in righteousness of your worldview is commendable. You can maybe start with unabashedly saying blessings before eating your lunch in Google canteen. Very warrior like behavior.

Priests and warriors are not the same thing. Both are traditionally masculine roles, particularly in the Christian West, and both are supposed to cultivate the kind of moral and religious basedness you are talking about here. But the warrior isn't supposed to be martyred - he's supposed to send the infidel to his "martyrdom". From a warrior's perspective, saying blessings unabashedly while undercover in enemy territory doesn't make you badass, it makes you an idiot.

In the context of this sub-thread, "warrior" isn't a metaphor for someone who tries to achieve something against determined opposition - it is a reference to people who make actual, real-world physical violence a way of life. Warrior-elites in this strict sense are a key feature of most societies. The taming of warrior elites into aristocracies who only fight the enemy, not among themselves, is part of the transition from barbarism into civilisation.

I don't really get quibbling over definitions, Warrior isn't bad because it's fascist, it's bad because it's cringe. "I'm a warrior because I pray in the company cafeteria" is cringey, dude no one cares.

Erasing the warrior-soldier distinction is bad because it makes it harder to talk accurately and precisely about violence professionals, and in particular to call out certain failure modes in civil-military relations.

Erasing the warrior-curmudgeon distinction is bad for the same reasons.

Welcome the euphemism treadmill. Erasing the moron-retard distinction is bad because it makes it harder to talk accurately and precisely about intellectual capabilities.

Warrior euphemism talk started, as I recall seeing it, with the cringey Wounded Warrior Project stuff, though I'm sure it has earlier roots.

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Doesn't forcing a warrior-soldier conflation also cause inaccuracy? A drone operator, artilleryman, submarine sailor or even an infantryman who never saw combat is hardly a warrior in the same sense as somali pirate or a mujihadeen suicide-bomber or an apache brave or a spartiate. The term "warrior" seems more misleading than not, for most roles in a modern military, in a way that "soldier" does not. There is some overlap, I grant, but it's hardly universal anymore.

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This is a very strange word use problem that I suspect stems from the stick up the arse of the USMC. US Marines are not an elite amphibious expeditionary force like the modern Royal Marines, or seaborne troops who specialise in boarding actions like the OG marines. (In so far as that latter expertise still exists, it sits in the law enforcement function of the Coast Guard). US Marines are, in fact, soldiers in the traditional English meaning of the word, which is the sense that Dr Deveraux of ACOUP and the Angry Staff Officer are using. But as part of their effort to maintain a distinctive culture, mission etc. from the army the USMC profoundly object to being called "soldiers".

My guess is that someone sympathetic to the USMC started using "warrior" as a general term for soldiers and marines and it stuck, rather than someone deliberately trying to end up on the wrong side of the soldier/warrior distinction.

When British politicians want to talk about soldiers in a way which includes things like the Royal Marines and the RAF Regiment, they tend to say "troops".

I don't think "liberalism" (here being used to refer to the prevailing value system of the pro-establishment left in the early 21st century Anglosphere) rejects the masculine virtues. The problem is that "liberalism" has decided that it needs to focus on promoting the masculine virtues in women through "Lean in" culture, physically badass women in popular entertainment etc.

The strong form of this claim is that liberalism hasn't rejected men or masculinity, but it has rejected masculinity in men.

The weaker form of this claim is that the culture-directing institutions of liberalism don't actually reject masculinity in men, but it has decided that it doesn't have the bandwidth to promote it given the dire need to create more girlbosses and warrior women.

The problem is that "liberalism" has decided that it needs to focus on promoting the masculine virtues in women through "Lean in" culture, physically badass women in popular entertainment etc.

This is actually a good point, although I think about it a little bit differently. There is only one set of virtues for both sexes - be it stoic virtues like wisdom, courage, justice and temperance or Christian heavenly virtues (the opposite of deadly sins) like humility, chastity, temperance, charity, kindness, patience and diligence.

Some of these virtues are gender coded, because they are more important for a given sex. For instance if large majority of women lost courage, it would be bad but manageable. But if most men lost their courage, it could be disastrous as they would fail in their role as protectors. The same let's say with kindness for women in their role of mothers and nurturers etc. But it does not mean that men should not be kind or that women should not be courageous.

What I actually think is that leftism completely warped the notion of virtues, and promotes sins instead. It literally promotes for mothers to kill their unborn babies, it promotes pride for gays, it promotes lust as a new norm and it promotes racial revenge and anger, it promotes stupidity as opposed to wisdom where women cannot be given any advise also called as mansplaining. The same goes for "boss babe" narrative - if she was a man, he would be seen as an unhinged petty tyrant, not as a brave man tempered by patience and wisdom worthy to be followed. So "epicurean liberalism" produces emasculated and emotional men as well as toxically masculine women.

In a sense it is inevitable result of leftist analysis of reducing everything to power struggle. If feminists view masculinity as strong and oppressive, while femininity was historically weak and unable to resist, they just want to flip the script, and thus they embody their warped sense of masculinity as source of power. I found this always as a weak point of many of the leftist narratives. For instance - if you are a black woman who believes that white people have privilege, does it not mean that from a pragmatic standpoint you should strive to marry a white husband, so your children can partake in power of whiteness, while black husband will only cause them more misery and adversity? It is self-defeating in that way.

It seems likely.

I even asked the allknowing AI, but it also didn’t know and rambled about him being probably used symbolically, as he was in an Ivy League but did not pursue an academic career?

From Wikipedia:

Hawley studied history at Stanford University, where his mother was an alumna. He graduated in 2002 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with highest honors and Phi Beta Kappa membership.

From the viewpoint of white liberals, I guess this means he was evidently supposed to become one of them.

Savage frames this as generation warfare rather than the racial/feminist Culture War. He and his sources cannot bring themselves to blame the women and minorities (he said he used to); no it has to be the old (Boomer/Gen X) white men who are keeping him out, and he says he doesn't even blame them any more. He has not yet learned to properly hate.

In this case, I think you're correct, and the bulk of the energy behind these particular movements comes from their beneficiaries.

But it occurs to me that this isn't always true, and some movements are made up almost entirely of "allies," with the beneficiaries playing a very small role. At the extreme, if some much-needed infrastructure project is canceled due to its potential impact on the habitat of the Desert Tortoise, this clearly isn't a power-grab by the tortoises.

The particular case I'm thinking of is the trans movement, which some (mainly feminist) opponents think is powered primarily by the force of will of XY-chromosomed trans people, when from my perspective, the main energy comes from (mostly XX-chromosomed) allies.

I'd suppose that, the fewer or less-capable the beneficiaries are, the more a movement is likely to be primarily driven by allies: I'd posit the order of some examples to go (from most beneficiary-driven to most ally-driven) feminism -> anti-racism -> gay rights -> trans rights -> animal rights/pro-life.

I actually do think there is significant room to blame white stakeholders for pulling up the ladder behind them. The most significant part of the support for affirmative action has always been from existing stakeholders, who want to reduce competition.

A lot of online rightists find it insane that any white people support affirmative action. White students are evenly split on affirmative action, despite being its putative victims. This support only increases as one reaches more selective schools, where affirmative action is harshest in action. Why is this? Because a liberal white student at Harvard Law, like the Manson family, believes so firmly and mystically in his own superiority that no white loss in a racial conflict can rattle him. He believes in his superiority as a talented white kid as firmly as he believes in gravity. He is one of the Great and the Good, his talent got him here, giving tithes to those inferior to him will only enhance his stature. After all, if I'm a white kid with a 165 LSAT who can't get into a T14, every 160 LSAT Black kid who gets in is a spot that could have been mine, I coulda been a contenda if only things were different. But if I already got in, if I'm confident that my 179 LSAT is such that I always will get in to whatever I want, then I'd rather a less qualified kid got in than a more qualified one. If you're trying to get into a class of 800, ever non-merit spot is a spot you lose, I go from having 800 chances to get in to 600 chances to get in. If I'm already in a class of 800, every non-merit spot is a kid who isn't competing with me anymore for the top spot, I go from competing to be 1/800 to competing to be 1/600. Let the Blacks push out the whites and the Asians, the Blacks won't be able to compete with me anyway. If we're all at a firm together, my pedigree and my talent are worth more the fewer people exist with my pedigree and my talent. Affirmative action at top schools is a way to narrow the field of actual competitors from that school.

Imagine as a model an elite selective law school where 800 new students are admitted every year. First 400 students are admitted on "pure merit" for LSAT scores, the top scorers are brought in automatically. Then those 400 students vote on the rules used to choose the other 400 students. The 400 students admitted on merit have no real interest in the other 400 students being admitted on merit. The kid with a 179 LSAT doesn't benefit from making sure that the kid with a 172 LSAT makes it in. The kid with a 172 is quite likely to compete with him in class for the top spots, the gap in ability isn't that large. But if he votes to admit kids on affirmative action grounds with a 160 LSAT, those kids aren't likely to compete with him. The same applies for any situation where incumbents are choosing the rules for those coming after him.

For a young white man applying to school, trying to get a job, trying to make partner, affirmative action harms him. For an old white man who already made partner, affirmative action helps him maintain his power, no young up-and-comers are coming for his crown because he makes sure that the lower levels are full of undeserving sycophantic incompetents. As corrupt leaders choose unqualified lackeys and promote them above their competence level, knowing that the lackeys will be forced to remain loyal to the leader because they can't survive on their own, so incumbents elevate diversity picks knowing that they won't threaten the current leadership, and will remain loyal to the institutions, because they owe their success to those leaders and institutions and values.

We saw this dynamic play out in the Democratic party over the past ten years. An emphasis on affirmative action in their choice of candidates left them with a thin bench, and allowed Joe Biden to become President. Joe Biden was always incompetent, but he had tenure, and by supporting minority candidates he protected himself against the rise of anyone ambitious and competent enough to supplant him. We didn't see ambitious young whites rising in the Democratic party, we saw affirmative action picks everywhere, and as a result in 2020 we wound up with the only half-competent white guy in the race winning, despite his being older than cable television. Nor would Joe have lasted as long as he did in the presidency with a competent vice president breathing down his neck.

Stunting the rise of competent competitors benefits boomer incumbents, protects them from being pushed out on an ice floe when they should be.

The 400 students admitted on merit have no real interest in the other 400 students being admitted on merit.

That's fine, so long as it stays "a few kids on college campuses". Let them vote on a single set of criteria for admission, scholarships, hiring, and promotion, and I bet they'd change their tune real quick.

The same process that puts racially-preferred students will be used again in hiring, and the top merit-based grad will be placed at the same level as the top diversity-based grad (or more likely: The top pure-merit grad will simply lose out to the top combined-merit-and-racial-preference grad). And again when it comes to promotion time: The top performer will be placed at the same level as the top racially-preferred worker.

It might be beneficial to pull the ladder up behind you, but I'd be very, very wary of doing it, even as a maximally-cynical move. The people ahead of me might start getting ideas and pull the ladder up behind them, and I'd be left behind if I can't climb faster than the trend spreads.

Imo he basically has to frame it this way to make it fit for public consumption. The normies aren't ready to turn against females and minorities, but this will shift the Overton window.

It'll shift the lines towards Millennials v. Xers (and Boomer remnants). So it'll be white male Millennials and younger plus all women and ethnic minorities working to get rid of the remaining old white guys (who will mostly be called "boomers" even if Savage is more precise). This won't work out well for the younger white guys of course, but maybe it'll be satisfying to Savage.

Yeah, that was definitely a weak point in the piece. Minorities and women clearly benefit from these discriminatory hiring practices and are often fervent advocates for their continuation and expansion, they share at least some responsibility for this situation. Old white men didn't just suddenly wake up one day and decide to throw young white men under the bus for no reason at all.

There was actually one part of the piece where he mentions it in passing:

So it came as a bit of a shock when David Austin Walsh, a Yale postdoc and left-wing Twitter personality, decided to detonate any chance he had at a career with a single tweet.

“I’m 35 years old, I’m 4+ years post-Ph.D, and—quite frankly—I’m also a white dude,” he wrote on X. “Combine those factors together and I’m for all intents and purposes unemployable as a 20th-century American historian.”

The pile-on was swift and vicious. “You are all just laughable,” wrote The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones. “Have you seen the data on professorships?” “White males are 30 percent of the US population but nearly 40 percent of faculty,” tweeted a tenured professor at GWU. “Hard to make the case for systemic discrimination.”

So maybe there is some space to hate Nikole Hannah-Joneses of this world, who adopt sneering and mocking attitude toward plight of straight white millennial men? It was probably the closest the author came to blaming somebody other than Boomer/Gen X executives implementing these DEI policies.

Also I can somewhat respect self interest from the actually diverse, but few found themselves in positions of actual genuine power so the whole thing has to be facilitated by senior white males.

Indeed. He claims that them merely making use of new opportunities available to them is their only role in this whole thing, which is clearly not the case.

The fever pitched he described in the media rooms to hire not white men was coming from the women and minorities they hired because in part the women and minorities understand they were hired because they are women and minorities.

But it explains why these institutions are failing hard.

I have trouble sympathizing with any of this. An institution's prestige comes from the people that compose it. If you're competent, the institution doesn't grant you prestige, it leeches off you to obtain prestige. If you're useless, it is the institution that grants you prestige (at the expense of its own reputation).

Take James Watson. He recently had all his stickers revoked by the "status-granting institutions" he was a member of for being a bad man and saying mean things. Guess what? I cannot name a single one of those institutions off the top of my head. But you know what name I do remember? James Watson.

The way you respond to an institution not accepting you or granting you status is just to go succeed anyway. Then the institution will suffer the reputational damage of looking like a clown for rejecting you. What you definitely should not do is fail at life and then cry publicly that the institution rejected you, because that vindicates their rejection! You are literally granting status to the institution by telling everyone they correctly rejected a failure! If you fail, at least be quiet about it, so the institution doesn't get the status boost.

This is especially accented when you consider how many successful people abandon status-granting institutions of their own will. Mark Zuckerberg was at Harvard, and apparently thought it was a waste of time, so he left. This makes Harvard suffer reputational damage (though I suppose they get credit for accepting him in the first place. But still, it's at least nominally supposed to be a school, which, ya know, is supposed to be telling you the Secrets of the Universe you need to succeed. If you just leave and succeed anyway, obviously none of those secrets were necessary). Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were also dropouts.

"Oh, well you're just choosing S-tier examples," you retort. "For regular humans, the world doesn't work like this." Ah, but check this out:

For men, the team found one correlation with GRE scores: men who scored in the top 25% of the GRE’s quantitative section were more likely to leave graduate school without a degree than men who scored in the lowest 25%.

So no, it's not just S-tier exceptions. Competent people do not need institutional blessing. Only the incompetent do.

This even plays out in the finances of institutions. If you're smart, you get scholarships to attend university--they pay you to go there! Why would someone pay you to teach you the secrets of the universe? Well, they're not. They anticipate you're going to be successful anyway, and so they pay you a bribe to waste some time with them so they can act like they took some part in it. For all the people that they don't anticipate will be successful, they charge tuition. This reputational laundering is, quite literally, the business model.

Cool, so it's okay if we took these policies and turned them on their heads? DEI for white guys? I mean, truly talented women, blacks, and browns can just succeed anyway. No biggie, right?

It should be dead obvious that being supported by the institutions of your field is better than being opposed by them. Yes, there are some people who succeed outside, but it's a much harder road they have to be that much better. And of course others fail with such opposition where they would have succeeded with support or just neutral treatment.

For men, the team found one correlation with GRE scores: men who scored in the top 25% of the GRE’s quantitative section

An interesting find, but the upshot of the article is "We should get rid of the GRE because men have an advantage in quantitative scores but no advantage in actually getting degrees". (Which I suspect is because of discrimination against them in the grad programs.) It's a call for even more enshittification of academia, and in an engineering publication no less.

ETA: He actually addresses this argument in an interview about an earlier article about white writers:

Oliver goes on to helpfully suggest that younger white men, if indeed they face institutionalized discrimination, should self-publish. Who cares about the New Yorker? A Naomi Kanakia in every kitchen, a John Pistelli in every garage!

This is just wild. Can you imagine giving that advice to any other group of people?

There's this magical idea among the Substack literati, who all appear to be deranged graphomaniacs themselves, that a True Artist will always produce work regardless of material circumstances. But do you really think Philip Roth or John Updike or Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith would have published dozens of novels between them if they couldn't make a living at it? And while we're here: if Tony Tulathimutte, whose writing both Henry Oliver and I both adore, hadn't been able to publish Private Citizens with William Morrow in 2016 — what would have happened? If he'd found himself ever-so-slightly further offsides the Maginot line of identity and a mainstream publisher hadn't picked up his début, do you really think we'd all have read Rejection in 2024?

There's this magical idea among the Substack literati, who all appear to be deranged graphomaniacs themselves, that a True Artist will always produce work regardless of material circumstances. But do you really think Philip Roth or John Updike or Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith would have published dozens of novels between them if they couldn't make a living at it?

I don´t mean to be overly hyperbolic, of course. But even back in Ye Olden Days, yeah, great writers were often persecuted. John Locke fled England on fear of his life. John Bunyan wrote much of Pilgrim's Progress from prison.

Today, with the advent of the internet, it's much easier. Fuentes had his bank accounts and credit cards locked, was put on a no-fly list, and booted from every major social media platform. Has that stopped him?

Or take all the AAA video game producers that have been ideologically captured. So what? Just make your own studio! Clair Obscur just won game of the year! And the runners up were like... Hollow Knight: Silksong (produced by a grand total of 3 people, if my knowledge serves me right) and Hades 2. You really can just Do Things, and out-play people with orders of magnitude more institutional privilege.

Anyway, the other thing I wanted to highlight with my post is that complaining about institutional capture is a really bad battle tactic. I won't contend that fighting to retake institutions is a bad idea (though it's not the sort of thing that inspires anything in me personally). It's probably a good idea. But complaining that you don't like the status-granting institutions lends them more status, because it looks like they correctly kept all the losers out. For anyone seeking to go on their own Long March to retake the institutions, you need a more compelling battle cry than "No, no, you can't refuse to accept me, my test scores were good!" I propose something akin to Harry Potter's line when he retook Hogwarts: "How dare you stand where he stood!"

Like the double edged sword of the Internet more broadly --- the crushing dichotomy of endless slop and almost the complete collective knowledge of mankind at your fingertips --- the tools are there for you and a couple friends to go produce, say, movies with effects that surpass Kubrick's with a much larger budget. Blender is free (and Academy Award winning!). Camera equipment is smaller and lighter and cheaper. LED lighting can run on batteries.

And yet, nobody that I've found is producing well-written, compelling movies on shoestring budgets that actually get eyes, while Netflix keeps churning out heaps of slop with the odd gem tossed in (KPop Demon Hunters was enjoyable). I'm really not sure what to make of it: maybe there is a stochastic element of movie magic that requires the stars to align for a good product and lots projects to produce a hit, or maybe it takes the collective will to power and collective experience of something like the Hollywood juggernauts to push to finish projects well. Or maybe it's happening, but not in genres I follow: are we in a low-budget horror Renaissance? Or it's a change in dynamic to creators of short-form videos?

And the same is true of other mainstream media. I suppose there are a few breakout hits on Substack or various podcasts, so maybe it's happening and we're just not noticing.

Movies in particular, no, but there's an enormous amount of quality video content produced on shoestring budgets on YouTube. NileRed, 3Blue1Brown, Adam Ragusea, Practical Engineering etc.. It's not just a handful of people: there are many channels on a myriad of topics, produced by people who as far as I can tell have no major studio backing. It's just regular people with cameras, doing stuff they find interesting and showing other people.

I'd wager this "industry" already dwarfs legacy producers of similar content.

I don't think there's anything stopping people from producing movies, the will just isn't there for whatever reason. But It's been done before: The Blair Witch Project was a successful low-budget film, and it managed to achieve fame even without the help of internet video distribution!

As for writing, there's SlateStarCodex, which was just a guy who decided to make a website to publish his writings. It was pretty big once upon a time, so I hear. He wrote a book, too!

The Blair Witch Project was a successful low-budget film, and it managed to achieve fame even without the help of internet video distribution!

The Blair Witch Project is a special case because being low budget is inherently part of the story, which alleviates most of the problems caused by having to be low budget. This doesn't generalize.

Because the larger organizations are on watch for such and will likely move to crush them.

Astartes sits in my mind as an example of this. It was a single person passion project that blew people away for how good it was and got more people interested in Warhammer 40K than anything Games Workshop ever did. So what did GW do? Bought the guy out and basically hid him away from doing anything.

Taking out competition is trivial when you have the resources and advantages to do it.

Sure. You can just do things works well for selecting the super agentic out of a large population reservoir. But not having email jobs available for the population reservoir over a generation or two destroys the population reservoir.

When we put a man on the moon maybe there were 10 kings and a thousand perfect math SAT white dudes doing the calculations by hand. The next generation kings probably see 1 king from the prior 10 kings and 9 kings from the 1000 white dudes just showing up to work everyday.

This is a level of indifference that would never be applied to any other group in a modern context. "Oh, you think blacks are discriminated against in publishing? Well MLK Jr and Nelson Mandela wrote from jail, why can't you succeed? You think women are discriminated against? Jane Austen made it in a man's world. Gay people are getting the short end? Oscar Wilde did fine and Alan Turing made a name for himself even while being chemically castrated".

People respond this way because they are white supremacists, they just aren't conscious of it.

I was going to reply to Soteriologian with somewhat similar. The right phrases it to sometimes sound like a white man will never be hired again. The left will claim this is all made up and point to some really specific stats like programming being overwhelmingly men (women don't even try to go into programming at nearly the same levels) or X% of a field is still white men (even though many got the job before DEI initiatives ramped up). But there definitely is a finger on the scales towards non white man. Success is a spectrum, not a binary. The geniuses of any generation can succeed against a headwind. But for those who are around average talent to somewhat above average, having the resources to get off the ground can be huge. Hollow Knight was made by a handful of people, but in order to do that they need a stable job with time to spare to work on personal projects.

We really need to do a "you halves he picks" analysis on these types of proposals. You guys define just how hard the millstone of racial and sexual discrimination grinds on the have-nots, but I get to pick who they are. If it's truly no big deal, you won't mind it pressing down on women and minorities, right?

Every so often, someone rediscovers the original position.

Which I suspect is because of discrimination against them in the grad programs.

Uh, does it control for degree program? Lower-scoring individuals are usually less likely to go into difficult programs, and thus finish.

This is true, but goes too far. Watson did his actual research i.e. his succeeding in the university, because that's where the equipment, the mentorship and the funding was. You cannot strike out and make it on your own as a particle physicist.

It is the case though that pushing people out of the high-status established sinecures can lead to good results in the long term, as long as the new shoots are allowed to grow.

Watson did his actual research i.e. his succeeding in the university, because that's where the equipment, the mentorship and the funding was. You cannot strike out and make it on your own as a particle physicist.

This is true, but the institution also wasn't averse to competent people at that time. If it were, he probably would have left and gone somewhere else, as many competent people have done recently.

And yes, I do concede that universities have access to funding. But as the Trump administration is showing, you can just... not fund them anymore if you think they're full of nonsense. Plus, private funding is abundant these days, and hungry for talent. There's far more money than there is talent. Thiel himself just threw a bunch of money at a chip startup that was a complete scam (and should have been transparently so from the outset): he clearly wants to given money to talented people, there just aren't enough of them in his contact list.

This is true, but the institution also wasn't averse to competent people at that time. If it were, he probably would have left and gone somewhere else, as many competent people have done recently.

The fact that an institution (namely King's) was averse to competent women at the time was utterly fundamental to the story of DNA. Franklin was in the process of winding up her research on DNA and moving to Birckbeck at the time Watson and Crick made their discovery, which was a clear downgrade in institution quality and a move she would not have made if she had felt welcome at King's. It isn't clear how much the issue was pervasive sexism vs. pervasive anti-semitism.

But as the Trump administration is showing, you can just... not fund them anymore if you think they're full of nonsense.

Funny you mention that:

Defendants are ENJOINED and/or STAYED from refusing to grant, non-renewing, withholding, freezing, suspending, terminating, conditioning, or otherwise restricting use of federal funds, or threatening to do so, to the University of California (“UC”), defined to include any of its campuses, laboratories, and affiliated medical centers...

courtlistener here.

Plus, private funding is abundant these days, and hungry for talent. Thiel himself just threw a bunch of money at a chip startup that was a complete scam (and should have been transparently so from the outset): he clearly wants to given money to talented people, there just aren't enough of them in his contact list.

The advantage of the conventional educational system, and of government grants in general, is just how damn much money is thrown out there, while its results and evaluations are monitored only on the largest scales at any politically responsive level.

UC, as a specific example, gets several billion, as in starting with a B dollars in federal funding per year for research alone. When UC throws money at a complete scam, or has its staff or students commit overt fraud, these are genuinely nutpicks.

By contrast, Peter Thiel could, if he liquidated his entire fortune, do that perhaps for four years. Not, you know, in reality, but if we replace economics with a frictionless spherical cow, it's kinda close.

In the real world, his foundation gives out less than five million per year, and I don't say that as a criticism. I couldn't quickly find out his stake in Substrate, the chip scam you mention, but it's probably not a large portion of the 100m USD that Substrate has been dick-waving as its seed fund. This is Thiel's Solyndra, perhaps! (Wasn't Solyndra 500m+ USD in government-supported loans?) This is Thiel's A123 Systems!

Actually, it's worse than even that: a lot of the evaluation protocols have been absolutely braincored themselves. I can't give the full rant without self-doxxing, but suffice it to say actually interesting with these groups seriously will turn your stomach.

So the real answer is that a successful buyer must have a solution to reliably cut through all of this mess and evaluate decisions several orders of magnitude more reliably than government funding, or a successful seller have so clear a product and vision - and marketing capabilities and acceptable presentation and everything else - as to resolve all of those issues for them.

Otherwise, it's a game of dice.

The advantage of the conventional educational system, and of government grants in general, is just how damn much money is thrown out there

I guess, but in a world of technology, even a tiny amount of empowered talent can compete with an ocean of well-funded incompetence. Telegram famously has like 30 employees, and it's one of the largest social platforms on the planet.

Regarding Thiel & co, it's honestly kinda baffling to me how much worse they've gotten with selecting people to fund in recent years. They used to be much better at identifying talent. Take Vitalik Buterin. We can debate whether Ethereum is a scam or not, but it is certainly extremely successful, and Vitalik himself is not a grifter: he is very gifted technically. He has good knowledge of cryptography, and has written extensively on it.

Similarly, take this recent tweet by Paul Graham. I agree with him, but it's a frankly baffling admission: are you seriously conceding that none of the people in charge of distributing large amounts of money know anything about how technology actually works? You don't think, maybe, you could get some actual electrical engineers and high-tier software developers on your staff instead of a bunch of socialites and wordcels? It legit boggles my mind.

Then again, the website I'm typing this on barely loads half of the time I try to visit, so apparently running a small forum requires S-tier talent these days.

That's a fantastic article, thanks for sharing.

It really does feel like an inflection point was crossed then- there was always affirmative action and PC stuff, but suddenly a huge cohort of people in power were aggressively pushing queer women of color at the expense of white males. You might say "this won't affect you if you don't work in the liberal arts" but it does, because it then affects all culture everywhere. And yes, for a long time it was like we couldn't talk about it for fear of retribution. Hell, it's telling that all of his sources still want to stay anonymous, even when they've moved on to other industries. It must have been a huge effort to find any real data and sources for all this stuff.

It's funny. They always said that they "wanted to start a national conversation about diversity." Well, now they're getting it... I just don't think it's the one they wanted. I feel like there's a sea change where even the most clueless white guys are starting to wake up and realize that woke liberals are a danger to them. And we're all becoming hyper-conscious of our race in a way that would have been unimaginable to me as a 90s kid.

You might say "this won't affect you if you don't work in the liberal arts" but it does, because it then affects all culture everywhere. And yes, for a long time it was like we couldn't talk about it for fear of retribution. Hell, it's telling that all of his sources still want to stay anonymous, even when they've moved on to other industries. It must have been a huge effort to find any real data and sources for all this stuff.

I agree. One example is that as of 2025 Hollywood experienced the lowest grossing October since 1997. And that is in nominal dollar terms not counting for inflation. And even that is worsened by the phenomenon of runaway production, where a lot of movies are produced outside of LA and California and it is even worse for other productions such as TV shows. This is the result of years of bad movies, which has huge impacts for other professions - stuntmen, people constructing sets, technicians and thousands of other people completely outside of Culture War origin of the current malaise in Hollywood.

I don’t think the main reason for Hollywood’s decline is bad movies, but rather the fact that it now has to compete with streaming, YouTube, TikTok, etc.

What’s the point of going out of your way to the cinema when already you have more movies than you could ever watch available at home, and whatever’s playing in theatres will be available online in 4K HDR whatever in a few weeks anyway?

This looks more like a covid effect than anything else.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/187069/north-american-box-office-gross-revenue-since-1980/?srsltid=AfmBOor6tecObPA5tRc_JKDIPNPgPpqw1hZkfT697In9AZWdB5RYJdJL

He said October 2025, that's not included on your chart. How is covid supposed to affect that anyway?

Box office revenues have been dropping since covid (as seen on the chart). Assuming the trend continues past 2024, it's hardly surprising that one month would turn out abnormally bad and be the worst such month for a long time.

How does covid affect box office revenues? I don't know man, the last movie I saw in a theater was Oppenheimer. Perhaps people, having not gone to the movies during lockdown, simply decided that it's overrated.

In any case, I don't think that a priori you would expect that Hollywood's wokeness would only catch up to it only in 2020, although I'm sure a sufficiently motivated reasoner could make the case.

Looking at netflix subscriber numbers, there is no drop like we see in box office sales despite the median Netflix release generally being way more shitty and pozzed than the median theatre movie. So I really don't think this is a story of "get woke go broke" at all.

In any case, I don't think that a priori you would expect that Hollywood's wokeness would only catch up to it only in 2020, although I'm sure a sufficiently motivated reasoner could make the case.

There was a massive acceleration of wokeness in 2020, related to George Floyd. You don't need much motivation to see that.

I included the next paragraph to (futilely) head off such sufficiently motivated reasoners.

Looking at netflix subscriber numbers, there is no drop like we see in box office sales despite the median Netflix release generally being way more shitty and pozzed than the median theatre movie.

Somehow, the theory is that people are disgusted by wokeslop in theatres, but happy to gulp it down at home. Perhaps the counterclaim will be that people pay for Netflix but don't watch it, or only watch it in the background.

Netflix has a lot of eg older shows people bingewatch, or dirt-cheap apolitical 'reality' brainrot that premiered on boomer cable networks to fill airtime. And, demonstrably, people like that stuff.

People watch a lot of stuff on netflix besides their bespoke wokeslop. Box office numbers are entirely dependent on their new releases.

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a lot of movies are produced outside of LA and California

Isn't that just a simple case of corporate outsourcing?

Sure, you can put it into the general deindustrialization narrative where corporations outsource their work. But the difference is, that there is a danger even for domestic corporations. One huge canary in the coalmine is the current state of gaming industry, where large woke studios such as Ubisoft experienced similar decline in sales often attributed to "woke" influences. As a result we see a lot of foreign studios such as Chinese giant Tencent producing successful games replacing these domestic behemoths. One other example is Japanese studio Square Enix axing their western branches lately.

So my argument is that overall "get woke go broke" narrative pushed by executives and other managers can have rippling effects for general more conservative workforce let's say.

They always said that they "wanted to start a national conversation about diversity."

This is a completely BS term just like the one about needing to start a "conversation about race [i.e. blackness]". What is promoted is not conversation but exhortation and secular evangelisation.

I still feel genuinely uncomfortable being super-sensitive to racial politics even as I realize "huh, I guess a lot of people do despise me just because I'm white."

Like, to the extent almost every other ethnic group has massive bias toward people who share their genetic makeup, the only viable strategy in response is to assume any individual of said group I encounter is biased against me until proven otherwise. It feels like I'm sitting there thinking "Okay, I know what stereotypes I'm expecting you to conform to... please please please don't confirm them."

After a certain point, the heuristics just prove too useful to ignore.

I read things like this and remain grounded by the successful young white men in my family buying homes and having kids. Are they in prestige jobs? Partly. One is a corporate lawyer in San Francisco. Blonde, blue-eyed. He hasn't been shut out. My other brethren aren't working in anything prestigious, but they're doing something even better: starting families.

  • -10

It's amazing how bad humans are at understanding probabilities. The existence of some successful white men doesn't mean there is no widespread discrimination against white men, any more than the existence of successful black women tells us that racism against blacks is fake.

Affirmative action's impact is by its nature stochastic, but as the old Democratic campaign line goes when you are out of work the unemployment rate is 100% for you. It's not that every white man makes 20% less, it's that some percentage of white men will be unable to get a job or a promotion or a project completed, while the rest move through their lives normally. If I'm at a law firm that commits itself to diversity in the partner ranks, it's not that I'll be paid less because I'm white when I'm an associate, or paid less if I make partner, it's that when I come up for partner I might draw the short straw and be up as the same time as a black guy or an Asian girl and get shafted.

Sure, but no white man is all white men simultaneously. Additionally, people getting blackpilled reading this kind of shit need to keep things in perspective.

  • -10

These are fully generalisable arguments against ever caring about anything ever, though.

Holocaust? Well, the Jews in Israel are fine.

Rwanda? Some of them make it, no Tutsi can be all Tutsis.

Fired without cause? Well, my brother still has a job.

The whole point of the article is that actually a lot of people are having serious difficulties. You can decide how much you personally care, and to be glad for your own good fortune, but you are not rescuing people by persuading them that their troubles don't exist. There is a spectrum between 'full blackpill' and 'this is fine', and the clear proof for massive discrimination at all levels really ought to be nudging you a bit further along IMO. I have personally seen people I care about fail to launch because of exactly this kind of stuff.

"Massive discrimination at all levels."

But it's not all levels. I don't think that for the vast majority of people these troubles do exist. And it certainly doesn't involve MURDER per your examples, where it does. Most of us are exposed to non-prestigious jobs where actual merit does in fact apply. Got a clean driving record? Voila, you're a pizza dude. It's a big, complicated, growing, non-zero sum economy where there's lots of opportunity.

I think my lack of professional success - or even much caring about it - is why I'm less bitter than the software engineers on this site who feel hectored by women of color with soft degrees.

But it's not all levels. I don't think that for the vast majority of people these troubles do exist.

I don't get how you can think that unless you ignore every single official pronouncement about how hard they're working to employ 'diverse' candidates, the massively changing demographics of your society as foreigners are bussed in to drive down wages, being told by practically every single person here that they've seen this stuff...

Some blackpills are very definitely up for interpretation: for example the people worried about the covid vaccine have to interpret certain things about the evidence, how pharma works, how vaccines work, etc. to come to the conclusions they have. Anti-white discrimination is different. They boast about it on every channel possible! People can't wait to tell you how hard they're discriminating against white men! I can't help thinking you are so keen not to be blackpilled that you're putting your fingers in your ears.

Beyond that, let's say you're right. Maybe the pizza dudes are fine. (I doubt it, I've seen the demographics.) It still means that white people are being given an incredibly hard time in better paying areas. Personally, I worked very hard to get into a good school, and then very hard to get into a good university, and then very hard to get into a good PhD and then very hard to get a good job. And at every stage, they clearly and loudly said that it was a shame they had so many white men, and they discussed what could be done to make sure that people like me weren't doing the kind of stuff I'm doing. You couldn’t see the noticeboards under signs about women’s mentorship groups and women’s leadership groups and female-only funding opportunities.

All indications are that it’s starting to work. My friends and colleagues are really struggling to get new jobs. The cohort under me, including my own relations, are having huge trouble and some of them are failing to launch completely. Good for you if you’ve found another way to live your life, but ‘just deliver pizza, bro, it’s not hard,’ frankly isn’t good enough.

Personally, I worked very hard to get into a good school, and then very hard to get into a good university, and then very hard to get into a good PhD and then very hard to get a good job.

Yea, see, I didn't. I'm not of that class, so I don't see what you're talking about. It's been a unified front of multiracial peons railing against a multiracial management my whole life, in jobs that are easy to get, for anyone, and easy to dispose of. Or put it another way: the generalized shitty, Kafkaesque labor experience from behind a colorblind Rawlsian veil is far, far more salient for me as I suspect is for most.

I don't find this an impossible to understand perspective, I do find it a rather odd perspective for someone hanging around this place to have. If you truly can't be bothered about systemic discrimination against your racial group then I'm tempted to say "don't worry about it kitten". Like what are you even doing here? Go have a slice and a brew and let the rest of us sort the big problems out.

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Do you expect arguments against discrimination to ever hold water in any context, ever again?

Sure. Here's an example: I bring home a non-white girlfriend, dad is apoplectic. I say chill out, race doesn't matter.

There goes "any context"

Let me attempt to be more precise, then. Do you expect arguments against societal-level discrimination to continue to hold water?

Perhaps not. I'm a small man, and I keep my identity small. I only think in terms of very direct and overt discrimination, of the everyman sort, hence "dad won't let my black girlfriend come to dinner."

Would it surprise you to learn that arguments about discrimination, concern over those arguments, and actions taken to address those concerns have been a notable driver of sociopolitical change in our society for at least the last century?

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"I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon."

I'm surely less successful than almost everyone here. I make 16 an hour part time (and even that's going away in two weeks), childless, single, in my 40s. And yet I'm less doomer than the lot o' ya

I read things like this and remain grounded by the successful young white men in my family buying homes and having kids. Are they in prestige jobs? Partly. One is a corporate lawyer in San Francisco. Blonde, blue-eyed. He hasn't been shut out. My other brethren aren't working in anything prestigious, but they're doing something even better: starting families.

I would agree that at an individual level, there are still plenty of opportunities for young white men, perhaps more than ever before. At a societal level, though, this sort of discrimination is both counterproductive and wrong.

At any rate, I would definitely advise young white men in the US to avoid career paths such as academia where it's impossible to get ahead without being dependent on large institutions.

At a societal level, though, this sort of discrimination is both counterproductive and wrong.

This article reinforces one of the theses I encountered on Red Pill sites. Namely: if you elevate the relative social status of young hetero single men, it’ll incentivize them to pair-bond, marry and have children. Thus the marriage rate and the birthrate will grow, the average age of both men and women at first marriage will drop, and men will become more economically productive on average. This is what happened in the US after WW2, for example. If you do the opposite, you’ll get the opposite of all of this, which is what we’ve been seeing throughout the West for decades.

Namely: if you elevate the relative social status of young hetero single men, it’ll incentivize them to pair-bond, marry and have children.

We really do need a proper survey done of 20-25 year old men asking them "so, do you want to get a job, settle down, marry one woman and have three kids with her, I mean right now, not in ten or fifteen years time?"

Shakespeare for one didn't think the young hetero single men of his day were eager to settle down to domestic responsibility the very first chance they got:

I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest, for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting—Hark you now. Would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather? They have scared away two of my best sheep, which I fear the wolf will sooner find than the master.

  1. You're all making it too complicated. Do you agree that the status of young women relative to young men is higher than it ever was? How's the fertility? I'm not saying correlation is causation, but it's certainly worth a shot.

  2. Men's 'domesticity' (ie, money they give women, some help) is not actually necessary for reproduction in our age of abundance. Not that it matters, because

  3. What men want is irrelevant, since women control the reproductive bottleneck both legally and biologically. So the whole TFR debate is just a woman-convincing enterprise. And I think it would help fertility to convince them they are not God's gift to humanity, and no, the teacher's praise, and the AA spots they snag are not actual proof they are as wonderful as they think they are. It seems obvious to me. What's the alternative? I don't know how much more praise we can heap onto women, and contempt onto men. Have you looked at Hollywood lately? But does anyone believe that more of this effusive praise will make them reproduce?

Men ran away as fast as they could from marriage and child-rearing during the Sexual Revolution. So this is reaping what was sowed - oh, women are now on the Pill and other contraceptive devices and don't have to get pregnant if they engage in sex outside of marriage, and indeed we WANT women to engage in sex outside of marriage because then they're not baby-trapping men and tying them down?

Well, here come consequences, boys.

Men ran away as fast as they could from marriage and child-rearing during the Sexual Revolution.

Where's the evidence for this? For your argument to be true, stats would have to prove that men were filing the majority of divorces and were the ones driving the overall delay of marriage and parenthood. As far as I can tell, the opposite of this is actually true.

Do you have anything besides blaming men for everything and women for nothing, based on your personal feeling? You're not even presenting some solution, you're just gloating about things being shit. For everyone. Haha I burned the house down.

I've long concluded that it's largely impossible to have a clear-headed, rational conversation about these issues with women.

What men want is irrelevant, since women control the reproductive bottleneck both legally and biologically.

Women who have less kids than they claim to want say the thing stopping them reproducing is a lack of male investment. (I am including "started too late because I married late" as lack of male investment even though the proximate cause of not having more kids is age-related infertility.)

As a matter of physical reality, your point 2 is correct - women can reproduce without male investment. But to do so is very low status, just as it always has been. In practice, it is also dependent on a system of government transfers - raising kids in third-world poverty is illegal for good reasons, and you can't raise kids in first-world poverty as a single mother on a lower-middle-class salary without supplementing it with child support or government bennies.

I note that the political faction that is most worried about falling fertility wants to dismantle the public subsidies for single mothers and reinforce the systems that make them low-status. Nobody who thinks low fertility is a problem thinks encouraging single women to pop out more bastards is the solution.

I am including "started too late because I married late" as lack of male investment

On what basis, may I ask?

If a woman planning to get married and have children eventually ends up with fewer children than she wants because she marries late and ages out of her fertility window, then the ultimate cause of having too few children is failure to marry younger. In other words she was unable or unwilling to secure the necessary male investment at a time when it would have made more difference.

The point I am making is that, assuming you accept that women are at least directionally truthful about how many children they actually want and why they didn't have that many, is that the problem lies in the relationship between men and women, not the behaviour of women in isolation. While true as a matter of biology, @Tintin's point that women don't need anything valuable from men (sperm is cheap) to reproduce is irrelevant in practice given that respectable working class and above women don't reproduce without male investment, and society doesn't want them to.

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I do, if they are of sufficient quality. You heard the hubbub about chinese millionaires paying dozens of american models to give birth to their kids? Those smart, rich, handsome kids have great net expected value to the state and to existing americans.

The problem with single moms is not that they're single moms; it's that they're poor and stupid, and their kids will be poor and stupid. The single mom who takes care of a millionaire's kid is fine.

Women who have less kids than they claim to want say the thing stopping them reproducing is a lack of male investment.

Yes, obviously they want more money, like the lawyer in Idiocracy. We have given them an awful lot already (legal and economic protections up the wazoo, free pointless education so they can have fun, free sinecures that look like prestigious jobs, 24/7 cultural programming blasting their awesomeness, etc), more than anyone ever had, and in return they have produced less and less children. When you're in a hole, stop digging.

But to do so is very low status, just as it always has been.

Right, it's more of a psychological problem that women have to overcome, nothing to do with resources. Certainly, giving women in general more status, like we've been doing, is not going to help, since status is relative. I am fine with raising the status of single moms who produce quality citizens, and its corollary, diminishing the status of voluntarily barren women. Although I'm not a big believer in 'changing status' solutions. I want laws changed, to be less (unfairly!) favourable to women.

If the single professional woman gets less goodies, the married and single mom will get more (relatively), creating an incentive to pair-up, because it's still easier to do the mom thing with dad help. I know the pro-fertility position gets caricatured as 'forcing women to breed' or something, but all I want is to take our hand off the scale favouring women, and let women freely choose from the fallen chips.

Let's try to make it simple: Women have three choices:

  1. professional childless woman

  2. single mother

  3. married mother

There are easy, cheap and fair ways to encourage option 3.

Cut off AA, scholarships, anti-discrimination law, free college, that encourage 1.

Make divorce fairer to the working partner by making the default 50/50 custody, no alimony etc , to encourage women to stay married.

You could limit welfare to single moms more, to get them from 2 to 3 - That's the idea of conservatives you criticize, although I personally I prefer outcome 2 to 1, so I'm not really on board.

The problem with single moms is not that they're single moms; it's that they're poor and stupid, and their kids will be poor and stupid. The single mom who takes care of a millionaire's kid is fine.

You're missing another failure mode, one very much inherent in single parenting and in some ways worsened by social justice.

Specifically, that there's no easy way to spot abuse in a single parent. There's by definition no other adult in the household, and abused kids have trouble noticing that their parent is a psycho because they have little basis of comparison and are highly susceptible to frame control (the single parent does, after all, have a very-large degree of control over the kid's environment and can argue circles around him/her).

I say that this is in some ways worsened by social justice because, well, social justice feminism does not exactly teach mothers not to abuse their sons, and it does tend to try to direct the police at the wrong target if and when they do become involved, complicating the issue even after official attention is drawn.

(I was starved as a teenager for the "sexist abuse" of "standing over" my foot-shorter mum. Eventually I went stark raving mad and started threatening to topple bookcases, she started dialing the police, I wrestled the phone away from her in a panic, she fled, and of course eventually she made it to a phone and the police reduced me to tears with a lecture about how I was going to grow up into a wifebeater and they expected most of my life to be spent in prisons and halfway houses (well, after making me put on underpants; I wasn't kidding about "stark"). Now, the fallout of that was actually mostly good - specifically, it was enough of a blowup that everybody working my case switched from "keep things from exploding" mode to "find me somewhere else to live" mode, and I wasn't actually arrested - and it's hard to blame the police given she wasn't lying (just delusional) and I was badly brainwashed to the point that I thought I was at least in large part in the wrong; spotting that in a short encounter is not actually trivial. But, y'know, I'd rather not make that situation, or that bad call by the police, happen more than necessary.)

Ah, well. I guess there's nothing to be done. Men too awful. Good for nothing. Never did well. How could we ever hope to build a demographically stable future while carrying such worthless dead weight?

Hey, good reason to go for broke with longevity right? Maybe I can find support here for my $100T regenerative medicine campaign. Men being impossible isn't a problem if they're unnecessary for securing the future.

Chin up, if AI works out as everyone is hoping, we're all unnecessary for securing the future, the transhumanists who are happy to be replaced by our superior silicon descendants will win, and neither men, women, nor others will survive the Great Robot Purge.

I think you know that surveys don't mean a thing in this context, at least not in the way you imagine. The current feminized world is all that 20-25 year old men - or their fathers, for that matter - have ever known and most of them cannot imagine any other, they don't grok what it'd mean. Either way, you as a woman(?) are probably also affected by the apex fallacy, which is why you'd probably be surprised by many of the answers to that survey.

Whether very early twenties men want to do this or not, it does demonstrably work- the military achieves a very high marriage and fertility rate with its population of, mostly, extremely young males from working class backgrounds.

The same working class background that a certain commentator likes to sneer about. And that our society has spent a lot of time over the past decades trying to shift the culture to "we're all middle-class now", and which has been successfully gutted so that the vices, but damn few of the virtues, of that background survive.

I'm constantly astounded by how much I find myself agreeing with Shoe0nhead, even when I disagree very strongly with other beliefs of hers; see this recent video, where she talks about how she grew up and now how her kids will grow up, starting at 17.01 here.

The military achieves a high marriage rate by legislating benefits for married servicemen.

Most businesses tend to give better benefits towards men who are married, even if it isn't explicit. This can involve promotions or better opportunities (as married men tend to be seen as more stable or more reliable), better financial compensation (as the man is "providing for a family"), or better work-life balance (the number of times I've been asked to work late or on holidays while my married coworkers get to go home early is way too high).

Those are unspoken or indirect or accrue over time, the military gives benefits immediately upon marriage for the act of marriage.

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In terms of fuckoverability when it comes to work-life balance (e.g., dumping an urgent task on someone and wrecking their night or weekend)—or fuckoverability in general—the rank-order I’ve seen over the years, holding seniority/age equal:

  1. Single man. He likely has nothing better to do and if he does have plans who cares, so fuck him. If anything, he should be grateful for the extra opportunity to contribute.

  2. Married man, no children. The victim here is the poor wife who may have her plans disrupted.

  3. Married man with children. We’re basically doing him a favor by giving him an excuse to be out of the house. The victim here is the poor wife who has to perform even more childcare-related physical and Emotional Labor.

  4. Single woman. What kind of jerk would be so MEAN as to disrupt the FUN that she has planned? We should find someone else who better has the bandwidth to take this on.

  5. Married woman, no children. Similar to 4. We should find someone else who better has the bandwidth to take this on.

  6. Married woman with children. What kind of monster would interfere with a brave working mother’s work-life balance? We should find someone else who better has the bandwidth to take this on.

Where the biggest gap between contiguous ranks is that between 3. and 4. The smallest one, to the extent it exists, is between 4. and 5. and the rank-order there can arguably be even inverted.

And these marriages are attractive to local women because the status of soldiers is boosted.

I'm not sure that's true. I don't think soldiers have a higher rate of being paired off than guys the same age that work at Wal Mart, but Walmart doesn't instantly pay their young male workers thousands of dollars extra for getting married.

Soldiers also have higher divorce rates than civilians.

If we made it a national policy to pay everyone thousands extra for getting married, instantly, we'd raise the marriage rate. I'm not sure that's increasing the status of young men, exactly, just paying people to get married.

Shakespeare has been dead for almost 510 years; I doubt he knows much about the modern situation. Anyway, it's certainly not clear that the particular cantankerous character you quote represented Shakespeare's views. He has young men who do want to (or do) get married.

500 years ago they were getting the wenches with child but not marrying said wenches; today they don't have to get them with child because contraception and abortion.

Most young men want to have fun, sow their wild oats, and then settle down. Even in the 19th century, they didn't want to be tied down, and ironically often those who did want to marry had to wait a long time for economic stability to do so, or even that their employers discouraged marriage as taking their attention away from the job.

This is classic apex fallacy. You are looking at the tiny slice of men who were some combination of rich, powerful, and charming enough to sow their wild oats, and completely ignoring the huge mass of men for whom marriage was their only chance at getting regular sex.

Do not make me go dig out mediaeval illegitimacy and prostitution rates.

Okay, early modern period, which is very roughly 16th-18th century. Someone has done work on that, and probably plenty more as well. But if you are trying to tell me the vast majority of men, historically, have been doomed to die kissless virgins if they could not find a wife... then we must have the heavens full of saints in spite of themselves!

In the Late Middle Ages, a third of the population was probably born extramaritally. From 1400 to 1600, the illegitimacy ratio dropped markedly, but from 1650 to 1850, it seems to have gradually risen from around 5 to 9% in most European states.

"A third of the population" would cover "had the baby first then the wedding" as well as "never got married", but one third? That's a heck of a lot of men not getting regular sex if they didn't have wives yet managing to father children!

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Even Shakespeare's cantankerous shepherd put the end of that period at 23. Anyway, in practice leaving bastards all over the country was a privilege of the aristocracy.

Namely: if you elevate the relative social status of young hetero single men, it’ll incentivize them to pair-bond, marry and have children.

For me (as a conservative) that's one of those claims that's "too good to check." i.e. I really would like to believe it.

That being said, I agree that there is a decent amount of evidence to support this, for example:

  1. The Swedish lottery study, which apparently found that when a man wins the lottery, he is more likely to get married and stay married; when a woman wins the lottery she is more likely to divorce.

  2. Ultra-Orthodox religious groups in the US, such as Haredi Jews and the Amish. In both of those groups, young men have a good path to obtain social status (in Judaism, by means of religious study; among the Amish, by working the land).

  3. The evidence is pretty good that when seeking a long-term partner, most women have a strong instinct to "marry up," i.e. to prefer someone of higher status than themselves.

So yeah, I could definitely see that (1) taking traditionally male pathways to social status and opening them up to women; and (2) substantially closing those pathways to a lot of men by giving women preferential treatment would have a negative impact on birth rates and such. How big of a factor it is, I don't know. But I do think that the kind of society which is wise enough to avoid getting caught up in runaway gynocentrism would be a much better place for everyone, male and female.

Exactly. Delaying graduates getting their first meaningful job is liable to snowball

As is the overall delay of parenthood.

"I read things like how cigarettes cause cancer and remain grounded by my family's good health. None of the smokers in my family have gotten lung cancer. Even my grandfather, who smoked a pack a day, didn't die of any smoking related causes."

And his examples are: TV writing, editorial staff of swanky East Coast publications, and tenure track humanities professors at Ivy League schools (not just tenure track professors at Ivy League schools; tenure track humanities professors). I'm sorry, but if your professional success rides on getting any of these positions, you need to reevaluate how realistic your goals are. These are high-paying positions in competitive fields; there's a good chance that you're not getting the job regardless of what the DEI policies of the employer are. Why doesn't he talk about budget analysts for a regional logistics company, or Civil Engineer II at a national contractor that mostly does electric transmission infrastructure, or purchasing agent for a company that manufactures forklift parts? You know, the kinds of jobs that most people apply for with a realistic chance of getting.

  • -20

Civil Engineer II at a national contractor

I work for a company that takes federal contracts. I've been involved in multiple interviews in the last four years.

I can't give you exact numbers, but I can tell you that less than one candidate in 20 who makes it through the HR filter is a white guy.

I was running grad hiring for a gambling company of all the things with a 95% male application rate and still got substantial pressure to hire a 50-50 gender split

You know, usually I appreciate you pushing back against the righties here, but this is weak.

The argument is not that high-paying and prestigious positions are now stacked against white men (although even if it was "just" those positions, how is that comforting?). The argument is that there are industry-wide trends in this direction.

Speaking as someone closer to those lower-level positions you mentioned, I can say that the government and many private companies definitely (at least until 2024) had "diversity" as a major element in hiring and promotion decisions, and to some degree still do. Does that mean a white guy had no shot at a budget analyst or a Civil Engineer II position? No, but it meant if you were competing against a "diverse" candidate, everyone knew who would get preferential consideration. It's not like it's an automatic "the black guy gets the job," we just all know in some departments that there is a certain Way Things Are...

Why doesn't he talk about budget analysts for a regional logistics company, or Civil Engineer II at a national contractor that mostly does electric transmission infrastructure, or purchasing agent for a company that manufactures forklift parts?

You have no idea how pozzed the hiring process is for these jobs at any globohomo megacorporation. The black lesbian candidates have all of the advantages handed to them at every step of the process.

Spoke with a recruiter for Boeing back in about 2013 and she told me that the recruiting process was already super biased and discriminatory by that point (she was opposed to it but the pressure to do it this way was coming from higher ups)

Of course the author will focus on the institutions with the most cultural prestige and influence - they are the tastemakers that set the bounds of appropriate conduct for everyone else. If Ivy League colleges are discriminating against white men, guess where administrations at less prestigious colleges will take their cues from? And guess who built the ideological framework that the HR lady at that forklift company will use to implement a DEI policy to discriminate against white men? Like with the Harvard racial bias in admissions case, tactically it makes the most sense to try to make an example out of the most prominent offender.

Also when writing for a national audience, you need a topic and subjects of national relevance. Ivy League colleges and the media conglomerates that decide what you see on TV are household names across the country, random small businesses are not.

Even if you write off the harm of discrimination to the people being discriminated against, all of those positions (except TV writing) rely on status and prestige to accomplish their social roles. If the bulk of people come to assume that anyone who works at a university or in journalism is either a nepo-baby or an identity hire as opposed to someone hired by a more broadly accepted measure of merit, those professions lose credibility and support. And without that, they're nothing.

Yes, and relatedly, if you believe a growing economy helps more slots proliferate overall, you're not as bothered. There is no steady state, evenly rotating economy of prestige. You can knock down walls and create new shit entirely.

Pretty sure it's not just those, also generic govt office jobs and generic white collar jobs at PWC or similar.

Key findings include:

52% believe their company practices “reverse discrimination” in hiring

1 in 6 have been asked to deprioritize hiring white men

48% have been asked to prioritize diversity over qualifications

53% believe their job will be in danger if they don’t hire enough diverse employees

70% believe their company has DEI initiatives for appearances’ sake

Once we get to 40-50% then it's more than just prestigious university jobs? For clarity, I'm quoting another report not OP.

Looking at the actual survey:

This survey was commissioned by ResumeBuilder.com and conducted online by the survey platform Pollfish on November 2, 2022. In total, 1,000 participants in the U.S. were surveyed. All participants had to pass through demographic filters to ensure they were age 18 or older, currently employed for wages or self-employed, and manage at least 25% of the hiring at their workplace.

Pollfish is a site that pays people ridiculously small amounts of money to take commissioned surveys. The way it works is that the kind of people who are induced by exchanging 5 minutes of their time for 25 cents will take the survey and are then asked questions at the end to do the demographic filtering. If they don't meet the demographic criteria they don't get paid, but from what I can tell a lot of these people just take the survey again and answer the demographic questions differently. In other words, what happened here is Resume Builder paid Pollfish to conduct a 1,000 person survey. Rather than polling known hiring managers at random, they put the poll on their website for people to opt into and did no meaningful verification that these were actual hiring managers. When they got 1,000 responses they closed the poll. I wouldn't take the results too seriously.

These are high-paying positions in competitive fields

Yeah, why would people be upset about getting shut out of those?

Forgive my sarcasm, but really. Even putting aside the problem of 'as above, so below' and 'writer of international essays writes what he knows', would you say to a reasonably talented black man, "look, high-paying prestigious jobs are in very heavy demand and they don't like blacks, have you considered being a shoe-shiner?".

older white men pulled the ladder up behind them, either for ideological reasons or as a defense mechanism to protect their own positions

And frankly your post is the kind of thing they say. It's not that it's untrue, it's that it's only said to young white men, and it's so often said by people actively making it harder for those young men to get good jobs even as they sympathetically advise them to aim elsewhere.

This is genuinely the other side of the coin for all the gender/dating wars discourse. All the pressure is being put on the men to improve and jump through whatever hoops women require in order to get one... and every avenue for improvement is being cut off and the hoops have been set on fire, lifted 500 feet in the air, and suspended over a pit full of poisoned spikes. And men are told "just jump higher, it is still doable!"

The whole "pull yourself up by your bootstraps, nobody is coming to save you, life doesn't owe you anything" mindset/'advice' that gets handed down to young men is blatantly contradicted by the fact that the entire social, legal, and political fabric is arrayed against them achieving the most reliable, rewarding paths to long-term success. On the margins, a lot of these guys will be completely wrecked because they followed the standard advice to a tee and had their path blocked anyway, leading them into a depression spiral.

And so when similar advice comes down with regard to the dating market, "Become worthy of women, nobody will set you up but you, women don't owe you anything" and men notice that they are in fact being selected against based on factors they can't control it starkly informs them that literally nobody is on their side, they have no 'allies.' And so older guys giving such advice will sort themselves into the 'enemy' category for simply failing to see that the situation is now actively intolerable to anyone trying to follow the standard advice.

And this wouldn't be quite so utterly intolerable if it weren't for the fact that these same dudes are going to be paying most of the taxes and will be expected to continue to be productive so as to subsidize their own disenfranchisement and replacement. They can't even really say "screw you, I'm taking my ball and playing somewhere else" because they will be compelled to pay into the system regardless.

On the one hand, you've got women who are increasingly rejecting settling for men and claiming its because they fail to measure up to said women's standards. Standards which have drastically inflated in recent times, whilst the standards women apply to themselves have basically evaporated. She can literally be an active prostitute for the entirety of her twenties and then 'expect' to settle down for a guy who will care for her (whether she gives him kids or not) in her 30's.

Then on the other, men are getting actively nerfed in their ability to advance their careers and they see additional competition is introduced from foreigners and their competitors are getting subsidized meanwhile Old Boomers are squatting in the seats of real wealth and power (and deflecting blame) and adding to the criticism of these young men. Oh, and some old wealthy boomers are also directly snatching up eligible women in their twenties and directly contributing to the aforementioned sky-high standards without a hint of irony. So young men notice that going for absolute degenerate crypto gambling and harebrained startup schemes are the only 'hack' to get yourself out of this rat race that aren't completely stacked against you. Its still gambling, but at least chaos is fair. (Note, I don't actually believe that, but I see the reason it would be preferable.)

And every step of the way, from every angle (except guys like Andrew Tate) they're informed that they are the problem. And if they crash out over this, that is seen as proof positive that they're the problem. In England, apparently, they can get literally jailed for complaining about some of this.

Whatever arguments you want to make about the improvement in material conditions for young men over the past couple decades, their social standing has been eroded to the point they can't actually use that material wealth to satisify their actual desires (marriage, kids, respect, social esteem, and purpose) and are constantly, CONSTANTLY at risk of losing that wealth for making the sort of misstep that today can get you arrested but in the Boomers' day would have been the subject of a classic comedy film.

Thus, the Hock: step one. In ages past, men used to have to kill LIONS, 1v1, one teenage boy vs. one 400lb apex predator.

The teenage boys usually won.

The strong survive; the weak perish...

The whole "pull yourself up by your bootstraps, nobody is coming to save you, life doesn't owe you anything" mindset/'advice' that gets handed down to young men is blatantly contradicted by the fact that the entire social, legal, and political fabric is arrayed against them achieving the most reliable, rewarding paths to long-term success.

Where's the contradiction? Both of these things can be true:

  1. The institutions are hostile to you
  2. Nobody is coming to save you, you need to be responsible for yourself.

In fact, I would argue that 1 leads into 2. If the institutions are hostile to white men, then obviously no institution is going to come in and save you.

The problem is that there's often an unspoken third item:

  • Don't be angry or upset about it, or move to organize against it. That's gay.

In recent years, a different third term has been fully spoken.

    3. You deserve it.

There’s a 5 that combines @HighResolutionSleep’s 3 and what I’ll re-number as your 4: To the extent that you Notice the hostility, much less oppose or organize against it, it only further demonstrates the necessity of said hostility and how you deserve it.

The contradiction is "you cannot save yourself from a literal systemic issue, coordinated action is necessary."

The point that needs to come across is "everyone else is coordinating with others to your disadvantage, you need to coordinate with others to prevail."

Boomer advice that ignores this sets people up for failure.

The institutions being hostile demonstrates that you cannot, in fact, save yourself without defeating those institutions. You cannot defeat those institutions by following the advice of going it alone. Its a contradiction in terms when you acknowledge the underlying fact.

The "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" narrative is of civic nationalist, conservative / Red Tribe origin and presupposes a society that is at least neutral but definitely not hostile towards white men on an identitarian basis, is based on meritocracy and promotes masculine virtues. I guess this is what the OP is referring to.

I'm not the biggest fan of Rand as a writer, but Atlas Shrugged and friends are generally considered right-wing and at least consider the idea of active hostility.

Yes, and Rand's only solution is to come up with a way to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Good luck with that.

Whatever arguments you want to make about the improvement in material conditions for young men over the past couple decades

Which are mostly BS anyway, if we want to be honest.

Well, its pretty clear that you'd prefer to live in this era in terms of the sheer abundance of any goods you could want, and the technology available.

But the inability to parlay that into a meaningful life is... problematic.

I'd argue that no, it's actually not pretty clear, and I also don't believe that the material condition of the average young man factually improved in the past couple of decades.

And this wouldn't be quite so utterly intolerable if it weren't for the fact that these same dudes are going to be paying most of the taxes and will be expected to continue to be productive so as to subsidize their own disenfranchisement and replacement. They can't even really say "screw you, I'm taking my ball and playing somewhere else" because they will be compelled to pay into the system regardless.

Naa, if they don't get good jobs they won't be paying most of the taxes. They'll just be eeking out a marginal existence or dying on the streets (because of course social welfare programs are not for able bodied young males)

I'd argue that the are available (look up Veterans using and abusing VA disability status, for example) but men are shamed for using them in ways that single moms and minorities of course are not.

No such thing as a welfare program designated specifically for them, however.

I know a white guy milked the shit out of his disability payments after a minor injury working in a warehouse. The welfare state's disinterest in austerity - its soft budget constraints - is why white able-bodied men can benefit too.

As I said, "social welfare programs are not for able bodied young males". Fraud -- claiming to not be able bodied -- is a different issue.

My read is that systematic abuse of disability programs (i.e. everyone in the system knows and does not care that the people getting the bennies are not as disabled as they are claiming to be) by white men between 50 and retirement age, particularly in poorer areas, is widespread and unofficially tolerated in many countries, including the US. In the UK this has been the case since the mid-1980's - despite multiple ineffective government crackdowns.

I agree that social welfare programs are not for able-bodied young males.

Then lie about it.

He's right about what's happening. He's wrong that there was anything special about that year. The villain origin story for cartoonist Scott Adams (a boomer) is that he was passed over for promotion, twice, once at a bank and once at PacBell because they were looking to promote women and minorities instead. Maybe it's been exponentially increasing -- the exponential curve is self-similar, it looks like it's getting worse and worse no matter where you are on it.

The cohort-based analysis is a really important point that not many people raise. Institutions almost never reach diversity goals by laying off existing employees, they only do it by applying pressure to the hiring and promotion pipelines. So what looks like a small difference in the total composition of employees can be the result of a titanic shift in the composition of incoming cohorts, which did happen in many institutions around 2014, as Savage pointed out.

Its frustrating when older white men in powerful positions in institutions enthusiastically support policies that would have prevented themselves from being successful, had the policies been in place when they were younger…

Can you blame them though? That's just the power of mass-media in action: the media told them something was true, therefore it was. People do not believe an idea is true because they've done a calm, rational analysis of the facts of the matter; they believe something is true because it has to be true according to their world-view, which is given to them by their "community."* After-school specials and sitcoms about how racism is bad (and that white people are responsible for it all), while holding up only the most contemptible examples of contrary belief as representatives of the whole, completely conquered the Western mind. They have no choice but to support DEI, how could they not?

It was ever thus; it took DeBeers less than 20 years to convince virtually every American that a proposal was not legitimate if you did not buy a diamond ring (that they would be the supplier for). Think about this; people of all walks of life:

  • Saw an advertisement that told them something completely at odds with what they knew
  • Knew consciously that this was an advertisement
  • That, as an advertisement, its sole purpose was sell them something they did not need

And yet, believed the advertisement was gospel truth! This included people that had lived their entire lives without this "rule," not merely those who had grown up with the campaign. This belief is so internalized that even bringing up "Hey, did you know diamond engagement rings was all a marketing ploy by DeBeers" will get you attacked as an incel or mysogynist; even when the nature of marketting is acknowledged, "the message" will still be defended as it is unassailable.

Tangential, but while browsing this thread, I opened Twitter, and in what I'm sure is just coincidence, and not pernicious data surveilance, my For You is literally this post, commenting on this article. I remember this event, and laughing at the frumpy Asian girl's insistence that White men simply surrender to their own genocide. That's crazy, right? Your whole strategy is demanding your enemy not fighting back, and them just complying? Wait, that's literally what happened!?

*Of all the Great Lies of modern society, possibly the most pernicious is the insistance that children, upon reaching adulthood, must leave their familial community behind and find out "who they are." Your identity will always be given to you, and if it is not by a community you have roots in, and is invested in your success, it will be by mass culture, which is not; in fact, it wants to exploit you.

DeBeers may have popularised the idea of "you too can and should buy her a diamond ring" but they did not invent engagement rings:

Engagement rings have been common in Western countries since at least the time of the Roman Empire. They began to feature diamonds during the Renaissance, and became especially closely associated with diamonds after a marketing campaign by the De Beers Group between 1939 and 1979.

Sure, not everybody had a diamond engagement ring, but there were betrothal rings and other items used/given as tokens of "now we are a couple who intend to marry and are not free to mess around with other people".

The DeBeers campaign was aspirational and worked on that, when people were all rising to the middle-class and expectations were rising with that. "Now you, too, can have some at least of the trappings of the rich and high-class! Demonstrate your success in life and how you're making it!"

Gender reveal parties are probably the modern equivalent of this, I'm still baffled by them. Baby showers were an exotic enough notion to me, now there's this new trend and of course, like all trends, it has ballooned into bigger, better, flashier showing-off.

That doesn't mean babies are a bad thing, and "DeBeers sold you on the idea of diamonds mean love and diamonds are forever, you poor boob, you sap, you credulous mark, you" does not mean getting engaged and married is a bad thing, either.

The point is that DeBeers has increased the price of a "valid" engagement ring by getting people to insist on diamond, while driving up the price above that of rubies and sapphires via cartel behaviour.

(NB: I am not going to give, and would prefer not to receive, a diamond engagement ring. Rubies and sapphires are a hell of a lot more "forever" than diamonds; they aren't combustible, for one thing.)

Its frustrating when older white men in powerful positions in institutions enthusiastically support policies that would have prevented themselves from being successful, had the policies been in place when they were younger…

It really grinds my gears as well. I had a conversation with an older white male physics prof at a social event a while ago, and he was giving this rather sanctimonious monologue about all the work they were doing to make the field more "diverse", and how they were rectifying the issues that led to women being excluded from the field. Of course he isn't giving up his job to a 60 year old women who was passed over for tenure in the '80s - but he apparently thought it was perfectly reasonable to have a lab with exactly one token white guy. It's just perpetuating the same problem on another generation, with different victims.

Getting cynical, there's another reason old men might prefer hiring young women to hiring young men.

Sexual harassment lawsuits?

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