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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   24074 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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You still haven’t quite addressed why, in your worldview, men like to simulate realistic violence against each other, as even implying that these are not the most popular games, they are so popular that a majority of American men have played and enjoyed them. If it were “just that boys like competitive games”, then why don’t they just stick to a pong-like game, or Wii tennis, or a soccer title? There is some reason why they like to shoot each other and take their resources, and while my etiology of this has explanatory power, it seems to me you refuse to even offer an explanation for this phenomenon. Consider that, if men were offered a game where they get to inflict suffering on an innocent animal, I think most men would never play this and would find the whole concept abhorrent. So it’s not “blood and gore per se”, it’s not that men are interested in experiencing some novelty related to that; instead there is something particular about the act of blood and gore coming out of enemies. I can’t force you to supply an explanation, but surely you notice the dissonance here: in a highly competitive marketplace with tens of thousands of options, males enjoy a particular feature which — in your worldview — they would be either be naturally averse to or naturally ambivalent to choosing.

two books

It’s unfortunate that you can’t provide the relevant passages, evidence, or arguments. Am I supposed to take the view of an economist on the history of Icelandic revenge culture for granted? I managed to torrent it (thanks Russians), and the passage about men being “chickens” in revenge cultures is just sort of a narrative that the author weaves without referring to any real data. Maybe his evidence is on another page.

Here’s a study on how violent men in Iceland conferred a fitness benefit: “We show that, on average, killers gain a very significant fitness advantage despite the often high costs they pay and, more importantly, that they had a dramatic effect on the fitness of their male kin”. This is more scientific than the book you recommended, where the author is all over the place talking about Hamlet and stuff.

Like most of the Germanic and Celtic tribes that occupied northern Europe during this period, an implicit ‘might is right’ rule prevailed, with lethal contests often occurring among the leading members of society for control over its resources. In early medieval Scotland, for example, only a handful of the leading men of the day (kings, earls, etc) died in their beds: most died in battle or were killed by rivals or treacherous members of their own faction (Pálsson & Edwards, 1981; Woolf, 2007). The death toll could be considerable: the violence that engulfed the small Icelandic community at the centre of Njalssaga, for example, led to the deaths of 31 of the 87 adult males. Of 23 families who feature in the saga, four lost all their adult males; only 11 families survived without losing any males

Berserkers, or berserks, were often described as headstrong and unpredictable, being credited with a combination of magical powers (e.g. being able to change shape into bears or wolves) and a reputation for ferocity in battle. Many Norse kings surrounded themselves with a bodyguard exclusively made up of these individuals (Dale, 2021; Speidel, 2002). Famously, they also formed the Varangian guard of the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople (Brøndsted, 1960). Berserkers were feared as much as respected within Norse society. Among the Icelandic Vikings, for example, the relatives of a murder victim were significantly more likely to accept blood money than opt for a revenge killing (the two options on offer under Norse customary law) if the murderer had a reputation as a berserk (82% vs a mere 13% when the murderer was a non-berserker, when a revenge murder was much the more preferred option: Dunbar, Clark, & Hurst, 1995). Because their behaviour could be so socially disruptive, these males were often banished by mainland Norse kings, ending up in places like Iceland that were beyond the reach of conventional justice. The often brutal disregard for others' interests that characterised many (but not all) berserkers is well illustrated by the behaviour of the berserker Egil Skallagrimsson in the eponymous Egilssaga who showed no compunction about driving weaker men off their land (if necessary, by killing them if they resisted) in order to enrich himself.

The selective advantage gained by killers (s ≈ 3.0) is very considerable. In natural populations, the selective advantage of traits under positive selection is typically in the order of s ≤ 0.10 (Kingsolver et al., 2001). This suggests that, despite the costs incurred by killers (a mortality risk ∼2.5 times higher than that for non-killers), aggressive males gained a significant net advantage. Rather similar risk/benefit ratios were reported in a comparison of war chiefs versus peace chiefs in the historical Cheyenne (Dunbar, 1991). In this case, war chiefs risked premature death on the battlefield but benefitted, if they survived, from significantly higher fertility rates than peace chiefs (who were never themselves directly involved in warfare).

In short, there is a net benefit to acting violently in the particular context of medieval Iceland despite the risks of being killed. Since the strategy works better than 50% of the time, individuals may be attracted to it because they exaggerate the payoff. The fact that those who are killed in the process do not have significantly lower fitnesses than non-killers makes the default payoff a safety net, thereby favouring the killer strategy. As in most such cases, however, the risks are unlikely to be randomly distributed among the males: the killers who survive are likely to be ones who are physically stronger, more willing to take risks or, as Palmstierna et al. (2017) showed, have larger extended families to back them up. Knowing this may mean that only certain individuals are willing to pursue a violent strategy – unless the potential benefits of doing so are very high.

Medieval Iceland was violent, their heroes were violent, their wives came from captured Irish slaves, and they descended from the most violent of the Norse who had inflicted violence upon all of Europe. This should have made you intuitively skeptical of Miller’s hypothesis that Iceland proves that all men are chickens naturally averse to violence. If someone insulted you in Iceland, the norm was to fight them. There are sagas celebrating men who request to kill another man because they want rights over a particular woman. So, a lot of the violence was purely volitional, as was the entire Viking raiding and pillaging over Europe, and the Varangian Guard.

However, I deny you really need any extra evidence on this. The “look at what males like to do” argument is strong. The next best argument would be “look at how brothers behave”. IMO this doesn’t require strenuous argumentation.

But the claim that Somalis are somehow much more keen on this

Yes, because of their culture, their religion, their tradition, and probably their biology.

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