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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   27133 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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Who do you want fifteen-year-olds to have sex with? Their classmates? High school seniors? College students? Their dads' friends?

If you are who I suspect you are you are, you're what? Around 30 years-old now give or take? If a 7 - 10 year age-gap is what you really want, why not date a 22 year-old?

Likewise if the goal is to improve TFR, why not advise boys to take few years after high-school to build up some experience and equity before going to college so they'll be more attractive mates?

Mate attractiveness is mostly a relative good. Giving everyone a relative good doesn't have absolute effects.

Note that in most of the USA, the age of consent actually is 16 or 17. The meme that it's 18 is from a combination of 1) California has 18, and makes most US media, 2) a bunch of other crimes do kick in at 18, just not statutory rape itself.

My problem with this idea is that legality, while originally designed to reflect morality, inevitably influences it. Both in the "illegal, thus immoral" direction, and, what's more important in this case, "legal, thus moral".

This might be literally a first-world problem, since countries with less pervasive state influence do not conflate legality and morality equally easily, but in a place like the US I'd rather have more fine-grained AoC laws, so that fathers don't have to resort to moral, but illegal acts to keep scumbags away.

The law mainly functions to prevent loving, family-condoned relationships between 20-something men and teenage girls.

How many of those do you think would happen in this day and age?

The law mainly functions to prevent loving, family-condoned relationships between 20-something men and teenage girls.

Mate, please stop explaining. You just sound more and more creepy the more you go on about older men and younger girls. Seven year age gaps can be a huge gulf, or not so much, depending on the age of both parties. 15 and 21 are two different phases of life. 22 and 29 are getting nearer in experiences. 30 and 37 are fine.

10 and 17 is not fine. 12 and 19 is not fine. And I've found that arguments around "why not 15?" tend to drift downwards rather than upwards in the "if 15, why not..." later development of the argument. If 15, why not 14? If 14, why not 13? If 13, why not 12 - after all in the Classical world 12 year olds were married! (as you have used as an example yourself).

As to "family condoned", that depends on the family. Were I the parent of a young daughter, I'd be highly suspicious of any 20-25 year old guy sniffing around my 13-15 year old daughter.

Eventually, you get children who don't desire sex, can't get pregnant, and don't understand it.

Paedophiles out there claiming six year olds experience sexual desire and are competent to have loving, consensual, sexual relationships with adults. Your arguments that "I'm not one of those guys" do not convince me on the grounds you are putting them. And it's becoming more and more evident your concern is "men can't get young pussy" and not "girls are being artificially debarred from forming permanent attachments leading to marriage and family".

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Why are all the guys so eager to fuck teenage girls also so insistent that these girls be virgins?

Serious question, bub: You keep talking about your "lived experience." So I assume you are not a virgin. I'm not going to ask if you've ever banged an underage girl, but I am going to ask: assuming you have had sex with a virgin, why didn't you marry her?

Why are all the guys so eager to fuck teenage girls also so insistent that these girls be virgins?

Half the point of dating a teenager is that she is much more likely to be a virgin.

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Its a simple balancing act. 15 is probably too young, because there remains a significant number of girls who are still beginning puberty at that age and pregnancy, while possible, is more dangerous than it would be in just a year or two. By the time a girl is 17, the chance that a pregnancy is better off delayed for a year based on physical development is minuscule.

Seems like a weird rule that you can have sex with a girl, and its legal so long as your swimmers don't hit the lottery.

Because the point of the sex is pregnancy. If its morally good to have sex with a woman, it is definitionally also good to impregnate her.

Plus in the modern age girls are idiots at 15. And the window of years around that. Particularly when an older man can flash cash at them and not be immediately hung by his heels by her brothers or dad. Some of the Epstein accusers aren't, in my view, the heroines they are made out to be, but I don't doubt they feel traumatized. Even the girl who served as his wrangler and got all her friends to turn up for all the great times. Of course she regrets it now. We all regret a lot of things.

Centuries ago yeah, maybe females and males could get the sexual congress going earlier. They could also feed themselves and survive in the wild, and had to answer to the tribe. In the current year I'm not at all convinced. I partially agree with @Corvos in his comment, but like almost everything, case-by-case.

I strongly suspect girls(and boys) were always idiots at 15 and that historical low marriage ages worked out mostly because the girl wasn't the final say in who she married. For some reason I don't think this guy is trying to bring that system back.

Germany

WP on AoC:

The age of consent in Germany is 14, as long as a person over the age of 21 does not exploit a 14- to 15-year-old person's lack of capacity for sexual self-determination

So it would be more accurate to say that the ages 14 and 15 are a grey area. (Arguably, that grey area extends further (probably all the way to infinity) if alcohol is involved, which likely covers the majority of new sex partners. A judge might view the ability of a 16yo to consent after two beers lot differently than that of a 26yo. And of course sex work is 18+ only.)

To be honest, I was not even aware of the AoC being 14 in Germany. When I was 25, the thought to try to find an underage girlfriend genuinely did not even cross my mind. I strongly suspect that a man who decides to groom 15yo's does not have their best interests at heart. However, I also acknowledge that things do not always go according to plan, and sometimes people just fall in love over age gaps most would consider inappropriate.

I think just handing the power to the younger partner to decide if they want to press charges rather than investigating ex officio is probably a good compromise.

For the sake of completeness, I should also mention that I do not see a good reason to apply different AoC's for different combinations of sexes, so your proposal would also legalize gay men grooming 15yo boys, which I intuitively find as unacceptable as straight men grooming girls of a similar age.

The arguments for an age of consent of 15 are multitude. First there's evospych; studies show most men in their twenties are attracted to 15 year old girls.

Being nubile at 15 is nowhere near being mentally or emotionally mature enough, and you're sailing right into Epstein Island waters by proposing "but why not 15 year old masseuses providing escort services, Science Shows guys think if they're hot enough, they're old enough!"

To be clear, I'm not imputing such views to you personally, but right at this particular moment it may not wise to start that hare.

Then there's ancient demography; the median age of marriage ranged from 16 to 18 for girls until 1600 AD and the minimum legal age of marriage ranged from 12-14 in most societies. ...Finally, the data don't seem to indicate that teenage girls are too young for pregnancy; the negative causal effects on their pregnancy are extremely mild and don't justify banning a 20 year old from dating a 15 year old.

Married off at 12 does not necessarily mean "and the older husband immediately deflowered his pre-teen bride"; often the extremely young ages were more to do with locking down alliances and getting prime inheritances into your hands e.g. Charles Brandon, aged 29, became betrothed to his 8 year old ward Elizabeth Grey which enabled him to be raised to the peerage as she was heiress to a title and a fortune. This contract was annulled when he married Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth was married off aged 10 to the 17 year old Henry Courtenay. She died aged 14 so it is unlikely the marriage was ever consummated.

Early pregnancy, even in the Middle Ages, was considered harmful to health; Margaret Beaufort was married at 12 to the 24 year old Edmund Tudor, who did consummate the marriage; he left her pregnant and a widow by the age of 13, and the birth of her only son was so difficult it was believed that it was the explanation why she never had any more children, despite being married twice more after that.

studies show most men in their twenties are attracted to 15 year old girls

Which studies would those be?

My takeaway is that age of consent laws over 14 or 15 primarily act to felonize normal young men under 25, with very thin justification

Yes, this is troubling. The predictable consequence of taking a genuine concern and putting it in the hands of bureaucrats and law enforcement operating under perverted incentive structures.

The big issue is the Fascist-Feminist synthesis means both the Left and the Right actually agree on this issue, but for wildly different reasons:

  • Older women viscerally hate it when older men date younger women, which has led to the Left broadly being hostile towards age gap relationships.
  • The Right has two elements: First, there was a lot of (wildly incorrect) hysteria that Leftists were going to try to make pedophilia legal as the next step on the slippery slope after gays and trans were done. Second, there's long been a bunch of conspiracies about pedophiles controlling the government in QAnon or Pizzagate form, so there's been a ridiculous trend to try and link practically anything towards sinister cabals of pedophiles.

As such, there's almost no political appetite for decreasing the age of consent.

As for what it ought to be, 15 does indeed seem like a more reasonable age than 18. It wasn't even that uncommon all that long ago, heck a lot of countries in Europe have their ages at 14. In terms of mentality, a lot of it depends on the individual's IQ. A 130 IQ kid could be emancipated at 13 and would probably make better decisions than the average adult, and there's an argument to be made that an 85 IQ person should always be treated as a child to some extent. But polite society has an allergy to explicit references to IQ so we just randomly draw a line at 16-18 and call it good enough I guess.

makes me think this topic is for some reason stratified mainly by intelligence.

How convenient it's only we knuckle-dragging mouth breathers who object to your reasonable proposal!

Every time I see this argument in the wild. Every. God. Damn. Time. It's maybe not a troll, but it is a guy who genuinely wants to stick his dick into underage pussy and feels unfairly victimised by society who think 30-40 year old men should not be eyeing up 13 year olds for their big racks. Of course society is made up of the stupid and the really intelligent deep thinkers like Underage Pussy For Me guys are the victims of their unreasonable distaste.

Male feelings when it's a 20 year old guy wanting to fuck a girl who was still playing with dolls when he was her age are about "me horny" and nothing more elevated.

And why not 13 and 40? If we're going to argue that "such an age is only arbitrary, this age is plenty old enough to make up their mind, in Classical times women were married by then", then why put upper limits on the loving MAP man? Why not 15 and 60, if it comes to that?

If guy is 20 now and girl is 15, when guy was 15 girl was 10. Can you not do simple arithmetic?

Every. God. Damn. Time.

Either you've got a lousy memory, or you're calling me a liar.

I do have a terrible memory, so I didn't remember you were one of the "it's perfectly normal for older men to want to fuck pubescent girls" types.

You claim it's not because of such attraction on your part, but pure devotion to scientific fact? Well, you have your claims as to motives, I have my beliefs as to motives, and since nobody is a mind-reader, all such will remain in the privacy of our skulls.

Unfalsifiable beliefs are pretty weak sauce. There are very few things more antithetical to the purpose of this place than do this kind of bulverism in the pursuit of defending taboos.

You claim it's not because of such attraction on your part, but pure devotion to scientific fact?

Devotion to liberty.

I don't believe I've ever said that there aren't 12-year-old girls that I find sexually attractive. I haven't said that because it'd be untrue; while I'm not a paedophile in the proper sense, there are some very-early bloomers out there and, indeed, postpubescence is all that's really needed for the normal male gaze to approve. However, I have no intention of pursuing them in that fashion, and this is not related to my opposition to the current Anglospheric ages of consent.

Do you realise that you've set up epistemic closure, here? If someone says that he wants to lower the AoC because he wants to fuck kids, you count him as part of your "every time". If someone says the opposite, you count him as a liar and still as part of "every time". That's not an algorithm that depends on what the truth actually is; regardless of the evidence, you'll simply become more sure of yourself.

I actually suggest you take a look through my post history. See if I'm really the sort to lie about myself.

and that smart people on this forum independently arive at the same opinions as myself

Do they, now?

Olde[r] women viscerally hate it when older men date younger women, which has led to the Left broadly being hostile towards age gap relationships.

I'm also quite cynical about this phenomenon, but for what it's worth, I felt a pretty visceral hatred for those relationships myself when I was a younger man.

I keep thinking about a tweet which went something like this:

Being a boy sucks because when you're 13, you're competing for the attention of 13-year-old girls against 19-year-old men. And when you're 19, you're competing for the attention of 19-year-old girls against Saudi princes.

As such, there's almost no political appetite for increasing the age of consent.

I think you mean "decreasing".

Correct, I've changed it, thank you for pointing it out.

The age of consent in reality is whatever age a person has to be for their "yes" to mean consent legally.

So there is no age of consent for women, and probably never will be.

There's contemporary cross cultural evidence, specifically from Europe, which shows that wealthy modern countries can do just fine with age of consent set at 14 or 15.

I do wonder whether scientists in these countries have done any rigorous studies regarding whether early sex has harmful psychological effects.

I don’t know, but I would guess this is very much ‘if you have sex at 16 and your culture regards this as abuse then you’ll probably be traumatised, but if society regards this as the natural outcome then you’ll be fine’.

It makes sense once you figure out it's never been about protecting children. (Death threat = topic is governed by conflict theory.)

It's about protecting old women from the competition [for men and their resources] young women inherently provide, in co-operation with a subset of old men [fathers] being able to credibly threaten to lock up whoever their daughters are dating. Whether this is a good or bad thing is out of scope.

All of the other stuff it's claimed the blanket approach protects against is already covered by existing laws (rape/kidnapping, extortion, and anti-incest for the rest of it), so by POSIWID that's not what the AoC is for.

It's about protecting old women from the competition [for men and their resources] young women inherently provide

You are not convincing me of the rightness of your views here: "yeah, given my druthers, I'd much rather a hot little 15 year old than that 30 year old hag, I'm only 46, I'm in my prime!"

yeah, given my druthers, I'd much rather a hot little 15 year old than that 30 year old hag, I'm only 46, I'm in my prime!

Which is a situation that "30 year old hag" (in your words) would naturally like to avoid. By cutting the top competitors out of the market, the rest of the competitors stabilize their positions.

Yes, the best men (from the most mercenary "sex for resources" perspective) are still going to select right at the limit. But since that market is artificially limited, the total supply of women is constrained, thus the definition of any given quality of man "settling for" becomes a correspondingly older woman (as that's what they can afford; age is usually a proxy for this, which you acknowledge). If no AoC, "settling" would be 20 (or a 8/10), but with the limit in place "settling" may be 25-30 (or a 5/10).

In this way, the AoC protects the sociofinancial interests of all women over it, at the expense of men (in the "not allowed to fully utilize resources for sex" sense, typically rationalized in some form of "men are objectively better than women and so have a duty to them") and women under it (typically rationalized as "too immature", but importantly the AoC doesn't actually prohibit these women from having sex, it just makes it so that the only men they can sell sex to can't afford to buy it).

Is this an overly simplistic model of how men and women form relationships? Sure- most people aren't quite that mercenary- but there's always some element of this present in every relationship (and is the fear keeping the relevant actors up at night).

You are not convincing me of the rightness of your views here

On the contrary, I think you are already convinced. It's not a crime to be on the high side of political power.

Let me assure you, 30 year old women are not thinking of 15 year old girls as sexual rivals and competitors, they are thinking guys who want to fuck girls that age when the men are the same age as the 30 year old woman are disgusting creepy predators.

Are you, at whatever age you are now, really scared that a 15 year old boy is going to out-compete you in the employment marketplace? The men on here who argue about "all women have of value are their tits and cunt, and that's all they have to sell, and as soon as they're over 20 they're undesirable, so they want to ban nice ordinary normal men who have perfectly natural preferences for 15 year olds from getting access to 15 year olds" are not coming across as rational giant brains, they're coming across as "welcome to the inaugural meeting of the Mensa branch of PIE".

they are thinking guys who want to fuck girls that age when the men are the same age as the 30 year old woman are disgusting creepy predators.

And if it wasn't obviously in their interest to publicly believe this, I might believe this as well. Half the problem with the "debate" is that this claim isn't being made in good faith; you acknowledge this yourself through your last sentence despite you already having established in previous comments that you know drawing that equivalence is wrong.

So, when everything anyone will tell you is going to be biased in their favor in some way, what else can you do but return to monke initial conditions and reason about what people will say about this topic now assuming those initial conditions remain valid (ignoring stuff like technologies [contraceptives, all known STDs of consequence cured except for one] with which human instinct is not natively compatible)?

The men on here who argue about "all women have of value are their tits and cunt, and that's all they have to sell"

And the women on here argue that "all men have of value is their ability to physically produce, and that's all they have with which to buy" (or "what price they can fetch on the employment marketplace"). Given gender equality, both should be valid.

The reason for the emphasis on this is that it's the only part of the dynamic we can actually control and measure, much like 6/6/6 is for women (but somehow that's acceptable, which again is why I believe women who do this while believing it's evil when men do it are mistaken at best and actively lying at worst). And every relationship is affected by these dynamics to some degree; there's no getting away from it, we're all human, we like good things, and may God have mercy on our souls.

Is it the full picture? Of course not; people marry their friends all the time to the point it's a meme, women actually seek out casual sex (contrary to an asymmetric biological imperative that they shouldn't), men actually seek out commitment, etc.- but to say that an age beginning with 1 or 2, or a total income that has 5 zeroes in it, isn't a measurable starting point at least some of the time (or at least an attractor, if not the primary one), and isn't the dominating portion of it from people who are working in a way compatible with their instincts? I think that's likely to be destructive.

really scared that a 15 year old boy is going to out-compete you in the employment marketplace?

They'll outcompete me in the dating marketplace for cougars and tomboys (if male sexuality in a woman, then they're probably looking for someone young in that unrealized-potential-is-attractive way); why even live?

if you honestly think forty year old women want fifteen year old boys, I don't know how to continue this conversation. Yeah, there are female predators out there as there are male ones, and they're both sick and depraved, not "this is simply evopsych in action".

I do have to wonder, how many of the gentlemen on here with wives/partners, are willing to go into real life and not just argue on The Motte with "Let's face it, honey, if I got the chance and I wouldn't end up charged with statutory rape, I'd dump you in the morning for a fifteen year old to have my babies and cook my meals. That's just evolutionary psychology, science has proved it! And then when she ages out at nineteen or so, I'd dump her for a newer model in her turn. After all, over twenty in a female is going from 8/10 to 5/10 for guys, sad but true, nothing I can do about it".

A long time ago I used to follow the Youtube channel of The Young Turks. (Bear with me please.) The host Cenk Uygur was commenting on the clearly accelerating social trend of relatively hot female high school teachers in their 30s and 40s seducing their male students. He offered an explanation that seemed to be right on point. There is only one thing in this world that a teenage boy can offer a grown woman but a grown man will never do so: undivided attention. It's a temptation many of them can't resist, as their lives are deeply frustrated in that area.

I think it's less "undivided attention" and more "absence of the open hostility/irony-poisoning typical between grown men and grown women[1]", where undivided attention is a [beneficial?] side-effect of that.

On the female side, I can't think of any larger refutation of "sex for resources" than intentionally going after men who don't even have those resources, and so are selecting for earnestness/potential more than anything else. It also throws out the protection that AoC is supposed to provide [to them as a class], since this is basically the only case where the risk is higher to the woman than it is to the man. (Not that they won't be arrested for sending nudes of themselves, but still.)

It's easier on the men, perhaps, since they won't even get selected if they aren't like that and they're already being frustrated by their cohort of young women only attracted to older men anyway. Perhaps it disadvantages young women once they hit 30 and this is basically allowing the good men to be taken out of the pool they'll be depending on later, but it's not acceptable for women to expect this and for the decent men to be forced to wait and have zero options until then.

It's a temptation many of them can't resist, as their lives are deeply frustrated in that area.

Yeah, can't imagine why that would be.

[1] The definition of "grown", of course, being "has become aware of, and internalized, that relationships are sex-for-resources because [reasons]". This is perhaps the main change puberty makes to your brain.

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There does seem to be a worrying increase in this, and I don't think it's "because my male students can give me undivided attention" (have you ever tried to teach a class of teenage boys?)

It's a combination of stupid idiot mentally ill women taking advantage of boys who are (due to modern standards of living) tall enough and physically developed enough but not emotionally or mentally mature enough for sexual relationships, to be fooled into "I really love you" and where societal standards do tend to laugh about it happening to boys and make salacious jokes about "I wish my hot teacher had hit on me when I was that age".

It's not funny and it can be every bit as traumatic as if it was older man/younger girl or older man/younger boy. Again, I see a lot of complaining on here about the attitude that Women Are Wonderful, and this is one area where it does damage: it is not taken seriously because even adult women are probably not capable of physically over-powering a teenage boy, so the view is "if he really didn't want it, he could fight her off". That's not how manipulation works!

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In this way, the AoC protects the sociofinancial interests of all women over it, at the expense of ... women under it (typically rationalized as "too immature", but importantly the AoC doesn't actually prohibit these women from having sex, it just makes it so that the only men they can sell sex to can't afford to buy it).

It actually also protects the interests of women under it: selective enforcement empowers women to "sell sex" at its peak and then exploit the illegality of the men's action as leverage over the those they "sell" it to.

Blackmail material is frequently of negative utility to the one with it, insofar as it gives a murder motive to the subject of the material.

Yes, it has high tail risks (and rewards). I think the average expected value of blackmail is usually still positive though, particularly when supported by the legal system rather than opposed by it.

True; that's why the AoC is currently infinite (and the women still honoring this compromise are generally seen as suckers). I think I could be more precise in saying that they can't sell sex in the context of a relationship that isn't purely exploitative on the woman's part, though since that was the entire point of establishing the AoC in the first place...

All sex is rape [as women obviously can't be trusted not to call sex they regretted rape] + woman forced to marry her rapist [provided this didn't occur where anyone could have reasonably heard her cry rape] is a stable compromise, which is probably why traditionalist societies did that.

Raising the age of consent(it used to be, basically, the beginning of puberty) is a remnant of older laws intended to protect unmarried young women from older guys lying to them to get laid. There were a lot of these laws in the past, a high age of consent isn't an adequate replacement.

IMO you do need an AoC, although the argument that sways me is contingent on the AIDS pandemic. Specifically, consent without knowing about HIV isn't fully informed, which means you need sex ed, which means you can't have 5-year-olds consenting to sex because lol good luck getting them to comprehend sex ed.

16-18 is way too high, though. If teens are lying about their ages to get sex, your AoC is too high. Sex ed for preteens and AoC at 13-14 is what I support. And if you get rid of AIDS I'd be willing to abolish it - it's the only one left that is a big deal (the rest are either curable, vaccinable, or so minor nobody really cares).

AoC at 13-14

Don't make me quote The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon at you!

Yes, it was sensationalist yellow journalism of its day, but it was also true that rich guys were having young girls pimped out by their poor parents to them, then at rape trials claiming "no, it was totes consensual" and getting away with it as the age of consent was that low. Hence, the raising of the age of consent from 13 to 16 by Parliament:

Under the Offences against the Person Act 1861, the age of consent was 12 (reflecting the common law), it was a felony to have unlawful carnal knowledge of a girl under the age of 10, and it was a misdemeanour to have unlawful carnal knowledge of a girl between the ages of 10 and 12. In addition, the 1861 Act had made the penalty for indecent assault or attempted rape of a girl below the consensual age two years' imprisonment. Although the age of consent was subsequently raised to 13 upon amendments made to the 1861 act with the Offences Against the Person Act 1875, these pieces of legislation were enacted to protect mainly the very young and the very wealthy.

Take it away, Mr. Stead!

London's lust annually uses up many thousands of women, who are literally killed and made away with—living sacrifices slain in the service of vice. That may be inevitable, and with that I have nothing to do. But I do ask that those doomed to the house of evil fame shall not be trapped into it unwillingly, and that none shall be beguiled into the chamber of death before they are of an age to read the inscription above the portal—"All hope abandon ye who enter here." If the daughters of the people must be served up as dainty morsels to minister to the passions of the rich, let them at least attain an age when they can understand the nature of the sacrifice which they are asked to make. And if we must cast maidens—not seven, but seven times seven— nightly into the jaws of vice, let us at least see to it that they assent to their own immolation, and are not unwilling sacrifices procured by force and fraud.

That is surely not too much to ask from the dissolute rich. Even considerations of self-interest might lead our rulers to assent to so modest a demand. For the hour of Democracy has struck, and there is no wrong which a man resents like this. If it has not been resented hitherto, it is not because it was not felt. The Roman Republic was founded by the rape of Lucrece, but Lucrece was a member of one of the governing families. A similar offence placed Spain under the domination of the Moors, but there again the victim of Royal licence was the daughter of a Count. But the fathers and brothers whose daughters and sisters are purchased like slaves, not for labour, but for lust, are now at last enrolled among the governing classes—a circumstance full of hope for the nation, but by no means without menace for a class. Many of the French Revolutionists were dissolute enough, but nothing gave such an edge to the guillotine as the memory of the Parc aux Cerfs; and even in our time the horrors that attended the suppression of the Commune were largely due to the despair of the femme vengeresse. Hence, unless the levying of the maiden-tribute in London is shorn of its worst abuses—at present, as I shall show, flourishing unchecked—resentment, which might be appeased by reform, may hereafter be the virus of a social revolution. It is the one explosive which is strong enough to wreck the Throne.

To avoid all misapprehension as to the object with which I propose to set forth the ghastly and criminal features of this infernal traffic, I wish to say emphatically at the outset that, however strongly I may feel as to the imperative importance of morality and chastity, I do not ask for any police interference with the liberty of vice. I ask only for the repression of crime. Sexual immorality, however evil it may be in itself or in its consequences, must be dealt with not by the policeman but by the teacher, so long as the persons contracting are of full age, are perfectly free agents, and in their sin are guilty of no outrage on public morals. Let us by all means apply the sacred principles of free trade to trade in vice, and regulate the relations of the sexes by the higgling of the market and the liberty of private contract. Whatever may be my belief as to the reality and the importance of a transcendental theory of purity in the relations between man and woman, that is an affair for the moralist, not for the legislator.

So far from demanding any increased power for the police, I would rather incline to say to the police, "Hands off," when they interfere arbitrarily with the ordinary operations of the market of vice. But the more freely we permit to adults absolute liberty to dispose of their persons in accordance with the principles of private contract and free trade, the more stringent must be our precautions against the innumerable crimes which spring from vice, as vice itself springs from the impure imaginings of the heart of man. These crimes flourish on every side, unnoticed and unchecked—if, indeed, they are not absolutely encouraged by the law, as they are certainly practised by some legislators and winked at by many administrators of the law. To extirpate vice by Act of Parliament is impossible; but because we must leave vice free that is no reason why we should acquiesce helplessly in the perpetration of crime.

You can cover that with child labour laws.

You can't just "get rid of AIDS" while tolerating the #1 enabler of it: homosexuality.

Making a vaccine or a cure would work. That's what removed syphilis, gonorrhea, and hepatitis as problem STDs.

(Technically, there already is a cure for HIV - bone marrow transplant from someone with CCR5-Δ32 - but that cure is useless because either you take such doses of immunosuppressants that you effectively have AIDS anyway, or you get graft vs. host disease and die even quicker. I mean a useful cure.)

EDIT: I've seen some reports that getting a bone marrow transplant from someone without the mutation, and getting graft vs. host disease, might also work. Still not a useful cure.

The weird thing about reading things in isolation from the mod queue is my first thought was "What the hell did Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez do now?"

reading things in isolation from the mod queue

(or from the firehose page)

I was trying to find the citation for my anecdotal example I wanted to use, to, kinda sorta, back you on this, but alas it's one of these things I saw on one of the zillions of 3 hour podcasts I listen to daily, and cant locate easily anymore, so ultimately the source is: trust me, bro.

So there was this interview I was listening to with some sweet old lady recounting her life as some sort of activist. Unrelated to the main topic of the conversation, she mentioned how her husband started courting her when she was 16 or so, and he was 20-something*, exactly the sort of relationship that you seem to argue for here. My first reaction was "yikes", but through the interview she seemed to have nothing but love and respect for her husband, and she also mentioned they had something like 5 kids together, and each of them had a lot of kids in turn, so she's now surrounded by approximately 7 zillion grandchildren and great-grandchildren. At the end of it, I found it hard to say this was all somehow wrong.

*) Or he might have actually waited until she turned 18, but he was definitely orbiting her since she was in her mid-teens.

That said, for something like this to work, I think the conversation has to be a lot bigger than "age of consent", and basically you'd have to RETVRN to traditional sexual mores: no sex before marriage, no divorce, the parents have to co-sign the relationship. I think a lot of the "ick factor" comes from people assuming the 20-something is just looking for sex - which is a reasonable assumption - and the the 15 year old girl is naive, and easily taken advantage of - which is another reasonable assumption. If, on the other hand, we assume the guy is looking for love and for a way to start a family... well I'm sure lots of people would still complain, but I think it's more defensible than lowering the age of consent, and normalizing big age-gap relationships with the current sexual mores in effect.

young men get a felony if they resist losing half of their dating pool to high age of consent

Really? Half of the dating pool is aged fifteen and under? The only way 20 year old Deep can get a girlfriend is to hang around 13 year olds?

Do you hear what you are saying?

A top level post about an extremely... divisive topic by an account with only 3 prior posts all made 3 years ago?

On the off chance you're not here to stir up shit, I recommend that you please try to be a more active and positively-contributing member of this community before posting top level comments about topics like this.

You are right, of course. But people here seem to have bad troll detectors. As long as a post is long and grammatical (and nowaways, doesn't have too many signs of ChatGPT), someone falls for it every time.

It's a perfectly legitimate topic framed in a perfectly legitimate manner. I think one of the moderators of this website said a while ago something like "If we can get trolls to participate in a productive manner as part of their trolling, then we have won".

@Jiro

Contra @Jiro's usual supercilious sneering, when we see a post like this, no one is naive to the likelihood that it's a troll. Some of the people who argue with obvious trolls are just the sort of people who cannot resist responding even to troll-posts. OTOH, if an obvious controversial post is "long and grammatically correct" (in other words, it's actually making a coherent argument), the difference between "troll" and "someone making a sincere if inflammatory argument" is only in what their motivation is, which we generally cannot know.

Yeah, I looked at @DeepNeuralNetwork's history to see if he might be an alt of our old nazi-pedo friend or the other guy who insisted that not granting full adult rights and responsibilities to children is slavery. Is he? shrug Don't think so, doesn't have the same style. Is he a troll writing an effort-post to giggle and see how the Motte will react to "It should be legal to fuck 15-year-olds?" He could be. On the other hand, he might also really believe what he is saying. While I don't agree with his argument, I don't actually think it's insane on the face of it- there are lots of reasons for why the age of consent is the way it is today and not what it was in the 18th century, and overall, his post didn't read like your typical troll who just wants to fuck 15-year-old girls.

One of @ZorbaTHut's explicit goals for the Motte is to enable it to be a place where people can come here with blazing hot takes (sincerely held!) that couldn't find a fair audience anywhere else. Let people post them and argue them and take the brickbats and rotten tomatoes. Yes, sometimes that means enabling trolls who are just here to shit-stir. Of course sometimes those blazing hot takes are things like "Certain people should have bad things done to them," which crosses some other lines. And often those blazing hot takes descend into an exchange of insults and personal attacks, which crosses others.

Moderation has never been flawless here. We have a set of dials we can adjust up or down, and every adjustment has consequences. The OP got reported by several people basically saying "This didn't break the rules but I don't like it." I've seen this a lot lately. I mean... what are we supposed to do about that?

Yeah, I looked at @DeepNeuralNetwork's history to see if he might be an alt of our old nazi-pedo friend or the other guy who insisted that not granting full adult rights and responsibilities to children is slavery. Is he? shrug Don't think so,

What you are talking about is single issue posters. Many of them are sincere, and really aren't trolls in the sense of shit-stirrers. I would agree that DNN is not an alt of one of those--a single issue poster and a troll are very different, even if they can both be disruptive in their own way.

The OP got reported by several people basically saying "This didn't break the rules but I don't like it." I've seen this a lot lately. I mean... what are we supposed to do about that?

If he's here to shit-stir (especially if he's doing it to get juicy quotes to make rationalists look bad, he is in fact breaking the rules. He certainly isn't speaking plainly, and if his intention is to get quotes from rationalists, he's not leaving the rest of the Internet at the door either. Don't confuse "it takes human judgment to decide that he's breaking the rules" with "he isn't breaking the rules". Yeah, Zorba wants people to come with hot takes that are sincerely held. This kind of troll's opinions are not sincerely held.

And single issue posters and drive-by trolls both violate "post on multiple subjects". I would also argue that someone who makes a post and never responds to criticisms is violating at least the spirit of the rule about low effort participation, even if the original post did require some effort.

And in response to @ToaKraka:

I think one of the moderators of this website said a while ago something like "If we can get trolls to participate in a productive manner as part of their trolling, then we have won".

This kind of trolling may have individual subjects that are discussed "productively", but trolls can cause damage just by changing the emphasis on what is discussed even if each individual instance of a topic is one that we might have discussed anyway. You don't really get productive trolls, you get trolls who are better at causing subtle damage. (And if they're quoting us offsite, that adds a bunch of extra harm that isn't always immediately obvious.)

Your entire argument is predicated on your ability to read a poster's intent better than we can.

There are few people whose judgment would cause me to second-guess my own, and you aren't one of them.

If he's here to shit-stir (especially if he's doing it to get juicy quotes to make rationalists look bad

Is this even still a thing? Where do they post their content? I checked sneer club but they seem to be basically exclusive anti-yud posters at this point.

Oh I agree it's a legitimate topic for debate with plenty of room for changes in the law outside of "I really want to fuck 15 year olds and you should just let me", and the OP isn't being a blatant troll, but my default assumption when I see a top level post like this is that it's to get responses to share elsewhere about how we're a bunch of evil creeps etc.

First there's evospych; studies show most men in their twenties are attracted to 15 year old girls.

Studies also show that men are more aggressive than women. That doesn't mean we should legalise assault.

Assault is legal in some cases, such as self defense

The law makes a very clear distinction between the two such that self-defense is not assault.

it's not a felony to get in a fight

In many jurisdictions, it absolutely is.

if I punch someone, they're more of a victim than a 15 year old girl who loves her 20 year old boyfriend

A "15-year-old girl who loves her 20-year-old boyfriend" is not the same as "a 15-year-old victim of statutory rape".

It would be even better if the law made a distinction where a loving relationship involving a 15 year old between could never be statutory rape.

Does the law ever pass judgement on which relationships are "loving" and which aren't? How would it even go about doing this? I know that in custody disputes between divorcing parents the judge may well take the respective parents' apparent affection for their children (and concern for their welfare) into account, but my understanding is that this is only one factor of many taken into consideration: if forced to choose between granting custody to one parent who really loves his children but is a heroin addict, and another parent who doesn't seem that invested in them but isn't addicted to heroin and always feeds and clothes them, I imagine most judges would choose the latter parent. Offhand I can't think of any instance in which the legal system adjudicates on which relationships are "loving" and which are not. Still less can I think of any crime which is not considered a crime provided the perpetrator and victim love each other. We used to recognise such categories (domestic abuse, marital rape), and it was considered a major feminist victory when we no longer did so. I, for one, would not like to go back to the world in which it is legally impossible for a man to rape his wife.

I guess in mine it's not

Which jurisdiction would that be?

It is if they have sex, even if she wanted it and is not victimized by it.

No, it's not. If a fifteen-year-old girl loves her twenty-year-old boyfriend, but they have a celibate relationship, no crime has been committed. If a fifteen-year-old girl has sex with her twenty-year-old boyfriend, in some jurisdictions he will be considered a statutory rapist. The extent to which she loves him simply doesn't enter into it. We're not criminalising loving relationships, we're criminalising the sexual exploitation of minors, and as with literally every law in the history of the human race there are bound to be weird edge cases where it could plausibly be argued no real harm has been done.

If a man is convicted of statutory rape, then he had consensual sex with a teenage girl.

Okay, now tell me why you can't (or wouldn't) make all these same arguments about a 10-year-old who has hit puberty?

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You are aware that it is possible to have a loving relationship without having sex?

I'm not willing to put the mere feelings of teenage girls over the mating interests of young men

Ah. Are we getting to the real nub of the argument now? And how many 20 year old men want to have babies with their 15 year old girlfriends, as opposed to getting to stick their dick into a hot, wet hole?

If we're going to argue old-timey laws and customs, seduction was also a crime, my friend, and that includes making a girl think she's in love with you and you're in love with her.

You've discounted feelings there, and that's the rationale of the laws around statutory rape: it used to be argued "it wasn't rape, she consented!" even in cases where it was clear the girl wasn't able to consent or was not mature enough to consent, and secondly the law is dealing in reason not feelings. It's bad for society when minors are exploited, even if minors consent to the exploitation and feel they are not being exploited and that they really do love the guy.

You don't believe the testimony of those who said they were not, in fact, old enough at the time:

Interlocuters swear up and down that they weren't mature enough to date at 15. Well, that's not my experience and the experience of a ton of other people, including entire countries with nuclear weapons.

But why don't you? These are people who are now older and mature and more experienced, saying "yeah gosh back then I thought I knew it all but I had no idea" and I think most of us find that out as we get older. The things we thought we understood and were equipped to deal with with, we had no real idea of what was involved.

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A "15-year-old girl who loves her 20-year-old boyfriend" is not the same as "a 15-year-old victim of statutory rape".

A 15-year-old who has sex with her 20-year-old boyfriend is, however, in most US jurisdictions ("Romeo and Juliet" laws tend to allow 4 years or less)

Yes, but the operative fact in that distinction is sexual contact. It's not a crime in and of itself for a fifteen-year-old girl to love a twenty-year-old boy, or vice versa. (Indeed, how could the law ever criminalise emotional states? That's right out of Nineteen Eighty-Four.)

While I agree that you can't criminalise emotional states, I'm also dubious about "but she loooves him!" arguments, because 15 year olds of either gender are damn idiots, and we've all seen grown adults ruin their lives over "but loooove!" Women who stay with men who beat the crap out of them, or who beat the crap out of their last girlfriend (but it'll be different with me). Men who get taken advantage of by gold-diggers and emotional leeches.

You won't die of a broken heart if mom and dad refuse to let you run off with your 20 year old paramour, and when you hit 20 yourself, you may be very glad they didn't let it happen.

Agreed. This is the entire reason we recognise the age of majority.

Indeed, how could the law ever criminalise emotional states?

And yet this actually is the law of the land; "woman regrets it afterwards" is the mechanism by which any sex may retroactively become rape. If and when this fails in a court of law, laws get changed to make sure future instances of this succeed.

That's right out of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Most (all?) modern gender politics are.

Finally, the data don't seem to indicate that teenage girls are too young for pregnancy; the negative causal effects on their pregnancy are extremely mild and don't justify banning a 20 year old from dating a 15 year old.

It's important to disentangle physical readiness from mental/financial/social readiness. Teenagers are not ready to raise children. They're still in high school, if they drop out of school they'll have to get a low paying job and will have worse financial prospects for the rest of their life. If they try to stay in school the baby is likely to get a poor upbringing (or the burden falls on their parents, IF they have good parents). They're probably never going to college. It's not automatically guaranteed to ruin their life, but it's likely.

Unless, of course, the father takes on a proper father role and earns money and helps raise his child because he's a proper and responsible adult.

This almost never happens (and probably still wouldn't even if it were legal to admit to being the father). What's more likely is she just aborts and and then we have more dead babies and more psychological trauma. I wouldn't object in principle to a teenager marrying an adult ahead of time and then having marital sex, because this handles the pregnancy issue, and also prevents a lot of the potential for predatory relationships where a high status man convinces a gullible teen girl that he loves her and her bullshit detectors haven't finished developing. I would also have a lot less objections if birth control were free, widely accessible, and perfectly reliable, though I still think the emotional and sexual dynamics are unlikely to turn out well.

15 year old girls demonstrate adult intelligence

is just flatly false. You can score high on an IQ test, but it takes a lot longer for people to develop some emotional maturity and shed off their childhood naivety. I don't think it's impossible for an adult and a teenager to fall in love, but there's such a huge variety of predatory and charismatic people who tell all sorts of lies to get into someone's pants. I don't think this is good.

If we lived in a more monogamous, more honorable, more high-trust society where a girl's father and brother could beat the crap out of and/or ostracize creeps who make false promises and break her heart, I think a lower age of consent would be fine. If we had a magical mind reading or future forecasting machine that could pick out people acting in good faith I think a lower age of consent would be fine if restricted to people who passed this screening. But in the world we live in, where we have to make a law and apply it fairly to everyone, something like "15-17 years old if the other person is within a certain age range, 18 otherwise" is fine, which is what a lot of U.S. states have. Statistically, this reduces bad outcomes while still enabling normal behavior in most cases. What Epstein did is horrible and wrong. It's much easier to convinct if we have clear lines that were broken instead of having to pick and choose "well, this girl was maybe kind of taken advantage of but I guess he didn't break any laws... oh well, guess you can go free."

And keep in mind that an adult who genuinely falls in love with a teenager with good intentions can just date them without having sex until they're old enough, so it's not like these laws are causing tons of harm to people. The laws only get people too impulsive, impatient, or predatory to wait, which is exactly who we want off the streets.

I tentatively agree with your more moderate points.

But by preventing loving relationships from forming in the first place, the laws cause significant harm. The 21 year old dating pool is essentially cut in half by high age of consent laws and the irrational taboos they enable. This causes large harm to normal 21 year old men, akin to a regulation that seriously disrupts the market for some good which most people need to be happy.

Sure. I think the age of consent laws Should have generous exceptions for young adults crossing the boundary. There's a difference between a 21 year old dating a 17 year old in his dating pool, vs a 40 year old teacher dating their 17 year old student. Yes, it is technically possible for them to actually fall in love and get married and form a stable family, but 90% of the time that's not what's going on there.

Getting someone to drop out of school shouldn't be a felony.

...maybe. If it was actual literal rape then yes, it should be a felony. If it's consensual but she only consented due to lies and deception (man tells girl he loves her and will divorce his wife for her but has no intention of doing so) then I'd say it's right on the border: minor felony or major misdemeanor. If they actually just like each other and there's no shenanigans going on then it's probably fine.

But... how do you tell the difference? In a legal sense, how does the law get set up in a way that you can prove one or the other beyond a reasonable doubt?

Now, in a lot of cases you don't make things illegal just because they might be bad, but in a lot of cases you do, when the probabilities are sufficiently strong. We make it illegal to drive while drunk, even if some people might be really good at driving and not crash even while drunk. Some people might be really good at holding their liquor and barely deteriorate in skill even if they blow a 0.08% BAC. Is it fair to jail simply for driving drunk if they haven't crashed or caused any harm or damage? Yes. Because they might. It's an irresponsible and negligent thing to do, and making it illegal causes more good on average than harm. Are innocent people inconvenienced by the inability to drive themselves while legally intoxicated but practically competent due to their unique situation? Sure. But a lot more people are saved in comparison to the minor harms that people can easily account for and compensate for.

I am tentatively in favor of decreasing the penalties for sex with teenagers. I don't think it should count as "rape" or use the term "rape" unless it's clear that there was actual force involved. But it should be punished, because it's not something adults should be doing. It's significantly more likely to cause long lasting harm than it is to make anyone's lives better.

If a 15 year old and a 20 year old fall in love, she will probably be about 18 by the time they are married and done with high school by the time they consider kids. People don't normally meet and reproduce in the span of a few months.

Cool. I re-iterate that I agree age of consent laws should have exceptions for people close in age together. For people with larger age gaps, as far as I'm aware it is 100% legal for a 15 year old and a 40 year old to date while not having sex. Maybe it's super out of fashion to date while not having sex. Maybe this diminishes their likelihood of staying together when either of them could have sex with their peers. But if they actually fall in love they can be patient and keep it in their pants for a few years. If they're actually in love with each other specifically then they have their entire lives ahead of them, there's no need to be impatient. That's the thing here. It's not saying "you can never be together" it just says "wait, take things slow, and make sure before leaping into something you might regret". Teenagers are impulsive. I remember classmates in highschool getting in a new relationship every 3 months on repeat (this is also bad). If these chain relationships had been with 40 year old, wealthy, sexually mature/greedy/desperate men this would have likely been a lot worse. Saying "hey, slow down" seems like a good thing to me. Again, anyone acting in good faith can just date them without having sex for a couple years and everything is fine.

One thing that has always bothered me about progressive politics, is the constant moral framing. As this women does here Along with this comment:

"The left will debate taxes and social programs, not human rights— And why would they engage in conversations intended to reduce personhood. Like Bffr."

But here is what i dont get - why are some issues less "up for debate"? (mainly social issues, such as gay marriage) but others not? & Furthermore, why is it assumed that Democrats & democratic voters are in favor of these Human Rights, even though many of them havent been achieved or been actively worked against?

To elaborate more on what i mean. Im gonna take a handful of things that are often stated to be human rights by liberals & progressives (or at least - could be argued to be) mainly:

A living wage Affordable Housing Healthcare Education

Affordable Housing is a notorious one, and no blue state in the country has been able to tackle the problem effectively. Mainly because locals vote against measures to make it more affordable. Many of these states are also notoriously expensive (part of it is because of housing as well) And the only way to get a living wage would be to go to school (which is arguably still a failure: a living wage as human right would imply all humans are entitled to it - no just those who went to college). No state has universal healthcare. Many states also have poor educational outcomes (Looking at you Maryland).

I bring a lot of this up, because i feel like what a lot of people who think this way dont realize is that many of these economic issues effect people a lot more, and on a lot more of scale than many social issues like gay marriage do. In such way where i think one could effectively "moralize it"

Lets say liberals in a blue state vote against an affordable housing policy, think of the consequential impact of that: The poor single moms and their kids have to stay outside in the heat and the cold & if she cant find a job with a good wage - potentially go without food? Is this supposedly more morally tolerable? Is this hypothetical liberal a "better person" than a hypothetical conservative voter who would vote against gay marriage for instance? Wouldnt they also functionally be against "human rights" as well? Why is "bigotry" more morally unacceptable to these individuals than the economic problems at hand?

For the record im not arguing that being against gay marriage would be "ok". But two guys not being able to get married shouldnt be as big of a deal compared to the hypothetical single mom scenario ive painted above. I think a lot of people (the majority voters) are probably against "human rights" in some way or another - a lot of it is because actually fully realizing the right threatens their self interests (home owner voting against affordable housing, people being against higher taxes, or against poor people moving in next to them to aid with access to education and general social mobility). The apparent lack of those things mentioned arguably creates more suffering for many more people than merely "hating" gay people would (if you wanted to frame it that way).

And why would they engage in conversations intended to reduce personhood. Like Bffr."

Abortion, anyone? That's a limiting of personhood they're very happy to converse about.

I think the main difference is how would you even argue for or against gay marriage? The difference of opinion on it and topics like it are on a different level than a debate. It is closer to a conflict theory topic than mistake theory. Religious conservatives don't argue against it because they agree that gays should be able to marry but disagree that the government should be the one to do it; they don't think gays should be able to marry, at least not in the same sense as traditional marriages, and usually more broadly.

Housing affordability, healthcare, education, etc... Are more mistake theory. There is a general agreement on both sides that it would be good if housing, education and healthcare were more affordable and higher quality. Both sides have the same goal, but the strategy to get there are at odds, usually some sort of opposition between government intervention vs free enterprise and markets.

This is a decent response. But i think the problem i still have is the one of functional outcome. The women in the video kinda stated that because voting republican would defacto = voting for someone who would be against those things (abortion/gay marriage other "human rights"). That means youd still be a "bad person", even if you agreed with that stuff. I would imagine it would still follow here: even if people hypothetically would be for more housing as an example - them voting against virtually all or any attempts to make it a reality (particularly if they dont want to sacrifice their own interests to accomplish those things, which is often the case with these kinds of policies) creates the same functional reality of people not having that available to them (& suffering consequentially as a result).

I guess if your judging things by intentions it might slide - but I think it still fails from a functional standpoint.

To add a bit (perhaps this is a reiteration) - being against gay marriage still yields less suffering overall (even if we were to call it intentional) than being against those other things, even if we assumed that people had valid or good reasons being against those specific housing policies (Id argue we already know the solution, people simply dont want it implemented because they are guarding their homes value). I suppose this would come down to how one is judging things.

Scott talked about this in 2013 ("Not Just a Mere Political Issue"), even using the same example you gave of how opposition to gay marriage is seen as verboten in a way that other, more obviously consequential opinions aren't.

For the record im not arguing that being against gay marriage would be "ok".

It’s okay, you can say that here.

But here is what i dont get - why are some issues less "up for debate"?

It’s literally just a rhetorical shaming technique to put their debate opponents on the defensive from the start. “If you hold this position you’re an icky person” is a schoolyard-tier tactic but on many normies it just works.

“If you hold this position you’re an icky person”

I agree this is a bad rhetorical device but what's the best way to get around them just calling you ick and posting a screenshot of you on Twitter? I'm my experience engaging with it, they just call you cringe and recieve a trillion upvotes.

My automatic answer to this is that debating with Twitterati is a fool’s errand; they are not there to honestly engage, they are there to farm upboats by calling you cringe, the only winning move is not to play. Better master debaters than I have tried to figure out how to “get around them just calling you ick” and none have succeeded. That’s why the place where we are currently exists: there is no solution to the problem other than going away to a different discussion forum.

However, in an effort to at least gesture in the direction of something, I think you can only fight fire with fire by (a) wresting control of the banhammer from their allies to your allies (thanks Elon), and (b) having more allies who’ll call them cringe than they have allies who’ll call you cringe.

I ask because I tried to implement your option (a) with a "It's not 2018 anymore, nobody gives a shit about this patriarchy shit" to match their unthinking dismissal. I unfortunately didn't have the follow through in real time to deliver a critical hit.

There isn't any difference. Whatever issue they are focusing on at the time, whether gay marriage, the social program du jour, or some tax, will be framed as a human rights issue.

But here is what i dont get - why are some issues less "up for debate"?

Because admitting they are up for debate means letting opponents speak and granting them legitimacy. If you can preemptively shut down the debate by declaring any other position beyond the pale, you win.

I find it hard to believe you don't "get" this.

I mean, if the goal was to "win" on these issues it clearly isnt a tactic that works for all issues. Hence many "human rights" not being realized in democratic states. And it also wouldnt answer the question as to why the economic issues brought forward are of less moral importance. (why give "homophobia" a less of a free pass when housing and wages negatively affect more people?). Even if you are trying to shutdown the debate, why shutdown some debates and not others? What makes, "lets not build housing or give a livable wage to a single-mom, because i dont want to give up my high house prices or pay more in taxes or have her live near me, ect" more morally legitimate?

I find it hard to believe you don't "get" this.

Is this obnoxious implication of bad faith accomplishing anything useful?

I find it hard to believe you don't "get" this.

Guy's not posted here much, and SJ doesn't always advertise the full strategy. I can believe he hadn't quite worked it out.

The declaration of certain issues like gay marriage or trans* or immigration as “Not about politics, just being a decent human”, and then following that up with “No political discussion” rules was honestly a brilliant(albeit extremely frustratingly, to me) way that many popular subreddits basically silenced all dissent.

I don't think @Nerd's question is "Why did a left that believed it had won try to cancel its political opponents?" - a question to which the answer is as obvious as @Amadan thinks it is. I think it is "Why did a left that believed it had won put so much more effort into cancelling IQ realists, biological sex realists etc. for threatening their social orthodoxy than it put into cancelling the Koch brothers or the US debt clock guy for threatening their economic orthodoxy"

Yeah, you actually summed it up nicely!

This is a well-phrased question regardless, and one that I'd like to see talked about.

Because admitting they are up for debate means letting opponents speak and granting them legitimacy. If you can preemptively shut down the debate by declaring any other position beyond the pale, you win.

This is correct, but I've been arguing for some time that this isn't necessarily even bad behavior, because endlessly negotiating every facet of your existence with the entire rest of your society is antithetical to anything resembling a peaceful, prosperous existence. Such an existence depends on the personal not being political, and the way that happens is exactly by the formation of "common decency", of a set of norms and rules and behaviors that people conform to without significant argument or complaint, with those who cannot conform being ostracized.

We have to do this, but having done it, we forgot why it was necessary, and so burned down all the mechanisms required, and are now sort of rebuilding them badly, ad-hoc, and in a values-diverse environment they aren't made for.

Such an existence depends on the personal not being political, and the way that happens is exactly by the formation of "common decency", of a set of norms and rules and behaviors that people conform to without significant argument or complaint, with those who cannot conform being ostracized.

I don't think that follows, at least not trivially. A liberal's answer - this liberal's answer, for example - would be that, quite the opposite, the personal becomes political because society ie the body politic tries to screw around with people's personal lives. In fact, I rather think that for the personal not to be political, you would need a maximally liberated society, a society where the very idea of taking issue with another citizen's behavior would seem nonsensical, if that behavior is not literally criminal. Then, and only then, can all people live secure in the knowledge that their life is their own, without feeling that their happiness is under siege every waking moment.

I am not a full-on anarchist or libertarian in terms of the political systems that I think can produce good outcomes in the long term, but I do believe that "people can do what they want forever" is an essential component of the Good, and that government is good largely insofar as it gets us closer to that ideal (with the obvious epicycles about the government being empowered to infringe on freedoms in the interest of collective survival, as people need to be alive to be able to do what they want).

A liberal's answer - this liberal's answer, for example - would be that, quite the opposite, the personal becomes political because society ie the body politic tries to screw around with people's personal lives.

This framing would make sense if you could define a "personal life" that politics should not screw with. But in fact, no such definition exists, any more than there exists a rigorous definition of "harm" or, in our context, "screwing". The appearance of such definitions is a product of values-coherence, of cultural homogeneity.

In fact, I rather think that for the personal not to be political, you would need a maximally liberated society, a society where the very idea of taking issue with another citizen's behavior would seem nonsensical, if that behavior is not literally criminal.

I think you are correct that this is indeed the Liberal perspective. I think it should be obvious to you and all others why this perspective is self-destructive. Behavior being criminal requires laws. How do those laws get written if you can't imagine objecting to someone else's behavior unless it's already against the law?

Human coexistence requires significant constraint of individual desires and will. Humans generally cannot "live secure in the knowledge that their life is their own"; the closest approach to this happy state is to get them to accept the constraints other humans place on them as normal and not really constraints at all, and the only way that happens is values-coherence.

I am not a full-on anarchist or libertarian in terms of the political systems that I think can produce good outcomes in the long term, but I do believe that "people can do what they want forever" is an essential component of the Good, and that government is good largely insofar as it gets us closer to that ideal (with the obvious epicycles about the government being empowered to infringe on freedoms in the interest of collective survival, as people need to be alive to be able to do what they want).

Maybe founding society on a goal that is obviously impossible to achieve or even closely approach is a bad idea? Values-diverse humans are going to want a lot of things that interfere with other humans against their will, and are going to have no way to calculate or enforce which infringements are minimal and which are unacceptable. Politics becomes a weapon, not a common tool, and then the whole thing burns down. You are currently watching this happen.

if that behavior is not literally criminal

Isn't the entire debate about what is and should be literally criminal? Rightists think that it both is and should be literally criminal to enter the country without permission. Leftists don't. In some states it is literally criminal to abort a fetus after a certain length of time, but before natural childbirth, but leftists don't want it to be. There are probably leftists who want it to be literally criminal to state certain opinions or use certain symbols, as it is in Europe. Leftists are often but not always in favor of more rights and fewer laws disallowing freedoms. Maybe not all debates are legal debates, but quite a lot of them are.

Isn't the entire debate about what is and should be literally criminal?

Given the talk of "sets of norms" and "ostracizing", I thought this was about non-law-based norms.

Non-law-based norms is the substance from which laws emerge. you can't say "anything not illegal should be permitted", because not permitting things that aren't illegal is how things get to be illegal in the first place.

Simple, straightforward, and correct.

My least favourite version of this is the "this isn't political" gambit. "This isn't politics, it's people's lives!" As if people's lives aren't the fundamental subject matter of politics! It is, in general, a transparent attempt to remove one's own positions from the arena of reasonable debate.

Your politics are politics. My politics are basic human decency. So it always goes.

Gay marriage is probably a good example of this - what was a matter for reasonable public debate and contestation became, as soon as it was implemented, something beyond mere 'politics', which is presumed to be universally accepted and will never be debated again. Speaking from Australia, our plebiscite on the subject was 60-40 in favour of SSM, and as a result, SSM is apparently locked in, even though two out of five people oppose it. By contrast, the Voice referendum was 60-40 against. Is that result as definitive? It doesn't seem like it. The losing side of that referendum seem to have vowed to continue the fight. Well, why not also the anti-SSM people? They would seem to have exactly the same justification for continuing the fight. The republic referendum was 55-45 against; the republican movement does not seem to have given up and gone home.

If the result is the result you want, you declare that result to now be sacred and removed from the realm of politics. If it's not the result you want, oh well, get 'em next time.

It is completely absurd. It's all politics. It is all up for debate. That is the point of democracy.

I think you shouldn't downvote user Celestial-body-NOS for telling his anti-HBD position. He answers questions, does not engage in obscurantism and does not claim his position was proven beyond doubt by some decades ago. I think that it's where anti-HBD actually comes from: that all humans have soul that is indivisible, preexisting, made by God, has one bodily experience and returns to God after.

I sympathize with your complaint, but it's just the way things are here - if you are standing your ground on an unpopular opinion, you will get downvoted.

That said, @YoungAchamian is correct- starting a top-level thread to complain about another thread is generally bad form. Address it in the thread, or if you really think it deserves its own thread, maybe take the effort to frame it as a general discussion about how and why Motte users upvote and downvote things so it's not just "I'm mad about this one thread."

Wrong location?

no, i intended that

Is Dinergoth a real thing? (soft-paywalled; use reader mode to get the whole article)

Before we get carried away with narrative, let's do a reality check. Is "Dinergoth" pointing to a real cultural phenomenon? Can anyone provide anecdotal evidence?

I can probably think of one or two people I know who meet this description, but that's not enough to validate the claim, which is that:

  • Dinergoth is not a subculture like the goths/otakus/furries of old; it is the mainstream culture of today's youth.
  • When Dinergoths identify as queer or trans, this is entirely apolitical for them. Far from being woke left-wing gender activists, they are completely checked-out and apathetic about politics, including LGBTQ+ issues.
  • Dinergoths live in flyover country and have bleak economic prospects. They are not urban elites or "PMC" types.

The problem is, this archetypal Dinergoth is, by construction, invisible to anyone who's not one of them. They can't afford to live in big cities, so you'll never encounter them there. Even in a small town, the Dinergoths are shut-ins who never leave their (parents') homes and never venture out into the community to meet people. Instead they (supposedly) spend all their time chatting with each other on Discord (hence, so the article claims, the flattening of regional accents among the youth - although I think that trend is older than gaming chats).

And now that I've read this article, the next time I run across one of those obese 20-something piercing-having pink-hairs I occasionally spy at CVS or Walmart, I'll update my stereotype of them from "Antifa" to "Dinergoth"; but really I'll have no evidence either way unless I talk to them and get to know them, which I won't.

Perhaps some of you reading this are Dinergoths yourselves, although I rather doubt it.

"Far from being woke left-wing gender activists, they are completely checked-out and apathetic about politics, including LGBTQ+ issues."

Others may have raised this point before me, but the dinergoth type (which, from growing up in a small-ish, poor town in the American South, I am quite familiar with) has a set of political beliefs formed entirely from TikTok/social media. This vague anti-Trump outlook and wannabe anti-Americanism has no real, concrete beliefs, just fads. If you're familiar with the empathy politics of the 2020s, you'll know what I'm talking about; it's quite similar. If you've been on the underclass side of TikTok (the "I prefer my ice... crushed" comments and the self-censoring TikTok Lives) you'll totally know what I'm talking about here. I think it goes along with the mushy-brain style of thinking and ideology that the kids these days have. A key part of being a dinergoth is having a mushy brain.

Add me to the chorus of people who don't like the name. I think the aesthetic the article is describing is real, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with either diners or goths.

I agree that what it's describing isn't a subculture, though possibly I'm using the word a bit restrictively and thinking of a subculture as something that implies a community or a scene. It's not necessarily 'the mainstream' because I think that implies a kind of universality, but I think it is a mainstreaming of a certain kind of low-effort, passive engagement with online culture.

I think the author has glued a bunch of unrelated ideas together and then gave it an unrelated label. The look is just what's for sale. Mall-emo metastasized because there was still money to be made selling it, much like every other youth fashion trend from the last 30 years didn't go away.

Probably no trend that gets big enough will ever really go away now. Older cultural phenomena like pet rocks and poodle skirts didn't have the internet and access to a global market to prop them up so eventually they went away. Pokemon and mall-emo hit fixation and will be here forever, they'll just continue to mutate over time.

I'm not sure Dinergoth is a useful category, outside of designating an aesthetic. There's a broader issue--the listlessness and demoralization of youth--and the Dinergoth is a good example of affliction by it. But it's shared across pretty much every youth subculture. Hustler, incel, NEET, based tradcath, femcel, influencers. To the extent any of them are political, it's an identity-defining gesture. Even antifa is just a bunch of young men wanting to break shit for an adrenaline rush.

A more provocative take: what is the cause? "Capitalism." Or, more precisely, capitalism as implemented on actual humans. Humans are wildy disparate in their capabilities and intelligences, and capitalism, by flattening the world in its relentless pursuit of legibility and information, has identified the weak and dumb and deterritorialized them from the structures that once protected them. When they previously would have found refuge in burrows or bramble, now they're easy prey on the open savannah. And a caste of strivers are the predators here, who bloodlessly condemn millions to a debased state with new, maladaptive structures that are more easy to exploit and are delivered over technology that was supposed to liberate us.

Gen Z and, to an extent, millennials are just the leading edge of it. They won't ever snap out of it, because they don't even know of any other way to live.

I disagree with you, but I don't want to argue because it won't get anywhere new and interesting.

Instead I genuinely want to ask you to what extent you think culture and local community degeneration are responsible? Or, in your model, is that downstream of capitalism?

I'm a capitalist and always will be. I am also - very roughly - what might be called a technological accelerationist. More succinctly, I think capitalism+technology = overall massive material improvements for society. That being said, I do admit that as technology progresses and as the capitalist machine turns, there are some folks who will end up on the short end of the stick. My solution, or, the idea for it, has always been that local first communities work to support the stragglers and that things like family formation and, especially, extended family mutual reinforcement would do a good job of evening out the rough edges of capitalism for all who aren't repetitively highly anti-social (i.e. criminals and drug abusers).

I am not at all a socialist or any other -ist, btw; my comment was meant as descriptive, not polemical.

to what extent you think culture and local community degeneration are responsible?

Entirely responsible; all of capitalisms' ill-effects are mediated through how it hollows out culture and local communities. Capitalism delivers massive material improvements to society through whatever ways its able to find to deliver those improvements. One way that's been very effective is by mining and hollowing out local communities, customs, traditions; turning the sacred profane. Socialism and various other -isms have their own issues: capitalism's genius is in allowing its participants to make that trade (of community for self-interest) in the most effective way possible.

My solution, or, the idea for it, has always been that local first communities work to support the stragglers and that things like family formation and, especially, extended family mutual reinforcement would do a good job of evening out the rough edges of capitalism for all who aren't repetitively highly anti-social (i.e. criminals and drug abusers).

It's a romantic vision, and probably the best option we have on an individual basis. But I don't believe it can amount to much, collectively; capitalism is too good at harnessing our energies to its own ends.

There are counterexamples, right? To be sure, they're small scale and niche - mostly traditional religious communities. I'll be specific here in that I do not mean the loudest groups (i.e. evangelicals) but those with the strongest and deepest tradition - Amish, Traditional Catholic, Orthodox, Haredi Jews.

I guess the counter to the counter here is that these groups are often not exactly capitalist and are also often somewhat techno-skeptic.

Curious your thoughts on that

I agree that those communities are kind of counterexamples. The reason for "kind of" is that they didn't emerge through any intentional action or planning, and attempts to replicate them through a plan have all failed AFAICT. Any attempt in contemporary times to recreate their success will end up co-opted and corrupted. They're more historic relics that occupy niches that so far have been resilient to capitalism.

Though, perhaps they'll survive and out reproduce us all, and capitalism can be retried on a more resilient culture.

Fair and good reasoning. I commend your internal consistency.

So, again, genuine question, what do you see as the end state of capitalism?

Spectacular wealth and corrupt hedonism. The masses of people in their state-provided goonboxes, with a small elite caste engaging in their own particular kind of debasement except with spectacular wealth, with an AI zookeeper watching over us all. And, in an accelerationist sense, I think it's inevitable, unless the AI decides to put us out of our misery.

So, to save one's soul, the option would be to become a literal monk. If you have a family ... move to outside the monastery and live as survivalists? Not trying to be hyperbolic or sarcastic here. It just seems like the stakes are high in your model.

More comments

Isn’t this “what’s cool in Brooklyn” coming to flyover country 15-20 years later, but in an (inevitably) altered form?

‘Elite’ or niche subcultures never become common in the same form. So the libertine sensibilities of the Greenwich Village beatniks in the ‘50s became free love for college students (a much smaller proportion of high school graduates back then) in the late ‘60s and then became John Hughes / suburban teenage picket fence Americana for the wider middle class in the very late ‘70s and ‘80s. Teenagers who had casual sex in 1985 didn’t typically share the leftist, third worldist politics of many of the hippies on communes eighteen or twenty years earlier.

Isn’t this “what’s cool in Brooklyn” coming to flyover country 15-20 years later, but in an (inevitably) altered form?

I think it's more of "this is what luxury beliefs look like when they hit the underclass."

My reaction is "This is what a Barista of Arts looks like with 15 fewer IQ points".

Agree with the overuse of the term goth, there’s nothing really goth here. I will note however that there’s sort of a stereotype here that gender ideology is something associated with college-educated coastal elites, and it may be at an intellectual level, but not as-lived on the ground. Walk around Princeton campus and the kids will look normal, they wouldn’t even look bizarre by the standards of twenty years ago. You’ll see much more gender nonconformity at a Walmart in rural Alabama than at Harvard.

I think this is basically the intellectually permissive ideology of colleges finally filtering down to Walmart, where it just gets interpreted as a complete collapse of any normative standards or shame. So you get this mixture of mall ninja aesthetics, anime, furries, piercings, tattoos, hip hop/black culture in an unholy combination assisted by algorithmic blending of previously distinct subcultures. Similar to interracial relationships. There may be nigh unanimous support for interracial relationships at Harvard, but you won’t see many except some White/Asian pairs, you see far more at your local Walmart, especially White/black. These ideas are formed at colleges but mostly inflicted on the trailer park class.

You know, separately I want to talk about poptimism and the death of subcultures. I was reading Chuck Klosterman’s book on the 90s (good fun, I highly recommend it) and he was pointing out how “selling out” was a huge concern among indie music fans in a way it isn’t today. In the 90s subcultural fans had an expectation for their celebrities of loyalty to the subculture, of purity, and of resistance to debasement. In the early 2000s for example, hip hop had its own unique fashion that was totally independent from the world of high fashion houses and luxury design And you would have never seen Modest Mouse collaborating with Cam’ron. At some point around 2012 when proto wokeness was emerging, indie music press started to become self conscious that their disdain of pop music was in some ways sexist and racist and they began to notice that the then-popular bearded-flannel-mandolin indie of Fleet Foxes and Iron & Wine was disturbingly White They shifted their ethos from searching for the most obscure music to praising the top-40 hits of Beyonce or Kanye for their racial politics, thus poptimism was born and the end of subcultural gatekeeping. I mean look at the writing credits on Beyonce’s 2016 lemonade, you have former indie darlings like Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend on there, this is like if Jeff Mangum was writing songs for Britney Spears, absolutely unthinkable twenty years ago. IMO aside from the algorithmic melange & capitalistic aspects, there really is a part of the story where wokrness and concerns over sexism/racism/gatekeeping destroyed distinct subcultures

While I agree with most of what you write:

Similar to interracial relationships. There may be nigh unanimous support for interracial relationships at Harvard, but you won’t see many except some White/Asian pairs, you see far more at your local Walmart

This isn’t true. Until last year the freshman classes in the Ivy League were like 12-15% black, those students (especially in that class and that environment) weren’t only dating other black people.

I guess OP was referring to the life choices of white and Asian students, not blacks.

But those 12-15% are extraordinarily self-segregated into various affinity groups, dedicated URM-only spaces, grievance study classes, etc. Now that I think of it, in the 7 years I spent on elite college campuses, I can't recall seeing a single black/white romantic pairing outside a couple of star black athletes with white girlfriends. Meanwhile, according to Facebook at least, something like half my right-wing trailer trash high school graduating class is currently part of an interracial relationship and raising mixed race kids.

In the olden days, subcultures had real functions, a chief one of which was that they allowed one to explore genres of music efficiently. If you were dissatisfied with mainstream pop and happened to hear, say, gothic rock and liked it, it's not like you had hundreds of curated Spotify playlists (or, earlier, music blogs) to find more stuff quickly; you'd get handmade zines, sections in obscure record shops, small clubs (or club nights) and, especially in non-Anglo countries, the necessity for mail-ordering stuff. To find all that you'd need to get into the local goth scene, and of course there would be other benefits like other media, interesting conversations, drugs, strange ideas and belief systems you wouldn't get elsewhere and so on that would keep you there.

Since all that is not particularly necessary now - due to the said Spotify playlists and music blogs and such - all the subcultures have since started to bleed together to create some sort of a general lowest-common-denominator simulcra of a subcultural look which, for some odd reason, is now being called "goth" despite not particularly resembling the goths of old, expect perhaps for the derided "Hot Topic goths". Earlier the same look was often called "emo" with only marginally more of a connection to the claimed musical genre.

you'd get handmade zines

Greatest punk zine of all time

It's kind of sad that the best DTTW t-shirts are always unavailable. Have wanted the one with the Arabic Lord's Prayer for some time.

a chief one of which was that they allowed one to explore genres of music efficiently

I think the bigger one was the sense of community itself. Maybe you were a loner in your class, but you could put on your "uniform" and mingle with people like you. You could even identify each other from a distance, just one glance to see that the person across the street was one of yours.

The sense of community probably dominated once you were in the community, but the exploration of niche interests, chiefly music, was what got people in the first place and the communities formed.

I agree that subcultural aesthetics are kind of pointless now, but it's not so much that Spotify made them pointless, it's that alt aesthetics have gone mainstream, or at least aren't really judged anymore, and hence there is no sacrifice and no meaning in dressing for a subculture. It doesn't tell you anything about the person.

The other day I was at a zoning meeting, the engineer came in to present and he was a youngish white kid with a man-bun. There was a time, and not all that long ago, when at a formal meeting no one would take a guy with a bun seriously. You just wouldn't. Everyone would comment on the guy's fuckin' hair.

Similarly, we've had the conversation on if tattoos are attractive or cool many times over, but one thing that is beyond dispute: they are so normal that you can't really judge based on them and achieve much of anything. In 1960, if my grandmother went to the hospital, she would have pretty much refused service from a nurse with a visible tattoo. In 2026, if you refused service from any nurse with a tattoo, you'd just die in the lobby.

A punk or goth in the 80s got bullied in school. In my high school years they got mocked as emo kids a little ("remember to cut down the road not across the street!") but could fit in as skaters or whatever. In 2026, a goth or emo or punk kid is dressing like and listening to bands that his teachers and parents listened to. He fits in, more or less, the same as he would if he dressed in polo shirts and khakis.

The other day I was at a zoning meeting, the engineer came in to present and he was a youngish white kid with a man-bun. There was a time, and not all that long ago, when at a formal meeting no one would take a guy with a bun seriously. You just wouldn't. Everyone would comment on the guy's fuckin' hair.

Maybe we have different definitions of "manbun", but IMO it's one of the more professional hairdos for guys with long hair, especially if it isn't straight. Or am I thinking of a topknot type of thing, and a manbun is different?

I don't disagree, in the year of our lord 2026. But 20 years ago, everyone would have commented on an engineer with hair like that, and it would have impacted his credibility in that room. 50 or 60 years ago, they might not have even let him talk. Find me the engineer with hair long enough to bun in this photo. Long hair on men was a serious, serious CW issue for like a good thirty years! It would have been considered wildly strange and unmanly, let alone unprofessional, for a man to have hair long enough to bun in America before the 60s. And until pretty recently, you could with workable accuracy judge that a guy with long hair did not have a good professional job. Now, you can't, that guy might be your traffic engineer. He might even be a good traffic engineer!

Other "weird" and "alt" aesthetics have developed similarly.

You mean like Don Eyles?

20 years ago? I wouldn't be too surprised to see a Gen-X engineer with long hair in 2006.

There's a Boomer engineer with long hair in the famous 1978 Microsoft employee photo. That's software, though. I expect civil engineering remained conservative longer.

Find me the engineer with hair long enough to bun in this photo.

I rue the day that a short sleeved button down shirt + dark tie became code for "McDonald's manager" instead of "NASA meat eater that shoots his load at the moon"

But 20 years ago, everyone would have commented on an engineer with hair like that, and it would have impacted his credibility in that room.

More than 20 years, I think. Lee Kwan Yew called out long hair on PMC men as a sign of western degeneracy in the 1990's. I had teachers with man-buns in a posh UK private school at that time.

I live in the sticks, even moreso twenty years ago. "Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear, Beads and Roman sandals won't be seen." It would have been highly unusual and mockable to see a professional engineer with hair long enough to bun in our town.

But having long hair, as a man, would have been a Serious Statement until quite recently, and not one that you could have in a professional white collar job.

Only if you consider 30+ years ago as ”quite recently”.

It would have been in 2005, I'm quite sure. I remember strong disapprovals of it in the early 2010s, at least, as well.

Back in 2001 I had a lecturer in the university whose day job was as an engineering R&D department leader at Nokia (a company not exactly known for being "hip" or a hotbed of alternative culture). As an old school goth he naturally had long black hair and dressed in all black, with a suit jacket being his only reconciliatory gesture to corporate dresscode. Absolutely nobody batted an eye at his style.

As another example, Mikko Hyppönen has been a well known computer security researcher / expert / educator for three decades, whose hairstyle has stayed the same at least since 1995. In some ways you could call his entire career a fight against a type of counterculture.

So, yes, long hair absolutely was something you could have in many professional white collar jobs unless you perhaps happened to live in a particularly conservative place. It really was and is more about your overall conduct and presentation than about any particular subculture style attributes. As an extreme example, an acquaitance of mine was a hard core crust punk in the late 2000s. In his free time he was all about sticking it to the man, fighting the police (in a very physical sense), multiple large piercings, tattoos etc. I've also rarely met anyone who's exuded as much polite professionalism as he did in his professional role (with the piercings and all) as a technical documentation specialist for a Fortune 500 company.

It's a good article, and there's definitely something real there, but I hate the term "dinergoth."

For one thing, they're literally not hanging out in diners. The classic 24 hour diner doesn't exist in most locations anymore, and when it does it's too expensive for broke young people to go there casually. Also they kind of frown on people just hanging out for hours, and young people are staying at home online anyway.

Also they're not goth in any way. The glassic goth aesthetic is dark, muted colors and sad, serious emotions. This aesthetic of anime, games, and internet memes is more about bright colors and direct, intense displays of vibrant emotions. Almost the exact opposite of goth.

I would call it something like "proleanime" or "e-prole." They're not pretentious, they don't want to hide behind many layers of irony, and they're not educated enough to even understand postmodernism. They want something simple and affordable which they can enjoy, heavily based online since that's where they spend their time. Also, they want to express their sexuality free from the constraints of modern feminism, which is often "performatively" sex-positive but "practically" sex-negative for anyone who isn't gay or trans. And sure, some of them are obese or ugly because lots of people are, but some of them are traditionally attractive too (like the girls who get super into cosplay). It's a big tent of people who want to express sexuality and don't have a good venue for it in today's society! So while I'm not part of this group myself, I do support it.

Also I think maybe older people have the idea that anime is more high-brow than it is? We got this small subset of poorly translated anime films in the 90s, plus everything from Studio Ghibli, and thought it should be some high-class artistic statement because we didn't understand it. But when you watch the majority of mainstream anime with proper translations, you quickly realize how low-brow and fanservice-heavy it is. Nothing wrong with that, let people enjoy themselves, it's just a very different aesthetic than you normally expect from people who watch foreign media with subtitles.

They want something simple and affordable which they can enjoy, heavily based online since that's where they spend their time.

In my own small-ish town, I've encountered old teens / young 20s somethings having conversations that are, without exaggeration, just the trading back and forth of what I assume are memes or Very Online references and meta-references. There's no "Hey, did you go to the movie with Jeff?" levels of basic fact exchange.

Teenagers were talking in Homestar Runner references 20 years ago, that's nothing new.

I said consummate Vs!

Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel.

The classic 24 hour diner doesn't exist in most locations anymore, and when it does it's too expensive for broke young people to go there casually. Also they kind of frown on people just hanging out for hours, and young people are staying at home online anyway.

As someone not from the US I'd ask you to elaborate on this a bit. I've only seen such particular diners in movies and I can only assume that they normally make cozy third places in the terms of sociology. Is there any particular reason why they are normally open around the clock and are disappearing and are relatively expensive?

Also I think maybe older people have the idea that anime is more high-brow than it is? We got this small subset of poorly translated anime films in the 90s, plus everything from Studio Ghibli, and thought it should be some high-class artistic statement because we didn't understand it.

This is supposedly such a widespread media phenomenon that it has its own article on TvTropes. Sadly I cannot remember the term anymore. The short story is that importing anime in the '80s, dubbing and distributing it was a big market risk, so these companies only selected those anime series that were pretty much guaranteed to be popular. This created the misconception among many Westerners that these series represent the entire anime industry and that anime is always high-class. Unfortunately Sturgeon's Law applies to it as well.

As someone not from the US I'd ask you to elaborate on this a bit. I've only seen such particular diners in movies and I can only assume that they normally make cozy third places in the terms of sociology. Is there any particular reason why they are normally open around the clock and are disappearing and are relatively expensive?

I think it's mostly a culture change. My parents, like to reminisce about hanging out at the local Denny's with their friends in the middle of the night. I have never even thought about doing that, despite going to the same college with the same Denny's. It just never came up, I did other things instead. Maybe an arbitrary change, or phone and internet related. Not only did they not have cell phones, they might not have even had an individual landline, I wouldn't be surprised if the phone was for the whole floor.

Before cellphones, you used to have specific gathering spots to hang out and meet up with people, where you'd shoot the shit while waiting for a critical mass of people to show up and decide to go do something else. A lot of times you'd never really get around to figuring out what to do, so you'd just hang out until someone made you leave for not buying anything. For me in high school, this was usually a local Dennys or mall food court. Now that smart phones are ubiquitous, these types of gathering points are no longer a necessary part of organizing a night out.

The decline of the classic American diner long predates this though, and begins with the interstate highway system and development of drive-thru fast food restaurants. Long distance travel used to involve driving down a lot of local streets and stopping at little diners for food/to stretch your legs. But the interstates streamlined a lot of that travel, and the ability to grab McDonald's at any freeway exit without having to get out of your car outcompeted the diners on both convenience and cost. And then COVID shut downs dealt the final blow to most of those who managed to survive.

As someone not from the US I'd ask you to elaborate on this a bit.

As someone from the US I've got to second this request. I've got 6 24-hour diners from 3 different franchises within a 15 minute drive of my house! Maybe @MollieTheMare is right that it's just a Southern thing now? 3 of those diners are Waffle House.

Maybe the "relatively expensive" qualifier is what's important here? Or maybe not. A quick check says that a big (eggs, bacon, toast, waffle, hashbrowns, but water to drink) breakfast at the closest spot to me would top $15 after tax and tip, and a full but cheap lunch or dinner (I'm assuming you don't get a T-Bone or something) is in the same range. That makes me wince as an old person whose mind recoils at accumulated inflation, but it's still only an hour's wage as a new fast food hire here. It looks like the situation is about the same for the "working poor" as it was a generation ago. This Denny's menu from 2003 shows comparable meals that would be around $7.50 with tax and tip, at a time when fast-food cooks were earning $7.27 per hour.

Or maybe the change was much earlier? My "young person in debt (not poor, just not working during college semesters) going to 24 hour diners" days were a few years before and after 2000, and I didn't notice any skyrocketing prices during that period, but maybe things were much cheaper in the 80s or 50s or something.

3 of those diners are Waffle House.

Is Waffle House safe for dinergoths to hang out in? As a somewhat-too-online Brit I have mostly heard of the chain in two contexts:

  • FEMA won't risk going into a disaster area until Waffle House reopen
  • It's a good place to watch late-night brawls

Yes. Waffle house is rowdy and... odd, but fights turning into all out brawls is genuinely rare.

late-night brawls

This is just anywhere that's open later than the bars and serves greasy food.

Can said dinergoths deflect flying furniture one-handed? (famous chair deflection about 1:30 in)

But I actually have no idea whether this 2022 event remains unbeaten because Waffle House violence is actually rare, or just because getting such awesome chair-fu caught on video is rare. Back in my "go to the diner at 1am" days the diner was either a Denny's or a local chain with only a couple franchisees.

The worst crime against memetics caused by the British English-US English divide is that the Waffle House Wendy story is not called "Chavatar - The Last Chairbender"

So you haven't heard about their insane marker system? It's right up there with the Waffle House Index and their chair-parrying employees for infamy.

their insane marker system

This is the longest Tim and Eric sketch I've ever seen.

As someone not from the US I'd ask you to elaborate on this a bit. I've only seen such particular diners in movies and I can only assume that they normally make cozy third places in the terms of sociology. Is there any particular reason why they are normally open around the clock and are disappearing and are relatively expensive?

It definitely used to be a thing. I remember going to places like that as a teenager, but most of the places I remember have either shut down or are no longer open late at night. There are still some, notably IHOP and Waffle House, but they're mostly near freeways, and not somewhere I'd really like to go unless I'm driving long distances at night. Even most fast food places shut down at night (but there are some exceptions). I did see a few classic 24 hour diners in New York City, but that's NYC being different, and they were very expensive.

For why, I'm not exactly sure, but I can guess a combination of factors. It just costs a lot more to run a restaurant than it used to, because of rent and labor costs, so it's not profitable to keep a big space open with few customers. Or if it's peak dinner time, they want people to eat and leave quickly so they can turn the table over to a new customer. Especially if the "customers" are bored young people who are going to sit around for hours talking loudly and not ordering anything except maybe one soda, it's just bad business. Then, if it's in a city, you also have to worry about homeless people using it as a shelter, which is even worse for business. Maybe in the past there were more middle-class people who wanted to use it as a third space and could afford to buy a full meal there at 2am, but those kind of people would just stay home now. Something like the classic "Nighthawks" painting I just don't see, and maybe it's better that people can just stay home and go to sleep, but it is a bit sad.

For why, I'm not exactly sure, but I can guess a combination of factors. It just costs a lot more to run a restaurant than it used to, because of rent and labor costs, so it's not profitable to keep a big space open with few customers.

Shouldn't higher rent encourage you to keep the business open 24/7, since it's a fixed cost that does not scale with hours of operation?

Rent is, but labor isn’t, and I bet restaurant owners have to pay a big premium to get employees to take the graveyard shift.

It's likely even worse than the normal premium, because a big chunk of their workforce has a curfew, either due to parole/probation or being teenagers. If you're not making a profit being open, you're not making a profit being open- especially when you add increased electrical and gas(restaurant kitchens are electricity hogs when they're in operation), and staff getting more lightfingered(all cooks use the kitchen as their personal pantry when on the clock, all the time. Good restaurant management can minimize this or limit it to cheaper items, but not get rid of it- and that's leaving out waitstaff and cashiers pocketing money directly, and the hourly workers[again, mostly kitchen] stealing time when not being watched, etc) when less senior managers are watching them(more senior ones won't take night shift).

Re:

diners in movies

Maybe @BahRam You can chime in with what he meant more specifically.

As some general US-based commentary, it is true that the charming, cheap, accessible, "everyone knows your name" movie diner is virtually gone now.

That's not to say there is no residual of the 24-hour diner left. Notably, Waffle House continued this tradition well into the 90s and is still extremely common in the American South.

In that era it did serve as a third place sociologically. Describing the eponymous song:

... it's about coming together with the people you love and making your dreams come true.

Dreams don't come true anymore.

Through a combination of prices rising, penny-pinching degraded service, and more widespread public drug use, it has now developed a reputation as a place for vagrants, not a place to hang out.

... promising cheap affordable food at all hours of the day. [B]ecause of this it attracts homeless people, drug users, drug dealers, gangsters, and generally drunk people

Being open 24 hours a day is part of the draw. They are often on the side of the expressway. And if you need a cheap(ish), filling place for food, you can be assured they will be open. Even after a hurricane.

Waffle House manages to survive because of highly highly optimized supply chains, and dirt-cheap wages. An independent diner with highly competent, friendly staff would have much higher overhead. Particularly a problem is that classic American diner staples have seen a dramatic increase in input costs. Eggs, chicken fried steak, coffee, etc. have all seen price increases that vastly outpace broader inflation. You still find some small diners limping along, but it's often more of a boutique, higher-priced thing.

Maybe @BahRam You can chime in with what he meant more specifically.

I mean the standard diner that is a recurring location in Goodfellas, for example.

Your independent diners are being pinched by inflation(egg prices, in particular, and large wage increases for lower blue collar workers like cooks etc) and changing tastes, with the younger crowd often preferring fast casual food or less greasy meals. The logical business move is to reduce hours, and overnight is the fastest axe to fall. Remember, this is, except for waffle house, a full kitchen with a full kitchen staff, so it's expensive to pay $15+ per hour 24/7. You can find a normal diner pretty easily if you go at normal breakfast or lunch hours, but independent diners are mostly not open for dinner or overnight anymore.

Waffle house is special, because they serve a restricted(and much cheaper) menu, have a business model that relies on hiring the cheapest labour possible, and specialize in selling to drunks after the bars close. It has a reputation that... reflects that.

As some general US-based commentary, it is true that the charming, cheap, accessible, "everyone knows your name" movie diner is virtually gone now.

I think this is a slightly different place.

The 24-hour diner wasn't charming. Cheap, certainly. Always looked at least slightly grungy. There were regulars, but also a lot of people who were just passing through. The waitress called you "Hon" (or local equivalent) regardless of which you were.

They are often on the side of the expressway.

There's been whole books written about diners, but I think it's probably expressways which were a large part of killing them. A lot of them were on old through routes (US Routes and similar, like the Conowingo Diner on US 1) that weren't limited access.

Some of these original diners still exist and are open though. Some have re-invented themselves as basically a nostalgia version of themselves, and there have been others purpose-built as nostalgia versions -- these are not cheap.

The 24-hour diner wasn't charming. Cheap, certainly. Always looked at least slightly grungy.

Yeah, I have the mental defect of thinking things that are slightly grungy are charming. The fact that purpose-built as nostalgia versions are not grungy is partially why I don't like them. In addition to not cheap.

There's been whole books written about diners, but I think it's probably expressways which were a large part of killing them. A lot of them were on old through routes (US Routes and similar, like the Conowingo Diner on US 1) that weren't limited access.

Civil-engineer nitpick: According to the official definitions (MUTCD ¶ 1C.02.03 items 83 and 91; probably also AASHTO, but I don't have access to that any longer and I don't care enough to look up a pirated copy), expressways are full-access (e. g., the parts of US 1 that you're talking about) and freeways are limited-access (e. g., I-95).

Official definitions be damned, I'm in that-sort-of-diner central and only limited access roads are termed expressways. Nobody calls anything a "freeway", they look at you like you're from California if you do that.

The Conowingo Diner I mentioned was on a part of Route 1 that wasn't (and still isn't) divided, so it wasn't even an expressway by the MUTCD defintion. It was here, where the Royal Farms is, though IIRC Route 1 was two lanes rather than 3 when it was open.

Disagree - diners have always served mostly local customers. The market has been for food done quickly with minimal service and without pretense, at reasonable prices [ETA: and where it's normalized to dine alone]. As such I think three things primarily killed diners:

  1. Frozen meals - I think a lot of people have forgotten how big a deal the introduction of TV Dinners was. For the first time, you could have a prepared meal in your own home, with no cooking required, at a price competitive with or even cheaper than cooking from scratch. Prior to this, if you wanted anything more complicated than a cheese sandwich and didn't want to or couldn't cook, your only option was a diner. Afterwards, you could have diner-quality meals at a substantially lower price, in the comfort of your own home, and all you needed was a freezer you probably had already and a toaster oven.

  2. Fast food restaurants - A major appeal of the diner was a hot meal you could get quickly and cheaply, and sit and eat at your leisure. Fast food restaurants offered hot meals even more quickly and cheaply, and many built indoor dining areas so you could sit down and relax. You were never rushed and dining alone is fine. Granted, the menu was much more limited, but it ended up capturing a lot of the remaining people that wanted a simple and cheap hot meal and didn't want to make frozen dinners.

  3. Bar food - I think a not insubstantial amount of diner traffic, especially the 24-hour variety, was from bar patrons desiring some food to soak up the alcohol, when most bars would offer popcorn or pretzels at most. Now many bars have a TurboChef convection oven to heat up all kinds of frozen snacks, and many have a full kitchen to serve up pub grub, so if you are drinking and want some food, you can just stay at the bar and eat.

That's why I think most diners now survive mostly on breakfast, which is under-served by all those categories.

I spent most of my 20s as a 24-hour diner creature. This doesn't make me an authority, but it makes me feel like I am. The pandemic caused most of the 24-hour businesses around me (not just diners) to get rid of their overnight hours. The local diners mostly all failed and reopened afterward with new owners, reduced and much more expensive menus, and much more limited hours. My suspicion is that, long before the pandemic, those 24-hour diners had already lost most of their overnight clientele (graveyard shift employees, EMS, cops) to mega convenience stores along the lines of Royal Farms, Sheetz, and Wawa, so once the pandemic killed the inertia that was propelling the 24-hour service there was no reason to bring it back.

There are lots of factors keeping the current crop of 20 year olds who should be lurking in diners in their homes, whether it's lack of jobs, the internet, or social-developmental damage from the reaction to the pandemic. But even if they did want to go hang out somewhere, I think there are even fewer places left to go than ever. We went to the diner because it was the place that was open once everyone was done second shift. Even once everyone was old enough to drink we mostly wound up there because it was open later than the bars and our cop and firefighter friends would cycle through. It's how we made our friends in the first place. Now where can they go? Not even the local Wal-mart is 24 hour anymore, so that last resort of killing time is also gone.

(As an aside, I knew real human beings who were goths lurking in diners. Dinergoths, you could call them I guess. This article seems to me like the author's brain made the noise "dinergoth" and he found a way to staple it to a concept that, in so far as it even points at a real thing, has nothing to do with either of those ideas.)

Yeah. Somehow I surmised that whatever happened is largely due to the lockdowns.

As someone not from the US I'd ask you to elaborate on this a bit. I've only seen such particular diners in movies and I can only assume that they normally make cozy third places in the terms of sociology. Is there any particular reason why they are normally open around the clock and are disappearing and are relatively expensive?

COVID killed off 24-hour businesses, including restaurants and retail. Plenty of other places (banks, libraries, etc.) reduced hours during the pandemic and never expanded them again. The lockdowns did permanent damage to our society.

I don't think anime was ever "highbrow" like French cinema, but in the Millennial anime period (maybe 1995-2015) it did have a certain edge to it, like all things Japanese (think: karate, console games, cyberpunk, sushi, Zen). You probably had to have an above-average IQ to be into these things (although whether that translated into social status was another matter). If Dinergoth is real, that's no longer the case today.

An artifact frozen in amber:

Definitely a difference in the sort of crowd that would download a torrent + apply the .sub file, or pay expensive import fees, or join a club just to watch someone else's bootleg tapes, vs the current meta of endless mindless streaming on demand.

Also, excuse me while I go full weeb a minute, but I feel the same way about sushi. There's levels to it. On the low end, you can buy cheap premade stuff as a snack, and that's perfectly fine, just don't expect any complex flavors. American restaurants usually oyster California rolls or some deep fried monstrosity and that's... fine... but you might as well just order fried shrimp. The better places offer simple nigiri or sashimi with nice rice, so you can really taste the subtle flavors of the fish, and a clear mild liquor like sake really does complement it well. Some fancy plates and a cool chef also helps the experience. But at some point people go to extremes where they're just wasting money on "the secret, ultimate fish" or whatever and that's just stupid. Or you get drunk salarymen snacking on sushi while also binge drinking and smoking so... that can be fun too, in its own way. But once in a while its worth making the effort to appreciate a fancy meal with more subtle flavors than typical restaurant fare.

Or you get drunk salarymen snacking on sushi while also binge drinking and smoking

You mean @George_E_Hale?

ばれた!

Also I think maybe older people have the idea that anime is more high-brow than it is? We got this small subset of poorly translated anime films in the 90s, plus everything from Studio Ghibli, and thought it should be some high-class artistic statement because we didn't understand it. But when you watch the majority of mainstream anime with proper translations, you quickly realize how low-brow and fanservice-heavy it is. Nothing wrong with that, let people enjoy themselves, it's just a very different aesthetic than you normally expect from people who watch foreign media with subtitles.

It's the availability/filtering problem. First it was "some feature-length cartoon from Japan won a lot of awards worldwide, we should dub it for art hoes". Then it was "looks like cartoons are big in Japan, we can take the most popular series and dub them for kids. Wait, you think we can attract the teens as well? Noice!" Finally, we've reached the point where you can watch almost every release with fansubs or genAI subs.

And this means you finally have access to the full unfiltered range of formulaic slop that is made in Japan every year. Turns out it's just as bad on average as telenovelas or Saturday morning cartoons or horror movies.

It's the old "foreign prolefeed becomes high-status because consooming foreign product shows cosmopolitan sophistication" scam. In my youth it was Asterix and Tintin being more sophisticated than Marvel and DC.

In Japan, anime is slightly higher-status than Mickey Mouse because there is no animation age ghetto, but it is fundamentally mass-market TV. Sturgeon's law applies, and also the 10% that isn't crap is still passive entertainment for Japanese normies.

I remember seeing bus-stop ads in NYC ripping off this issue for beer in the late noughties. I don't remember who paid for them - the vibe is right for Yeungling but it may have been a generic Drink American ad by a trade association. There was a picture of two bottles of Stella Artois. One was captioned "The beer of the poor in Holland" (This is cuts even deeper than the target audience would have spotted - at 5.2% Stella has a relatively high ABV for mass market beer, so it is the beer of drunks and hooligans. In the UK at the time, it was called "beater" because it was said to be what you drank before beating your wife) and the other "$7 a bottle in the US" (or whatever a bottle of overpriced beer cost at the time).

Isn’t the “beater” thing also a reference to “A Streetcar named Desire” where Marlon brando’s character screams “stelllla!” while wearing a tank top undershirt? (AKA, a wife beater.)

It is possible that it began that way, but I doubt it. The overlap between people who drank lager in the UK in the 1990s (the respectable working class still drank bitter, and the middle class drank wine) and the people who were familiar with vintage Marlon Brando movies, let alone Tennessee Williams plays, was not large. When I was introduced to the saying, there was no suggestion that the reference to wife beating was other than literal.

There was a straight-to-VHS remake of A Streetcar named Desire in 1995 starring Alec Baldwin, that might also be the source if it has the same scene in it.

I mean it's worth noting that a 'wife beater' tank top undershirt in the US has, by repute, the same etymology- it's the garment of people who beat their wives(in this case explicitly class based- it has always been associated with people who can't afford air conditioning, for perhaps understandable reasons).

It’s the euphemism treadmill in action again. My dad (silent gen/New Jersey kid) still calls it a guinea tee

I always thought this was also due, in part, to shows like Cops wherein arrested male suspects ended up handcuffed wearing the tank top? Because many of these were related to domestics, the fashion-guilt-by-association emerged.

Probably, yeah, but isn’t it an older term than Cops?

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In my youth it was Asterix and Tintin being more sophisticated than Marvel and DC.

But Asterix is far more sophisticated than 50s Marvel ever was. (Of course, that says more about 50s Marvel than anything else. I'm not sure it's more sophisticated than Carl Barks's Donald Duck from the same period.)

Exactly. There have been high quality sophisticated comics that have come out of US but Marvel and DC sure as hell aren't those.

I'm not sure it's more sophisticated than Carl Barks's Donald Duck from the same period

Yes, well, we can't all have a concept album created by a symphonic metal composer, now can we?

That album was inspired by Don Rosa's Life and Times of Scrooge Mcduck, though Don Rosa himself was a Barks fanboy who mostly expanded on his work.

Might have been Heineken, who also mocked Sam Adams ("Benedict Arnold Pittsburgh Lager") and some other beer they called "Grandpa's Old Fuzzy Ale". Or Newcastle, which has mocked Stella before. I don't recall Yeungling doing mocking ads.

Reminds me of this scene from Mad Men: https://youtube.com/watch?v=deXGXYJo4-0?si=V5uQm8Q-7JoJlZQ1

Also I think maybe older people have the idea that anime is more high-brow than it is?

I think it's one of these midwit meme distribution. Glug thinks cartoons are low-brow childish entertainment, midwit thinks since it's not aimed at kids it's adult and somewhat sophisticated. Genius knows it's mostly endless rehash of tropes comfortable to its audience.

Yeah that's fair. I'd like to point out that there is some sophisticated anime, and especially the niche manga that never gets turned into anime. But I'm well aware that's not what people are watching on Crunchyroll or Toonami.

Do you know of a good resource for a list of niche manga you'd consider good? That's something I've never explored but would probably enjoy.

Try Blame! It is not without its faults, but it sure is unique.

Not an easy one. I used to use MangaRock, but it got shut down for piracy. Im not as plugged into the scene as I used to be- the big mainstream western accrptance and commercialization kinda killed off the indie scanlation volunteers. Your best bet is probably to search the list of manga that have win awards not in the shonen/shoujo category, like the general category of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogakukan_Manga_Award. Once you find something you like, you can search what else they've done- often they have more experimental works that never hit it big, but are more intellectual. Or if there's a specific genre that interests you, you can see if there's a magazine for that (eg, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Yuri_Hime for yuri manga that's actually aimed at women, instead of male fanservice). Unfortunately the rabbit hole gets pretty deep, and the really niche stuff is often print-only, not sold outside Japan.

I think it's one of these midwit meme distribution. Glug thinks cartoons are low-brow childish entertainment, midwit thinks since it's not aimed at kids it's adult and somewhat sophisticated. Genius knows it's mostly endless rehash of tropes comfortable to its audience.

This would be odd given the Black + Asian fanbase of anime.

Anime is aimed at teens and is for teens. Adults who are black appear to love it as well. If the meme is to be fufilled the jedi at the right end of adults should also love it.

It's the barbershop pole distribution, then.

"E-prole" is a great coinage. It captures the alt-slop normie aesthetic while avoiding all three of those now very tired words.

I would call it something like "proleanime" or "e-prole." They're not pretentious, they don't want to hide behind many layers of irony, and they're not educated enough to even understand postmodernism. They want something simple and affordable which they can enjoy, heavily based online since that's where they spend their time. Also, they want to express their sexuality free from the constraints of modern feminism, which is often "performatively" sex-positive but "practically" sex-negative for anyone who isn't gay or trans. And sure, some of them are obese or ugly because lots of people are, but some of them are traditionally attractive too (like the girls who get super into cosplay).

It strikes me that this aesthetic is much more related to the old scene subculture than goths (as is e-girl subculture). e-prole sounds about right.

I know the type. The "they live in flyover country and have bleak economic prospects" thing strikes me as quite real. When rainbow hair colors started going big, I thought it was really strange -- around here that's only associated with the e-prole type, CVS worker, down on their luck, demoralized. There's a lot of hopelessness in flyover country, which competes with the hopefulness of family and faith and confusingly messianic-hope that "Trump will fix this broken country" and, of course, drugs. But there's a lot of hopelessness and a lot of drugs on the coasts, too -- I just don't know what hopefulness competes with it.

But I'll challenge that this is principally sexual. Or that cosplay is. Hell, the cosplayer I dated briefly in college turned out to be asexual, which made her the second woman I've dated that turned out to credibly claim asexuality and the fourth such woman I've had a crush on. Obviously neither relationship lasted long or went very well. (Women I've dated have turned out to be either sexless or more sexual than me, I still don't know why.) One of the latter two is someone I thought of when I read the description of the dinergoth.

I think it's fairly true that these folks are mostly politically disengaged, but in flyover country the type runs consonant with being a political leftist. But I'd describe the type as "politically disengaged because they believe the Democratic party is full of rich people who don't want to help people like them," or "politically disengaged because they believe the only solution to America's problems is gay space communism established through the revolution," which they fantasize about while standing dead-eyed at the CVS checkout counter.

I don't know that this is the default youth culture, but it certainly is huge. I'm an elder zoomer -- this is the end-fate of a lot of people I went to school with. The Asians and the gays went to elite colleges, the Christians went to <evangelical_school>, and the dorks, who I hung out with, often tried to go to college, dropped out, and ended up listless and hopeless.

Apparently I'm pessimistic tonight. I don't mean to be. I'm actually very proud of where I grew up and the school I went to, despite their problems. But there's real hopelessness out there, and everyone of my generation I speak to almost identically tells me they have no real hope for the future and almost feels humiliated in spite of their achievements. Even if they're married, have a good job, a house, friends...

That said, the author of this particular piece is far too pretentious, and far too apt to see the elements of flyover country he's noticed as meaningfully distinct from their coastal cousins. I see confluence between the e-proles and the coastal progressives -- a lot of it. In some ways it feels like he's just now realized the existence of social class in America, and is astonished to find that lower-middle and lower-class people in flyover country exist, and live different lives from coastal strivers, overfitting this astonishment to the particular problems of young people who struggle with mental illness. I know the type, "I have OCD and ADHD and major depression, I live with my parents", I know the type. But I'm not convinced this type doesn't exist on the coasts; just not in the upper-middle-class social communities that the author lives in.

By and large, these are depressed, poor people who see gaudy self-expression as one of their few remaining possibilities of mattering in the world. If anything, their existence says more about the hopelessness of modern America than about its objective economic decline.

Definitely a lot of hopelessness going on. I'm a millenial, so I've heard us described as "the sad generation," an entire generation of young adults longing for the days of our youth when things were so much better. Which is weird, because all the economic stats say that we're much wealthier than ever, and there's a million new options for entertainment that we never had before, and... somehow that made everything worse? Odd.

I'd agree that e-proles and cosplay aren't just about sexuality. I meant it more like... any raw, unfiltered display of emotion. The male cosplayers I've seen at cons usually favor huge weapons and elaborate armor, which is more of a power fantasy. Then you've got the people super into historical recreation, or cute slice of life, fantasizing about some life of pure coziness. And even the more sexual anime stuff they rarely actually have sex, it's just blatantly showing off the bodies of hot women with no shame. I think it's that feeling of like "raw burst of emotion" that appeals to people who are kinda depressed and hopeless, because it at least lets them feel something. It's like taking a straight shot of cheap tequila, as opposed to sipping a fancy wine.

But also, yes, it's just a very convenient aesthetic. They can stay at home in their parents house, talking to their friends on discord, and apply some $5 hair dye or wear a $20 cat ear headset, and instantly they're part of it. No need to buy expensive concert tickets, or name-brand clothes, or a racing car, or cocaine or anything like that.

But also, yes, it's just a very convenient aesthetic. They can stay at home in their parents house, talking to their friends on discord, and apply some $5 hair dye or wear a $20 cat ear headset, and instantly they're part of it. No need to buy expensive concert tickets, or name-brand clothes, or a racing car, or cocaine or anything like that.

Reminds me of the discussions about vsco a couple of years ago. Identity made cheaper and easier to purchase than ever before.

Anime is the only real remaining mass entertainment artform where 1) the chasm between good and bad craftmanship is obvious to the average consumer, and simultaneously 2) not irony poisoned.

The vast majority of anime is painfully, awfully earnest. Characters train hard to get stronger. Characters pursue romance for romance, not for self-actualization. Characters fight for lizard-brain reasons; survival, power, money, sex, respect - or for noble reasons like meaning, brotherhood, friendship. Hollywood used to produce this stuff on the regular but then got bored or got high on their own supply/addicted to masturbating and navel-gazing, or some combination of the two. Or just got profoundly disgusted by the people they were making the Content for.

This is a bunch of fake academic sounding nonsense. I would completely disregard this article as it appears to be mostly cope for the author's breakup with a hot portland goth girl. He has a nice dump of random statistics, many of which are years old, and no real honest way to pull conclusions from them. You can alternatively just as well say that anime is popular because netflix made content for young adults boring and gay.

For a few years now, I have been more and more worried about the youths. Sitting on my porch, in front of my lawn (get off!), I watch the they/thems scuttle by and think to myself, "kids these days!"

The aesthetics don't actually worry me. This is kids doing what kids do; picking fashions and accessories deliberately to freak out the squares. Long haired hippies, punk rockers, grunge, glam, goth, emo. It's all branches from the same trunk.

What worries me is the response to it by their peers. For most of post WW2 western history, there were normie aesthetics that were obvious and represented the median of teenage expectations. Think of your preps or in-crowd. Jocks and cheerleaders. Perhaps those were the zenith of normie expectations, but it filtered down. Being counter-culture was deliberate and carried real costs. If you had green hair and piercings, you'd be looked at weird. Peers would make fun of you. You might be bullied. You then got to respond to this in a number of ways;

You could endure the bullying and double down on your identity as a goth/punk/emo/sensitive kid. Good for you. These are the kids who go on to art school or something and at least maintain their weirdo integrity. You probably open up a Banh Mi shop in Portland years later and dabble in polyamory.

You could decide being bullied sucks and that conformity actually isn't so bad. You ditch the piercings and black clothing and get a decent pair of jeans, a polo, and a leather wristwatch. Later, you laugh at some old high school photos you find years later as you logon to your 10:30 zoom call and greet your peers with "Happy, Friday, gang!"

Or, least preferable, you let bullying soak into your soul. You maintain your goth aesthetic but develop anxiety and depression. Barely graduating High School, you self-medicate through your 20s and wake up at 35 as a committed misanthrope. You either turn into a hardcore burnout or find religion.

This spectrum is continuous, not discreet. Most kids experiment with some level of "rebellion" in the teenage years but shake out towards the median. That's fine and good. With that last example, of the committed burnout, I'm being a bit intentionally hyperbolic. This is also why I still am against extreme forms of bullying.

I am not, however, against all bullying because the alternative is worse. The alternative is what has resulted in these so called Dinergoths.

Total and radical acceptance means there's no cost to defecting from norms and median social aesthetics. If I come into 9th grade with cat ears on my pink dyed hair, black lipstick, a rainbow flag choker, and am met with a shrug from my peers and "you do you" milquetoast encouragement, I haven't encounter a real social cost function. This is a massive societal failure to the Youths. Childhood and adolescence is where you have unlimited (mostly) do-overs for social situations. You awkardly ask someone out, you make a bad joke, you make a poor outfit choice, you experiment with various identities. It's all (well, most of it) fine because the folly of Youth is expected and you can reset as many times as you like.

In adulthood, this isn't the case. The stakes are high. Being socially malformed can have real negative impacts on career and personal development. Of late, being an autistic weirdo male can even get you fired from your job (See: James Damore). I think these Dinergoths are what they are because they didn't encounter real social cost until it was too late and they had no emotional means of dealing with it, so they retreat to basements and discord servers.

To use a physical health analogy, it's always been folk wisdom that letting kids get a little dirty is a good thing for their general immunity. I don't know how accurate that is (although I believe exposure to peanuts has been proven to reduce or eliminate peanut allergy severity) but I think it is still useful. Likewise, it's good to let a kid make a few social faux pas - and to let his or her peers inform of this. Sure, there may be some tears and hurt feelings, but how many childhood embarrassment stories become the stuff of humorous remembrances later on?

Taking this useful and necessary feedback mechanism from kids makes them brittle and turns them inwards as they enter adulthood.

I hope that you are wrong and 2rafa is correct. I suspect you are right, though. Interesting take.

Being socially malformed can have real negative impacts on career and personal development

Not now that dinergoths are the ones making the hiring decisions. Plenty of people get away with non-median social aesthetics now, and still make plenty of money and have successful social lives. The archaic social norms no longer matter at any stage of life (other than maybe for boomers, but soon they will be retired and irrelevant).

See: James Damore

James Damore was fired because of wokeness, not because of his aesthetic or personality traits. He was fired for committing wrongthink. When has someone ever been fired from a tech company for wearing cat ears? The question of what lifestyles and aesthetics are allowed is different than freedom of speech and thought.

James Damore was fired because of wokeness.

Subtext matters. As anti-woke as I am, sometimes it isn't the true believers standing on principle, but normies getting rid of weirdo under the auspices of righteous indignation. The Salem Witch Trials started with at least a few people who really thought the devil made them do it, then developed into back biting and score settling for petty offenses.

I'd offer you this meme

Not now that dinergoths are the ones making the hiring decisions. Plenty of people get away with non-median social aesthetics now, and still make plenty of money and have successful social lives. The archaic social norms no longer matter at any stage of life (other than maybe for boomers, but soon they will be retired and irrelevant).

This thread is veering off topic. If "dinergoths" exist at all, they aren't working as well-paid professionals, let alone as hiring managers for said professionals. They're going to be in dead-end jobs commensurate with their poor social skills, as remnants of the hollowed-out working class.

As much as engineers may bemoan getting bossed around by Woke HR Karens despite their lack of "real" skills (as in, pertinent to the company's stated purpose), becoming adept at Machiavellian court intrigue isn't exactly easy either. Your typical socially inept Dinergoth would never make it in HR.


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