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I saw a thread about Louis Theroux's manosphere documentary. OP relates his teen daughter's alleged words and experiences to make a point about healthy values and teen male behaviours. The current verdict is that boys should have their screen times monitored or limited so they don't get corrupted by the manosphere, and raise them with feminist values. Okay. I agree with some of this. There are certainly incel adjacent online spaces that spiral into nihilism and hate. There are teenage boys with zero offline male role models to mainline this stuff and end up emerging more bitter than buff. Parental gatekeeping of violent porn, gambling apps, or extremist political content seems like basic risk management. If your heuristic is “anything that makes my daughter feel existentially unsafe is bad for my son too,” the monitoring prescription follows naturally. And yes, the generational digital literacy gap is real. Parents are often shocked their kids know the lore. I'd go further, I'm in favour of a blanket social media ban until they (both boys and girls) turn 16.
That being said. This comes just one day after Clavicular's recent clip with Leela Saraswat went viral. FWIW the "boyfriend" commented on Instagram that it was an old prom pic and they weren't dating. But are we allowed to question what message women's questionable dating choices (made of their free will with no external pressure) send to young boys and girls? We have a clip of an (allegedly) attached woman melting for a high value male on camera, yet the discourse pivots to “protect boys from the manosphere”. Here's the truth nuke: Clavicular is not an incel. He is living proof of the sexual marketplace the manosphere describes, which is heavily determined by looks, money, height, race, social status, etc. He pulls taken women with minimal effort. Young men are not “corrupted” into noticing these patterns. They notice them first (through lived failure) and then find the subculture that names the pattern instead of shaming them for noticing. So what is the problem with the manosphere? That it spreads dangerous lies and radicalises young men into subjugating and even killing women? Or that the rhetoric makes women look bad?
If it's the former, I need to see some evidence. Netflix's "Adolescence" made waves last year for catching the so called andrew tate problem that's apparently radicalising 13 year old boys into stabbing their classmates. Never mind the fact that homicide rates in the UK have been trending DOWN over the years, particularly against females. Are we allowed to discuss the harm caused by manufactured hysteria? If it's the latter, then you’re not protecting boys. You’re just delaying the day they notice the discrepancy between official feminist sermons and observed reality. And when they finally do notice, they’ll be angrier for the wasted years. And manosphere critics would tell us they've been "corrupted".
Lastly, since #notallmen was mentioned as a gotcha, can I point out how this "collective guilt" only flows one way? If every man should feel ashamed about the manosphere because we share genitals with them, what about the (overwhelmingly male) miners, linemen, firemen, welders, construction workers, road workers, steel workers, etc etc who commit to physically intensive and dangerous labour everyday to keep your lights on? Do we all get a collective male labour paycheck for that too, simply because we share genitals with the workers in these vocations? You don't need to hold yourself to consistent principles if you have sufficient social capital, like feminism does.
Feminism, as an ideology for advancing women's interests, cannot survive in an open marketplace of ideas. It's Motte is 'Feminism is about equality between men and women' which is indefensible when presented with the flood of examples of Bailey exploitation where 'feminists' pick or discard gender roles according to whatever is most in their interests in the circumstance, equality be damned.
Boys and men can now drink from the firehose of the internet which facilitates easy noticing. Like many other ideologies crumbling in the face of evidence, Feminism's supporters have started pushing for suppression of information to allow the gaslighting to continue.
It's this broader desire for suppression to allow narrative control that worries me about the West right now. Its happening along other fronts such as Multiculturalism which also seems to now require suppression of speech to get incompatible cultures to coexist.
That politician from Australia notwithstanding, I don't actually think that Multiculturalism requires suppression of speech to function, it just requires some amount of cultural assimilation and little-L liberalization. It's really easy to go back and read something like H.P. Lovecraft's He, where he wrote:
And see it as a bit silly and overblown. New York city isn't dead just because it isn't Dutch or Anglo American. (Also, surely London has had some shift in ethnicity from its Roman founding to the time of Lovecraft? Like, what about the anglo-saxons and the vikings?) And it just seems obvious that many of the ethnic groups that H.P. Lovecraft was worried about, like Southern and Eastern Europeans, the Irish, and Asians just aren't that scary in the modern day. Surely, even critics of multiculturalism would find a passage about the scary Asians like this one:
To be utterly laughable. Seriously, I've been to Chinese New Year celebrations within my city, and it is a fun time. They do have drum performances, and dress in strange clothes, but I don't feel like a group celebrating their heritage once or twice a year is some death knell for Western civilization and culture.
The good, still mostly functional Western countries that matter like the United States, still remember what it means to be an empire (even if they don't call it that), and we've successfully anglified basically every white ethnic group that has come here, we anglified the Native Americans, and sufficiently assimilated Asians and Hispanics so that they're no great threat to our society. People look at the statistics of Europe's failed immigration policies, and assume that they also apply to the US, but they just don't. Regardless of whatever foolish policies Europe and the wider anglosphere adopt, the United States is doing fine and will continue to be a torchbearer for Western values even after those cultures have become just like the New York of Lovecraft's imagination.
I kind of don't understand people who look at the facts of succesful past assimilation, and who just assume that there is no soft or hard pressure to assimilate anymore in spite of political correctness and what the progressive left say. People who come here learn English. People who come here, learn a baseline of American culture and values. Just as the Chinese Empire of old hanified many of the disparate ethnic groups within its borders and failed to hanify others, so too America has and will succesfully anglify (or if you prefer, americanize) many ethnic groups and will fail to anglify others. But as long as we have the state capacity to stop the non-anglified groups from being too much of a problem (and we definitely do), it is a total non-issue for our civilization and way of life.
American exceptionalism aside, in the non-American Western nations there is definitely a lack of will and state capacity to assimilate foreign cultures. It is cheaper in terms of political capital to double down on indoctrinating the host heritage populations to accept the 'eccentricities' of immigrant groups over mandating assimilation. There's also perverse incentives where host politicians (and parties more broadly) can benefit themselves by championing immigrant groups over heritage citizens. The US isn't immune to this in pockets, but broader American culture may be more resilient against cultural infringement.
Noticing the 'two tier' celebration of immigrant cultures over the denigration of the host cultures is building resentment. The UK seems to be the first of the Anglo nations to reach a crisis about this with free speech infringements used to keep a lid on things.
The fertility decline/rapid aging of the citizen population doesn't help either imo. The younger cohorts are much more diverse.
It also means that you can't ever stop and assimilate people. People always bring up the Ellis Islanders or whoever but that stopped and the intake slowed for a generation after. Nobody who cites that as a success story even pretends that's going to happen because they want workers and to show population/economic growth.
Nobody can ever make the argument to ease off for a decade or two, even for specific groups.
There's some pretense that they're gonna fix the plane when it's in flight but no one actually knows how to do it.
It's the only group with revolutionary potential so it's very dangerous to embolden their critiques of multiculturalism or show it may be worse than they think. I think, in the eyes of the leaders, it runs the risk of becoming a runaway train where they take it too far.
Of course, this is partly what helped the very offenses that make it even harder to fess up and further discredit the system.
I might sound like a broken record, but I think TFR is the root cause of all this. Western governments see population decline (and consequent tax base erosion) as a sovereign risk and will do whatever they can to forestall it. Immigration is the only tool they think is feasible to 'fix' this, so we continue to see uniparty policies of mass immigration despite it being grossly unpopular.
Everything else is downstream of this. I've heard speculation that AI based productivity gains might obviate the need for immigration, but I'm not holding my breath.
We know this is not the reason, because the governments have data that show immigrants are a massive money sink. Some of them even decided to share it with the public!
This didn't actually prevent some government orgs from assuming otherwise, e.g. in the British OBR projections that assumed migrants would be as productive as locals.
That and lobbying from business (and fears of a dying healthcare system) explains the massive post-COVID migration spike.
Incredibly short sighted (basically low wages for business that didn't like how COVID shifted the labour market + pretty projections of growth so you can borrow at the expense of taxpayers for decades) but governments can be shortsighted. It also doesn't help when discussions on human capital are basically taboo so it's hard to coordinate criticism without being called racist.
Of course, that's another structural problem caused by aging: there aren't really many high IQ populations to squeeze since most of their countries are both wealthy now and aging (and, in the case of Britain, they left the EU). If you think migration is your solution it's gonna be Third World migration and we've seen how even selective immigration systems that try to get the cream of the crop from places like India got corrupted by the incentive to import cheap labour.
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