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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   25793 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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Feminism in the YooKay

This is an article that popped up on my feed and has been making the rounds.

It's about young women in the UK. The UK, for context, has been stagnating on a GDP per-capita basis since 2008 and is facing funding problems amid a large social spending bill. It's hardly a Randian capitalist paradise.

O’Brien grew up in Leicester, in what she calls a working-class family. (She defined this in the Marxist sense, meaning anybody who works for a wage, unlike the “asset class” and what she calls the billionaire “Epstein class”.) She had always been progressive. But while studying for her master’s degree at Bristol University, she started going to Black Lives Matter protests on College Green and felt inspired by the collective energy she saw there. She already had a TikTok following from sharing “random content”, but her audience rapidly grew as her posts got more political. Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, and Israel’s response in Gaza, was a “catalytic moment” for her. “I had been talking about immigration issues before, like Marxism, like philosophy,” she said. “Then it all just became the war.”

I don't have a problem with her in particular. There are odious people in every generation, in either sex. There will always be people that demand more even in the face of the state being bankrupt, nobody ever thinks they live in a good economy (not to say the UK has one).

The problem is that the movement here has become utterly unmoored from reality. In the case of the UK, the left broadly got what it wanted. There are sweeping laws against almost every leftist bugbear, there are gender equality rulings that means female cashiers have to be paid the same as male warehouse workers, taxes are incredibly punitive at the top end, the UK has worse pay compression than the Soviet Union (!!!).

While Adolescence was filmed about incels (an utterly fabricated moral panic, as involuntary celibate men are both more likely to be non-white, less likely to rape and less likely to be violent against women than their sexually more successful counterparts), there is no societal feedback mechanism against the wishes of women. When the (western) world chafes against women's preferences, the world gets sanded, even if it shouldn't. There is no accountability or feedback mechanism against female preferences, they are assumed to be true. While this is unpleasant, one could stoically accept this for a while. But when it starts intersecting with politics at large and with the functioning of the economy, well, that's a different story. I don't live in the UK but I have strong ties there, so this story did feel sad.

Online divides have also bled into real life. Exclusive polling by Merlin Strategy for the New Statesman reveals that young women, aged between 18 and 30, are by far the most progressive demographic in the UK. This polling found that young women are 26 percentage points less likely to feel positively about capitalism than young men, and much less likely to feel the economy works in their favour. They are also much more pessimistic about the future – their own, and everyone else’s. They also feel much more negatively towards young men than young men feel about them.

Again, beliefs utterly unmoored from reality. Young women outearn men and the economy bends over backwards to an absurd degree to make that happen. I work in quantitative finance, in a field where there is an incredibly tight feedback loop between performance and PnL. It's really not that possible for us to do affirmative action or similar. And yet every year, HR tries to force teams (sometimes successfully) to hire subpar women. I am sure there are some women who could do the job, but most very intelligent women eschew quant finance. And yet.

O’Brien told me she considers herself a revolutionary rather than an activist. “Revolutionary is more, ‘I want systemic change. I don’t want to exist within these same systems. I want to be an instrument of the revolution.’” She said she felt anxious seeing injustice and doing nothing. It was a physical sensation in the centre of her body. Perhaps this was why women were more likely to be progressive than men, she speculated. “Women tend to be a little bit more connected to their bodies and their physical sensations and emotions.” It seemed like an essentialist, even reactionary view of gender: the idea that women are emotional, physical beings, in a way men aren’t.

Women are more agreeable and more neurotic than men, in a big five sense. Both qualities that are not necessarily adaptive. Women are good at steering and enforcing social consensus, at language games, etc. What is described here is just women's greater emotional reactivity, as measured by the big five personality scores. This is not new information or anything; variants of these tendencies have been known to societies across the ages.

Anna’s politics had become more radical during the long process of getting personal independence payments for her disability. She felt the whole system was set up against her. The experience made her feel dehumanised.

I grew up in a European country with a large welfare state. It's quite funny how quickly people start taking welfare payments for granted. I guess if you believe in the whole Marxist system as such you are just taking what you are owed and any obstacles to that are just signs of reactionary resistance.

When I asked women what specifically had radicalised them, the war in Gaza was the most common answer.

Gaza as the omnicause. Many words have been spilled about this already; suffice to say that the Gazans would have none of this.

These women weren’t outliers. According to the New Statesman’s polling, young women are twice as likely not to want children as young men. All the Leeds women told me they feared a Reform government pressuring them to have babies. One woman mentioned Suella Braverman’s pledge to scrap the Equality Act and repeal other human rights laws. “It just feels… out of control.”

Their growing isolation could also have profound long-term consequences for British society. It will almost certainly make relationships harder: fewer than half of young women feel men understand them. Young women are much less likely than men to date people who disagree with their politics. People will get lonelier, and angrier. And it’s getting worse. Among those under-30, younger women feel the bleakest: women under 25 are most likely to believe things are “stacked against me, no matter how hard I try”.

The UK's current TFR is 1.41 and recent research suggests TFR is heavily downstream from relationship formation. It making relationships harder is one thing; if the Zoomettes mass opt-out of having children then it's very possible (and I'm generally no doomer!) that the UK as its current society no longer exists in 50 years. Maybe reality has to be the escape valve that forces women's beliefs to become moored to reality again.

Is this what it's like to be in Latin American country seeing decline, like Argentina? Blame everything on capitalism, ignore the fact that you are getting your preferences (as much as the state finances and bond markets can bear it year over year) and continue advocating for a system that guarantees you'll be worse off in 20-30 years?

I think you are largely correct about the state of things, except that it’s not just women. The rise of social media and thus social media politics is very radicalizing. This works in both directions, to the point that I’d suggest that there is a correlation between time spent on political social media (and later activism) and radicalism. It works by creating a tight feedback loop that rewards people for saying the most radical versions of what they believe, and for liking and sharing that content. This is made worse by the filter bubbles that feed content that affirms the politics you hold and paints your out group as evil and stupid and possibly subhuman.

The problem with this is that only one set of these communities is seen as the problem. Male and conservative communities are constantly being considered as radicalized communities of potentially dangerous individuals who are going to be violent or totalitarian. The other side gets a complete pass. Mainstreamish media can get away with referring to the right as fascist, and the current ideology as fascist, even referring to the current government as soft dictatorship. They can talk about disruptive protests, and not even sit-ins, but directly interfering in ICE raids. No one is handwringing about liberals being radicalized online. No one is concerned about protecting women from toxic feminist or radical left ideologies.

This is bad from two angles. First, focus on one group makes it almost impossible to talk about the actual phenomenon and the mechanisms that drive it. Social media is perfectly designed to promote engagement and it turns out that the best way to do that is to radicalize everyone so they keep doomscrolling and hate posting. Second, the large blind spot on the left makes it extremely likely that there will be political violence coming from the left where this is allowed to go on unhindered. Bluesky is liberal twitter. But while twitter is regularly called out as dangerous radicalization, blue sky gets a pass. Liberals can get mainstream publication for a book called “On Tyranny” that pretty much calls Trump and MAGA fascist. No one would have touched a similar book about Biden. When that happens, it seems pretty likely that the group getting a pass for violent and dehumanizing speech is going to create radicals.

Male and conservative communities are constantly being considered as radicalized communities of potentially dangerous individuals who are going to be violent or totalitarian...No one is concerned about protecting women from toxic feminist or radical left ideologies.

If my relatively unconsidered perception that women are more susceptible to peer pressure (on average) whereas men are more likely to go full on dril "it only makes my opinions Worse" in response, then this is both ironic and counterproductive, or at least an inefficient use of cultural resources.

It’s all counterproductive in the very real sense of the world, whether you double down or fall for peer pressure simply because a society full of opposing radical factions is going to quickly tear itself apart. The society full of people cheering every ICE raid and with people convinced that ICE raids are (and I’ve seen this phrase used in the wild) the boxcar phase of the holocaust is going to come to blows rather quickly.

And the problem to me isn’t which side gets radicalized, tbh especially since my exit from a lot of online political discourse, both sides are pretty darn radical at this point, and it’s going to get worse as the algorithm rewards radical content and silos people into political tribes. At the moment, because only one group of radicals is being monitored and warned against, it’s easier for the other side to push the envelope farther until we start seeing it acted out in very violent public ways.

And again, this is a problem that happens on all sides. But until you can talk about the general process and incentives in the social media space that are creating radicalization, it’s hard to stop it. The problem isn’t the teen doing a TikTok dance on hearing about the Kirk assassination. The problem is the social media creating an environment that encourages and rewards radicalization and keeps people in radicalization silos. Fixing that before we blow up Western civilization for likes is the challenge of our time. At present, we only want to talk about the issue in terms of incels and “fascism” and “the manosphere” all of which, from the liberal perspective is “those weirdos over there”. And as long as everyone is saying “it’s not us, it’s those people over there,” no one will solve the problem.

I definitely think the algo has something to do with it (perhaps even a lot to do with it) but I also think the influence of social media would be tempered by much better economic conditions. The ideological terrorism in the 1970s happened without the algorithm, but I would hazard a guess that the mediocre economy helped fan the flames more than a little.

On the gripping hand, though, the worse economic conditions would be tempered by a better algorithm (or none at all). In particular, it seems like gender relations are really poisoned now in a way that they weren't in, say, the 1970s. And I think that's insanely radicalizing, people can handle being relatively poor if there is still a viable path to marriage and family formation, and it seems to me that right now the algorithm and the socio-cultural trends it amplifies are harming that more than the economy.

I mean im not suggesting that the algo is the only thing that can cause terrorism, but it works quite well to spread it, and I would argue that it’s doing so in relatively good times when in ordinary circumstances before social media, it would take a good bit more to get people thinking in terroristic or politically radical ways. You couldn’t easily curate your life to the degree necessary without upending it, you had to meet in person most of the time which imposes both cost and risk (as if anything happened you were a member of the group that did it and would be in danger of arrest. Now you can get a good dose of radicalism in line at Walmart or between classes.

Gaza as the omnicause. Many words have been spilled about this already

Where can I read these words? I simply don't see why Gaza would have anything to do with women's (perceived) rights.

I came across the idea of the omnicause from Matthew Yglesias, but I think he was popularising a term coined by other centre-left figures with more experience at the sharp end of intra-left turf battles.

From a mistake theory perspective, the omnicause is the mistake common on the activist left of taking everything bad in the world, lumping it together, calling it "patriarchy" or "capitalism" or something similar, and defining your activism as opposing the lump. When the Israel-Palestine conflict is in the news, the lump is "Zionism".

From a conflict theory perspective, the omnicause is the result of all professional left-wing NGOs adjusting their positioning to attract funding from the same small number of funders. Right-wing conflict theorists tend to suspect the relevant funders are George Soros and other European financiers with large noses, centre-left conflict theorists are pretty sure that it is the Ford and Hewlett foundations (and they would know).

The link between feminist causes in the US and the Israel-Palestine conflict in the minds of omnicause activists is that real progress (as defined by the activist left) on both can only be made if the lump is defeated, and military defeat of Israel by Hamas would take a lump out of the lump. This is as stupid as it sounds, which is why I subscribe to the mistake theory on this point.

Sufficient words have been spilled that you can just google "omnicause" to find them.

The link between feminist causes in the US and the Israel-Palestine conflict in the minds of omnicause activists is that real progress (as defined by the activist left) on both can only be made if the lump is defeated, and military defeat of Israel by Hamas would take a lump out of the lump. This is as stupid as it sounds, which is why I subscribe to the mistake theory on this point.

I would not underestimate this. There is a perfectly valid theory from liberation standpoint; that nobody is truly free unless the least free is liberated. If it produces seeming logical contradiction, then this is perfect as it means we need to do more Marxist work to align Marxist Theory and Praxis. Being able to hold contradictory opinions is a feature of Marxism, this is how you perform dialectic - you resolve the contradiction by abolishing the concepts and create something new and better. It is akin to dissolving the question. We may not see how such a reconciliation can look like now, but we have faith that such a solution exists if we try hard enough.

You for instance see it with feminists vs trans issues exemplified with simple "what is a woman" question. The true liberation will happen only if we abolish the gender binary completely. We did not manage it yet, but we are getting there. It is very similar to how the old school Marxists thought that capitalism and its opposite the socialism will eventually transform into true communism. The same for lets say how dictatorship of proletariat is only transitional period before bourgeoisie and proletariat will be "reconciled" by completely abolishing class as a concept and entering classless society. Again, nobody knows precisely how to do it, you need to do the work, that is the point.

It may all seem stupid and contradictory and all that. But for some reason these conspiracy theories are very resilient and they lived 150+ years already. They are internally coherent and people can believe them. You just need to understand the idea behind these concepts including the "lump theory" you describe, the crux of the leftist conspiracy theory that explains everything. I many times argued that leftism is where true conspiracy theories live, where "serious" people and respected academics can believe in conspiracies that deliberately oppress victims and create oppressive "systems" of - capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, colonialism etc. James Lindsay was more eloquent in his speech in EU parliament about it.

In fact with colonialism it is straightforward as it uses the same word. Colonizers are oppressors, colonized are the oppressed the evil system that colonizers create and perpetuate to keep their privilege is called colonialism, and the solution is to decolonize everything until we reach "Equity" - the ultimate "Social Justice" akin to communism. The same goes for leftist feminist theory where men oppress women via patriarchy and we need to dismantle the patriarchy to achieve social justice etc. It is all the same omnicause but in a more metalevel of intersectionality. So yes, decolonization and dismantling of patriarchy are related concepts, they both must proceed in order to establish true Equity and Social Justice. Don't know how, but we must believe such a progress is possible through proper work. And if it fails, it just means that true Social Justice was never tried.

Something needs to be done about the womanosphere.

Young women are fed a deluge of propaganda by social media teaching them that 150% of men they meet will rape them, that spousal abuse is common(and highly unpredictable), etc etc. The insane scaremongering serves the purpose of driving young women to the left by painting right wing men, in particular, as unusually bad/predatory/abusive- and their own male allies serve as a useful illustration of how men are just too dangerous to trust, you don't need to want to be an independent girlboss.

I think that the womanosphere has very little effect against the female sex drive, which after all evolved in times when men actually were probably much more likely to rape any woman who was not being protected by other men than they are today. The female sex drive is so powerful that it often drives women to go to isolated locations with much larger and stronger animals, men, whom they just met.

The vast majority of women are still trying to hook up with men, even if the womanosphere might drive some of them to the left. Not only that, but they are as fascinated by men as men are by women, maybe even more so. Which means that the vast majority of women will be regularly exposed to actual real life men rather than propaganda men, which might temper any possible misandry. Or maybe not, given how many men treat women poorly, but that's a different matter.

Most of those actual real life men will be socially invisible to them, so I find all this rather doubtful.

If you look at a lot of historical feminists, especially the ones further out from the overton window of the time, you often see them abused either by a male partner or a relative. If more women feel maltreated either by male family members or by the romantic/sexual partners, then I think that would drive them to more radical pro-woman identity politics. Given the correlation of divorce and sexual abuse as well as the numerous points women make about the, generally sub-abuse but often criminal, harms they suffer in hookup culture I can very well see a case where women now have more meaningful negative experiences with men than they did in the past.

Writing this, I think it's also important to note that women aren't a monolith and, generally mediated by class, they will have different experiences with men. Underclass women have always had a horrible time almost by definition. I suspect a difference now is that working class on up to even PMC women have a lot more negative experiences with men than in the past, especially if you look at sub-criminal stuff like many hookup culture complaints. If women's collective experience with men is worse than it was in the past, it makes sense they would be more pro-female anti-male.

All this being said, it's a question of margins. I'm Gen Z, and my wife and I voted Trump. There is always a diversity of views and experiences.

I suspect a difference now is that working class on up to even PMC women have a lot more negative experiences with men than in the past,

Historically, we see that (proto)-feminism became popular first with higher-class women, who had a far easier life than working class and farmer class women who didn't seem to be into feminism all that much. The mass adoption of feminism seems to correlate with industrial inventions & changes hollowing out the female gender role, also suggesting that boredom was a bigger motivator than feelings of oppression.

In modern times 'we' have unleashed the chads, which means that those chads can hurt many more women, which many of those women then generalize to all men (encouraged by feminist messaging that most men are under the spell of the patriarchy and thus about equally bad).

Underclass women have always had a horrible time almost by definition

But they tend to end up with underclass men who also have a horrible time and we can easily observe that feminists almost never even acknowledge those experiences, let alone hold them up as a goal for women to achieve.

How can it be so worse? Practically every law and societal norm has been adjusted in the last 100 years in their favor. You could argue that the sexual revolution was a trap, but that was half a century ago. Or you could argue that most everything is a trap, not because it's a patriarchal conspiracy, but due to second-order effects no one could've foreseen or used as a justification, like suffrage leading to political polarization and normalizing equal pay leading to single-income families becoming unable to maintain the same standard of living.

I think the 'more women have more negative experiences with men' and "women's empowerment" factors are often correlated in modern society. One thing that women's empowerment, both the active ideology and industrialization reducing sex rules, results in is men and women directly competing. In the past, they generally had different spheres while today they interact, both as cooperators and competitors, in far more domains. Women's empowerment, both from issues with the sexual revolution and from directly competing with men, causes more calls for even more women's empowerment as a result of direct competition and negative experiences with men. It's less 'women have it better/worse' and more 'there is more surface area now for women to conflict with men than in the past'.

That's definitely the case in person. But I'd wager that a non-negligible percentage of the divide between men and women is driven by inert factors like filters on dating apps and similar. It's much easier to be virtuous in solitude in front of a computer and meticulously set things up to filter out the heretics before 'biology' has gotten a chance to weigh in.

That's not to say there's a lack of reasons to be against the womanosphere or the modern gynocentric hysterics matrix in general. Women's ingroup bias is cranked to the max all the time and that necessarily has negative consequences for everyone.

Online divides have also bled into real life. Exclusive polling by Merlin Strategy for the New Statesman reveals that young women, aged between 18 and 30, are by far the most progressive demographic in the UK. This polling found that young women are 26 percentage points less likely to feel positively about capitalism than young men, and much less likely to feel the economy works in their favour. They are also much more pessimistic about the future – their own, and everyone else’s. They also feel much more negatively towards young men than young men feel about them.

Again, beliefs utterly unmoored from reality. Young women outearn men and the economy bends over backwards to an absurd degree to make that happen.

De Tocqueville's law in action. Cataclysmic social change happens not when people are desperately poor, but instead when their situation is improved or improving, but their lives are still not hedonically satisfying, whether for cultural, political, or personal reasons.

TL;DR young woman at UK university is indistinguishable from young woman at USA university (frothing leftist, Marxism, Gaza, BLM, ACAB, disdain for boyfriend).

And this is the case in every country that is allied to the US, not just the UK.

The most damaging and pervasive American exports are its media and academia. Leftism is the king of memes.

I once asked my father what he thought America's biggest export was to the rest of the world and his answer was "our sense of entitlement."

Why can't the right meme as well?

They don't control academia and the press.

In those spheres they control, like free online discourse, they trounce the opposition so easily it has to flee or compromise the freedom of discourse to survive.

Leftism is the ideology of public servants and managers and as such strives in the environments they control.

Both the left and right can meme perfectly, it's just that the hothoused infrastructure types in power can't. Look at who can't and you'll know who's currently in power.

Why would those in power be unable to meme, when memes themselves are such a potent force for zeitgeist transformations?

Because when you're in power, why the fuck would you need memes?

Because the inability to meme might result in your removal from power due to your inability to steer the public narrative?

We're arguing in circles about different things.

If you have power, real power, you don't care about the public narrative. What zeitgeist transformation? What the peasants think has zero ability to threaten the actual position of those in power.

Soros-as-a-giant-cartoon-villain meme has existed for basically as long as I've been alive. What has it done to stop him?

More comments

We can't?

Well the comment I was replying to said "Leftism is the king of memes," so assuming that is true, why would it be true?

Fair enough, I disagree with his premise.

We can, but in different spheres. In academia, leftism has been winning. In 4chan, rightism.

As I've said before.

Women aren't the problem. But the problem is with women. It is harbored in their minds.

Its right there in the data. In every piece of reliable data that is available on this topic.

Here's the actual graph on the data about each gender's view of the other as discussed in that article.

72% of men under 30 view women positively. 7% view them negatively.

For women under 30, 50% view men positively, 21% view them negatively.

For women under 25, its 35% and 27%, respectively.

If men are steeped in misogyny and treat women so horribly, how does it work that a supermajority of men view women positively, and a substantial minority of women view men negatively. This is incoherent without some very strained definitions of the terms used.

The only way the data makes sense is if these women absolutely believe men are steeped in misogyny, and do not realize that this appears to be misguided and incorrect.

It also pairs well with this bit of data out of the UK where young (teen) men in relationships report substantially more abusive behavior from their partners than the women do. This suggests that men's 'flaw' is believing in the goodness of most women in spite of experiencing their bad behavior.

And of course the official governmental policy [in the UK] is to crack down on male behavior. They (the UK) are trying to ban depictions of strangulation in porn even though, once again, women tend to be slightly more likely to consume such content. Its not clear to me if this is an incompetent government that is ignoring the data, or a malicious/intentional attempt to shape the outcomes by force because it just doesn't like what the data shows and wishes it were different.

How is it possible that after decades and decades of civil rights advances favoring women, they're LESS satisfied with their status in society?

How is it possible that they view men as collectively the biggest danger to their rights and safety when, A) women are as a class safer than they've been at literally any point in history and B) men have very peaceably stood aside or actively boosted women's interests to enable the aforementioned civil rights advances?

If the entire course of the civil rights movement was viewed as an empirical study, an experiment in trying to truly increase human thriving by social engineering and applying technology to alleviate almost every burden that is nominally borne by women... hasn't it objectively failed at that goal?

They're more sad. More mentally ill. Less healthy. They have more STIs (likely because they tend to have more sex partners). They have more debt (although you can certainly argue they're more financially independent). They commit suicide (slightly) more often. And to the extent they still care about marriage and childbirth, they're having more trouble finding and keeping relationships, and they're having fewer children, later in life, if at all. They've acquired artificial signifiers of success like degrees and job titles and digital photo albums full of travel photos... but have so very little tangible to show for it.

All the material wealth we've accumulated has made life easier, across the board. So most 'difficulties' they complain about must be either illusory or self-imposed. It is simply impossible that men as a group are conspiring to keep the women from achieving true happiness.

Anyway, my nutshell theory is that the women are wonderful effect simply dominates cultural and political norms. That's why we get a documentary about the Manosphere and its effect on women, and NOT one about Tiktok and Feminist influencers and its effect on women. Because there's an unstated assumption of "if women are doing it, it can't be bad!"

In spite of the latter being an OBJECTIVELY bigger deal with larger negative impacts on both the individual and social level.

Yes, I'm, still mad.

Gentlemen, what women want is Dracule Mihawk. And I, for one, have no problem with that 😁

What sort of woman is worthy of such a man, remains the question.

We are a long ways off equality of outcome. Quick, something must be done. Women must kill themselves at rates close to men! Or at least succeed more often at it.

Only slightly less pithily, why aren't you considering this the result of an evolutionary response from women, who precipitate the memeplex to make their competition (other women) deeply unpleasant and avoidant of men?

72% of men under 30 view women positively. 7% view them negatively.

I think this statistic elides some subtleties which women IRL realise but which are non-obvious prima facie. While I am no longer under 30, my opinions now remain as they previously were: in that I would answer a polling question “Do you have a positive opinion of women” with a yes, but this is almost exclusively because I have a positive opinion of titties. “Do you have a positive opinion of women” is synonymous with “Are you heterosexual”; a yes answer comes not because I have a positive opinion of respecting a woman, or treating her and her opinions and professional goals with anything like the consideration I would do for a male peer (affirmative action is a great way to weight my priors that she’s not as competent as a man in the same job, that’s just an inevitability).

So I put it to you that possibly this dynamic is at play, and women are right to infer that mens’ positive opinion of them is positive in a way that they don’t want (or at least they’d like to check height and jawline before they decide whether they want). Under such conditions, it makes some sense that they would not reciprocate the demographic’s affections; and their opinions are based on an understanding of men which is MORE accurate, not less accurate, than that captured by the survey’s relative ratios.

This seems like an overly complicated rationalization.

Whatever the basis for it, if men are claiming a positive view of women by and large, this runs against any strict definition of 'misogyny.' As I alluded to, viewing women as more likeable and having more positive emotions towards them is common enough that it has a specific term in psychology that doesn't mince words: the "women are wonderful" effect.

And on top of that, there are precisely ZERO ways in which Western society has become more patriarchal over the last 50 years. Many ways it has advanced women's interests.

So how exactly have women correctly assessed mens' true feelings and intent, when the actual consistent trend over decades is men standing by and even actively supporting the social ascension of females across the board. This needs an even more elaborate explanation for why men, in spite of hating women, have used their social authority to give them every thing they've requested and have not backtracked on it once.

Their belief is arising from somewhere, and you're basically saying that they're Making it up in their heads based on attempted mindreading.

Meanwhile we can see many womens' negative feelings towards men demonstrated constantly in their easily observed behavior.

Its literally backwards logic:

"Men, despite their actual statements and their observed behavior, are secretly all hateful towards women and actually dislike them very much. No I have no direct evidence of this but we can reach this conclusion by reasoning from certain premises... which I also have no evidence for."

And of course, if men really were these dangerous, secretly malevolent actors who were obscuring their true beliefs, how in the hell do you feel comfortable constantly antagonizing this group.

"Men, despite their actual statements and their observed behavior, are secretly all hateful towards women and actually dislike them very much. No I have no direct evidence of this but we can reach this conclusion by reasoning from certain premises... which I also have no evidence for."

I always feel like I'm living through Groundhog Day whenever I participate in one of these gender discussions, and it is always pretty incredible to me how much of the discussion always proceeds solely on vibes (seen often whenever people discuss the supposedly widespread nature of Male Bad Behaviour here, with this omnipresent "Everyone knows" attitude that really shouldn't be so common in a forum like this one).

This seems like an overly complicated rationalization. Whatever the basis for it, if men are claiming a positive view of women by and large, this runs against any strict definition of 'misogyny.' As I alluded to, viewing women as more likeable and having more positive emotions towards them is common enough that it has a specific term in psychology that doesn't mince words: the "women are wonderful" effect.

It's not just overly complicated, it's actively contradicted by much of the existing literature. The argument is especially lacking if you're in any way acquainted with the actual methodologies of these studies, considering that many of the Women are Wonderful studies do not simply ask people about their positive or negative opinions about the opposite sex absent any further investigation. The basis for a lot of these studies is to get respondents to indicate their beliefs about the traits typically held by a certain social group, and then to evaluate these traits on a good-bad ranking system. The very first Women are Wonderful study going all the way back to 1991 explicitly studied the evaluative content of people's beliefs about men and women in this way, and no evidence of negativity towards women was found from both male and female respondents, in fact they found preference. Then there's also the fact that more contemporary research shows that perceptions of competence and intelligence (and also communalism) now favour women, and male respondents assigned traits like competence more to women than they did to men (the only gender difference that favours men is perceptions of agency, possibly a byproduct of the constant promotion of female victimhood and helplessness). The new study is just another drop in the ever-growing body of evidence that points in a female-favouring direction.

It is very common to find that perceptions of women among both sexes are more positive than perceptions of men. The issue is that women's activism constantly needs a new problem to justify its continued existence, and without any proper empirical basis for misogyny they have to signal-boost disparate wrongthinking corners of the internet that haven't yet been aligned with their ideological project and, hilariously enough, bring them more into public view. It's a memeplex whose survival is dependent on creating problems that it then "solves", and it has resulted in women having a very prejudiced view of how hostile men and the world at large are to them, with a seriously adversarial view of gender relations. And yet we are supposed to believe men are the ones who are The Problem in spite of everything. I'd echo Strider's sentiments further downthread; I become more and more radicalised on the topic of sex issues as time goes on, and feminism is the cause of this, not "Andrew Tate".

Making it up in their heads based on attempted mindreading

Yeah, because women would never try to do that, especially when men are concerned.

Men, despite their actual statements and their observed behavior, are secretly all hateful towards women and actually dislike them very much.

Well, we could turn that around and say

Women, despite their actual statements and their observed behavior, are secretly all loving towards men and actually like them very much.

which I think is closer to the truth of the matter but it's inconvenient for both parties. That whole "seriously but not literally" thing comes to mind... but then the [comparatively rarer] women who don't work like that achieve power -> an audience because they don't work like that, then start telling the more traditional women that not being treated [as a fellow man would be] is bad, who then believe it and enter a state of confusion where they don't actually want to be treated that way but insist on it anyway because femininity is, like, weakness or whatever.

(Of course, because that's been the room temperature for the last 100 years, most of the literature about this is just, like, really bad, and as we can see from what passed for psychology in the late 1800s [and earlier] we were just as stupid then as we are now so it's not like you can even go back to the past for answers.)

Meanwhile we can see many womens' negative feelings towards men demonstrated constantly in their easily observed behavior.

You know, it's almost like that negging thing is fundamentally uncomfortable to women [the kind it doesn't work on] more because they know it's the thing their gender does to men. A trans-gender behavior where the man's adopting what the woman sees as a female behavior.

We can't talk to each other honestly because some of us don't even work like that and especially post-feminism it's all case-by-case for people who aren't used to that. The pronoun discourse is perhaps instructive about this matter.

At the risk of engaging in shameless self promotion.

I don't think that this has anything to do with whether or not someone has a Y chromosome. I think the issue is that as a society becomes more traditionally "feminine" the failure modes of femininity will become more prevalent.

You know, it's almost like that negging thing is fundamentally uncomfortable to women [the kind it doesn't work on] more because they know it's the thing their gender does to men.

It is rather interesting how men acting like women in relationships is considered abusive isn't it?

I guess trans acceptance only goes so far.

And of course, if men really were these dangerous, secretly malevolent actors who were obscuring their true beliefs, **how in the hell do you feel comfortable constantly antagonizing this group.

The same way Jews are both running the world and are about to be wiped out any second if only USA stops helping.

and are about to be wiped out any second if only USA stops helping.

The only people saying this are Jewish, or sympathetic to them. Otherwise, the suggestion to stop helping them would be met with a shrug, not all the drama we see in reaponse to it.

Jews are permitted far more leeway to organize specifically around advancing their own interests than males are, incidentally.

Women are not treated better, they are treated far worse. Huge numbers of women are in situationships, used for sex and losing out in other ways. A hypergamous dating market and hookup culture is deeply damaging to young women. The amount of women who have negative experiences is genuine and largely the fault of certain men who are over-represented in the amount of harm they commit.

  • -15

The amount of women who have negative experiences is genuine and largely the fault of certain men who are over-represented in the amount of harm they commit.

Yeah but they're the gatekeepers and they're consistently picking the same people to let through the proverbial gate. Average single guy in the average single woman's body could speedrun to 'an okay relationship' in 48 hours even on the dating apps. Vice-versa and they are so very very very very fucked.

That sexual revolution thing didn't turn out so well for women, did it?

I always thought it was common sense to anyone paying attention. It liberated men more than it did anyone else.

Well, a certain class of men who are charming and sociopathic enough to exploit the opening it presented.

As I said before.

Huge swaths of men don't even have the OPTION to enter a situationship. (hate that term, personally).

Women can practice celibacy if they want, they can stay off dating apps, they can avoid hookups and demand commitment before sex (or, marriage, if they're trad enough).

Some percentage of them do, its just far smaller than it used to be.

How much agency do we ascribe to the rest of them?

The amount of women who have negative experiences is genuine and largely the fault of certain men who are over-represented in the amount of harm they commit.

The question, of course:

In what way are those men forcing, coercing, or otherwise cajoling women to act this way? What we learned post #metoo is that a LOT of women will retroactively claim they were forced or coerced when in fact they just folded to the most minute amount of pressure or even enthusiastically accepted advances from a more 'powerful' male.

And if women are unable to resist a minute amount of pressure, or can't be trusted to make good decisions around powerful males... what else might we need to protect them from?

And more importantly. If women are having bad experiences with a small subset of men, then why does that justify negative opinions about all men?

Why are men expected to tolerate bad behavior (and as seen in the stats, maintain a positive view of women as a whole) or be labelled misogynist, whilst women can base their opinion of the whole male gender on the conduct of <10% of them?

This is where we find ourselves. Unable, as a society, to police womens' behavior (in part because the men who would do the policing benefit too much from the current arrangement), but far, far too ready to go after males for the smallest misstep, and to heap all blame on the men for things they ultimately have no control over. And unable to shift out of this equilibrium because any proposal that might inconvenience ladies is politically nonviable. Nonviable, that is, while the Boomers are in charge.

There are no non-loser first world men who are involuntarily celibate, you can passport bro if it comes down to it(and even if you have strong ethnic preferences, very poor countries with lots of white women exist)- but it usually doesn't. I don't know if it'll stay at that point forever, but most men can get themselves into a long term relationship, even if they're pretty average(and average is a broad term). Yes, this might entail lowering your standards, you're probably not that much of a catch either.

  • -12

you can passport bro if it comes down to it

'Just be rich enough to fly to another country and find a wife' is not the stirring rebuttal you think it is.

I understand the Motte is weird, but you do realize that this is outside the price range for most men, yes?

You know I am not a tech worker, right?

Affording a mail order bride/passport bro wife(I don’t quite know the difference between the two, and I suspect there isn’t one) is doable for a man earning mildly above median(which is a very reasonable expectation in a high opportunity society), because there are many such men who have done it. And most men don’t have to, thé average 35 year old man is married. The point is that unmarried western men who are genuinely above average in desirability are unmarried because they choose to be, perhaps by priority- not because there are no options.

Also with modern migration etcetera you can passport bro lite without leaving your immediate surrounds in a lot of places. I met my Malaysian wife in Australia and now live in Malaysia, but having extensively online dated on my way to finding my wife the majority of women who hit my minimum threshold of non-fat, has a job, doesn't have somebody else's kids, not overtly trashy in order to have a first date were born overseas.

A combination of the locals 'pricing themselves out of the market', value drift in Western women etcetera

It's an option yes, but it's not a scalable solution for a lot of people. That's also like saying starvation isn't a real problem because you can always dig out of a dumpster if you're really that desperate. Yeah. Technically that is true. It's not a sound policy to address unemployment or homelessness. I have options in my social circle available to me if all I was doing was looking to get laid and knock a former fling up or a friends that I know are on the level. That's not generally what they're looking for though.

But starvation isn't a real problem in the modern west. People who can't afford food will be taken care of- possibly by food waste, but more often by charity- either private, government, or informal(eg the donut shop worker giving unsold product to the homeless at close instead of throwing it out for raccoons).

I'm reactionary enough to suggest that an average male shouldn't have to leave the country of his birth to have a prospect of finding a wife. That's a major social failure.

And now you've just exported the externality. What of the poor males in the countries where the women are being plucked from? Now they've got to compete with wealthy foreigners and THEY can't passport bro it up.

And it all leaves the fundamental, core problem. Men have no stake in the continued maintenance of their future if they don't expect to be able to form a family. Why would they throw in their lot with their home country at that point? What's their buy-in?

And of course, all the single cat ladies will continue to cast votes in their country too.

However, if we were to implement an immigration program specifically to allow scads of young, nubile, single women to attain citizenship if they marry and pop out some kids, I think the incentives overall would get aligned REAL QUICK.

Of course, it appears that a huge excess portion of the ACTUAL immigrants we get are young males.

What of the poor males in the countries where the women are being plucked from? Now they've got to compete with wealthy foreigners and THEY can't passport bro it up.

You'd be amazed how deep the chain of passport broing goes into the developing world. I'm an Australian who met my Malaysian Chinese wife in Australia and now live in Malaysia. The stereotypical Malaysian Chinese boomer guy looking for a second wife/mistress will usually pull from Vietnamese girls who are a bit poorer and then the equivalent Vietnamese guy will usually pull from Laos. God knows what the Laotian guy's doing, though.

God knows what the Laotian guy's doing, though.

Padme: He gets to marry the Australian woman who's now available... right?

Trickle down chain hypergamy :laughing_crying_emoji:

Australian Men       ←  Australian Women 
                     ↖
Malaysian Chinese Men   MC Women
                     ↖
Vietnamese Men          Vietnamese Women
                     ↖
Laotian Men             Laotian Women

Simplified diagram as there could be more northwest-pointing arrows at steeper and steeper angles.

God knows what the Laotian guy's doing, though.

This is my point. There's a bottom somewhere, unless everyone is going around stealing everyone else's women.

This is not me saying I owe the Malaysian, Chinese, Laotian, or Filipino men anything. "Stealing" women from competing tribes is about the most natural process we can imagine.

But as usual, I'm an advocate for facing and solving the actual problem head-on.

And it all leaves the fundamental, core problem. Men have no stake in the continued maintenance of their future if they don't expect to be able to form a family. Why would they throw in their lot with their home country at that point? What's their buy-in?

It seems to me that modern society, and this goes beyond just issues of sex, works by honestly demanding very little of people. I hate taxes as much as the next guy, but I'm a pampered tech worker who works in a climate controlled office. When it comes down to it, I live a very comfy life even if I'm taxed a lot and culturally disparaged. The closest thing I've done to sacrificing my comfortable life is having a kid, and even then I still either work in a climate controlled office or live in a climate controlled house. I'm still comfy. The men and women who become NEETs are in a similar boat. The middle class too. Not much is demanded of most people.

It remains to be seen how modern western society would function in a crisis that does demand broad sacrifice from its people. We are not currently in that state.

I hate taxes as much as the next guy, but I'm a pampered tech worker who works in a climate controlled office.

My hatred runs a bit deeper because I'm aware of what we could be achieving if we weren't wasting billions, arguably trillions per year on programs that aren't just wasteful, but often actively detrimental.

The lackadaisical attitude to the waste allows it to continue.

But the point rings true. Nobody in America is really expected to shoulder serious burdens on behalf of the whole.

Although it gets to a question that came up recently. which subset of people are actually doing the critical work that allows the rest of us to coast, relatively speaking?

I’m not disputing that something is broken in a system where guys who round to average and aren’t doing anything wrong need to go to foreignstan to find a wife often enough for it to be a discussed phenomenon(to be perfectly fair, this system isn’t great for women either). Just saying that ‘incels’ aren’t an actual thing- they don’t ’just Want a wife’, those are available assuming these guys aren’t just, giant losers, and basement dwellers wouldn’t have been married in 1955 either(there were just fewer of them). The craving for validation from a specific kind of woman is a different phenomenon entirely, and while it’s not entirely unprecedented it’s also… look, these guys want to be rock stars. It’s not a totally natural response to circumstances, thé history of loveless men is pretty long and it tends to look like broadening thé search pool, not like endless public whining about the need to restructure society completely.

I think you're understating the effect of being neurotic/intensely spectrumed. I've got a family friend who's a very brilliant (Major international awards) academic mathematician but socially incapable who essentially got adopted by his wife in high school in rural Australia 40 years ago and now has a bunch of sons who have not fallen far from the tree.

The sons haven't been able to get into academia since they're cis hetero whites and they're intensely struggling to find productive employment and/or girlfriends since the dating app and job app realm is fucking brutal for a nerdy white autist. Longterm I'd expect they probably find partners born overseas due to the market and cultural dynamics, but it does seem downright deranged how hard it is for them to get meaningfully on any ladder. Their father's a genius but I also don't think he'd be doing particularly better if he were in his twenties circa 2020.

I mean, unemployed, uneducated men with poor social skills are losers though.

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I had an Australian Indian friend. His dad went to one of the best universities in India via scholarship, moved to Australia and is among the top rated neurosurgeons in the entire country. Absolute narcissist though. Verbally and physically abused his son to a point where his mom (who was abusive herself) took him and his sister away. The sister was adored by both their parents, turned out fine, got an arranged marriage and moved to Singapore where she recently had a son. My friend seemed like he didn't fall far from the tree when we were growing up but... he sorta turned out okay. Above average intelligence, normal job, okay social life, level headed. Unsure about his dating life though.

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When I look around at a lot of couples, I see examples of people who I think have a wrong headed attitude to what a relationship is and should be. Two crackheads can stay together forever, but that isn't the kind of thing that makes up a good relationship. Even mutual interests isn't sufficient for the things that matter. At some point, the honeymoon phase is over. You know all their stories. You're with them at their best and you're also going to slog through things with them at their worst. Just because people are in relationships doesn't at all mean they're happy or functional and fulfilled. And frankly when it comes to your obligations to your wife/husband/children, your happiness can kiss my ass and go right out the window as far as I'm concerned. If the choice is between your family or your happiness, there's only 1 correct answer to that question; and only in healthy relationships are those 2 the same thing.

Most guys I know don't want what it is you're describing. They are intelligent, industrious and very hard working people who want a fairly simple life and were raised in and for a social model that's been out of vogue for almost a century now. We no longer live in a family society. We live in an individual society that isn't conducive to the former. Either economically or socially.

There are no non-loser first world men who are involuntarily celibate

This is just a tautology.

And more importantly. If women are having bad experiences with a small subset of men, then why does that justify negative opinions about all men?

Because the men the women are having bad experiences with are the only men the women have any interest in, in the first place. And they have that interest in them precisely for the same qualities that result in the bad experiences.

Yeah, which is indicating that there needs to be some policing of that subset of men too.

But the logic of the sexual revolution is that women get to choose whomever they want, so ipso facto restricting the access of those top tier men to the wider female population is verboten as it directly restricts female's 'choice'.

Like imagine a rule that, say, banned professional athletes from hooking up with random girls they see on Instagram in their hotel room while they're in town for a game. I'd go ahead and guess that the women would howl harder about this restriction than the athletes would.

You nailed it. That's exactly the problem. For someone to step in and begin regulating social behaviors or rolling back norms to generations prior, that would amount to "telling them how to live their lives." They're not ready to have this conversation. The kind of solution they want to this problem is the kind of solution that would prevent them from having a voice at all in the first place. The only time you'll ever be able to blame me for the way I am as a man is when I'm making choices on your behalf. Otherwise, this is on you. You're the one making the choice. I've never been for unbridled freedom in the case of either gender, but what's an occasional problem for every other man has become an epidemic for woman writ large and there's only one group of people responsible steering the ship.

They are treated worse, by men they choose. Yet it's a choice. I reject the idea that women as a sex are so stupid they can't help themselves, or that the hookup market is a force that acts upon them with no recourse.

Maybe in the 90s the memeplex around dating was "go grrrl", but today there's plenty of wisdom in the air that men [that they notice first] are not out for the women's best interest. One needs but listen and learn.

The irony is the men that are out to aid and assist women's interests are the ones women hate on the most. You may reject the idea of their complete ignorance in being able to detect the quality traits and attributes of those they choose to deal with, but they absolutely are out to convince you of precisely that. I literally can't tell you how bad some of their choices are.

You want to know if a man is a bad catch? Simple. I can tell you that easily. If a man is tatted like the underpass on the 10 freeway, that's a clue. If a man has been through rehab (or worse yet, hasn't been through rehab), that's a clue. If a man is 30 years old and hasn't had consistent employment, maybe you're with someone who just wants to sponge off you. If a man is physically threatening or harming you, there is never a valid reason that justifies that kind of behavior. Hell, I can tell you if he's a good catch as a teenager without ever seeing him in person. Give me his high school report card and I can sort this out in 20 minutes. Just listen to the kind of people you come across. How ignorant can you be to not see things like this?

I mean how dumb can you be to not see things like this?

That's the question I asked with the story of the divorced Irish woman from a little while ago. All I can think is that sexual attraction is one hell of a drug, worse than heroin or meth or fent or crack or all of them put together. It turns your brain to mush and you can't literally see what is in front of your nose when your hormones are all addled with "I have to be in a relationship, will I ever get anyone, the years are going by" plus "this guy is charming and interested in me". You end up ignoring "okay yeah so he hits me sometimes and is verbally and emotionally abusive and a loser and I'm the one supporting the household and kids, but otherwise everything is just fine!"

I swear, with all the failures in my life, the one thing I am absolutely thankful for is that I never, ever, succumbed to romantic love. How fucked-up would I be right now if I were running like a bitch in heat after some guy, any guy, please somebody stick with me I don't want to be alone?

I have a stronger drive and appetite on all levels than a lot of people I know. Whether it’s food, sleep or sex; and it took me a very long time to learn how to control it. My father used to call it my “obsessive need to consume.”

It makes sense why you would tolerate someone’s faults when you’re in love with them. Forgiving people for their sins and mistakes is part of my charter and it absolutely doesn’t come easy. But we shouldn’t be quick to associate people’s mistakes, faults and imperfections with abuse.

I was never one of those people who was afraid to be alone. I’ve learned how to live on nothing but my own two feet and have practiced it for decades. I used to tell people “if you can’t tolerate being alone, it’s only because you’re in bad company.” (i.e. you suck as a human being). If I woke up tomorrow morning to a ghost city, with everyone having disappeared but me, left to wander the streets, it wouldn’t cause me much sorrow or grief. I’d say to myself, “damn, it sucks that so-and-so isn’t here to see this…,” and I’d miss my family and friends, but I’d get along just fine by myself.

In love, I was raised according to the conventional norms and stereotypes of the 20th century. Marriage is about love, primarily in the context of family life and family formation. I don’t want a “business partner,” or “partner in crime,” or be the “hang-around-er,” that never left. In a relationship, as a man, I want a wife and kids. That’s my purpose that I was raised and built for. I know what that entails, I know what it demands of me and requires me to sacrifice, I know it’s a lifelong endeavor that you can’t back out of and I accept the costs. For me it’s always been an easy choice because I think I have a more correct frame of mind than a lot of other people do.

Marriage is about love, primarily in the context of family life and family formation.

I think the problem is we have replaced love in that context with self-fulfilment. Love is romantic love, it's not "we're spouses, we're parents, we've built a life together, we stay together and don't jump ship at the first rough patch". So once X or Y has 'fallen out of love' with Y or X, then it's time to shut it down and move on to the new partner Z. Oh, the kids will be fine, they'll adjust!

I think love changes as it matures, but if someone confuses the first fizzy giddy romantic feelings of new love as how it is supposed to be and should remain like that forever, then they are not going to be able to cope with "oh but I don't feel the way I used to feel" and then we get the whole no-fault divorce and constantly moving on and looking for the next best thing and distrust between men and women that we get now.

This, of course, is different from abusive situations or marriages where one or both parties are not able to handle the demands, where the best thing indeed may be to separate.

All humans are so stupid they can't help themselves. Thankfully they are never truly alone.

This is why wise leaders create institutions so that everyone helps each other reach higher Nash equilibria and we avoid the tragedy of commons.

One of these institutions is marriage, which among its many benefits (the thing is truly so neat it is rightfully associated with the divine) solves the problems we are talking about by taking top men out of the market and enforcing monogamy and certainty of paternity.

However marriage has sadly been abolished and forbidden by no fault divorce. This has evidently turned us into savages.

The simple fix is to allow people to marry again and encourage them to reenter civilization.

...Tune in next time, where we will solve rampant crime with wooden beams, rope and a wig.

<De Maistre Hat>The authority of marriage collapsed before the no-fault was the law. Before no-fault was the law, people would get around the fault rules by perjuring themselves. Only through the organic growth of successful subcultures will no-fault divorce once again be the social norm. </De Maistre Hat>

I'm glad to see I have some followers around here.

In practice, a truly no-fault divorce free marriage in the modern world requires a subculture in which every single one of your friends and acquaintances testifies against the spouse who wanted the divorce. The only successful ones so far have been religious.

Ah man it's almost as if there's a social need for religion which would explain why all successful human societies had it to some degree.

I sound sarcastic but I'm genuinely bummed out that the humanist project of reason just doesn't work. We actually can't free ourselves from society and live blissfully in the rekindled state of nature. We can't just act rationally without our trembling hands tied by a higher power.

I feel like Lazar Kaganovich, the last Old Bolshevik, who joined the Communist party in 1911 and lived through the whole of Soviet history up to 1991 to die a few months before the fall, his last words being allegedly: "This is a Catastrophe".

That's about how I feel about sex relations at this point.

Maybe in the 90s the memeplex around dating was "go grrrl", but today there's plenty of wisdom in the air that men [that they notice first] are not out for the women's best interest. One needs but listen and learn.

Well, listening and learning is hard enough for anyone, but I think there's a catch-22 here that's specific to this situation, in that the people they need to listen and learn from in order to avoid these pitfalls are people that they, almost by definition, don't respect or even notice. I do agree with you that it's entirely the personal responsibility for someone, woman or man, to avoid people who are romantically harmful to themselves, and the negative treatment of women in this context is the responsibility of the women who choose to tolerate or even reward such treatment. But I don't think they can help it any more than men can help being attracted enough to skinny, youthful women that they enable awful behavior from that set.

The issue is that it is far harder for a woman to compete when other women are engaging in that type of behaviour. If all other women are doing things to grab attention it is difficult for women who don't

If all other women are doing things to grab attention it is difficult for women who don't.

Most men I know are attracted to a woman who doesn't have a vain desire to stand out above everyone else. I certainly am not attracted to attention whores. The more she acts like one the less interested I become overtime. When I was in high school there was a very attractive girl who liked me who lost me on behavior alone, pulling shit like this. I really have no idea how some of them manage to think that leading like a ho is something that’s going to inspire attraction and affection. It’s disgusting and repulsive.

If only it were illegal!

The issue is that it is far harder for a woman to compete when other women are engaging in that type of behaviour. If all other women are doing things to grab attention it is difficult for women who don't

I totally disagree with this. With so many women chasing so-called "Chad" it's become very easy for a woman to find a guy who has solid morals; a decent job; and genuine desire for a long-term committed relationship. Provided she is willing to overlook the fact that he is short; or balding; or mediocre in facial attractiveness.

Exactly. Also the nature of dating apps means that the territory of a given 'chad' has expanded exponentially and their mindshare of the market has thusly increased. Plus it gives a sense that the pool is a lot wider and deeper than it is so if something's not perceived as a perfect fit you should just keep drawing lots.

With so many women chasing so-called "Chad" it's become very easy for a woman to find a guy who has solid morals; a decent job; and genuine desire for a long-term committed relationship. Provided she is willing to overlook the fact that he is short; or balding; or mediocre in facial attractiveness.

In other words, it hasn't gotten any easier for women to find a mate who has solid morals; a decent job; and genuine desire for a long-term committed relationship.

They don't all have to compete for the top fuckboys. And seeing as we appear to have established that actually attracting the attention of the fuckboys then getting used in a situationship is bad for them, it should be a relief to quit the attention whoring race and get herself someone more her speed.

Because all Europe and the US and the west in general has internalised the Marxist framework of sadness, anger and depauperation caused by oppression, believing that people that receive more are more peaceful and more amicable to the system. While the reality is the Nietzschean framework of ressentment turbocharged by equality. The more people will be democratic, equal and fair, the more they will absolutely hate each others.

In tangentially related gender war news, Iraqveteran8888 got divorce raped.

For those who don't know he was one of the bigger gun enthusiast YouTube channels back in the day.

He's taking it in stride. Dropping a banger Top 5 Guns to Keep After Divorce. And a If Guns Were Women video. Giving us a hint of where his head is at.

Not knowing the circumstance around the divorce, it's hard to tell how much sympathy one should dole out, but regardless of that its always hard for me to wrap my head around how men still manage to end up homeless and without any material possessions after a divorce.

The contrast of seeing an old school gender war story and the ongoing disaster of UK modernity is... bleak. None of the old problems were resolved, we just added new ones to make things even worse.

But it's not as if the gender warriors of yesteryear had any solutions. In fact, their prescriptions for young men were to not get married at all. That's not good for the constantly declining marriage or TFR. I remember the prevailing MGTOW divide between going full hermit or not largely revolved around the ugly truth that women would just replace you with sub-par foreigners. Weird to see how that played out in reality.

how men still manage to end up homeless and without any material possessions after a divorce.

That's the extreme end of things, but the child support orders in some locations are beyond absurd (very state-dependent). Plenty of family court judges follow the "kids must live the mother unless she's an unstable, drug-addicted BPD psycho" rule regardless of what any written law says (they can always justify it as "best interests of the child," which is usually the controlling standard), so mother stays in the family home with kids, father must pay his share of the mortgage for that family home he's no longer living in, and then must also pay child support. Maybe even paying some spousal support/alimony depending on the state (less common than it used to be). Unless he's making a lot of money, the tiny apartment and barely getting by suddenly becomes reality.

Yeah, its usually the child support that really takes a bite out of the guy's ability to support himself. Instead of living in a house with the wife and kids... now he's paying to make sure the kids are given a decent living arrangement without him there... and if he wants to have the kids over he needs to find a living arrangement that isn't viewed as dangerous to them, so he's gotta pay extra for his own living space to be up to par too.

Florida passed some laws to put a harder cap on alimony, but if you divorce with a kid, or multiple kids under 10 years, you're getting stuck with quite the bill over the next 10 years.

The simple answer here is to make sure you marry a woman with comparable assets and a career so you can divorce rape her. There are a bunch of famous female celebrities recently that have gotten divorce raped by their lower-earning male ex-partner. I imagine the DR happens more when you marry some woman who becomes a stay at home mom who you have kids with.

The courts see woman + kids and "balance" the income for the woman and then "balance" it again for the kids. ie: 100% income (male) 0% income (woman) -> divorce: 50% M and 50% F -> each give half to the kids, 25% M & 75% F as women are assumed to be primary caretakers.

It's a big reason to maintain a two income household as well, even if childcare ends up costing most of the second paycheck. Marital assets are generally going to be 50/50, but it's a lot harder for a woman to argue for alimony if she has been working full-time for most of the marriage.

Yes the non-tongue and cheek answer is that this is a problem that has been semi-solved by having a more egalitarian relationship with both partners working at a comparable income. Assortative mating within your socio-economic class leads to stable relationships. I'm not sure where IraqVeteran8888 falls into the spectrum, but my shot in the dark is that a guntuber is conservative -> trad relationship -> Wife stayed home to take care of the kids and do the home making -> bigger alimony payment when divorce happens.

The other observation, though probably more charged, is that average gender warriors opinion of women getting the short end of the stick through their own actions in the dating, is to say "you should have picked better, or actually cared about the red flags". Unfortunately that same advice applies to men in the marriage market. Don't marry Stacy because she's hot and wants to raise your kids if she also is the type of vindictive or mercenary to take you to the cleaners in the divorce.

You know these polls always remind me of the “happiness surveys” that show that Finland is the happiest country in the world.

In the abstract, the rankings have some truth to them. They are broadly correlated with GDP. The countries with the lowest happiness rank are places like Congo and Yemen. The highest countries are - Costa Rica aside - all rich. But zoom in and some discrepancies become apparent. Greece has a far, far lower happiness ranking than many poorer countries - roughly the same as Libya, which has been in a civil war for 15 years. And if you visit the top countries like Finland and Iceland, they don’t seem that happy. Not only are these cultures quite unfriendly, lonely, cold, deal with depressing and harsh winters etc, they also have much greater problems with alcoholism and suicidal than the “less happy” Mediterraneans. They laugh less, they smile less (no offence, but this is just something that one notices immediately in them).

I don’t really think that Finns are actually so much happier than Greeks. In fact, I often think they’re less happy. So what really explains the difference? Social pressure. Finns read every day about how rich and happy they’re supposed to be, how low their unemployment is, how their social fabric is the envy of the world, how un-corrupt they are, how lucky they are to have been born Finns. The depressed alcoholic Finn whose cousin just committed suicide last month ticks ‘8’ on the happiness survey because - his temporary problems aside - he is pretty lucky, right? The Greek sits back on his terrace overlooking an azure sea, ouzo in hand, another day of pretending to work complete, and thinks doesn’t he read all the time about how corrupt Greece is, and how many problems it has, and how Greece is the basket case of Europe or something - and there was some struggle with the debt crisis 15 years ago etc etc? So he puts down ‘5’.

The reality and the survey are two different worlds. It’s not about how happy you are, it’s about how happy you feel you’re supposed to be. In the end, people believe what they’re told. How they act varies more.

Happiness survey is an example of how social scientists, uh, think about survey design in a way that deserves a book titled "How to Lie With Survey Design". Weirdly enough the "happiness survey" doesn't ask "how happy are you", it uses a thought experiment called Cantril ladder:

Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?

Obviously it conditions on the culturally shared notions and idiosyncratic capacity to imagine "best possible life you can imagine". Like, pervasive pessimism is one symptom of major depressive disorder, I would not be surprised if a seriously depressed person rated quite okay because he/she may not even think it possible to be a happy in the best possible life.

I have seen this complaint made several times when Cantril ladder comes up, and never seen a good response.

Yeah, that doesn’t represent happiness, that measures how you feel you measure, literally, on the social ladder. Is there research that asks something more like, “How happy are you, 1-10?”

Wow, that's mind blowing. I've been hearing about these surveys my entire life and never knew that they had this critical weakness. I now understand why Americans don't score that high -- the delta between American life as it is (pretty great) and as Americans imagine it could be (virtuous yeoman farmer utopia/fully luxury automated gay space communism) is massive. You don't mistrust social 'scientists' enough. You think you do, but you don't.

Mexico at #11 right behind the Nordics is interesting. I don't know enough about Mexico to guess how they rank so high. And Afghanistan ranked dead last is also interesting. I suspect that the bottom half of the rankings is marred by poor quality sampling; they probably emailed a bunch of professors at the University of Kabul instead of riding out into the desert to interview Taliban patriarchs, who are presumably quite happy.

Mexico at #11 right behind the Nordics is interesting. I don't know enough about Mexico to guess how they rank so high.

This does not surprise me. Outside of having a sunny and generally happy physical climate, Mexicans (in general) culturally accept a huge amount of flaws in the world and have consequently low expectations that they generally can meet. Additionally, you have the factor of parts of Mexico being pre-industrial poor and those people moving to modern cities which lets them run ahead of the hedonic treadmill for a while. Low expectations plus a modern, industrial economy seems to be a recipe for optimism. Post WW2 Europe and USA were similar cases of low expectations from war and depression meeting a growing industrial economy.

Countries that report higher happiness scores also have higher suicide rates, a trend that also holds across US states. It is worse to be depressed when your neighbors are happier.

Costa Rica aside

Costa Rica performs much better by purchasing power than it’s GDP would suggest, and it’s surrounded by basket cases so it looks even better in comparison.

Greece has a far, far lower happiness ranking than many poorer countries - roughly the same as Libya, which has been in a civil war for 15 years. And if you visit the top countries like Finland and Iceland, they don’t seem that happy. Not only are these cultures quite unfriendly, lonely, cold, deal with depressing and harsh winters etc, they also have much greater problems with alcoholism and suicidal than the “less happy” Mediterraneans.

While Finnish suicide and alcohol use rates have actually gone down considerably in recent years (suicide rates most likely due to active anti-suicide campaigning, alcohol use due to same trends in youth drinking as elsewhere), they're still indeed higher than in Greece, though there might be a cultural factor here (ie. autistic/secular Nordic cultures are more likely to honestly report suicides as suicides as cultures where your cousin didn't commit a suicide, he just, uhh, went on a walk and must have slipped and fell down a cliff, perhaps there was an accident or something, you can give him a church burial etc.) However, at least according to this, Finns feel less lonely than Greeks.

Happiness studies are still probably bunk, but so are a lot of other studies that you can compare here.

Uh, didnt Finnish drinking decline due to a government campaign?

This is the first I’ve ever heard of such campaign.

Over a decade ago, Scott cautioned people against using depression/suicide metrics as a proxy for how happy or functional a society is. Other than climate, the most obvious secular difference between Greece and Finland is hours of daylight, which is known to have a major impact on suicide rates. After Greenland, Finland reports the highest rates of seasonal affective disorder in the world, while Greece is twentieth.

Happy and functional are two vastly different things. The same is true even within a family. There are terribly unhappy people with entire well structured family lives - a paid off mortgage, a marriage without fighting or much drama, three children, no financial troubles, and very happy people whose lives are far messier.

Scott presents several reasons why Finns and Danes might have high suicide rates even though they have well functioning societies: these include things like lack of daylight, boring and bland diets, etc. But what if lack of daylight actually does make you much less happy? Scott says that black Americans have lower rates of depression than white Americans. OK - my impression is indeed that black Americans are often happier than white Americans (there are even plausible Motte-friendly reasons why this might be the case)!

I don’t buy Scott’s last theory that suicide is just a function of societal development level or something like that. I think it most likely that after a certain development threshold where individuals don’t have to worry about daily survival and the prevailing society doesn’t consider suicide an extreme taboo, it’s mostly about sunlight hours experienced (this accounts for weird discrepancies between places that are sunnier but have fewer daylight hours, and for places that have fewer of both but where people spend more time outside during the day, albeit mediated for altitude (like in the ‘big sky’ states).

The sunlight hours theory is suspect. I would expect them to have adapted to it over the millennia, the same way they evolved lighter skin. Meanwhile, in places with ample sunlight, people do their best to avoid it: historically in the form of the siesta, nowadays awake but in an enclosed, air-conditioned space.

They aren't avoiding indirect sunlight though. In Scandinavia shit gets really dark for most of the day during winter.

You go to school/work when it's dark and you leave after the sun has gone down. You go months without really seeing the sun even if you live far south of when the sun literally doesn't go up during the day like in Kiruna, Narvik or Tromsø.

I have plenty of family far in the north of Sweden and they meet a ton of people who try to move there. Those people usually worry about that cold but that is almost never an issue, the cold is easy to deal with. The reason people leave again is because they don't understand just how dark it gets and how that really feels.

All that said, I also find the sunlight theory suspect on similar grounds to you. It's not like people are trapped there and there is no statistically significant difference in suicide rates based on latitude once you control for how rural a county is. People are killing themselves in the countryside, not the cities, and even that is greatly affected by demographic differences.

the “happiness surveys” that show that Finland is the happiest country in the world.

FWIW, the reaction here in Finland to those surveys is always ”Lolwtf? Are you fucking kidding me?”

I don’t really think that Finns are actually so much happier than Greeks. In fact, I often think they’re less happy. So what really explains the difference? Social pressure. Finns read every day about how rich and happy they’re supposed to be, how low their unemployment is, how their social fabric is the envy of the world, how un-corrupt they are, how lucky they are to have been born Finns.

While there may be something to your theory, this is old news. Finland now experiences double digit unemployment of 10,9% with youth unemployment approaching 25%. They are now worst in EU, worse than Spain. The same for GDP per capita which stagnated basically since 2008. Their famous education and good results in PISA tests is also history as it plummeted from first place in 2006 to out of top 10 today. There is something rotten in state of Finland.

Can we plot the graphs of immigration, unemployment and education and and see whether there is correlation between them.

Yes, we can. The wiki page has a bunch.

No, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t show what you’re expecting, because a giant chunk of the immigration comes from the Baltics and other post-Soviet countries. I didn’t find data which separated those out over time.

Thanks and nice job! You just saved me from erroneously reifying my priors here. Appreciate it.

Well, I think the question is still open. No idea how many of the immigrants post-2014 are fleeing Ukrainians vs. economic migrants, Russian dissidents, Chinese, who knows what else. So if you find country of origin + time data, let me know!

the UK as its current society no longer exists in 50 years. Maybe reality has to be the escape valve that forces women's beliefs to become moored to reality again.

Well does the society of UK circa 1976 exist today? Coal miners. British Steel. The Mid Atlantic accent. Roger Moore. Rumpole of the Bailey. That Britain is dead and gone, it may as well be another world.

This isn't quite a 'change happens so you should accept bad change' post. It's certainly bad if high-quality peoples like the British are dying off. But I don't think we have to care about sustainability into the long term future like we used to. 50 years is too far away. Reduce TFR to 0, why not? AI will certainly be good enough to compensate within 10 years, let alone 50.

How does TFR matter? We invest in a society that produces children today. In 18 years the kid is qualified to be an entry level worker, after 100s of thousands more in investment? +4 years for university? What is the estimated return of this? I say zero. That kid is not going to be militarily, economically, politically relevant. The AI of 2044, when he is 18, will be overwhelmingly more capable than he is. Society is a machine for producing and distributing resources, so that groups can enjoy wealth and military power. That's why we have culture and capitalism and politics.

It would of course be ideal if we had healthy, confident, advancing civilizations rooted in correct values rather than delusions. But the fact that we don't may not be fatal. It's harmful mostly in the delusions damaging or derailing the transition in this final stage of human life.

But the distinction is that I don't think we need a real cure, only a quick fix. Better a band-aid than deep cultural medicine if it takes 20 years to work. Better to burn the bond markets, state finances, TFR, climate and social trust as long as the right people control the datacentres and AI models.

I know this is kind of boring as a post, feels like it trivializes and robs the meaning out of every single issue. I think it's fine to talk about non-AI things and not have it injected with AI but I think long-term thinking at this point is a trap.

Right, you hit on a very important distinction which is that birth rates only matter because of immigration.

If your society is 98% indigenous and tfr falls through the floor, and mass automation replaces most or all jobs, this isn’t really a problem. In fact, as long as consumption rises, which it easily can, everyone lives a better life, has more space, etc. This is not really a problem. The economics of population will change in an age of mass automation anyway. Koreans will still exist (assuming the stalemate with the north holds), there will just be fewer of them, which is fine. They will remain in control of their destiny.

If your society is diverse and divided, then you have to care, because these people are your neighbours and their children will be your children’s neighbours (and yours if you lead a long life), and they will have the same vote that you do, and they are probably having more kids than you.

It's not a problem unless you're the SOB born at the exact wrong time to benefit from either family support or welfare (or AI)

The country/ethnic group will survive but it's not gonna be fun for you personally. Which is a major incentive, in people's eyes, to not fight immigration or the dominant pro-immigration parties.

The problem is that the movement here has become utterly unmoored from reality. In the case of the UK, the left broadly got what it wanted.

Well, Phoebe O’Brien certainly does not feel she is living in paradise. Neither would any representative of historical "left" before about Clinton times.

There are sweeping laws against almost every leftist bugbear, there are gender equality rulings that means female cashiers have to be paid the same as male warehouse workers

And neither are paid very much.

taxes are incredibly punitive at the top end

And are they spent on anything that benefits Phoebe in any way?

the UK has worse pay compression than the Soviet Union (!!!).

And like in Soviet Union, it does not matter, because the real elite benefits are not things you can buy in shop with pieces of paper or plastic.

Yea, Phoebe O’Brien is angry. And you admit that there are many good reasons to be angry in today's UK and today's world.

Yea, Phoebe's anger is misdirected. Yea, Phoebe is ignorant, badly miseducated and misinformed. Now, instead of laughing at her hair, what would you tell to her? Who is her real enemy, who should she be angry at? If it's not the men, the billionaire class, Keir Starmer, Donald Trump and Israel, who is it?

Or would you tell her to chill, stop GAF about anything and be content with her lot of life?

"Dear Phoebe, you live in the best possible world. Stop crying, stop complaining, be thankful you were not born as slave in ancient Egypt and enjoy your life. Do not forget to thank every day Israel and heroes working in quantitative finance who made it all possible."

"Dear Phoebe, you live in the best possible world. Stop crying, stop complaining, be thankful you were not born as slave in ancient Egypt and enjoy your life. Do not forget to thank every day Israel and heroes working in quantitative finance who made it all possible."

Yeschad.jpg

Best possible world? No. But a pretty good world. The opportunity and luxory available to her is incredible if she would get out of her way and not compare herself to the very lucky.

And are they spent on anything that benefits Phoebe in any way?

yes, phoebe is given enough food to eat, a roof over her head and healthcare that 99% of all humans who ever lived would have killed for. Her anger is born of a vicious envy.

Do not forget to thank every day Israel and heroes working in quantitative finance who made it all possible.

I wouldn't say we are heroes but quant finance isn't completely zero sum. It may be almost zero sum on the margins but Phoebe and Co. would notice very quickly if we all disappeared in a poof of smoke.

How big are the margins, though? If somebody arbitrarily limited the tick speed and bumped the fuck out of commission rates to the point that high frequency strategies weren't viable there'd likely be an increase in financial friction but it's not like we didn't have a functional financial system circa 30 years ago with floor traders.

Yeah, the margins are massive, but someone needs to do the work in the end, and we do it the most efficiently.

What would be the most immediate, noticeable effects for Phoebe if Phoebe isn't a trader who is concerned about market liquidity?

In the UK, the falling pound (and resulting imported inflation) and declining tax revenues (and resulting bond-market enforced cuts to the public services her mother relies on). Finance is an export industry for us, so whether or not it benefits the clients is not a problem for the British to worry about.

I think it'd depend on the exact manifestation. 'All Quant Finance in the UK disappears, still happens elsewhere' and 'poof the field of quant finance gets patched out of reality' are very different

And are they spent on anything that benefits Phoebe in any way?

Yes. Aside from free healthcare, thé heavy subsidization of women being girlbosses enables her lifestyle in a way it doesn’t for men.

I’d tell her what I think is the truth or at least close to the truth regarding these issues. That her hairstyle is laughable and should be changed (if she looks like a feminist activist who repels normal people with her appearance in itself). Her anger in itself isn’t bad or unwarranted. Some of her problems are caused indirectly by Trump’s and Israel’s policies to a small degree. Other problems of hers are caused by Starmer to a much larger degree. Yet other ones are caused by billionaires. Some of the men she is attracted to are likely to treat her badly. There also men who would do the opposite, but many of them are invisible or unattractive in her eyes. And I wouldn’t bring up Ancient Egypt as it’d just be triggering.

I can understand how UK inflation might be exacerbated by Trump's tariffs from last year. I can understand how part of the reason she feels miserable and angry a lot of the time is because of social media algorithms which were designed by the companies who built them, which you could indirectly say is "problems caused by billionaires". But I'm at a loss as to how the problems of anyone living in the UK can be laid at the feet of policies enacted by Israel.

The Israeli government initiated a Middle Eastern war that is completely disrupting the global trade in crude oil, natural gas, aluminium, helium etc.

There is not a chance in hell that Phoebe O'Brien would say a major reason for her dissatisfaction with her life is a war that began six weeks ago.

There is an absolute racing certainty that she would say this - it is the politically correct thing to say. She would be wrong though, as demonstrated by her dissatisfaction having begun a lot more than six weeks ago.

Yes, you're right. What I meant was that if you asked Phoebe how dissatisfied with her life she was immediately before the war in Iran, she would give the same answer as today.

I didn't say it was major.

Okay, fair. But if you were to list all the reasons O'Brien is dissatisfied with her life in descending order of importance, I'd be amazed if the war in Iran cracked the top 50, or even the top 100.

Yet other ones are caused by billionaires.

Which of her problems are caused by which billionares?

And are they spent on anything that benefits Phoebe in any way?

Yes. Her education is subsidised, a lot of the jobs she could get are probably a result of legislation passed by the state and subsidised by it, in the unlikely event she has kids that is heavily subsidised, as is her aged pension, her healthcare, of which she will consume a lot more statistically over a lifetime than if she were a male, is subsidised. Taxes overwhelmingly go to the old, women and the infirm. The purpose of the system is partly to take money away from people she hates to people like her.

Who is her real enemy, who should she be angry at?

The real enemy is, well, herself. Pre-2008 the UK had some of the highest growth rates in the developed world. A big reason it's gone to shit and is on managed decline is that its slowly changing into a weird social market economy with pay rates set by fiat at the behest of people that think like her.

Or would you tell her to chill, stop GAF about anything and be content with her lot of life?

I would ask her to think about what exactly makes modern industrial life possible in the first place and how precarious it is.

What does she really want? I am not going to try and psychoanalyse the people that think differently to me as that would just lead to a lot of unfair characterisations. What I can say is that what she wants, would, historically and practically speaking, generally lead to very bad things if fully implemented, if you believe empirical observations about econometrics and history.

This is nonsense. I don't think Phoebe is unhappy because she is a paypig for entitled Boomers (the problem is clearly spiritual and not material), but that is a much more accurate model than Phoebe as ungrateful welfare queen.

Yes. Her education is subsidised,

Phoebe took out a student loan to pay for tuition fees and living expenses. The fees she (nominally) paid don't cover the full cost of delivering her education as calculated by the Hollywood accountants in the Pro-Vice-Chancellor-for-finance's office, but they are a lot more than the amount of actual instructional and facility spending she got the benefit of. The loan is subsidised, but in a way Phoebe won't see the benefit of until the unpaid balance is written off when she is in her fifties.

a lot of the jobs she could get are probably a result of legislation passed by the state and subsidised by it,

Roughly half of female graduates are working in healthcare professions, teaching, or non-graduate retail and food service jobs. Comparing the UK to peer countries suggests that government involvement in healthcare and teaching reduces worker pay (by setting up a monopsony) rather than increasing it. Also, a large percentage of the total compensation in healthcare and teaching is public-sector pensions which are generous in a non-obvious way - i.e. money that Phoebe isn't seeing and would, if she stopped to think, assume she would somehow-or-other be cheated out of by the time she reaches retirement age.

The UK is a big exporter of professional services, so the stereotypical power-suited girlboss is much more likely to be working in a competitive export-focussed firm than her US equivalent.

So the chance that Phoebe is a government-subsidised girlboss in a way which is legible to her is well below 50%. Overall, there is some subsidy to girlbossing, but not enough (definitely in the UK, and almost certainly in other rich countries) to compensate for the cost of the three Bs of grand-scale welfare beneficiaries (Boomers, bastards and babymamas).

If Phoebe is able-bodied, employed, and childless she is going to be a net contributor. The Boomers get so much that there is not much left for deserving working-age cases, and in any case single childless able-bodied white women are pretty close to the bottom of the Progressive Stack.

in the unlikely event she has kids that is heavily subsidised,

As you acknowledge, she doesn't. And Phoebe comes from a culture and social class which means she would expect to only have kids with a gainfully employed husband, meaning that the amount of subsidy would not be high, and would not count as a transfer from men to women.

as is her aged pension, her healthcare, of which she will consume a lot more statistically over a lifetime than if she were a male,

Her mother is subsidised. She may be subsidised in the future if the country doesn't go bankrupt in the interim. (She is even more pessimistic on this point than we are). Right now, she is paying the subsidies.

Taxes overwhelmingly go to the old, women and the infirm.

Taxes go to the old, the infirm, and families with children. (In the UK, now in that order, and increasingly not to families with children where at least one parent has an upper-middle-class income). Not women like Phoebe. The statistics show women as net beneficiaries because subsidies to families disproportionately go to families headed by single mothers, and the payee field on the welfare cheque has the babymama's name on it even though the money is supposed to be for the kids.

What she wants is Marxism, and the history of attempts at implementing Marxism leaves quite a few industrialized, modern societies. They’re just poor and shitty.

Maybe we're using different meanings for words here, but in my mind modernity (modern cities with gleaming skyscrapers, high speed 5G access everywhere, efficient metro systems, etc.) is directly correlated with wealth. Which modern society is poor?

I mean, China meets all of your criteria while being poor.

It’s quite common for communist countries to have good public transportation, urban infrastructure, etc while having very low PPP.

I can't help but feel like calling China a "poor" country is a bit misleading. The modern parts are wealthy, and the poor parts are backwards. To the extent that China is modern, I would consider it wealthy too, and vice versa.

And neither are paid very much.

A warehouse worker makes £26k a year.

And are they spent on anything that benefits Phoebe in any way?

Yes, as outlined in the OP. Feel free to consult the most recent budget if you don't believe it.

who should she be angry at?

The people who design social media algorithms, chiefly.

A warehouse worker makes £26k a year.

A quick search seems to show that's not much different than a US warehouse worker. Or cashier; they're overlapping ranges. The UK may be a better place relatively for warehouse workers compared to brain surgeons, but you're likely at least as well off being a warehouse worker in the US.

There are arguments for the UK warehouse worker doing better. British rents are cheaper in dollar terms. Grocery costs are lower. Low income neighborhoods in Britain have much lower crime rates than their American equivalents.

But even if we assume their QoL is merely the same, that’s incredible - America is twice as rich as Britain! British professionals make less than half of their American peers.

Since 1997, British governments of both parties have pursued a policy of cutting material inequality within the wage-and-salary class while trying to increase inequality between low-paid workers and able-bodied dole bludgers* and being broadly relaxed about the increasing wealth of the super-rich. It isn't clear to me how much of this was deliberate, but almost every government economic policy since 1997 is either that agenda or a transfer to pensioners.

* Hence why every marginally employable adult in the UK has found a disability.

and being broadly relaxed about the increasing wealth of the super-rich.

The super rich are irrelevant to British politics unless you’re a communist. This is because everyone except Jeremy Corbyn and Zach Polanski types understand that the rich are transient, that they have little money in Britain, that if their businesses are based in Britain they usually derive the majority of their earnings from overseas, and that the exceptions are a few elderly landlord who are mostly politically and economically irrelevant, and whose wealth is itself propped up by the transient international rich (eg the Grosvenor family owning half of central London). You can’t really rinse the Ambanis or the Qatari royal family or Ken Griffin (to name three super rich people who own some of the most expensive ultra prime property in London) because they are ‘British’ the way that I am Maldivian when I go on vacation.

The moderately rich, people at the top end of finance, commercial law, some corporations, insurance etc are similarly transient. The businesses they either work for, ultimately serve, or both, are mostly not based in the UK. That the UK serves as the global or regional center for finance, insurance, consulting, ex-US commercial law etc is a matter of history and convenience and, in a big pinch, could be relocated to any number of other welcoming jurisdictions. This leaves the domestic moderately rich, like the owners of successful chains of car dealerships, large scale fast food franchisees, property developers, medium sized manufacturers, etc. They can probably be squeezed a little but not much.

Domestically wealth in Britain is concentrated in the upper-middle class who did pretty well until 2009 but have been rinsed since then by a combination of tax changes, extreme salary stagnation, a weakening pound, stagnant property values in the southeast and London especially etc.

while trying to increase inequality between low-paid workers and able-bodied dole bludgers

I agree that this has been a well-intentioned aim, but of course in classic British fashion almost every innovation designed to ‘make work pay’ and ‘increase the percentage of people in work’ (most infamously recent measures like PIP, Motability and UC) have only served to increase the welfare bill with laughably exploitable mechanics that the British underclass and their sponsors quickly figure out.

The problem in British politics is that both main political factions (the Left and the Right) each rely on a welfare-dependent constituency. This is true for both Labour and the Tories and, if they have any hope of government, the Greens and Reform, too - not to mention the regional parties. Under FPTP in the British multiparty system, small swings are enough for a parliamentary majority.

The sum of these effects is that it is impossible for Labour to cut (or slow the growth rate) of any benefits whatsoever (the baseline welfare class plus second generation migrants who are disproportionately welfare reliant are its core voter base, while pensioner swing is necessary for a Labour majority even if most of them vote Tory), and it is impossible for the Tories to cut (or slow the growth of the bill) in net terms, since they can’t do anything about pensions, and while they can slightly trim some benefits they tend to compensate for others by jacking up in-work benefits to buy votes among the poorly paid white working class, who are still far below the ~40k net contribution threshold.

The bizarre salary compression story, where a 19 year old warehouse worker and a 26 year old graduate get paid the same, is a consequence of government policy but, much like the “triple lock” bill, largely unplanned, a simple byproduct of the above political dynamics worsened by the unfortunate fact that Oxford PPE seemingly doesn’t, in fact, teach you as much economics as it should. Raising the minimum wage as significantly as the UK did is essentially a Hail Mary attempt to boost consumption at any cost since the working poor spend everything they make; in a way, it is (kind of) working. Whether ‘it working’ is actually good for the country is questionable.

American rents are higher, but you do get more for your money- IDK how much it cancels out, but a lot of ways in which America is more expensive(mostly not groceries though) are like that.

Americans get access to ridiculously opulent luxuries, like air conditioning and closets.

Yes. So I don't buy @Eetan's claim that warehouse workers and cashiers in the UK are both getting shafted.

They may well be, but not by their salary. Rather, by the general economic malaise that's brought about by the policies meant to keep their salaries relatively high.

A warehouse worker makes £26k a year.

Just for context, due to inane minimum wage laws and similar these sort of positions are some of the highest paid in the world in the UK, normalized to median wage and price levels. It's not a great place to be a nuclear engineer or surgeon but it is a pretty good deal if you are a cashier, store clerk, warehouse worker, etc.

Which is, funnily enough, broadly what people like Phoebe O'Brien want. Unfortunately it does have some pretty severe second-order effects.

The UK's current TFR is 1.41

Pakistanis have far more children than the natives. I wonder if you disaggregate TFRs by ethnicity, are white Britons already significantly below replacement? Children of Men for the natives, but not for the migrants.

I've looked into this a bit, and the politics of having children. Conservatives are also doing fine-ish in most places, still usually below replacements but only at like 1.8 or 1.9. As @IdiocyInAction says, immigrants in western countries are closer to natives in number of children than one may think, but it's kind of a fools errand to put a number on it since they are a mix of different ethnicities from different source countries, some of which are already substantially below replacement themselves. Generally speaking, though, if you restrict it to immigration from high-birth-rate countries specifically, they're still AFAIK above replacement. Urban vs rural is also a very noticeable difference, which also correlates with politics.

Taken together, the implication is that moderates might be more close to one, and especially progressive, urban whites probably have east asian style birth rates. Scott once mentioned that rationalists and polyamorists have substantially < 1 TFR, and I don't think they are exceptional compared to progressives.

I think minorities actually converge to native (low) birthrates remarkably fast IIRC. This has been one thing that right-wing commentators of the 2000s got wrong.

Does fertility rates for minorities include children brought in that weren't born in the country in question?

Depends on the data and variable, as usual. TFR specifically is a rather synthetic approach that looks at all the women in a given year, records how many had a birth in that year and their respective age, and then creates a synthetic women that sums through these average birth rates for the current year to get a total number of children. This is why it is a lot less stable than actual numbers of children and very sensitive to delayed child birth, at least in theory (in practice, delayed child birth and reduced birth rates are so highly correlated that it doesn't really matter). So no, it doesn't include children they brought with them. But it still shows that after entering western countries, they reduce the rate at which they're having children quite quickly.

I doubt it.

True, but it hardly matters when the immigration floodgates have never been shut. The proportion of natives in any given western population is still shrinking.

True, but it hardly matters when the immigration floodgates have never been shut. The proportion of natives in any given western population is still shrinking.

Yeah, it's interesting that where I live (Northeastern Suburb) the native European stock is completely gone (I'm talking about the "posterity" referenced in the Declaration of Independence.) All that's left is street names and old gravestones.

That being said, I think all of this hand-wringing about TFR is kind of a moot point. Because in the next 100 years, one of two things will happen: The most likely possibility is that changes in technology will replace our current set of headaches with a completely different set of headaches. Failing that, the population of ultra-religious types (Amish; Ultra-Orthodox Jews; etc.) will explode and turn into the world's main demographic issue.

Yeah, it's interesting that where I live (Northeastern Suburb) the native European stock is completely gone (I'm talking about the "posterity" referenced in the Declaration of Independence.) All that's left is street names and old gravestones.

"European stock" and "the posterity mentioned in the Declaration of Independence" are different groups. Intermarriage between white ethnic groups makes the statistics dubiously meaningful, but most white Americans self-define as descended from Ellis Island era immigrant groups.

"European stock" and "the posterity mentioned in the Declaration of Independence" are different groups.

Agreed. I actually said "native European stock" to clarify that I was referring to the people who founded the United States. But I realized that was not clear enough, so I added further clarification: "I'm talking about the 'posterity' referenced in the Declaration of Independence."

Even so, you still found a way to misinterpret my point. I guess I should have said "founding European stock," but going forward could you please interpret what I say charitably? Thanks in advance.

Yeah and they won't be shut as a lot of immigrant groups form blocks and demand entry routes for their brethren (which you see in many Anglosphere countries these days).

While Adolescence was filmed about incels (an utterly fabricated moral panic, as involuntary celibate men are both more likely to be non-white, less likely to rape and less likely to be violent against women)

I'll be honest, that show radicalised me far more than "Andrew Tate" could ever hope to.

UK's statistics show a downward trend of violence against women over the years, a pattern that's remained consistent throughout Andrew Tate's influencer period. So even if we generously allow the dubious "correlation = causation" logic, empirical facts point in the opposite direction of the show's premise.

I'm overgeneralising, but progressives are consistently inviting allegations that facts and figures function as their worst kryptonite. The irony is compounded by the real world assault charges against the actor who played the black detective.

And for a production that lampoons boomers for their lack of tech literacy, the show itself mirrors the very species of reflexive (and completely unfounded) moral panic stoked by suburban karens over violent video games in the 2000s.

The actual crime is young white men's perceived departure from progressive politics, but that is not enough to cause alarm. You need to engineer a moral hysteria that your 13yo sons are gonna murder your daughters. But really, you're streisand effecting stuff like this. Progressives seem to have forgotten what teenagers are like. They push boundaries, they don't care what it is but if it's a sacred cow to the adults, they will push those buttons. Perhaps they thought bible thumpers would be the butt of the jokes forever and cannot fathom being seen as the out of touch scrooges themselves.

They also feel much more negatively towards young men than young men feel about them.

Yet we're told that men are the ones being radicalised! Women's concerns are a failure of society and men, but men's concerns are a failure of men.

Again, beliefs utterly unmoored from reality. Young women outearn men and the economy bend over backwards to an absurd degree to make that happen.

And yet, young able bodied men continue to disproportionately shoulder physically intensive and dangerous vocations that sustain modern infrastructure - the grid, roads, energy, built environment. Men still account for >90% of all occupational fatalities. Male labour remains foundational to the physical backborn of the modern world. Yet, the culture allows anti-male messaging to proliferate without consequence, while framing women's minimal participation in these fields not as a reflection of preferences or average physical differences, but as society's failure to accommodate them. Collective male guilt for crimes committed by men is axiomatic, but collective male credit for dangerous, essential labour carried out by men is never acknowledged.

And despite this, we are not allowed to write stories about male heroism without extensive ideological throat clearing to accomodate girl power mandates. Women are encouraged to retrofit male oriented media (movies that they don't watch and video games that they don't play) with feminist themes, to atone for the arbitrary crime of pandering to male power fantasies and featuring female character designs that appeal to straight men. Frank discussion of men's distinctive struggles is permissible only when prefaced by deference to feminist priors.

Times are a-changing. White guilt petered out with the George Floyd riots, the "Holocaust industry" ran out out of steam with the Gaza war, the "misogyny industry" is next. Acknowledging men's unique qualities and contributions, and extending reciprocal respect, is unlikely to leave women worse off. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Collective male guilt for crimes committed by men is axiomatic, but collective male credit for dangerous, essential labour carried out by men is never acknowledged.

This right here has to be my biggest objection to Woke/Social Justice/Leftism/cultural marxism thought when applied to historical 'privilege' arguments.

Collective guilt is assumed. Guilt for your ancestors' bad behavior is mandatory. And of course you can be collectively lumped in with people you've never associated with and share no beliefs with if someone deems you to possess enough characteristics in common with them.

But credit or pride? No, silly, you can't be proud of things members of your group did! You can't take credit for advances that were achieved by your forefathers! Those were individual accomplishments that you had no role in! Why would we let you claim those in the present? But of course the fact that you benefited from them should make you feel MORE guilty over your privilege!

Nevermind that whatever the mechanism they claim allows guilt to propagate forward through time... should by definition also carry credit and accolades forward.

And they do that because a fair accounting would make it clear that in the grand scheme, the amount of suffering that Westerners have caused in history, while it is a staggering amount, is on net outweighed by the sheer magnitude of benefits they have achieved for all humans, everywhere, and continue to achieve. So if you want to hold modern Westerners accountable for sins of their fathers, don't be surprised if they start looking back and taking credit for and pride in the successes and victories of their fathers, too.

Obligatory Thomas Sowell banger.

I really must read one of his books, every time someone shares one of his quotes on Substack or quotes him in an essay he comes off as incredibly sharp and perceptive.

He's the rare intellectual that lives up to the hype, and balances sharp wit with incisive commentary, backed by actual research.

Shame he's so old, we won't have him for much longer.

Not to be a contrarian, and I don't mean to disrespect Thomas Sowell whom I know little about, but I don't think that's a revelationary quote. It's something obvious that any intelligent person would have observed, except that if you say it out loud, you will get accused of white supremacy and fired from your job.

Thomas Sowell has the benefits that he is a black man so the usual white supremacy accusations don't stick (I'm sure they'll call him an Uncle Tom, though) and he has life tenure as a judge of the supreme court. That enables him to say what everyone is thinking without the usual blowback. I'm glad he's saying it, but I don't think it's a particularly insightful or original thought.

He's done a lot of useful research and distills insights down to pithy sayings that even normies can comprehend.

Him being black is surely a factor, but his observational abilities are extremely keen by any reasonable measure.

and he has life tenure as a judge of the supreme court,

That's Clarence Thomas, not Thomas Sowell.

Oops, you're right. How embarrassing. Wikipedia tells me Thomas Sowell was a professor at UCLA between 1974 and 1980 and is now 95 years old, so clearly in a position to say whatever he wants. But the quote isn't necessarily recent; when did he say that?

If he was a tenured professor at ACLU that's still consistent with my point that he was in a unique position to say what was obvious to anyone with a brain. Kind of similar to Jordan Peterson who could say the things he said because he was a tenured professor who didn't have to worry about losing his job, not because he was the first person to ever think of them.

JK Rowling is another example. And many such cases.

But credit or pride? No, silly, you can't be proud of things members of your group did! You can't take credit for advances that were achieved by your forefathers! Those were individual accomplishments that you had no role in! Why would we let you claim

This isn't true, though. A common, but not major, "woke" talking point is that black people ought to be proud of all the things their ancestors did, often including rather historically questionable claims of inventions or identities, such as the claim that Shakespeare plagiarized from a black woman or that Cleopatra was black. Of course, this is often justified on the basis that this sort of pride is only to make up for the way oppressive society forces them to be shamed merely for existing or whatever, but also of course, the actual explanation doesn't matter. It's just who/whom, based on identities that educated people can convince themselves belong to whatever part of the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy.

In short, your ingroup oppression points and achievements are positively correlated. One woman's achievements are treated as collective credit for all women. And women get to hijack men's inventions by claiming female erasure, an ironic which systematically hinges on male erasure.

that black people ought to be proud of all the things their ancestors did

IMO woke history revisionism is one of the most damaging trends in modern academia, simply because of how much it is allowed to proliferate uncritically or even treated with any seriousness. It usually manifests in the systematic downplaying (or outright denial) of slavery, human sacrifice and other endemic practices among non white civilisations, and claiming that white men somehow introduced these vices to their otherwise harmonious civilisations.

There's also a recurring theme in progressive history circles to claim the Americas would've still evolved to become the modern superpower that it is today had European settlers never arrived on these shores, as if leaving the indigenous peoples entirely undisturbed would have produced equivalent institutional, scientific, and industrial outcomes. Even though historical and even current parameters do not support this claim.

I doubt even they believe this though, but saying it out loud would get them exiled by their ingroup as it would be implying that atrocities (real or perceived) against indigenous Americans was justified as it had led to more productive outcomes.

IMO woke history revisionism is one of the most damaging trends in modern academia, simply because of how much it is allowed to proliferate uncritically or even treated with any seriousness. It usually manifests in the systematic downplaying (or outright denial) of slavery, human sacrifice and other endemic practices among non white civilisations, and claiming that white men somehow introduced these vices to their otherwise harmonious civilisations.

Yes, but also, this is just a generic problem with anything "woke" in academia, because one of the core tenets of "woke" is the rejection of logic, rationality, and empirical evidence in favor of "other ways of knowing" based on claims by people who belong to favored identity groups, since the former are oppressive inventions of White Supremacy and Patriarchy. As such, there's no limiting factor for claims made by people who are at or close to the top of the oppression totem pole. Academics resolve the cognitive dissonance between this and the fact that academia is fundamentally about applying reason, evidence, and skepticism, by just looking the other way when such claims are made. This applies outside academia, too, of course.

There's also a recurring theme in progressive history circles to claim the Americas would've still evolved to become the modern superpower that it is today had European settlers never arrived on these shores, as if leaving the indigenous peoples entirely undisturbed would have produced equivalent institutional, scientific, and industrial outcomes. Even though historical and even current parameters do not support this claim.

I doubt even they believe this though, but saying it out loud would get them exiled by their ingroup as it would be implying that atrocities (real or perceived) against indigenous Americans was justified as it had led to more productive outcomes.

I'm sure some are performing like this - perhaps more now than ever - but let me assure you, I know for a fact that this is a genuine, sincere belief that has been held by at least one person in this group, and I have near-fact-level confidence that an extremely high proportion of people claiming this also do genuinely, sincerely believe it (to whatever extent anyone can be said to genuinely believe anything, anyway).

You're right, they probably do genuinely believe it. But I think that's marginally better than being dishonest with your own intellect and staying in the bandwagon out of fear of getting kicked out. You can make a far stronger case for States' rights being the leading cause of the Civil War, but no reputable journal will ever publish it. You'll only see them arguing against it, while allowing far more methodologically flawed papers arguing for woman the hunter. I just think, absent any social/career cost of offending progressives, academics will more readily reject these narratives offhand. Instead, it's pick the wokest answer and write backwards, basically.

Perhaps, although I think they allow you to feel pride only in proportion to the amount of oppression that was heaped upon your people.

If I was of a group that had barely any ancestors [particularly, of my gender] that did anything interesting, it's only natural I'd be tearing down the notion anyone should be proud of that too, least of all the people closest to me (i.e. men) whose ancestors actually did do anything interesting.

I would also be incredibly concerned about the fact that the technological developments that even allow me to feel this way in the first place were also nearly exclusively developed by those ancestors. I would claim that the reason why my ancestors have no achievements is out of malice, and make sure the dominant pretense in society is that my gender (in aggregate) is just as capable- because if those guys organized (in the way my gender does instinctively), they would shut me out again.

I'm overgeneralising, but progressives are consistently inviting allegations that facts and figures function as their worst kryptonite.

It doesn't work as kryptonite. If facts and figures are necessary, they just make them up, and the media (which they control) will back their play. Control of the mainstream media is a superweapon.

@2rafa

I'd like to call your attention to this. Just recently you discussed the allure of right-wing extremism to autistic men and their concept of fairness. Would argue that this here is a valid left-wing feminine parallel?

She discussed the allure of both left-wing and right-wing extremism, not just right-wing.

She didn't mention women though.

Most of the women in the groups she was talking about were, themselves, autistic men, I suspect.

I am sure there are some women who could do the job, but most very intelligent women eschew quant finance. And yet.

Surely gotta hope for Speedrunning-type women to come and save the day

We get a few of those too, but they also don't seem to enjoy this sort of job too much (and they are generally not that well liked). Unlike Google et al. you get fired pretty quickly for doing anything but your job and it's a much more pragmatic environment than big tech of old used to be.

That article is great reporting; I feel like every line had a gem.

Take:

Anna has a boyfriend, whom she described as “a fucking Labrador”. “He’s reading books about how climate change isn’t actually that big a deal, and it’s hard to separate that from the fact that he’s not really faced much adversity in his life as a straight white man who was privately educated,” she said. “I’m probably the adversity in his life.”

Or:

Israel struck a Palestinian camp in Tel al-Sultan in the southern Gaza Strip. The attack caused a blaze that set tents alight and killed 45 people. Ash remembered watching videos of the attack, feeling cold and hopeless. Several women began openly weeping. The male students, meanwhile, were preoccupied with planning the next day’s protest. “I feel like sometimes men don’t feel the gravity of the thousands of people that have died,” Ash told me.

Wow.

But, my takeaway: you're imagining things. I direct this at both you and the interview subjects.

It's important to remember that this is a particular, peculiar subculture/mental illness being reported on. It gets a whole lot of attention, because many members of the media class are also afflicted with it. But it's not at all representative: we're being presented with a deeply warped carnival mirror style representation of reality. One that's optimized toward creating an emotional reaction and us-vs-them dynamic, which is ideal for engagement.

And so are they:

Evelyn was concerned about what the men she knew were watching online. “The stuff that’s being said about women is crazy,” she said. “They’re getting all these reels, talking about, like, bad stuff about women. And I get reels of women saying bad stuff about men. I try to think, not all men are like this, but…”

This is a typical pattern: a man whispers Andrew Tate's name once, and it echoes a million times.

Her friend group can almost certainly be assumed to be nearly entirely college educated men. And a reasonable bet for the modal number of times they had engaged with a misogynistic reel is 0. Men absolutely have their electronic follies, but few suffer from social media addiction (the more usual error path is video game addiction or porn addiction). Men are on social media much less than women, and they spend much less time on it when they do.

It's a extremely weird gap in understanding of reality to me, akin to a man worrying that women were learning to hate and murder men by playing too many first person shooters.

It's important to remember that this is a particular, peculiar subculture/mental illness being reported on. It gets a whole lot of attention, because many members of the media class are also afflicted with it. But it's not at all representative: we're being presented with a deeply warped carnival mirror style representation of reality. One that's optimized toward creating an emotional reaction and us-vs-them dynamic, which is ideal for engagement.

This reads as the latest update to the usual dismissal:

  1. It's just some kids on college campuses
  2. okay, it's more than college kids, but it's just some weirdos on the internet
  3. okay, it's more than college kids and internet weirdos, but it's an isolated subgroup getting too much attention

It becomes less believable each time. The whole western world is the internet. There is no "non-internet" reality to return to (unless one is Amish, I suppose). Swathes of people are addicted to social media/tiktok/IG/whatever (and it's likely worse among women). The media class is afflicted, the chattering classes are afflicted, the PMC are afflicted, and the white collar workers are afflicted. Resentment-powered leftist identitarianism is everywhere. Being told "it's not representative" is false and borders on gaslighting.

It's important to remember that this is a particular, peculiar subculture/mental illness being reported on.

But the "illness" is spread through information. So when people of the media class are afflicted with it, their vast reach spreads it to others. As their words reach more people and start to dominate on social media, more people will assume that this is now the default, socially acceptable outlook.

So politicians start using these opinions to formulate policy, and ordinary people start to adopt them as a way to fit in. Initially this only happens to terminally online folks and activists, but over time a feedback loop is created, as the more people believe in it, the more it actually becomes the dominant idea. Thus, even ordinary people will adopt theses beliefs as a way to fit in, which is when they really start to affect the world.

I wouldn't dismiss this as a fringe phenomenon. They appear to be average middle-class / precariat urban college girls to me.

Anna has a boyfriend, whom she described as “a fucking Labrador”.

Not even trying the least to beat the dogpill allegations.

“I’m probably the adversity in his life.”

It’s a common flex for a young woman to brag about how she’s negative value-add to the men she dates. To boast about how desirable she is, that men will put up with her shit as the cost of being with her. “Just here to ruin your life.” “Hope you like bad girls because I’m bad at everything.” Or the older: “If you can’t handle me at my worst you don’t deserve me at my best.”

This is a typical pattern: a man whispers Andrew Tate's name once, and it echoes a million times.

Bro got Streisand Effected to fame, as did Clavicular after him. Good for them, I suppose. To the extent Tate or Clavicular are part of a cause, they don’t have to do much recruiting as women do it for them.

Not even trying the least to beat the dogpill allegations.

Nor the "redpill" allegations. She knows that he doesn't share her values, she believes he's lounged off his wealthy (allegedly) straight white male privilege all his life, so what made her choose to be with him? Just what about him is worth overlooking his politics for, which she claims is alarming her?

This tracks with the pattern I've seen irl, literally the worst men I know (deadbeats, drug users, serial cheaters, emotionally distant dbags, Andrew Tate followers) who treat their girlfriends like fleshlights face near zero barriers to attracting women. You can't keep wielding the social crime of "misogyny" as a conversational cudgel to stop people from noticing unflattering* patterns in female attraction and dating incentives.

*I personally don't think it's unflattering, but it's probably difficult to reconcile it with progressive sacred cows.

I actually think it is the only logical thinking they perform. If you truly believe in white privilege and that misogyny and patriarchy is ever-present and powerful, then of course you will make those associations on personal level, and you should date white privileged boys to eke out a little bit of that power for yourself. You would be stupid if you go for oppressed black handicapped weakling.

It is self-defeating nature of these movements, the same by the way goes for the other side of the spectrum, where some parts of the manosphere give advice to have many sexual partners. They at the same time resent women as hoes, but then they cannot help themselves and validate their own masculinity by sleeping with dozens or even hundreds of them - thus actually giving them value.

There is a saying that you are what you worship. If you worship power, this is how it logically ends.

It's important to remember that this is a particular, peculiar subculture/mental illness being reported on. It gets a whole lot of attention, because many members of the media class are also afflicted with it. But it's not at all representative: we're being presented with a deeply warped carnival mirror style representation of reality. One that's optimized toward creating an emotional reaction and us-vs-them dynamic, which is ideal for engagement.

I'd like to believe this but more and more data points corroborate the fact that people do sincerly believe this stuff.

Her friend group can almost certainly be assumed to be nearly entirely college educated men

Why? Probably it's all neurotic women.

But, my takeaway: you're imagining things. I direct this at both you and the interview subject.

Women radicalizing to the left is a real phenomenon. For example this. It's trivially researchable.

Men are on social media much less than women, and they spend much less time on it when they do.

The average man and woman spends something like 2-4h a day plus on social media.

And a reasonable bet for the modal number of times they had engaged with a misogynistic reel is 0.

Yeah probably, as mentioned, the whole Tate thing is more moral panic and partially driven by immigrants and immigrant-descendant men (for whom this whole thing like acting like Tate is much more de rigeur)

Among those under-30, younger women feel the bleakest: women under 25 are most likely to believe things are “stacked against me, no matter how hard I try”.

One of the biggest issues we seem to be facing socially right now is pessimistic victim complexes, especially among young people but it's popping up everywhere. The obsession with being the underdog narrative has grown to massive proportions, whether it be young people adopting oppression olympics identities or the insane comments I saw just a few day ago comparing being a modern man in Europe as tantamount to slavery. Everybody needs to be a victim now in at least some way.

I do think part of it is exposure to more information and negativity focused algorithms. It's hard to feel all the wins when everything in your feed is just people complaining about the compromises they've had to mistake. It's like what Scott Alexander had talked about before with showing the same film to Israel/Palestine supoorters and them both coming thinking it was biased against them. People see the stuff that agrees with them as the neutral baseline and the stuff they don't agree with as an anomaly so something that might be "70% agree, 30% disagree" gets treated as "70% normal and smart, 30% abnormal and dumb". So even just more fair information looks like biased against you information.

But it's not just algorithms and information, they would not work if people did not bite. It's because they want to be angry. Someone naive might think "good news, data centers don't use much water!" or "good news, vaccines don't cause autism and there isn't an autism epidemic, it's just diagnostic drift" or "good news, cops don't really kill that many minorities" or "good news, schools are not giving litter boxes and trans surgeries to cat identified kids" would be received with a smile, but instead it's pushed away with anger. Weirdly enough, "the world is better than you thought" is seen as a bad thing to learn! They want to be a victim of a bad society.

People see the stuff that agrees with them as the neutral baseline and the stuff they don't agree with as an anomaly so something that might be "70% agree, 30% disagree" gets treated as "70% normal and smart, 30% abnormal and dumb". So even just more fair information looks like biased against you information.

You nailed one of my least favourite trends in the Israel/Palestine discourse. I've personally flirted with the Zionist conspiracy bandwagon myself but even in my Joo-poasting arc, I could not read any article from "Jewish" mainstream media and come off thinking the IDF are the good guys. The examples they usually cite of this supposed pro-Israeli bias are occasional word choice hedges (“clashes,” “alleged strikes,” contextualising rocket fire as “response to…”) or instructing reporters to avoid terms like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”. But to me, that feels less like propaganda and more like the cautious house style of an establishment outlet that doesn't swallow the full activist catechism. The tone is still predominantly grim Palestinian suffering, orphaned children, power imbalance and skepticism of Israeli explanations for strikes. So is the real charge that these papers are not maximally pro-Palestine and anti-Israel enough? On the other side of the spectrum, pro-Israelis believe that progressive media is inherently biased against "apartheid" Israel and won't take everything their government says at face value, while purchasing the "Hamas narrative" with far less scrutiny.

I could not read any article from "Jewish" mainstream media and come off thinking the IDF are the good guys. The examples they usually cite of this supposed pro-Israeli bias are occasional word choice hedges

Tbf a good part of the this cause is also just illiteracy. People can read in the sense of "X does Y" but actually understanding anything beyond that can be difficult for many. Consider the reaction to the Economist's obituary for the Ayatollah.. Just a whole lot of idiots who if not explicitly told "The Ayatollah is bad, the Ayatollah is bad" over and over again are unable to comprehend that you're actually criticizing him because they're too stupid to look past the most literal of readings.

So with the "Jewish media" if you don't explicitly say "Israel bad is evil kill millions of children" then you're basically pro Israel to many of the complainers.

Yeah I don't miss leaving X at all. That title comes across as a withering backhanded slap at a tyrant's delusions of divine grandeur, I literally can't read any adulation there. Hot takes and one-note emotionally charged short-form communication have killed people's reading comprehension like tiktok has killed the youth's attention spans. This is why I abandoned my own joo-poasting, took me too long to realise I was insulting my own intelligence.

Tbf a good part of the this cause is also just illiteracy.

The thing is that journalists and others in the media either know that illiteracy of this type is incredibly common among the audience of their articles and even moreso among the audience of their headlines, or they have the intelligence and knowledge required to know. So when there's significant misunderstanding by the audience of stuff like this, it speaks to either malice, malicious ignorance, or incompetence that's advanced enough to be indistinguishable from malice.

One of the biggest issues we seem to be facing socially right now is pessimistic victim complexes, especially among young people but it's popping up everywhere.

People are largely victims of 20th century empires. I have almost nothing in common with most of my countrymen, they control me, and I am simply a victim of it. I could have something in common with a 5% or 10% segment, and we could build a society with an actually consensual social contract together, for us. I think this argument even applies to a lot of normies, and they're picking up on it. Broadly, liberals in the United States really are victimized by Republicans, and conservatives are victimized by Democrats. The cattle are off the plantation; personalized media is waking the masses up to the idea of personalized government. Anything short of personalized government is constant extraction and domination for the sake of the Other. That's a fact.

People are largely victims of 20th century empires. I have almost nothing in common with most of my countrymen, they control me, and I am simply a victim of it. I could have something in common with a 5% or 10% segment, and we could build a society with an actually consensual social contract together, for us.

So you know how even two loving people in a relationship still have to compromise over things sometimes despite only being two people who are self selected for similar tastes?

That's going to happen with your fantasy society too, you're going to have disagreements with others and you're going to have compromise with them on things. You're still going to feel like you "lose" on most topics because you're going to be one voice out of, let's say roughly 36 million people if we go off your 10%. Sure it won't be to the same degree, but if you have the mindset of viewing compromising on stuff as a loss then you're not going to be winning anytime soon.

And you'll be in many real ways weaker for it. You'll have a poorer economy less able to achieve any particular goals you want. You'll have a much weaker military. You'll be easy pickings by the ~330 million people who are still part of the greater compromise that is American society. The reason why couples live together is because they find the benefits to be worth compromising on curtain colors or furniture arrangements or noise levels or cleanliness or whatever else. The reason why societies mostly stick together is the same whether it be within the same country or economic unions like the EU or alliances, it's because the benefits of having more than just yourself are great and worth varying amounts of compromise.

So you know how even two loving people in a relationship still have to compromise over things sometimes despite only being two people who are self selected for similar tastes?

That's going to happen with your fantasy society too

Either-or fallacy. If you marry the wrong person, you are miserable. The best thing they can do is split apart or else one person will be motivated to domineer because their differences are too deep. So, 20th century empires are essentially poorly selected, abusive marriages. That doesn't mean there isn't a better spouse possible.

You're still going to feel like you "lose" on most topics because you're going to be one voice out of, let's say roughly 36 million people if we go off your 10%

No, because they are defined as agreeing with me on the important topics.

And you'll be in many real ways weaker for it. You'll have a poorer economy less able to achieve any particular goals you want. You'll have a much weaker military.

No it wouldn't. Open free trade economy, super intelligent population will mean possibility for elite weapons program and great economy. The whole point is merely to throw off the yoke of proletariat moral laws. Essentially it would be a libertarian polis for high IQ people. Dumb people can come and work, which they will want to do because there will be lots of money, but they will get no say in the politics because they won't ever earn citizenship. When you give them a say, they subjugate better people , which is what is happening in the 20th century empires.

The reason why societies mostly stick together is the same whether it be within the same country or economic unions like the EU or alliances, it's because the benefits of having more than just yourself are great and worth varying amounts of compromise.

No it's mostly race, language, and domination.

You'll be easy pickings by the ~330 million people who are still part of the greater compromise that is American society.

There are many ways around this. The United States could break down and split up. The polity could be far away from the United States. The polity could have a charter with the United States. The polity could have a deal with a serious competitor like China. If the polity were hyper-militaristic, it could rival the size of the United States military with 10% of the base population. Have you heard of Israel by the way? It's like Israel.

Bruh I had to quit Facebook over this. Not posting culture war content. No, the things that drove others most berserk was arguing things were, actually, good and getting better and not bad

She knows Europe has problems, but they're not constantly blasted across media. Indeed, the problems her friends in Europe worry about are mostly problems in the US.

Yeah media is definitely a big part of it, American media dominates the world. We're the fun little soap opera Housewives of the US for them to all laugh about. You can find maga hats and confederate flags and (BLM protests and whatever else all across the world. Not often but more than you'd think, and it's because our whole country is blasted on loudspeakers and things spread everywhere.

I'm worried if we actually did move to Europe I would still continue hearing about America and being troubled by it. But also be troubled by problems in Europe I would also start Noticing.

If you are following the right-wing noise machine in America, you are learning about twice as many problems in Europe as could be Noticed by being there. We have problems, but the American right has an incentive to exaggerate them. It is exactly analogous to Guardian readers in the UK learning about problems in the US that they would struggle to Notice if they spend time there.

Arguments are soldiers. More specifically, in this case, the mistake is assuming that, say, "datacenters use too much water/we should waste less water" is the reflection of a terminal value. "Datacenters bad" is much closer to terminal, whatever it is; the role of the water narrative is more akin to "finally I have found a good story to convince the sheeple to join the fight against datacenters".

If you take it away, this does not, in their eyes, make datacenters any better, but just makes it harder for them to get agreement and sympathy. So it is with everything else; telling any doomer that their legible indicators of doom are a lie is just telling them to shut up and endure their feeling that everything is rotten alone. (Crime statistics tend to do similar things for right-wingers.)

"good news, vaccines don't cause autism and there isn't an autism epidemic, it's just diagnostic drift"

Uh this just opens up a cascade of other issues. Like it's good that the 'classical autism' numbers are remaining consistent but significant diagnostic drift around mental illness is going to have other major issues especially in a robust welfare state.

That there is actual issues in the world to discuss doesn't make the main complaint people keep saying over and over again any less nonsense and anger motivated. Someone like RFK has all the resources he could possibly need to understand that the "autism epidemic" isn't actually meaningfully a thing, and yet instead of focusing his efforts on what you said, issues related to diagnostic drift, he wastes all the effort and energy instead. Because admitting that the autism epidemic isn't real topples the other parts of the jenga tower he's built his beliefs on (like if autism epidemic isn't real, then vaccines or preservatives or whatever else couldn't be causing it) so he has to clutch onto nonsense and waste time and money that could be actually doing something useful.

And even when things aren't directly connected, it's not like people go "X isn't true? That's good to hear, but I'm still worried about Y". Like if you think data centers are using too much water and too much electricity and are only good for slop then you can accept the good news on water but still be worried about the grid and slop content. Instead, most people just get pissed that you're pointing out X isn't true.

You're completely missing the point with this. Yes, autism as defined by the previous school of thought is maintaining relatively consistent numbers generationally. However, scope creep of the diagnosis combined with the weaponization of 'I have a disability give me free shit' from people tapped into the system inevitably gets downright rapacious when people who were considered able to have full healthy lives (albeit a bit weird) a generation ago now have a label which entitles them to access whatever societal privileges. I agree that the vaccination = autism correlation/argument is spurious and created by a series of underlying mostly-uncorrelated correlations. RFK's identifying something salient in that the modern system of privilege creates massive overdiagnosis of psychological conditions, even if he doesn't understand or wish to communicate that fact since he'd likely get sledgehammered from anothe direction.

The Data center point is a complete non-sequitur in this case and isn't really reasoned from any place other than 'I don't like data centers and I broadly like the environment, this is a good cudgel'. The same goes for discussing the Trans violence rate not being that high when you take out a vanishingly small chunk of sexworkers, yet yaddayadda Trans genocide.

You're completely missing the point with this.

No I understand the point, I disagree with you that it matters much. "Sure he's wrong but at least he's vaguely directionally correct in this particular interpretation" is just "he's wrong" to me. He's using all the government rhetoric and resources to target the wrong things when he has every opportunity and resource to have a better and more nuanced and more correct view.

He's actually worse than a similar person who believes the "autism epidemic" is real and doesn't use it to blame vaccines cause at least that similar person isn't going to be behind the deaths and sickness of tons of kids.

The Data center point is a complete non-sequitur in this case and isn't really reasoned from any place other than 'I don't like data centers and I broadly like the environment, this is a good cudgel'.

It's exactly the same. Something that people if they bothered at all could easily see the real facts (autism epidemic isn't real, data centers don't use much water, whatever) but not only refuse to update themselves on it and focus on actual issues, but get angry at the very idea of it.

The same goes for discussing the Trans violence rate not being that high when you take out a vanishingly small chunk of sexworkers, yet yaddayadda Trans genocide.

The trans issue makes everyone insane and stupid. There is no trans genocide epidemic and there is no trans mass shooting epidemics, violence is incredibly rare in all directions from most groups in the modern world. The only things that really kill you when you're young is drug overdoses, car accidents and by your own hand. If you don't get into trouble like gangs or hanging around the very few kill streets you're exceedingly unlikely to be murdered no matter who or what you are. Humans have always been like this to some degree, but ever since telecommunications allowed stories to spread from far away we can get flooded with a deluge of horrific but very rare examples that makes violence and crime seem far more common than it actually is.

I don't personally care that much about the victim complex per se. That's eternal. What I care about is real politics being done according to those grievances and the downstream societal damage. And that's hard to deny. Though that's kind of been the story of the entire 21st century so far I suppose.

The genetic legacy which will be squandered by these women not reproducing is a tragedy of historical proportions, but I think we're less than a generation away from the corrective counterswing.

Main problem being institutional capture and the unbelievable amount of human damage which will be committed in the name of pride, i.e. futile resistance.

The genetic legacy which will be squandered by these women not reproducing is a tragedy of historical proportions, but I think we're less than a generation away from the corrective counterswing.

I don't think Islam is going to help. Conservative women reproducing doesn't help either -- a girl of conservative (but not fundamentalist Islam) parents put into the school system and exposed to the media becomes a leftist.

Are you referring to futile right-wing resistance and an impending severe economic collapse please?

I'm referring to institutions continuing to try to indoctrinate the population with failed leftist ideology even as the waters close over their heads.

The genetic legacy which will be squandered by these women not reproducing is a tragedy of historical proportions,

Will it really? I'm inclined to think that anyone so susceptible to the media environment as to be taken in by demoralization tactics would not improve the gene pool by breeding. And besides-- rates of intermarriage are high enough that mixed race children will serve as reservoirs for whatever positive alleles you believe white people possess. If those alleles are truly beneficial they will persist at higher-than-chance rates and on the order of a few hundred years (less with embryo selection) will reach their optimal distribution again.

Just look at how the mutation for blue eyes got distributed, for example.

I'm inclined to think that anyone so susceptible to the media environment as to be taken in by demoralization tactics would not improve the gene pool by breeding.

Some predators which have evolved to eat humans, e.g. bacterial infections, must be fought off using genetic technology like the body's immune system. Other predators evolved to eat humans, e.g. Satan, must be fought off using memetic technology like Christianity.

Society decided that having a memetic immune system was low-status and threw the whole thing away. Now, pregnant men, sterile women, hopeless children.

Anyway, holding genes faulty for failing to respond to novel memetic predators seems unwarranted to me, especially when those genes evolved in an environment where such memetic immunity was a given.

pregnant men

Men still can't get pregnant. Women pretending to be men getting pregnant is vanishingly rare - cross-sex hormones suppress fertility, and the kind of woman who pretends to be a man probably doesn't want to anyway.

Holding genes faulty for failing to respond to emergent situations is just what natural selection does. Trying to preserve maladaptive genes is fundamentally a futile endeavor.

As for memetic defense nets... How did you think these things get built? Whether childless people are suffering from bad genes or bad memes, the prescription remains, "leave them alone so they can't propagate those things."

And other predators still, like Christianity must be fought off with memetic technology like rationalism, critical thinking, and atheism. However it was a clever predator and it to adapted to the anti-bodies and now gave us a virulent strain of Atheist-Christianity aka Woke-ism.

If those alleles are truly beneficial they will persist at higher-than-chance rates and on the order of a few hundred years (less with embryo selection) will reach their optimal distribution again.

Evolution doesn't care if alleles are 'beneficial' for any of the purposes that we care about (peace, prosperity, happiness etc), just that they increase reproductive fitness. If low-IQ psychopaths have higher reproductive fitness than others, then alleles for low-IQ psychopathy will increase.

Low-IQ psychopathy is a particular reproductive niche, and like with all niches attempts to overexploit it lead to localized population collapse and repopulation of other niches.

Right now, the "neurotic upper middle class striver" niche is overexploited, and that's why we're seeing a low tfr in that region. After collapse, there will be a natural rebound.

Speculating about ecological niches is interesting when discussing species other than the one I belong to. But we're talking about human society here. If the average global IQ drops from 90 to 75, and every developed country enters a permanent recession, it's pretty hard to care about 'beneficial alleles' or whatever. I care about the world that me and my children will live in, do you?

I'm talking about niches specifically because I care. Consider how welfare props up unsustainable modes of living that cannibalize the very productive systems that mantain them, demanding ever more welfare until the whole system becomes dysfunctional and collapses. Well, the same is true for anything else you want to point at. Trying to mantain the population of a specific genetic niche above their carrying capacity requires ever-more investment, as the very fact of their overpopulation reproductively advantages opposing niches. You can't feed pigeons without increasing the alleycat population. So you get a system where there's ever-increasing downwards pressure on whatever your favorite group is (which very tangibly makes people miserable), PLUS resources that could have been spent productively are getting wasted.

rates of intermarriage are high enough that mixed race children will serve as reservoirs for whatever positive alleles you believe white people possess

Does intermarriage happen to any significant degree in the UK?

Yes, apart from South Asian muslims. In particular, black-white intermarriage is noticeably more common here than it is in the US.

The overall rate of interracial marriages is just under 10% in both countries, but you have a lot more opportunities in the US because you are more diverse to start off with (the UK is still 83% monoracial white as of the 2021 Census), so compared to baseline demographics Brits are more likely to marry interracially than Americans.

It only takes a large number of mixed race children in absolute terms, rather than proportional terms, to serve as a reservoir for any gene you think is possessed by 50%+1 of whites. Even just ten children will have five copies on average, and when mixed features are valued as a beauty standard (which they are by many black communities, red "red bone") mixed race children are already more likely to reproduce and reproduce with each other. So the next generation containing people with two copies of the allele becomes likely even in the case where the gene is recessive and doesn't confer any benefits to the children itself.

Why think in terms of single alleles instead of traits? Complex traits get lost immediately upon mixing with populations that don't have them fixed. The odds of recombination get lower and lower the more complex they are.

Any hypothetical complex trait would be doomed anyway due to the fact that modern technology massively changed the reproductive calculus no matter what political schema is implemented. And to be honest I'm not really concerned about alleles either, but at least those have a shot at persistence that could be affected by political machinations.

Will it really? I'm inclined to think that anyone so susceptible to the media environment as to be taken in by demoralization tactics would not improve the gene pool by breeding.

I went to a pretty elite high school/university combination and I see a lot of girls in my cohort who I'd say are high ranking for intelligence, conscientiousness and a bunch of other positive traits who'd post this kinda content fairly frequently. They might not be on the right social wavelength right now to be maximally productive, but if you're nerdsniping a bunch of high IQ performers with the powers of Girlbossing I'm pretty skeptical it's longterm beneficial to the gene pool.

Are they really that intelligent and conscientious if they're not intelligent and conscientious enough to have children? I'm inclined to suspect that the childless upper classes really aren't as genetically ascantaged as they seem-- rather, they have simply allocated time and resources to training how they present themselves in professional/academic contexts instead of working on the kinds of actually useful intelligence that makes childrearing easier.

I'm indicting myself with that assessment, since I don't currently have children, but that's a bullet I'm willing to bite.

@JeSuisCharlie this is actually my position, rather than a purely darwinistic worldview.

What I think @GBRK is saying is that evolution doesn't care about what you might think is "longterm beneficial to the gene pool".

If the liberal striver class does not want to reproduce then the liberal striver class deserves to go extinct. That's just Darwinism in action.

Beneficial alleles might not coincide with the values or goals someone has for Homo sapiens. You could very well see e.g. rule following and neuroticism as good (either in themselves or in what function they perform in society), but they make carriers susceptible enough to behavioral defects to pull them out of the gene pool.

So then the solution is to create a society where people posessing particular positive trains (NOT genes, traits) are reproductively advantaged. The genes that code for those traits will then bounce back from any temporary deficit regardless.

So have the government arrange marriages for the conscientious.

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