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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25329 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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What do you think of male-female dating dynamics relative to the culture war? I have a lot of thoughts on this but ultimately think the people worth pursuing are not crossing people off their list because they don’t believe in X or Y.

But it might be beyond your control. As an American, I remember swiping on tinder in London and seeing ‘Do not swipe if you are Republican’ but they replaced the word with something called the Tories. Clearly some people will only date people that share the same ideology. Which is fair if you want someone to nod along to whatever you say, I guess.

It gets tricky when you outright pretend to believe things you don’t. It’s not courageous or respectable. Not apologizing for what you believe is paramount to gaining the respect of your partner. Obviously, when I say this, I’m really talking about relatively conservative men dating liberal women. And honestly, except for far left people like Hasan piker that glorify violent revolution in such a way that they do a 360 and put off conservative ethos, I do think men women find attractive aren’t the male feminist, Bernie bro type. It’s almost like a yin and yang thing where you want some tension with your ideals.

Unlike religion, I really don’t see a need to agree with my SO on much of anything (odd to me that JD Vance and Usha married despite this). It’s sad to think that, on the spectrum of ‘not scaring the hoes’ political ideology, you could have a good thing with someone, say the wrong thing, and lose a relationship because of it.

Only thinking this because I’m coming to terms that I don’t necc need to date a based woman who appreciates old Sam Hyde stuff and edgy right wing leaning online happenings. I’d rather not select for political belief, find someone that will lightly argue with me, and has no interest in that stuff. Likewise, I’ll voice my opinion to her but not make fun of her for being on bluesky or whatever

I think it’s widespread on the left and even in me, I’m a dude but I’d have a really hard time dating a girl who’s values are so different than mine.

Even if I just wanted to sleep with her, being too conservative is sort of a turn off. She’d have to be really hot to make up for it and then I’d be disappointed in myself later, haha. Which is weird because I can’t say the same thing for other persuasions. Like if a girl was a hardcore socialist, that’s not a turn off, I could totally sleep with her, but relationship-wise It’d probably end up becoming too annoying to be worth the trouble.

I actually think if you surveyed most of my male friends on this they’d probably say similar things.

But I don’t think this works the same for conservatives for some reason? Maybe it’s just that women are more liberal usually so it’s expected and it’s kind of a normal trope that a man is more conservative than a woman and those relationships can work out.

Conservative women mostly aspire towards marriage, and are picky about religious groups, which clump politically as well. Like if a Catholic girl is a bit socialist, and her prospective partner is a bit into Republican coded Fait and Family stuff, but they both think they should listen to the Pope and bishops on serious matters, then that's fine.

Like if a girl was a hardcore socialist, that’s not a turn off, I could totally sleep with her, but relationship-wise It’d probably end up becoming too annoying

The problem comes more from the downstream effects.

If a girl is a hardcore gynosupremacist/progressive, what happens when the rubber meets the road? Is she going to treat other men that happen to be in my life poorly, or denigrate/be actively harmful to anything she identifies as "man things"? And perhaps more importantly, what about any sons? (Is she going to divorce-rape me if I put up resistance to him having his balls cut off because she wanted a daughter instead?)

I get that this is a trope for a reason, but I'm not interested in sharing my life, or my bed, with someone who will just straight up profess I'm fundamentally evil and better off enslaved or dead. So if I can't find someone who is, symmetrically, above that, then I'm objectively better off with the AIs.

No woman is going to turn up her nose at a man for having different political opinions from her, provided he ticks enough of her other boxes. If a woman says "I matched with this guy on Tinder, but when I found out he was MAGA I ghosted him" – I mean, yes, that's the sequence in which those events transpired. But you didn't ghost him because he was MAGA: you ghosted him because you didn't find him attractive enough (not just physically, but also in terms of charm, sense of humour, financial viability etc.). Claiming that she rejected him for his political opinions is just social desirability bias: she would have been more than willing to overlook the exact same opinions if expressed by a more attractive man.

It may sound like I'm calling women shallow, but I'm really not. Men generally don't pretend to put a big premium on political compatibility with their romantic partner: the social desirability bias in men's case comes from attempting to downplay how important youth and physical attractiveness are to them. Plenty of men will claim not to care about looks and to just want to find a nice, normal, down-to-earth girl they can hang out with, but in practice will put up with a great deal of crazy behaviour from their romantic partner, provided she's young and hot enough.

I think you’re right in that a lot of women who say that could get past it (and maybe even learn that their worldview has some holes). But filters frequently prevent getting to the “look past it” stage.

Exactly. Lot of people can apply filters on an app that wouldn't apply if they met the person by happenstance. If a woman just toggles conservatives off on her Hinge account then that's that

The key phrase is “put up with”, there’s still a limit on what people will tolerate. Many men might tolerate occasional emotional outbursts from an attractive enough woman, but not threatening him with a knife or destroying all his possessions. Likewise, a liberal woman might stick with a hot guy with a few conservative opinions on immigration and welfare, but not a full-on white nationalist who believes women are second class citizens and that abortion should be illegal.

I matched with this guy on Tinder, but when I found out he was MAGA I ghosted him

For many leftists and liberals MAGA is sufficiently repellent that yes, it can justifiably be the sole reason to reject someone. American politics have become enormously polarised and MAGA isn’t the same as milquetoast conservative viewpoints.

MAGA isn’t the same as milquetoast conservative viewpoints

Yes it is. MAGA is mainstream conservatism today.

MAGA is closer to "90's Democrat" than modern Dems are.

What they really hate is their parents.

Many men might tolerate occasional emotional outbursts from an attractive enough woman, but not threatening him with a knife or destroying all his possessions

I can fix her.

The key phrase is “put up with”, there’s still a limit on what people will tolerate.

It depends. If she respects you enough, and your politics aren't retarded, then it doesn't actually cost you anything.

There's a difference between "I'll put up with his stupid beliefs because he's hot" and "I'm willing to listen to this guy because I take him more seriously than I take myself... and he's kinda got a point".

but not a full-on white nationalist who believes women are second class citizens and that abortion should be illegal.

Agreed, I should have said "No woman is going to turn up her nose at a man for having conservative (as distinct from far-right etc.) political opinions, provided he ticks enough of her other boxes."

Hypothetically, I think one might be surprised by the number of women who would be willing to overlook a man who was a literal neo-Nazi provided he was also smart, handsome and made decent money. But this is a hard thing to demonstrate, because most neo-Nazis (if /r/beholdthemasterrace is anything to go by) are none of those things. After getting out of prison, Varg Vikernes (hardly handsome and probably not especially wealthy) managed to find himself a wife who bore him eight (!) children – maybe she already shared his political opinions, but it's possible she didn't.

Reddit is, by definition, skewed towards fat, dumb, and awkward people.

Are you familiar with the subreddit I was referring to?

Yes, it’s probably not going to be prominently featuring eg Harrison Butker.

Varg Vikerness is also something a rock star in a particularly culty subgenre of metal who murdered a rival musician and spent his time in Norwegian prison cultivating his online neonazi fan club. Something tells me his wife (whom he married and presumably met while in prison) isn't some random woman from tinder he hit it off with who decided to overlook his politics because he just had so much rizz.

I would genuinely love to know how they met, and if she was a fan of his music beforehand.

They met when she wanted to use something he'd done for a class project, I believe.

Considering they married in 2007 while he had been incarcerated for 13 years, and the fact that she's French (so probably wasn't hanging out in the Bergen black metal scene in the early 90s), I'm assuming she was a crazy admirer/pen pal who met him online.

I would suspect many would be more willing to date the literal tattooed neo-Nazi than the milquetoast conservative. The dark triad goes a long way.

Plus the whole incarcerated reasonably-attractive serial killer thing would probably create a power law where 'good candidates' are getting fanmail from a global array of psychophiliacs

No woman is going to turn up her nose at a man for having different political opinions from her, provided he ticks enough of her other boxes.

This seem almost unfalsifiable. I might as well say

No company will ever fire someone for being direct and outspoken, provided he is good enough at his job.

Partners and employees are package deals, and rational actors such as woman or companies often evaluate them using scores. Unfavorable traits like excessive outspokenness or an incompatible political foundation can certainly lower your score to the point where they decide that they can do better than you.

And political opinions covers a lot of territory from 'I voted for Trump' to 'I support the establishment of a Caliphate' or 'I am notorious for calling on twitter for the gassing of $outgroup'. If you are a famous and rich Hollywood actor, the median single woman is probably not going to file for divorce if she learns that you voted for Trump. If you are some rockstar programmer, a company might well decide that they will put up with your obnoxious behavior to a degree they would never tolerate from other employees. I am sure that a disfigured billionaire would be able to find a perfect wife who is willing to overlook his unfortunate appearance and see his lovable character instead, but that does not mean that looks don't matter.

This seem almost unfalsifiable. I might as well say

No company will ever fire someone for being direct and outspoken, provided he is good enough at his job.

That just seems straightforwardly true to me. If you add enough value to a company, you can get away with being direct and outspoken (and a great deal worse). That's just a true factual statement.

By the same token, you'll sometimes see girls with lines in their Tinder bio like "if you're a Tory, swipe left" or whatever. But in terms of revealed preferences, I think the number of women who would refuse to date a man whom they otherwise found highly attractive solely because he held conservative opinions is vanishingly small.

I think this depends on the woman's social circle and what kind of behavior "conservative opinions" entail. If you have enough queer friends then you just can't be in a long-lasting relationship with someone with anti-LGBT views, for example - something's got to give.

True – and I suspect the population of heterosexual women who would be more than willing to cast aside their assorted gay best friends for the sake of a committed relationship with a smart man with a lucrative profession would be significantly higher than you might think, and certainly higher than one would naïvely expect based on how many women put "swipe left if you're a Tory" or similar in their tinder bios.

Granted, and I think many more still might just make a doomed attempt to make everyone get along, one big family Thanksgiving dinner that never ends. My point is just that a liberal woman having a rule against dating conservative men isn't necessarily purely about personal preferences/purity standards; it can be a practical matter on a level with "I have three cats, swipe left if you're allergic".

Oh sure, I don't doubt that's true in some cases. But in my personal experience, back when I was active on Tinder, the girls I saw with "swipe left if you're a Tory" in their bios weren't limited to the alt girls with dyed fringes and piercings (who one might reasonably expect to have a significant number of gay or lesbian friends in their social circle), but also included plenty of girls who looked like, for lack of a better term, Stacies, and who I would strongly suspect had no close gay or lesbian friends. Frankly, some of them looked like the kind of straight girls who would be loath to invite a lesbian friend on a girls' trip, out of fear that the lesbian would try to get in their pants.

I'm sure it helps that that the venn diagram circles for smart men with a lucrative profession looking for a committed relationship and the one for men with such strong anti-gay opinion that they'd force or otherwise cause their girlfriend to break off their friendship with her gay friends likely have so little overlap they might as well be completely separate circles.

I'm not really sure if that's true. There are probably lots of devout Christian men in red states who are making significantly more than the national median and who wouldn't tolerate their girlfriends/wives being friends with gay men.

This some ignorance right here. Just straight up ignorant bigotry.

My folks are super conservative, super religious. They were missionaries for years, my dad has been a lay preacher for longer than I've been alive, and was at Jan 6. Mom's best friend is gay, has been since before she met dad. He stayed in our home for a year or so back in the day getting back on his feet.

My dad thinks old guy is going to hell, so does mom for that matter. Doesn't make him not her best friend. You're projecting your own hatred onto people you don't know.

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That is absolutely not the norm for wealthy red tribers- neither the 'church crowd' nor the 'country music crowd' expects a general shunning of the gays, although there are plenty who do not want the gays around their kids or wouldn't personally befriend one.

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Unfalsifiable seems a bit strong, here: we just don't have the data collected to falsify the hypothesis. But that data isn't in principle uncollectible.

Though, it's an interesting question from a philosophy of science point of view: if data that no one will collect anytime soon is necessary to falsify a hypothesis, is that hypothesis unscientific?

To falsify it, I would have to find a single woman (a counterexample) who would never date a man with a given political opinion.

This is either trivial or impossible. To the degree that it is trivial, I pick Greta Thunberg as the woman and "build more coal plants" as the political opinion.

I suppose that @FtttG might say that this is merely because the candidates fail to "tick enough of her other boxes", and if god wanted, she could certainly create a man who is so perfect a partner for Ms Thunberg in every possible way from gender identity to kinks to lifestyle and everything that she would date him despite his fossil fuel opinions. And that would be impossible to falsify.

Thunberg is probably asexual, or at least calls herself that, but if she does end up settling down with someone I'll be sure to ping you. If she does it'll most likely be someone just as autistic as she is.

As @omw_68 notes below me, Thunberg's recent pivot to anti-Zionist activism demonstrates that she isn't really the diehard environmentalist she presented herself as for her first few years in the public eye. I was tempted to say she's really an omnicause activist, and @omw_68 chalks it up to her being a grifter, but I don't think that's quite right. I just think she's an intensely impressionable person, who seamlessly adopts the opinions of anyone in her vicinity she perceives as high-status. As a child, her parents told her that climate change was The Thing, and she took that to heart; having been taken in by a crowd of leftists, she's been persuaded that anti-Zionism is The Thing. What this means in practice is that Thunberg's opinions are entirely contingent on those of whoever happens to be in her immediate vicinity. I don't find it remotely implausible that, in the next few years, she might meet and fall for a fellow Swedish autist who is fervently opposed to Syrian migration, and seamlessly adopt his opinions without any subjective feeling of discontinuity or hypocrisy. I can't imagine she felt any sense of discontinuity when she pivoted from environmentalism to anti-Zionism (because it's. All. Part. Of. The. Same. Struggle, as omnicausers would have us believe).

The other possibility is that she grows up and belatedly develops an internal ethos of her own, her worldview no longer beholden to the vicissitudes of fate and happenstance. I wouldn't bet on it: I think she has at least one more pivot left in her.

@omw_68 That leads into the larger question of why the greater left seems to have suddenly put a damper on environmentalism and climate change activism. This seems like more than just a pivot to a new Current Thing. Environmentalism and climate change hysteria has been the background music of the left for the last 30 years, and suddenly there seems to be a coordinated move to turn down the volume. I’m not sure why.

That leads into the larger question of why the greater left seems to have suddenly put a damper on environmentalism and climate change activism. This seems like more than just a pivot to a new Current Thing. Environmentalism and climate change hysteria has been the background music of the left for the last 30 years, and suddenly there seems to be a coordinated move to turn down the volume. I’m not sure why.

I don't know either, but my best guess is that there's no real reason, it's a matter of intellectual fashion.

From the perspective of the individual Leftist, there's value in running with the crowd. If everyone in your circles seems to care about global warming, the safe thing to do is to care about global warming yourself (or at least pretend to). Of course, there is also value in being (or tying to be) a trend setter. If you start pushing a new issue, it might convince people that you are a high status trend setter type.

In my opinion, this is very very similar to the way people think about fashion when it comes to clothing.

Of course, with clothing, some years ruffle skirts are in; some years bell bottom jeans are in; etc. etc. Often there's no clear reason for it, it's just an emergent property of a system where there's value in copying others but also value in being a trend-setter.

(As a side note, it's interesting that women seem to me more into keeping up with fashion than men both in terms of clothing and ideology. I would guess this is not a coincidence.)

So my best guess is that there's no real reason for the pivot you mention (to the extent it's real), it's just something that kind of happened.

I pick Greta Thunberg as the woman and "build more coal plants" as the political opinion.

Assuming Greta Thunberg has normal female sexuality, I don't think she's the best example. After her pivot from environmentalism to the Arab/Israeli conflict, it became reasonably clear that she's a shameless grifter and that her views are a matter of convenience, even if she herself believes herself to be sincere. I mean, if she genuinely believes that the world is facing an existential climate crisis, why waste time and energy on one of many violent conflicts and alienate potential allies?

So yeah, I could easily see her f*cking or even marrying some coal baron who's tall dark and handsome. Probably she would justify it by saying it gives her the opportunity to gather information and learn about the industry from the inside. Which is frankly a more plausible rationalization than the one she offered for her pivot to the Middle East.

I do agree that there are probably some women out there who would never date a MAGA type under any circumstances whatsoever. But I think for the most part, the vast majority of women would date, have sex with, and marry a man of differing political views provided that the woman believed she would not be publicly shamed or humiliated over her decision. That's just the way women are wired; it's just very very unusual to meet a genuinely principled woman.

Yuh. A clean cut clean shaven at church most sundays but not in a weird way 5 on 5 off at the firestation man is gonna do well regardless of his politics; the political orientation of it all is just another weight on the balance.

Dating apps are probably dysgenic. You don’t want to select for the men who are the best at picking their own photo, manipulating women over text, fibbing about their life and keeping up-to-date on passing in-vogue memes in female circles. The kind of guy who equipped black nail paint back when it was a trend and now equips a mustache and matcha — this genre of men would be bullied out of having any status in a male ecosystem but probably has the best odds of success on a female-choice dating app. Meanwhile the exact kind of guy you want in civilization, someone who is modest to a fault and doesn’t pay attention to the weekly red flag newsletter and likes the simple things in life, he is probably uncompetitive on the apps, although he would have the most status in a male ecosystem. I remember years ago having a friend who was quite handsome, friendly, charismatic, and he showed me his photo and bio on a dating app and it was just awful. He just lacked that typically-female aesthetic instinct and was too male-brained to know what women were attracted to. But you don’t want to select for female-brained men! We already have a whole gender for that.

I don’t think that’s a problem caused by dating apps. That gentleman would have been equally autistic and unappealing when he was an 18th century farmer. The difference is that back then, he would have had a lot more female relatives around to help him moderate that and present a courtable image.

Also marriage was far more of a commercial concern than a feelings-driven thing and in the days before birth control even brief entanglements tended to be able to scale to be far more sticky

Makes sense to me.

Suppose that I believe that Republicans (or Democrats, pick your poison) are all either not paying attention (ie, Stupid) or actually are all in on the party platform (ie, Evil). Why would I ever want to date someone I think is a lesser human than me?

Putting "No X" in the profile just saves time and effort for everyone involved.

Semi related: It's probably an artifact of the weirdly mixed politics of the area that I live, but even the apolitical women I know have started putting various flavors of "I think Trump is stupid and his followers are cultist idiots, if this offends you then fuck off" instead of "No republicans", simply because that filters out a good chunk of men that are a problem to date.

It really is an open field for women willing to tolerate conservatives in high income areas, they get to pick out of a huge lineup.

someone I think is a lesser human than me

That is a curious way to phrase it, and fails the ideological Turing test hard.

Most people have outpgroups whose members they like less than members of their ingroup. For example, they might consider the classes below them to be the unwashed masses and the classes above them to be entitled snobs who do not deserve their wealth and status. Even the most enlightened utilitarian will like some people more than others.

But to explicitly impose a total ordering of human worth is definitely Nazi-coded, and almost nobody does it these days. Even our resident immigration skeptics would rather speak of "low human capital people" than of "lesser races".

Now, you can certainly make the argument that SJ does impose a total ordering, but its proponents would say that this is merely conditional on the history of oppression, and that in the SJ utopia white cisgender MAGA-voting men would not be sent to the salt mines, but be convinced of the wrongness of their beliefs and then life in harmony with everyone else or something.

But to go from "oh, you don't like $outgroup" to "you think $outgroup are lesser humans, just like the Nazis!" seems a poor argument.

I am using hyperbole for comedic effect, but to explain myself:

I believe that someone's qualities, their value, even their actions, should be decoupled from their moral weight; while simultaneously reckoning with the fact that some people are just lesser than.

Any moral, aesthetic, or effective judgment of anyone or anything is de facto placing them on a ranking. I don't just think I have different opinions than my political opponents, I am fundamentally BETTER than them as a human; and there are people that are fundamentally BETTER than me, who are purer of spirit and bigger of muscle and brain; even though we all deserve the same amount of moral consideration.

I think one of the places that some heinous behaviors spring from is the false consciousness required to believe that everyone deserves equal treatment because we're all the same in the end. No! The deontological value comes first and stands alone, the other things are all head measuring and have no effect on the first thing!

It's not going to happen of course and I only use my specific autistic terminology on these websites for a reason, but it is a coherent view IMO.

Why should I pay attention to something that I have literally zero power over, as opposed to focusing on building a rich, fulfilling personal life? Does that make me stupid?

I don't understand the connection here.

Edit: Oh, I get it! Response: You are on this forum, you are a human, you were born with the right to vote or at least the right to die on the barricade. Choosing not to think about it is an act of moral cowardice, and no amount of grill talk will convince me otherwise.

If you think that "not paying attention" means "stupid", you have a very blinkered view of human nature - as is common among people who are very into online politics, though, which is now a large and growing percentage of the population.

I disagree.

Politics is the river we all swim in, deciding to close your eyes and ears but still swim in the same rivier is either cowardice or stupidity.

If you choose to leave, or become a Mennonite or something, that is entirely different and much more worthy of respect.

Some people are just normal and healthy, you know. (And some are too smart to care about politics. The smartest woman I've ever met doesn't give a shit about politics except insofar as it affects her family personally, anything else would be a distraction from math).

To that I say: Cope.

Unless you live in the woods and never engage in the exchange of goods and services outside your direct community, you are engaged in politicas. Choosing to look away doesn't mean anything other than you are giving up your power over your own life.

The woman in question can't be that smart if the amount of brain power needed to calculate her incentives against her axioms against the expected outcomes takes any energy at all; and if it makes her tummy hurt to think about it so she doesn't she's back to being a moral coward.

Girls are suppose to be empathatic in their role so become a liberal and having suicidal empathy fits with ideal female personality traits. I don’t think many men would not date a girl because she’s a liberal. Though they may question whether people with those traits should get to vote.

If I was a girl and hear someone say Suicidal Empathy I would put that right up there with SMV. Even conservative women would cringe at that sort of line, because of the implications. You gotta keep that shit on the forums.

This is a forum.

The funny thing with giving women the right to vote is now we have the evidence (partisan splits) that either women or men should not have the right to vote. One side has to be correct - right? Which means the other side shouldn’t get to vote.

Married women vote like their husbands. Single women vote for the left. So instead, a modest proposal- male heads of household get an extra vote for every dependent, including co-resident children.

What’s interesting though is that the split was long-predicted but took nearly a century to actually develop. Which would seem to moly there are other factors that have recently separated men’s and women’s joint interests.

That other factor would be the decline of marriage, which was predicted by anti-suffragettes. Social conservatives are always Cassandra, eventually.

Of course, many of the predictions of anti-suffragettes(Women will begin wearing pants!) are, from the perspective of even many on the right, firmly in the territory of 'it happened and it's a good thing'.

Maybe; could be that if you take the average of two biased perspectives you get closer to reflecting the true state of things.

At the moment, Men are the ones who are in their feelings about everything, 'Wah wah wah dating is hard, my wife is legally allowed to leave me if I beat her, I'm lonely, I want cheap treats but also I want my job to be easy and pay well and everyone should respect me'.

Real I want all my groceries in one bag but I don't want the bag to be heavy behavior.

It will eventually either normalize or shift the other way as it always does, but you do get tired of the bitching in the meantime.

Maybe; could be that if you take the average of two biased perspectives you get closer to reflecting the true state of things.

This is correct.

Let's say women in general tend left and men in general tend right. This would give you the situation we see at the moment, where sometimes the left wins and sometimes the right wins, and swing voters matter a great deal in directing which way it goes. This is plausibly superior to "the left always wins" or "the right always wins".

Of course, since we've seen male-only electorates, we have a pretty good idea of what a single-sex electorate would actually do, which is not that so-and-so partisan split always wins. Rather, both major parties will orient around the median voter. In a male-only electorate, the Overton Window of politics is probably further right than it is right now, but government still swings back and forth between the less-right and the more-right parties. Replace 'right' with 'left' and that's likely what you get in an all-female electorate.

It would be the just world fallacy to suggest that the electorate at present has the Overton Window in exactly the right place. It is, however, not obvious that the current state of the electorate is worse than either the right-tilted male electorate or the left-tilted female electorate.

It's worth noting that the incorporation of women voters tilted politics more socially conservative for a good half-century.

One side has to be correct - right?

I'm not sure this follows. Democracy is meant to represent the collective will of the people, not find the correct answer to a binary question.

If 60% of the country votes for the dog party and 40% for the cat party, our conclusion should be that 60% of state pet funding should go to dogs and 40% to cats, not that cat voters should be disenfranchised because they answered 'wrongly'.

In that situation dogs win every vote and can vote against cat interests despite cats having 80% support among cat voters. So cats would probably prefer to live in a country that is filled with cat voters because then they can vote in pro-cat legislation.

There's a particular pathology I sometimes see on this forum (and generally wherever high-decouplers congregate to argue) which is along the lines of "the majority of people disagree with my political views by at least epsilon. Given that this means the world is wrong and evil, should I kill myself or go on a murder spree?". It seems to be based on a questionable deduction from the observation that intransigent camps in politics tend to get an unfairly large share, and high-decoupler aversion to changing one's value function (something about Murder-Gandhi, the orthogonality hypothesis etc).

Yeah, and as someone who likes talking to/is a weirdo I don't get it. A majority of Westerners who live in say Dubai aren't monarchists yet seem to manage just fine. IDK I disagree with a lot of modern politics but also being a modern westerner is fairly easy. IDK why these types can't just be like "the world is fucked, fuck the powers that be" I'll tend to my own family and my own garden.

What about Pathological Altruism?

Still bad!

Portraying any of the biblical virtues as bad or wrong in some way is gonna come off as, if I may, Satanic to any normie westerner.

As in, made up?

I don't think normie westerners think in terms of things being "satanic" or not. Do you mean in the actual IRL church-of-satan sense, or the Satanic Panic sense? Or do you mean bizzarro-verse inverse Christian values?

Either way, all the satanic iconography and tropes are basically fanfiction.

The median person thinks of 'satanists' as occultist weirdos dabbling in animal cruelty- and possibly committing serious crimes with human victims. Not the edgy shit made up by a topless bar manager in the 60s. You're correct that it's probably not a go-to insult, but it is not a word with positive, neutral, or even only mildly negative connotations. Normies have a very positive impression of Christianity and biblical values, even if they don't personally practice it.

As in, something that a Saturday morning cartoon villain would say as a shorthand to indicate to the audience "I am evil as I am opposed to your hegemonic cultural values inculcated by centerius of being more or less christian!"

And totally separate from the colloquial meaning of the word; you've got tot talk to more conservative normies. They are Deep in that shit. A majority of the republican parties' voting population (maybe, data is fuzzy here) are committed believers in the red skin horns on head spaded tail actual DEVIL, it doesn't matter that it's all fanfiction, it's real to them.

Formerly niche high IQ movement that went a little mainstream with normies that crashed and burned

What is the implication?

That you are a piece of shit that will take advantage of her and then dip, because you don't respect empathy as a cardinal virtue.

Tell me you have read Aristotle without telling me you haven’t read Aristotle.

I'm my area, the women demand that you are also a leftist and/or communist. Sometimes every single Hinge prompt in their profile is something political.

In my area they are like this but are also frustrated that the men they match with are all burnouts and losers who are unemployable. The blue coastal elite men they desire are at the coasts.

"Why can't I just find someone with an honest blue collar job that's not MAGA?"

They're so close to putting it together.

(I'm a Dem voting blue coastal elite that retired to this town and am enjoying the comedy)

There are functionally no normal blue collar men who are conventional progressives or democrats in any way. Yes, that includes the unions.

The blue coastal elite men they desire are at the coasts.
Why can't I just find someone with an honest blue collar job that's not MAGA?"

“Coastal elite”

“Honest blue collar”

one of these things is not like the other

My interpretation @dr_analog's comment that they want a "Costal Elite" but would be willing to settle for a good-looking guy with an honest job.

The "problem" is that selecting for men with honest jobs means selecting against men who hold luxury beliefs. They may as well be asking "why can't i find a handsome dark-triad bad-boy who wants to settle down with me?

The answer is that these are contradictory desires. Dark-triad bad-boys aren't interested in settling down. And well-adjusted men with honest jobs who are interested in settling down are not going to share their politics.

Do you live in Leningrad?

I haven't been on the apps in a couple years but putting conservative on your profile in any major metro in the West is absolute poison as a guy

Is it? As a guy, don’t you want to differentiate yourself? Better to stand out for 10% of the population compared to be unnoticed by 100%.

You're standing out as a complete autist who doesn't want to get laid. If you're otherwise a 10 it might work but you're gonna struggle immensely otherwise

No, you do not, not in this case. It doesn't particularly stand out as anything other than proof to them that so many men are racist fascist orange man supporters.

Also, apparently listing "moderate" or "not political" are also regarded by women as proof of being a sexist racist transphobic bad person.

I don’t believe that 95% of women that age are progressive. Let’s say 70% are, 10% are neutral, and 20% are on the right.

Why aren’t you increasing your odds on the 20%

Because a conservative woman who isn't already married is a "Pick Me!" who's after hotter guys than me.

Because I don't want to listen to Jesus talk any more than I want to listen to BLM ACAB LGBTQ et cetera talk.

Because I no longer use online dating after going through a summer where 95% of my arranged dates flaked or ghosted me the day of the date, and this included the people I'd met IRL, and the only ones who turned up were obese or had all the personality of wet styrofoam.

Yes this is what the loud majority (minority?) might say. But again you aren’t trying to attract the majority of women. You are trying to attract a small enough set of women to find hopefully a good match.

Yeah. I've literally AB-tested this anything but liberal under politics kills you in large metros

Chicago.

Chicago is awful for this sort of hicklib/post-tumblr politics, but on a dating app you can basically treat it as 20%/80% "I'm cripplingly neurotic and vanishingly unlikely even to go on a date" or "I'm absolutely not relationship material, but play the first date right and I'm coming straight back to yours". You can respond to that signal as is appropriate for your goals.

How is a major metro area "hicklib?"

Hicklib is a state of mind. They're still motivated by a hatred of the podunk chuds they see as surrounding them, and still look up to an ideal of the rainbowed coasts. Many if not most have moved from smaller places in the midwest to Chicago. You even get hicklib transplants in New York and SF, though they usually try to hide it.

Ehh, I found plenty of conservative women in chicago, when I lived there in the late 20-teen/early 2020s, including a date with a straight up neo-nazi adjacent woman. There are a lot of people in the city and even more in the burbs, it's just a numbers and signaling problem.

including a date with a straight up neo-nazi adjacent woman.

I was going to make a comment about you fumbling a win, but then I remembered the one I met who had a swastika and SS bolt tattoos. A man's got to know his limitations.

I fumbled nothing lol. She was interested afterwards, I was not, we wanted a different relationship style. I might have a pathologically open mind but spendapotamuses still trigger a disgust reaction in me.

Edit: neo-nazi in views but not a skinhead or a “baddie” looks wise, she definitely wasn’t the biker bar type.

All the conservative Chicagoland women are in the collar counties and don't use dating apps.

I'm not looking for conservative, I'm looking for someone who doesn't ask me what my pronouns are.

Is she's talking to you, your preferred pronouns are "you/your". If she needs a third person pronoun on the first date, it implies she gossips about first dates, so not a keeper. See, easy.

You can generally treat anything said in a dating app as an aspirational preference. "I want a tall, handsome, rich man" yeah but she will settle for someone 5'10" ok looking and with steady employment.

"I wont date a republican" probably settles to something like "don't embarrass me in front of my friends with your icky conservative views". Meanwhile you are at a cookout with her girlfriends and all of their partners and lo and behold every other guy there is also some version of conservative-lite. With even the "liberals" being pro-gun or against extreme welfare state handouts.

Hysteria and hyperbole abound online, but the real world is full of lots of quiet compromise and people getting on with their lives.

What do you think of male-female dating dynamics relative to the culture war?

In theory, it seems reasonable that people should not enter relationships where the parties have strongly held but conflicting political views.

My objection is that the modern Left seems to have this aggressive purity thing going on where they boycott X; boycott anyone that transacts with X; boycott anyone who transacts with anyone who transacts with X; and so on. For example, I heard that Guy Fieri, who is basically a blue collar restaurant critic, got in trouble because he was seen talking with one of the Tate brothers. Apparently he's publicly disavowed the Tate brothers, but if he hadn't, I wouldn't have been surprised if the Left started pressuring his network. Perhaps "boycott" isn't quite the right word, but I think you see my point.

Anyway, my sense is that when a woman says she won't date anyone who voted for Trump, it's usually not so much about incompatibility as it is about wanting to demonstrate her ideological purity. There's a difference between saying something like "I'm progressive in my politics so if you are a hard core MAGA type, probably we won't get along" and saying something like "If you voted for Trump, swipe left!"

Of course the truth is that any Trump voter probably wouldn't want to seriously date someone who was that so into progressive politics that they were on the purity bandwagon. But even so, I think it points to a bigger problem in our culture at the moment: The Left is just ferociously aggressive and intolerant of disagreement or dissent.

I think honestly for a lot of people, politics is religion, it’s a complete world view that they take on faith that colors and shapes the rest of their lives. It comes with assumptions about what is good or evil, who and what humanity is, and how we deal with the environment and poverty and technology and so on. So it only makes sense that people now treat political differences the way someone would treat religious differences in an earlier era. There was a time when the denomination you followed was important enough to break relationships for. We don’t do that even with religion anymore— mixed religion relationships are perfectly acceptable in most cases. But if you lived in 1626, it would have mattered a great deal whether you were Catholic or Lutheran or Anglican and it would have been unthinkable to be close friends of anyone who didn’t share your faith, let alone a Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu or something.

This. You can date someone from the other political party if you both have a different religion. You can't date someone whose politics is religion, and is opposed to yours.

I mean I’ve noticed this trend in all major political movements for a while now, and while it’s not literally everyone in a political “tribe”, it’s becoming much more common for people to orient their lives around their political beliefs even if they’re nominally religious. Tell me your political ideology, and I can probably predict a lot about your other beliefs and habits. Liberals tend to fetishize the products of other cultures— food, fashions, and art especially. They play up their differences from their neighbors and especially in their sex, gender and sexuality. They are much more likely to smoke weed (this might be just people I know). Conservatives very much favor Americana, especially things associated with country living, cowboys, and emphasize their similarities with their neighbors. Theres no reason that such a thing has to be.

By contrast, you very rarely (with the exception of fundamentalist Christians) find Christians orienting themselves and their beliefs and practices around Christianity to the degree that it impacts how they dress or behave in public. Theres no correlations for most modern Christians. There are for Muslims, or at least serious believers. They won’t violate their religion for conformity to politics.

Religion has always been a part of political identity. Atheists have a hard time with the concept. I recall Hitchens telling an irish joke, the punchline of which was "Protestant atheist or catholic atheist?" He then waxed eloquent as only Hitchens could about what a ridiculous mental construct that was. But it never made any practical sense. The Irish don't hate Protestants, they hate the Scots-Irish. They don't like catholic or agnostic Scots-Irish any more than protestant ones. Religion isn't an a la carte thing, it's part of a cultural and often ethnic identity. Whatever your personal metaphysical beliefs are does not really move the needle for anyone but you.

Religion isn't an a la carte thing, it's part of a cultural and often ethnic identity. Whatever your personal metaphysical beliefs are does not really move the needle for anyone but you.

This really depends on time and place, in the Roman Empire, Historical China the Modern West and many others Religion absolutely is/was a la carte because it's not the baseline value of society so people are free to mix and match as long as they maintain a few festivals and civic virtues. In highly sectarian societies like Northern Ireland and Lebanon it's exactly as you say but whether it is or isn't depends on time and place and is definitely not a universal.

Hadn't heard that story about Hitchens, but there's something similar with Dawkins. And, speaking as myself, it's very damn skating on thin ice for a couple of Englishmen to tut-tut about the Paddies like that, when youse are the fuckers who made such distinctions so important in the first place!

Just because your society now has dumped any pretence about being more than vaguely culturally Christian (but it's still important that you're ex-Anglicans not ex-Roman Catholics, though to be fair to Hitchens he did seem to be as opposed to Anglicanism as any other faith, all of it being part of the irrationality of religious belief), does not mean that over-rides centuries of penal laws and persecutions and deliberate stirring up of partisan strife for political ends (see Lord Randolph Churchill and playing the Orange card).

The important part is that your personal beliefs don't have anything to do with the religion you belong to. You belong to a cultural identity associated with a religion, whether you believe in it or not.

Being into radical politics almost certainly correlates with mental illness, an unstable personality, etc, and possibly prioritizing “the mission” over your family, a stable job, showing up at Thanksgiving etc. It also marks someone out as having low agreeableness, which is also bad in a partner. So generally, the smart move is to find someone broadly centrist, maybe a little left or a little right, within whatever the Overton window is in your society.

Extreme thinking in general tends to correspond to mental illness in a lot of cases. It’s not just the resulting panic about people disagreeing, but it takes a certain mindset to become obsessed with a topic long enough to be radicalized. You need to be isolated, you need to have a strong need to be obsessed, you need to have few connections to the rest of the human world, and really I find most people into radical politics are after a sense of power and control. A normal person with good real-world relationships, hobbies, sports interests, and a good job probably isn’t going to follow politics enough to become a radical. They have too many other things they care about.

All major Christian denominations discourage interfaith marriage - not being unequally yoked is in the Bible. Catholicism explicitly discourages interdenominational marriage, because it creates conflicts about which denomination children will be raised in. Islam only permits interfaith marriage if it is a muslim man marrying a non-muslim woman who he does not intend to treat as a human being. Ethnic religions like Judaism discourage interfaith marriage for different reasons, but it becomes a load-bearing part of the religion and associated culture. And in a world where most people actually believed in their religion, religion is a proxy for core moral values.

So "Don't date someone with different core moral values" is lindy, and the reasons why it is good advice, at least as regards potentially babymaking relationships, still apply just like they always did. (Either one of you will have to abandon passing on values to their children, or you will end up raising the children as moral relativists.) And in the 21st century people define their core moral values by their politics, not their religion. Someone who actually believes in wokism would struggle to co-parent with someone who doesn't. Obviously the same is true of the political-religious hybrid that is red tribe evangelicalism, and I would say it is true to a lesser extent of red-hat wearing MAGAism and establishment liberalism.

There is a separate issue that left-wing women believe, correctly, that right-wing political views are correlated with anti-feminist attitudes that the women in question consider misogynistic (and to a lesser extent with views that really are misogynistic), and that right-wing women believe, correctly, that left-wing political views are correlated with feminist misandry. I'm a liberal, and even my dating strategy included an early filter to rule out feminists. So politics are an actually-useful filter in a world where there are enough apparent options that you can afford to use a noisy filter.

Finally, there is a signalling aspect. Publically stating that you won't engage in interfaith dating is a signal that:

  • You are committed to your own faith
  • You are dating for potential marriage, not just for casual sex.

Both of these are signals you would want to send. If Tinder existed in the 1950's, it would provide a filter so Catholics could avoid seeing Protestant profiles and vice versa, lots of people would use it, and there would be a mild stigma to not using it.

Putanumonit's The skewed and the screwed is a good discussion of the negative practical consequences of this.

but they replaced the word with something called the Tories

"Tories" refers to members and supporters of the Conservative party - it is an informal term used both as a self-descriptor and as a slur, dating back to the era where the Whigs and Tories were aristocratic factions rather than organised political parties. I doubt the chick in question is using the word accurately - I assume she would be even less likely to date a Reform or Restore supporter than a Conservative.

Yeah but in dating apps not self-declaring a conservative leaning as a man is just a basic shit-test to see if you have any ability to hide your power level. The majority of the women trying to filter by that don't actually believe anything and/or will bury political disagreements if they feel chemistry otherwise when actually meeting.

The "Hello Human Resources" meme reigns supreme. Or... women's incentives generally lead them to putting up "brick wall" filters that exclude all men, thus accepting only men who figure out how to bypass the filters. Much of the problem of modern dating is the enforcement of those filters becoming far too good.

IMO it's this and the nature of online dating meaning that attempts inherently become 'all or nothing' since you can't just have an awkward convo then randomly bump into the same girl 2 weeks later when she's forgotten about it/smoothed it out. Now it's all in DMs and goes in the permanent record.

When somebody's only in your social orbit off an app it's way easier to discard the good for the perfect.

It depends on whether these beliefs are deeply internalized and impact real life behavior and decisions, or if they are vibes, aesthetics and slogans. It also matters how radical the woman is in the left ideology. If it's relatively moderate, echoing the mainstream schooling and institutional messaging, then it just signals being well-adjusted and agreeable. If they are mindkilled into talking about this all the time and are turning antinatalist because of the climate crisis and freaking out about the issue of the day all the time, then it's a pass. But most people live their lives modeled around what they see around them in real life. If they grew up in a stable family, have siblings who managed to form stable families and are going about life in a "normal" and "sane" way that is functional in the existing society (I do see that not everyone agrees on what that is, but you have to judge it from your own position), then it doesn't really matter if they are doing some signaling with these things that have been shown to them as being "the good causes" from kindergarten on, their whole lives.

In fact, I'd be more wary of an urban young woman who somehow decided to go "based". It may not be an issue but it seems they somehow couldn't fit in, either because they are very disagreeable and contrarian, or they had to rely on this strategy to stand out and attract men, which is also suspicious. It can all be clarified and may be fine, especially if they come from some conservative family or simply have this kind of social group somehow and it's not some kind of daily crusade, who knows.

My point is these declarations of party affiliations, slogans, logos, symbols are often superficial and compartmentalized. They are not much deeper than whether she likes Nike or Adidas shoes. What matters is how they behave on a daily basis, what they value and how they see the future, whose life advice they take seriously, what kind of life patterns are present in her closest friends and family, what's her personality like etc. But the deeply held beliefs and the life patterns they take seriously are super important. You have to agree on the actual ground level of how you live together, when and how you have kids, how you split the tasks, how important careers are, is moving every few years to climb the ladder worth it, versus staying put in one place and settling for long, etc.

If you're not aiming for a marriage and family yet, and plan to break up in a few years (or months) either way, then yes, you only need minimal compatibility in abstract beliefs, you just need attraction and a compatible schedule and activity level and agree you'll use contraception and abort if that fails. Well, okay that's a bit of agreement required right there...

Yes there is very much a case where the rare women who actually self identity as conservative on a dating app tend to be right of Hitler

If you're going to fish in the shallow end of the gene pool, the catch may have tumors.

In fact, I'd be more wary of an urban young woman who somehow decided to go "based". It may not be an issue but it seems they somehow couldn't fit in, either because they are very disagreeable and contrarian, or they had to rely on this strategy to stand out and attract men, which is also suspicious.

I think it is also relevant that both wokism and the "based" right are malignant from a normie or establishment liberal perspective. If your worldview is normie or establishment liberal, you shouldn't date a wokist or a "Nazi", excluding the scenario where you are a man going for a pump-and-dump in which case the fact that she is a human being with thoughts and feelings is mostly irrelevant anyway.

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