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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25294 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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Today I learned there exists a person who likes both Hitler and Netanyahu. He likes Hitler because he helped his nation get devloped and was a great leader. He likes Israel because they are defending against terrorism.

  • -42

This isn't particularly weird, there's always been a strand of antisemitic thought that just wants the Jews removed from the speaker's own country and views Israel as an effective containment zone. There are other strands that despise the Jews but view them as the second most important threat next to the Muslims and take "the enemy of your enemy is your friend" seriously.

There's also of course people who just want to be edgy and given explanations are just cover for that. And taking the Hitler is cool stance is edgy. Increasingly taking the Bibi is cool stance is getting edgy. Quite a lot of extremists when you get to know them are really just that, they wanna be edgy extremists first and pick which flavor of extremism after. It's the same thing with a lot of the authoritarians, there's a reason why Trump is so fond of both Putin and Kim Jong Un. He likes people who boldly hold extreme power and people who will flatter him, regardless of idealogy.

Makes sense? The polar opposite (hates both) surely is common, as is the person who would be inclined to say that said polar opposite is wrong about approximately everything. Then just take that thought to its logical conclusion.

Also, "strong leader who values everyone outside of their own people at <=0" is an obvious and coherent category.

This is surely an uncommon pairing of leaders for someone to appreciate, but I don't actually see any internal contradiction. Someone could also like Saladin and Pope Urban II even though they weren't exactly working towards the same goals.

If all of someone's favorite historical leaders could sit in the same room together without a fistfight eventually breaking out, I don't want to know them.

This is an incredibly bad top level post, even for a weekend.

First this seems 'boo outgroup'.

Second, liking Hitler is an extreme fringe position in Germany. Hitlers success at making Germany great again was very short-lived, and most German nationalists would not claim that a few years of ruling most of Europe at gunpoint was worth the eventual defeat, the splitting of Germany (with the East still worse off than the West today) and the destruction of the Germany cities, even if they were totally indifferent to the pain the Wehrmacht inflicted on the rest of Europe. As a rule of thumb, great leaders do not cause their countries to be ruined within a decade and change.

Or do you mean that the person you are talking about is not a German, and Hitler helped develop another nation, indirectly? The US? Israel? This would be much easier if you had bothered to proactively provide evidence, e.g. a link to a tweet or something.

Third, you can't chose what people admire you, and as a dig at Netanyahu it seems incredibly weak. I dislike his policies from the bottom of my heart, but "a fringe German Neonazi agrees with him" does not change at all how I feel about him.

I posted it because it was funny not because of any political implications or as a dig at Netanyahu. I suppose that can count as low effort here.

Then it should go in the Friday Fun Thread.

If felt too political for that, since it is Netanyahu. What thread is best for political jokes anyways?

TheMotte is not for all purposes. Political jokes and political satire specifically do not fit here very well.

Go to X or reddit for that

It was a pretty funny post.

Notably, you made a bad not too level post by comparing Hitler to Trump (ie make Germany great again). Trump isn’t Hitler even if Trump has an authoritarian streak.

make Germany great again

I will stand by this, actually, because while it was not a NSDAP slogan (they used "Deutschand Erwache", awaken Germany, I think), I think it is a fair summary of their platform in four words.

Take the endonym of the regime, 'Third Reich'. Its explanation supposes, simply enough, that there were three times in history were Germany was great. The first time was the thousand-year long Holy Roman Empire (ending with Napoleon), the second time was the Prussian German Empire (ending with Germany losing WW1, or in the mind of the Nazis with Germany getting stabbed in the back in the back by traitor Jews and Commies in alliance with evil foreign powers bent on keeping Germany down through the Versailles treaty), and the Nazi project was promised to be even greater than these two glorious periods of German history, lasting another thousand years or so.

I concede that I would have been unlikely to pick exactly that phrasing if Trump had not used it before. I did so intentionally, because I claim that the most basic narrative -- our nation is destined for greatness but traitors and evil foreigners are keeping up from it, but now a strong man will clean up is pretty similar.

I think it is more than just combining a presidential campaign slogan with a bloodthirsty monster of history. If I tried "Lenin promised the masses Change They Can Believe In", I feel like the analogy would fall apart plenty of steps before the MAGA/MGGA one, as Lenin wanted to violently change the system, and Obama advocated working within the system.

I am also not claiming that Trump is Hitler or as bad as Hitler. I am pointing out a curious similarity (not unique to them, plenty of strongmen have campaigned on similar premises), which would be a deadly sin on LW ("how can you poison our minds by bringing politics into this"), but seems pretty standard for the motte.

As you point out, it is very common. It isn’t something that was only found in Nazi German or MAGA thought. Thus pointing out the similarities falls apart as an excuse since it would be similar with other movements.

Instead it looks like an attempt to sneer at your outgroup by Goodwining it.

Hitlers success at making Germany great again was very short-lived, and most German nationalists would not claim that a few years of ruling most of Europe at gunpoint was worth the eventual defeat, the splitting of Germany (with the East still worse off than the West today) and the destruction of the Germany cities, even if they were totally indifferent to the pain the Wehrmacht inflicted on the rest of Europe.

From a German nationalist point of view, East Germany wasn't all that bad compared to the rest of what Stalin did - the annexation of Prussia, Silesia and the Sudetenland, with the entire German population of those regions expelled. There are plenty of Germans today for whom the land of their ancestors is forever gone.

Sure. I tend to forget about that because the Oder-Neisse line was reality for about four decades when I was born and had even been accepted by both Germanies for more than a decade. Perhaps 1 in 100 Germans today would seriously consider sending tanks to change our border with Poland to acquire lands which have not had a German population in 75 years.

And while driving out the Germans of lands which they had settled long before Hitler would definitely be a war crime by today's standard, the Germans had just done the same to the Polish and Russians (and a lot of other Slavic peoples) before with a much higher death toll. Basically my understanding is that if the Red Army wanted you gone from the lands, you had a decent change to escape with your life. If the Wehrmacht really wanted you gone from the lands, you would likely just end up as a civilian casualty to the siege of Leningrad.

We were actually rather lucky that despite Hitler betting all and losing, we did end up with a lot more than nothing after the war. Germany did not share the fate of the Carthage. We did not even get the Morgenthau plan, West Germany got the Marshall plan instead for geopolitical reasons. If I had to chose between living the life of either the modal 20-yo Sudentendeutscher making it to West Germany with the clothes on his back in 1945, or the life of the modal 20-yo Soviet citizen, then with the benefit of hindsight I would pick the life of the 20yo who starts from zero but gets the Wirtschaftswunder after a few years.

My point was that this adds on to the list of shit Hitler ruined for Germany and Germans.

Yes, I totally agree with you there.

Why is it so surprising? Yes, Hitler hated Jews, but this isn't the only thing he's infamous for, and it's wrong to reduce the lessons of WWII to "anti-Semitism is bad". If you are able to decouple, you can easily compare Nazi Germany to Israel: a country that punches well above its weight vows to never again be humiliated, puts the well-being of its nation above all others to the point that makes everyone else accuse them of committing atrocities.

Yes, Hitler hated Jews, but this isn't the only thing he's infamous for,

Notably, everyone seems to hate "Nazis", but what exactly is the defining characteristics of such seems to vary quite a bit: Putin calls anyone opposed to Russian dominion of Eastern Europe a Nazi (or sometimes anti-communist positions), which I suppose are some of the actions Hitler is famous for. I've occasionally seen other parts of Europe drop the reference to any sort of German leadership of the bloc. Israel-stans point to the Holocaust as the defining action for obvious reasons, which part of America seems to align with, while the rest of America sees "Aryan supremacy" as the most salient. I'm sure there is some mass-transit-stan somewhere who sees the Autobahn and its ilk and the idea of a "People's car" as central.

They are such a widely-defined enemy that it's almost important to clarify why the Nazis were evil in contexts like this because it can explain otherwise-nonsensical positions.

The frustrating thing from my perspective as a history nerd is that, to me there seem to be clear and obvious reasons why the Nazis were evil/went down the path they did but we don't talk about those reasons because there are a lot would-be revolutionary socialists in Academia who would find themselves having to answer some difficult questions if we did.

Not unheard of for some niche lowbrow online Indian/Hindu nationalist types. In both cases it’s “enemy of my [historic] enemy”.

They dislike Britain because of the British Empire, so they like Nazi Germany, plus they used the Swastika and extended some token sympathies to Indian nationalists contra the British.

And they very much dislike Muslims and the Muslim presence in India, so like Israel because they’re carving out territory in a formerly Muslim land and have good relation with India. And Palestine is the central global Muslim cause more than any other, so it often comes up.

I don't think learning that Nationalism exists warrants any comment, let alone here.

This is a rather low-effort post. Are you referring to someone in particular? Are you subtweeting something? Is this a reference we are supposed to recognize? Or did you just come across a random person who has a random set of beliefs, which we are supposed to find interesting... why?

"Likes both Hitler and Netanyahu" is odd enough to be worth contrasting, I suppose, but not in such a vague way that it just reads like a drunken shitpost.

"Likes both Hitler and Netanyahu" is odd enough to be worth contrasting,

Is it? Both need Lebensraum, both view their neighbors as potential targets for conquest, both draw their legitimacy from historic grievances, nationalists, conservative, preside over some of the best engineering minds in the world. Both policies could lead to their countries potential downfall. Somewhat cavalier attitude towards the civilian suffering and deaths inflicted on the populations they subjugate.

If you have a general liking to nationalist strongman, they are not that different aside from their answers on the jewish question.

Hitler and Lizzardspawn are both humans. Look at the similarities!

Yes if you take a 1,000 miles high view, the two look similar. But…if you have any sort of refined look the differences emerge pretty quickly.

Hitler was subhuman. He was vegetarian after all.

He sometimes ate sausage or meat dumplings. He wasn't a very devoted vegetarian.

He liked dogs, which brings him most of the way back. This analysis is, admittedly, incomplete, and has not taken into account every aspect of his character or biography.

It was a meme posted by an Indian man on Twitter. It shows an image where half of Hitler’s face and half of Netanyahu’s face have been joined together at the center to make one face. They are both images where the men are making an intense Kubrick-style stare at the camera. The Indian Twitter user posted the image because he greatly admired both men and saw similar characteristics of personality in each.

It’s not that weird when you realize it’s an Indian guy from India making an independent assessment of both guys from his own vantage point: Hitler held all the imperialist powers of Europe by the throat for a moment, and did it while draped in a lot of mythical quasi-Hindu symbolism. Netanyahu is a strongman leader who defends his country from the Islamic hordes, much like Narendra Modi. All in all it’s no weirder than a western liberal admiring both Harvey Milk and Che Guevara.

I’m not sure that it’s possible to have a democracy and have rules about what parties can exist. Nor do I think democracies can survive when millions of people vote for parties of an authoritarian nature. I don’t see any way out of that conflict though. I’m almost to the point where you can have a stable democracy if you have the kinds of centralized media that used to exist, or you can have modern decentralized media and let democracy die of whatever populist movement that ultimately ends it.

I can't agree that an AI wrote this as it's hard to imagine an AI coming up with something so wrong.

In Britain a similar story has been repeated, wherein government hesitation to pursue an outlawing of unconstitutional parties like Reform and Restore in spite of their unconstitutionality necessarily depriving them of the protections of assembly, since there is no democracy outside the nation state which is the guarantor of freedoms and rights for people, and necessarily that seeking it’s abolition are (morally but not necessarily legally) outside it’s protections.

There is no such thing as an unconstitutional party in Britain. We have an informal constitution because it is spread across various acts passed by parliament, none of which are legally distinct or special from any other acts, all of which can be changed by a simple majority. In the hypothetical case that a pro-dictatorship party came to power they could abolish elections with a majority vote in the commons and this is, in fact, entirely constitutional. An executive self coup like the German Enabling Act would also be constitutional (one already happened in 2020 with the Coronavirus Act)

In this system I’m suggesting all parties as stated will adhere to some extent to one of these three positions, and those who are opposed to it will have to be disbanded or reformed to be eligible to participate in elections. Similarly, the creation of new parties must require the approval of an office capable of judging the conformity of these new groups, and former leaders within disbanded organisations must be monitored to ascertain that they pose no threat to the state or the people it’s sworn to protect.

Ahh, yes. Using anti-democratic means to defeat (supposedly) anti-democratic parties. You have to see how this is hypocritical, right? Is this not the same behavior you would be hating the big bad fascist for? If people are electing populist-far right parties, how about you take a look at why thats happening and try to appeal to voters on things they care about, instead of betraying your beloved liberal principles?

Or they could just do what plenty of other European countries have done an integrate them into the political mainstream. This has not lead to anything particularly bad anywhere it's been done. Mostly it's seems to have tempered the parties in question, dealt partially with the political hole they're exploiting and made democracy function better in the countries because you no longer have a parliamentary mess that can't form effective governments.

Can you explain how reform and AfD are unconstitutional parties, as opposed to ones which you happen to dislike?

upturn the rules based international order

Can we at least do away with this cliche? It's not a thing any more.

Nobody ever explained what the rules are, in this rules based order. New rules could be invented on the fly, like 'responsibility to protect', various police actions or authorized uses of force. Not authorized by the UNSC but by the US president... just like the rest of great power politics throughout human history, where rules were drawn up by the strong.

This is a game everyone can play and indeed everyone is playing it. Iran is making a new rules based order in the straits of Hormuz.

In Britain a similar story has been repeated, wherein government hesitation to pursue an outlawing of unconstitutional parties like Reform and Restore in spite of their unconstitutionality necessarily depriving them of the protections of assembly, since there is no democracy outside the nation state which is the guarantor of freedoms and rights for people, and necessarily that seeking it’s abolition are (morally but not necessarily legally) outside it’s protections.

Also, this sentence is far too long and ungrammatical, can you at least make it easier to read?

Should western powers have banned all political parties that took money and instructions from Russia when they were communist? Those "Third Way" mugs would have been in prison.

Should western powers have banned all political parties that took money and instructions from Russia

Yes. Alas, we can't change history, but better to start now than never.

Of course this has nothing to do with the parties being populist, communist or whatever.

I don't see that being a convincing political argument. You first.

None of this makes sense, because it misses the entire point.

What the is purpose of the First Amendment? Why does it exist? Why does the Second? The Fifth? The Tenth?

It exists because nobody can trust the government. It doesn't exist for speech, or religion, or anything. It exists for trust, and specifically the lack of trust in the government.

So no, I don't trust the government to pick acceptable parties, and it's offensive that anyone would ever suggest that I trust a government that far. No government is that trustworthy. No government will ever be that trustworthy, certainly not one rules by the mob (democracy). You have missed this point completely by assuming that the government is inherently trustworthy and has my best interests at heart, when both are obviously false.

If you want to go live in a totalitarian state where the government picks the parties, China's right over there. Go nuts.

(so long as no anti-democratic tendencies or hate speech is spread, as hate speech is not free speech)

If a political position becomes popular enough to merit democratic political representation, but the political system declares that that position is a priori illegitimate and anti-democratic, there are only two options:

  1. Suppress that position, thereby introducing anti-democratic tendencies into the political process
  2. Tolerate that position, thereby introducing anti-democratic tendencies into the political process

That's all

Scott Adams had a quip similar to this with Democrats and Trump: You successfully convinced the public that Trump is Hitler. Hitler won. Now what?

In this case it's especially damaging because the "anti-democratic" position that nobody is allowed to express except for AFD and Restore and other such parties is that migrants should be deported and European countries should stay demographically European. You basically can't keep a lid on that. "Democracy can't allow mass deportations." Two guesses what happens next

If more legalistic methods had been applied to suppress disinformation from social media sources and the papers were held liable for misinforming the public, this trend could have been “strangled in the crib”, so to speak.

So you're in favor of eliminating the first amendment and freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

a solution can certainly be reached to resolve the issue. If you look at the 2024 Romanian presidential election for instance, the results which favoured a right-wing populistic party was annulled after irregularities were discovered which had shown clear interference from outsider forces to bring an anti-Atlanticist candidate into power.

So you're in favor of voiding elections if forces in the security state allege that they are invalid.

The preoccupation with calling the actions of constitutional governments “anti-democratic” is well understood as a tactic used by forces hostile to democracy

Ok, you can continue to call yourself democratic while suppressing the press and election results you consider anti-democratic. But that's not what most people understand those words to mean.

By the terms most people understand, you are suppressing democratic freedoms to entrench a regime you are calling Democratic. In this scheme Democracy isn't about freedom of the press or free and open elections, but about moderate liberal and conservative parties sharing a monopoly on power. I take it that parties such as Restore and AfD (which represent significant sizes of the electorate) are a priori not democratic. Maybe because they promote mass deportation. Democracy is about never allowing parties that support mass deportation to come to power. Elections are secondary.

Ok, you can invent whatever definitions you want. But most voters are wise to this trick by now and you are not going to get much traction here by advancing it.

I am in favor of voiding elections if credible suspicions of election interference are raised by trustworthy sources. Are you implying they made an inaccurate assessment of the situation?

You’re in favor of handing ultimate power to whatever constitutes “trustworthy sources”. I don’t even know what that looks like. Probably bureaucrats in the security state. Everything important to know will ultimately be classified. Call that system whatever you like. Doesn’t sound like democracy to me.

Democracy is ultimately a goal to strive towards, but

See, I won’t mind if you don’t especially value democracy. You’re a socialist, or a utilitarian, or an adherent of scientism, or whatever. You don’t believe in democracy as such, you just admire democracy if it can take you where you’re going. That’s fine, Erdogan famously said democracy was like a bus and he’d get off at his stop. Japanese nationalists and German bureaucrats alike have no problem admitting this is how they feel.

I would certainly consider it justified for a minority to impede their efforts,

Just remember that we invented democracy as an alternative to war. And that’s what you’re eventually going to get if there is no democratic way to deport migrants who will inevitably need to be deported.

Two wolves and a sheep....

I suspect that ethnic animus is inversely proportional to living standards, which are downstream of energy supply. If so, then the Greens are one of the most anti-immigrant parties, and AfD, in supporting nuclear energy, might very well contain the seeds of their own destruction.

Why hello there Marx, playing at historical materialism again?

The problems natives have with the tens of millions of foreigners is the tens of millions of foreigners. Yes, it's entirely possible that if material circumstances were cushier, more people would distract themselves with the opiates of the masses du jour. But the massive everyday ethnic friction isn't some psychological projection or poor man's cope or some other intangible phenomenon you can wave away by accumulating a little more public debt to throw at the dissatisfied public. You can sedate people, sure, but they're learning their lessons - that immigration is a problem first and an opportunity second, that foreigners are not their brothers in humanism, that politicians and media will absolutely do their best to shaft them for ideological gains, and that the establishment parties may claim to take their concerns seriously while actually despising them and acting against their interests.

It's a good thing for the left that they already delivered a far more fatal stroke to nativism than "just throw money at the rubes to make them shut up". Sneaking in millions of immigrants, and later letting them rush in through opened floodgates while sabotaging every mechanism that might stem the tide or lead to functioning assimilation, that was a generations-long campaign that worked out excellently. Europe is now a multi-ethnic continent, and has neither the will nor the means to revert it. The AfD and similar parties will die out eventually as the natives are successfully replaced. Congratulations. You already won. To everyone's detriment.

playing at historical materialism again?

I do not claim that material conditions are the sole driver of history, but they do play a major role. It can hardly be a coincidence that the same island that birthed James Watt also gave rise to William Wilberforce; nor that women's liberation saw wide success in the decades following the invention of the washing machine.

The problems natives have with the tens of millions of foreigners is the tens of millions of foreigners.

Some people may oppose the presence of foreigners as a terminal value, and would throw away a life of luxury with their neighbour of foreign extraction having equal comfort to live in poverty and toil as long as the other guy has it even worse, but I doubt that we would have made it as far as we have if that particular character flaw were universal.

it's entirely possible that if material circumstances were cushier, more people would distract themselves with the opiates of the masses du jour.

  1. If material circumstances were better in the Rest Of The World, I don't think there would be as many foreigners trying to move to the OECD countries.

  2. I hardly think that the machines that allow so many of us to have the benefit of servants without any of us having to be the servants constitute 'the opiates of the masses du jour'.

the massive everyday ethnic friction isn't some psychological projection or poor man's cope or some other intangible phenomenon

No, some of it is a need for education; contra the wokists, the education needs to be on both sides. If a man immigrates from a country where the community considers decisions about who is allowed near a woman's nether regions to rest with her husband, father, or other male relative, with her preferences in either direction being considered irrelevant, he needs to be informed that, here, even if there is no father/brother/husband forbidding him to touch a particular woman, if she tells him to back off, he can either respect that on her sole authority over her own unmentionables, or he will have the same number of years to reflect upon his life choices as an indigenous European or European-American who did the same thing.

However, a lot of the ethnic tensions come from lingering memories of the nearly-always zero-sum pre-industrial world, in which we did not yet know how to raise ourselves except by pushing others down, and ties of colour or creed formed a convenient Schelling point for ganging up on the neighbours to take their stuff and make them do the donkey-work.

accumulating a little more public debt to throw at the dissatisfied public

No, I am advocating the production of more physical assets. More energy, more housing, more trains, &c. Things that would be potentially useful even on a deserted island.

foreigners are not their brothers in humanism

If that is the case, it is because they come from societies that have more recently emerged from, and have not advanced as far out of, the aforementioned pre-industrial zero-sum state. (The Green Party, as I have have stated passim and frequenter, are Not Helping.)

that politicians and media will absolutely do their best to shaft them for ideological gains, and that the establishment parties may claim to take their concerns seriously while actually despising them and acting against their interests.

That would happen just as much in an ethnically homogeneous society. (Not that it would stay ethnically homogeneous; if everyone of extra-German extraction left Germany, it wouldn't be long before everyone in Bavaria who previously objected to the presence of Poles and Turks and Syrians started objecting to the presence of Saxons and Westphalians and Hannoverians [lumped together as Damp Russians].)

Europe is now a multi-ethnic continent, and has neither the will nor the means to revert it. The AfD and similar parties will die out eventually as the natives are successfully replaced. Congratulations. You already won.

I don't consider that a 'win' so much as a 'good first step'; there are several more continents to get to.

To everyone's detriment.

You mis-spelled 'benefit'.

Some people may oppose the presence of foreigners as a terminal value, and would throw away a life of luxury with their neighbour of foreign extraction having equal comfort to live in poverty and toil as long as the other guy has it even worse, but I doubt that we would have made it as far as we have if that particular character flaw were universal.

Yes, he who dislikes mass immigration from foreign cultures into a continent that fails at assimilation mus surely be a hateful bigot who just wants others to suffer. Something something ideological Turing test.

If material circumstances were better in the Rest Of The World, I don't think there would be as many foreigners trying to move to the OECD countries.

We Germans do not control the Rest Of The World.

I hardly think that the machines that allow so many of us to have the benefit of servants without any of us having to be the servants constitute 'the opiates of the masses du jour'.

There is no lack of washing machines, dishwashers and vacuum cleaners in Germany. I do assure you that household appliance shortages are not the cause for our deplorable xenophobia.

No, some of it is a need for education; contra the wokists, the education needs to be on both sides. If a man immigrates from a country where the community considers decisions about who is allowed near a woman's nether regions to rest with her husband, father, or other male relative, with her preferences in either direction being considered irrelevant, he needs to be informed that, here, even if there is no father/brother/husband forbidding him to touch a particular woman, if she tells him to back off, he can either respect that on her sole authority over her own unmentionables, or he will have the same number of years to reflect upon his life choices as an indigenous European or European-American who did the same thing.

However, a lot of the ethnic tensions come from lingering memories of the nearly-always zero-sum pre-industrial world, in which we did not yet know how to raise ourselves except by pushing others down, and ties of colour or creed formed a convenient Schelling point for ganging up on the neighbours to take their stuff and make them do the donkey-work.

"Education", said the soviet. "New Man", he said. Yeah, I'm sure we'll social engineer our way out of this by telling so-called educators to push feminism even harder.

If that is the case, it is because they come from societies that have more recently emerged from, and have not advanced as far out of, the aforementioned pre-industrial zero-sum state. (The Green Party, as I have have stated passim and frequenter, are Not Helping.)

Great. The state of assimilation in Germany is such that urban youths without any immigrant background are converting to the more charismatic ways of our new countrymen. We are not making them advance out of their zero-sum mindset; they're convincing ours it's the better way.

That would happen just as much in an ethnically homogeneous society. (Not that it would stay ethnically homogeneous; if everyone of extra-German extraction left Germany, it wouldn't be long before everyone in Bavaria who previously objected to the presence of Poles and Turks and Syrians started objecting to the presence of Saxons and Westphalians and Hannoverians [lumped together as Damp Russians].)

Again, ideological turing Test. You won't believe it, but there are actual differences between having to live with different kinds of Germans and having to live with muslim arabs, subsaharan Africans and Afghans.

I don't consider that a 'win' so much as a 'good first step'; there are several more continents to get to.

You mis-spelled 'benefit'.

Look at any muslim country. Look at africa. Look, at the most optimistic, at Brazil. That is your future.

Yes, he who dislikes mass immigration from foreign cultures into a continent that fails at assimilation mus surely be a hateful bigot who just wants others to suffer. Something something ideological Turing test.

Disliking immigration as a terminal value is a character flaw. Opposing it as an instrumental value, in pursuit of some other goal, leaves open the possibility of some other route to the same objective.

We Germans do not control the Rest Of The World.

I was more referring to the wealthier countries put together; the dismantlement of USAID was a bad move even from the perspective of forestalling long-term demographic change.

There is no lack of washing machines, dishwashers and vacuum cleaners in Germany. I do assure you that household appliance shortages are not the cause for our deplorable xenophobia.

That was just one example; there are many other dimensions of material circumstances that can shift attitudes.

"Education", said the soviet. "New Man", he said.

Something being tried and failing does not mean that it is impossible; otherwise, per Thomas Edison, I would be typing this by candlelight.

Yeah, I'm sure we'll social engineer our way out of this by telling so-called educators to push feminism even harder.

A pure redoubling of force on 'intersectional privilege patriarchy male-gaze blah blah blah buzzword buzzword buzzword' feminism is unlikely to be successful. An adjustment of methods, focusing on the sort of feminism that asserts that Women Are People In Their Own Right, Not The Property Of Their Husbands Or Fathers....

Great. The state of assimilation in Germany is such that urban youths without any immigrant background are converting to the more charismatic ways of our new countrymen. We are not making them advance out of their zero-sum mindset; they're convincing ours it's the better way.

And that is the problem we need to solve; less economic precarity would, I believe, at least contribute to the solution, if it weren't being blocked by manglement worried that a lack of desperation in the workforce might possibly create limits to the social dominance they can wield in the workplace.

Again, ideological turing Test. You won't believe it, but there are actual differences between having to live with different kinds of Germans and having to live with muslim arabs, subsaharan Africans and Afghans.

There was a time when the indigenous people of Europe were no better.

Look at any muslim country. Look at africa. Look, at the most optimistic, at Brazil. That is your future.

I hardly think that Brazil represents an absolute limit on the quality of life in a multi-ethnic society; and it is still much better than the last time ethnic supremacists were in charge.

This post is longest form "We must maintain the post-war consensus."

It laments we are not maintaining it, but doesn't once tell us why we should maintain it!

Here's why I don't want to maintain it: It is ethnically displacing and disenfranchising Europeans.

Gonna be honest - I am approving this post despite severe misgivings.

  1. You are obviously a sockpuppet (account created today).
  2. The thesis of this post is essentially "We should ban all political parties outside the centrist Overton window in order to protect democracy." Almost certainly bait.
  3. The writing smells like AI. The style doesn't have obvious AI tells so possibly it's only AI-enhanced, but it still has the feel of something output by an LLM after careful prompting.

So why am I allowing a post that I am more than half-convinced is trolling?

  1. We don't want to summarily ban every new account, even though most of them nowadays are people spinning up backup alts.
  2. The post is interesting enough that I guess it's worth engaging on its merits, if anyone cares to.
  3. I am wary of becoming too paranoid about AI, because there will inevitably be false positives.

I am saying this so I can preregister my suspicions and see whether they are borne out, and also to give some transparency into why we let some posts get through and not others. (Quite often, someone appearing with a fresh-rolled account and a manifesto does not get out of the filter.)

"I'm going against my own best instincts and making the wrong mod decision because... (Excuses)".

Many regulars are indistinguishable from trolls, if their median post was their first they'd be filtered. I say there's nothing wrong with letting in some fresh troll blood.

Ok, but only if they're right-wing trolls.

Oh no. Not the right wing trolls patch! I, a devious left-wing wrecker, could never benefit from flooding the Motte with low-quality right-wing discourse!

Oh, if you admit you're a wrecker than this was just an obviously bad idea for the forum to begin with.

I think he was being sarcastic sir

Doesn't work when he's trying to show off how unbothered he'd be by low quality discourse.

We do it all for people like you.

I don't think that's true. You should interrogate your own mind.

I explained my thinking adequately, and if I felt a need for deeper interrogation it wouldn't come from an anklebiter who's just trying to provoke. Now cease your anklebiting.

You're being uncharitable. Disrespectful even.

I have never once had "provocation" as a primary motivation for a single post on this forum.

Your mod record shows otherwise. You have no purpose in this engagement except to be obnoxious.

This is 100% bait, and if he'd been a bit more subtle it would have been phenomenal bait too.

This was too obvious:

The first of these is the Third Way position of Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, in Social Democrat fashion, which we already know can be trusted to uphold sensible economic and societal policy.

Which is a shame because these were excellent, and would have gotten me to reply:

as hate speech is not free speech

Thankfully the need to have a permit in order to protest is already a well-established norm within many western countries

What makes you smell AI? I did a second read looking for that and the grammar/punctuation is too clapped to be AI. Unless they edited LLM output to make it worse on purpose.

This is 100% bait, and if he'd been a bit more subtle it would have been phenomenal bait too.

I'm getting old and jaded, because I can't tell what is supposed to be the difference between the bits that lacked subtlety, and the bits that were excellent.

I found the two I called "excellent" subtle enough that I would have assumed he was just a moron with the most awful takes, and the temptation to tell him that would be great.

However the first paragraph was just too obvious. Only someone attempting to rile up this forum would say those words in that order.

I feel like this week has had a greater than usual number of weird, semi-hostile takes, but more than one have started subthreads that rewarded reading anyway. The initial posts were kind of rough to get through, and I didn’t have anything of value to add, but the other comments made it worth it.

But this sort of effort to milk the lolquokkas, or whatever – and I suspect it’s not the only one this week – poisons the well and erodes my willingness to endure my fellow weirdos’ off-the-wall rants, and that saddens me.

Thank you for all the yeoman’s modding, and for making the effort to make the call regardless. It’s appreciated.

a sensationalist media which amplifies any individual instances of so-called immigrant violence

I stopped here. That's the opposite of reality afaict and to see it baldly asserted pissed me off.

This is bait, but it's not good bait. I thought there was a shadow of a chance it was real until you suggested every democracy needs to have East German style blocparteien.

It's not really interesting to debate a deliberately ridiculous position you don't even believe in.

Apart from all the little nitty-gritty problems this post has, let me just focus on the one closest to home.

Banning the AfD.

Hilarious! Just ban the party that over a quarter of the population supports. What's going to happen? Those people suddenly turn into good little drones again and vote for one of the consensus-approved parties?

There's a giant hole in public discourse, and people are being told to ignore it. The AfD very literally ran their last campaign in my state on the platform of "Come on, you can plainly see it". It's there, and it's not some mirage conjured up by online populists and Russian trolls.

Its crazy how the thinking goes: "You can vote for anyone except for parties that will lead to fascism. Which ones are those? Don't worry, we're experts; we will tell you."

I've spoken previously about possible solutions to the current masculinity & dating crisis. But another overlooked part of the conversation is the role race plays in dating and sexual selection. I think to fix this problem, we may have to tailor policy towards each individual race, based on their unique circumstances within the country. I'd like to start with the race that is having the most trouble with this: black people.

A Profile of Single Americans

According to pew research, about a little less than half of black people are single. That is about 68% more than other racial groups. It's also no secret that black people are more likely to have children out of wedlock, less likely to marry, and are more likely to divorce. A big chunk of this is because there is a shortage of eligible men (& women).

Whats the problem with black men?

There are..... a lot.

First and foremost, black men are less likely to attend and complete college. This not only makes them less attractive mates in terms of status, but also in terms of resources (those with a degree make more than those without). They are more likely to be incarcerated ,unemployed, and/or dead. Not good. On top of all of that, they are more likely to be the perpetrators of domestic violence and rape. They aren't great partners in the grand scheme of things.

Whats the problem with black women

Black women do, like women in general, prefer a mate that is high in status and with a good resource pool. They are completing college at a higher rate and also are more likely to be employed. But they also have issues, mainly:

  1. They are more likely to be obese/overwieght.

  2. They are more likely to have multi partner fertility.

I also wouldnt be surprised if many of these women were "less feminine" than their non-black counterparts, particularly because black women are in a more violent and aggressive environment, that demands more masculine behavior as a matter of survival. This is more of a hunch than something I have direct evidence for.

Solutions?

For black men in particular, there needs to be a re-imaging of black masculinity. Black Men tend to see themselves as more masculine. I'm gonna argue here that this perception is largely harmful to themselves and to the community at large. Especially with black men, the whole manly man with a huge bbc stereotype is incredibly culturally pervasive. Everyone thinks of a black man as a athlete or rapper, instead of a scientist or a physician. There are no black pretty boys (EDIT: well, there were RnB stars but they have fallen out of favor recently), like we see with asians. I suspect much of this is because of the toxic environment that was created via the war on drugs & the familial breakdown following the sexual revolution.

The first step really should be trying to have mentors setup via government interference, particularly for black men. Their ought to be more skills to black masculinity besides "guy with huge dick and a Glock with a gold chain". Programs helping the community become more wealthy would contribute to this change in masculinity, as it would give less reasons to be toxically masculine. Have them do ballet, painting, and heavily emphasize soft and social skills. This should be done in combination with rugged stereotypically masculine activities such as wrestling or football. Good men have strong elements of masculinity, with some healthy doses of feminine attributes on the side!

Education needs to be emphasized, even if its not college. As the knowledge economy grows, the labor market demands those with social and technical skills. I'm not just talking about college, if they cant or wont go, fine. But there needs to be something after high school, with a job that is decently paying lined up shortly.

This next one isn't one I'm personally endorsing, but depending on whether or not someone is a racial nationalist. You might want to encourage black men to date within there own race, as they are more likely to date outside. Assuming we make black women more desirable, this may fall by the wayside on its own.

Ok, so what about black women?

The first step with black women is to get them on some kind of glp-1 (honestly, this should just be done for both sexes, but lets face it, looks are more heavily emphasized for women, and black women in particular are more likely to be overweight). Women get more options and attention the more physically attractive they are, and its healthier to be skinnier anyway, so this is a no brainer.

Also, the culture around birth control is more conspiratorial than what is warranted. Put an IUD in, and be slow with putting out. Black women are less likely to use birth control. I'd like to see that changed.

I'd also like to see young black girls engaged in girl groups (such as girl scouts, for example) to sharpen feminine attributes and personality more in black women.

Gender Neutral Policies

Another step that needs to be emphasized is what a healthy relationship actually looks like, and how to select a dude who will give you a healthy relationship. I have an intuition that this skill, particularly with black women, is somewhat lacking, hence high multi-partner fertility (Note: what drives multi-partner fertility is relationship breakdown, not just promiscuity). Show young girls how men are suppose to treat you, what they are suppose to do, and how the courting process is suppose to work. Many women have seen way too many bad examples of this. They need to be shown good examples. The same works vice-versa: Young boys and men need to be good boyfriends, and have examples of what that looks like.

Social media needs to be targeted here. Screen time at a young age extremely limited. Kids need to play outside, with other children to learn social skills. Relationships are a lot harder to build if you are socially retarded.

Lastly, I'm probably gonna get some people here arguing about how much of this is genetic vs not. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and just argue that these policies are good in their own right. Even if 70% of the black race couldn't be saved for whatever reason, if we are able to turn the tides for the other 30% that can be, then I'll consider that a job well done.

  • -12

Are there any functional religious subcultures among the AADoS? Not a church, but maybe Nation of Islam is an example? I know there are quite a few among the Caribbean peoples. You can't top down grow Church membership, people just pantomime the behavior and live as they otherwise would in the shadows, but it seems to me that the only global solution to family breakdown is those subgroups growing. Policy can fiddle around the margins, but actually turning a 'poorly behaving' demographic group into a 'well behaving' only comes from gradual, bottom up change.

Nation of Islam is pretty close to defunct(because it’s schizo fundies who can’t get along with anyone, including the police), but there’s plenty of black ‘Bible believing’ churches not much different from their white fundie peers, who do about as well, and the black Hebrew Israelites seem to have pockets of functional subcultures.

Maybe a good first step would be cutting SNAP benefits and forcing people to enter the labor market. A big issue we is a lack of manufacturing jobs anymore mainly due to productivity. People would be forced into restaurant work etc instead of no work but it would become socially acceptable

The post-1994 (in the US) or post-1997 (in the UK) policy of incentivising single mothers into low-paid work with their kid in subsidised daycare has succeeded. But a single parent in a low-paid job (or, for that matter, a second parent in a low-paid job) which barely covers the cost of childcare isn't directly improving their economic situation by working, only making themselves more deserving of subsidy.

To fix the incentives towards single parenthood, you need to increase the gap in standards of living between two-adult, two-income families and one-adult, one-income families. For the less-than-respectable working class, making single-parent families poorer in general means letting kids starve, but you could abolish the soft preferences for single mothers in the jackpottable parts of the welfare state (like social housing in the UK). And increasing the standard of living of low-paid couple-headed families at that level (where people are not rich enough to pay a lot of income tax) means giving them money, which gives conservatives the ick, unless it is BAH for dependas.

The working poor will not starve in the US(and I’m given to understand that groceries in the UK are cheaper, not more expensive)- rice is too cheap to meter.

In the west, what we tend to see is migration from low wage work into gig work in response to welfare reductions- because Walmart gets you eligible for TANF and Medicare, uber does not.

Black Men tend to see themselves as more masculine. I'm gonna argue here that this perception is largely harmful to themselves and to the community at large.

This is not a problem for black men. Men of any race benefit from masculinity in any event or situation where they are not cucked sissy hypno'd humiliation ritual'd invited into the realm of feminine dominated status politics. Sexual competition favors masculinity for men. Evolutionary psychology points to dominant masculine males as the most desirable people to mate with. Women and gay men (such as myself) are programmed from millennia of sexual competition and successful fertility and resource scarcity to seek the best mates they can.

You go on to propose that black men should be encouraged to be less masculine, basically. In other words you are trying to bring him down to a level where you can compete with him as you are a non-black man. It doesn't work, it is ridiculous, it all falls apart the second you hit the real world. The black man "studying ballet and in education" is cringe but still more masculine than the white man "studying ballet and in education" and yet more masculine than the Asian man "studying ballet and in education." The ballet and reeducation is going to solve nothing but be a ridiculous charade. At the end you can point to the black harvard educated ballerina and say, ah good, he got the girl because he played the game on my white bourgeois terms: in elegance and sophistication and education, and now I don't have to rip apart my entire worldview where I believe men should be chosen based on their elegance and sophistication and education, rather than submit to the stark reality that women choose mates based on primal instinct of masculinity and dominance and physical power which you or the less dominant man knows he can't compete at and win.

Much of sex and race relations are totally conflated due to the dual-variable situation. Basically, the races of people who have more desirable masculine traits are the opposite stack from the races of people who have more desirable feminine traits. Black men are more masculine and dominant than white men who are more masculine and dominant than latino and asian men. Asian and latino women are more feminine and attractive than white women who are more feminine and attractive than black women. This is why so much of modern day US race relations are so broken: Polite society is dominated by women's concerns, and white women are more attractive than black women, and in a feminine twist of slave morality (or christian love, or judeo-christian David vs. Goliath ethics) women get to forever place the lives and souls of Black people above their own because it doesn't actually ever interfere with how they as white women are hotter than black women, and get to simultaneously reap the benefits of socially accepted dominant (black) male mate selection and humiliation of the inferior emasculated white or asian man.

The fact that white or Asian men come up with the solution you propose, over and over again, leads only to their humiliation and constant misunderstanding of what a woman wants from them. The answer isn't to bring the more dominant men into the same humiliation rituals they are burdened with, it is to avoid having to compete with more dominant males to begin with.

I also wouldnt be surprised if many of these women were "less feminine" than their non-black counterparts, particularly because black women are in a more violent and aggressive environment, that demands more masculine behavior as a matter of survival. This is more of a hunch than something I have direct evidence for.

I suspect Black women are less feminine than their non-black counterparts because every Black women I've ever met is more masculine than I am (as a white male.) White men will never admit this but let's go through some observations. In sexual dimorphism within the same ethnicity, women tend to have lighter skin than men. So a Black woman is already starting from a distance and at a glance to have a more masculine presentation than any man who isn't darker than she is. In the extremes, of course, there are cute and feminine Black women like Duckie Thot who I think is very cute but she is at the far end of the bell curve in terms of neoteny and half of her female relatives are probably more butch than your average white or Latino or Asian man.

IMO there is a great dignity in ethnostates that doesn't exist in diverse settings. In Japan, there is a great diversity of people in a positive way. Your construction worker is Japanese, your lawyer is Japanese, your doctor is Japanese, your priest is Japanese, your emperor and your empress and your prime minister are all Japanese. There is phenotypical diversity in Japan, yes, but culturally, everyone is Japanese, and there is a dignity in that you know the place you end up in society is a product of your own work and your own ability. In America, your construction workers are Mexican, your lawyer is a WASP or a Jew, your doctor is Nigerian, your priest is Italian, your president is half nigerian or part cheetoh or whatever. What of the Mexicans who want to be a lawyer and not a construction worker? The Jew who would be happiest laying bricks? We have a great illusion of choice but once you notice the specialization of race linked to profession it's a bit sad.

There are no black pretty boys, like we see with asians.

Again there actually are black pretty boys. Usher is pretty. There are Black ladyboys and Black trans women and Black cross dressers and anything else you can imagine. Your insistence that there are no black pretty boys is an artifact of your judgment of Black people by white or nonblack standards. Black men can point at Usher or other pretty black men and say those are the pretty ones. If you are white and can't imagine Black men being pretty it's because you can't step outside of your viewpoint in your judgment compared with them which is the sexual selective competition problem I'm trying to illustrate. To contrast and reinforce the point, of course you mention asian "pretty boys" because if you're outside of the Asian community then nearly all Asian men are to the "pretty" side of things compared with you.

The first step with black women is to get them on some kind of glp-1

So I think the problem is women need to stop desiring dominance or rather they need to stop putting themselves in positions that require dominant positions. I have a friend who happens to be an obese Black woman. I have experience with weight loss so she sometimes asks me for advice about it. One time she confided in me that she had been thinner in the past, but that she was "afraid people would beat her up." This is a real fear, and is also consistent with needing to have a bit of weight to throw around to assert dominance. In the past 10 years I have weighed 300 and I have weighed 190 lb and from experience, at 300 people are much less likely to mess with you than at 190. Women, especially those who live in an urban environment, are put in positions where they feel they need to dominate things physically. Nomadic women in Mongolia or city girls in China- or even rural/nonurban northern European women, despite what the immigration doomers will have you believe, have no such social threats that they find themselves needing to become obese to assert domination. Women and poor people are not going to start dropping weight en masse until everyone does as it's a sort of cold war (american obesity skyrocketed at the same time that racial integration became more ubiquitous.)

Another step that needs to be emphasized is what a healthy relationship actually looks like, and how to select a dude who will give you a healthy relationship. I have an intuition that this skill, particularly with black women, is somewhat lacking, hence high multi-partner fertility

This attitude is so arrogant to me, people do what they're programmed to do, why are you trying to socially engineer their behavior to begin with? She can choose the more sexy masculine dominant male over the really sweet guy, the problem isn't her, the really sweet guy if he's such a great partner needs to man up and express his masculinity in addition to his ability to take care of his mate and offspring at the same time. If someone whose brain is designed to opt for a masculine dominant mate who are you to encourage her to go against her millennia of programming in favor of you and your preferences, the less dominant male? What's in it for anyone but you?

You go on to propose that black men should be encouraged to be less masculine, basically. In other words you are trying to bring him down to a level where you can compete with him as you are a non-black man.

Um, Im not? This is largely in their interests. Black mens variation of masculinity does have an element of clear toxicity, driven by historical, societal circumstances, and governmental policy (and maybe we'll say here that HBD might be playing a role, but I'd like to focus on what we can control here). This clearly doesn't make them very attractive mates, a la them being more likely to be single. It actively damages their relationships.

Women find both masculine and "feminine" qualities attractive in men. Again, no ones arguing against being manly, I'm merely arguing for a slight tweak in masculinity to include some of these softer elements, that would aid in keeping a mate in the long term. If you insist on a slightly manlier variation of this, the comic-book hero Superman fits the bill fairly well.

We shouldnt be overstating womens preference for masculinity. Yes, women are looking for elements of masculinity when selecting mates, but the man in questions cant be too masculine, because that risks turning the strength aggression on her and the children.

Again there actually are black pretty boys. Usher is pretty.

I actually stand corrected! Excellent. For the record I actually forgot about Usher and RnB black men existed for a second (& sadly, we don't see them that much in the mainstream anymore). I'd like to see more!

So I think the problem is women need to stop desiring dominance or rather they need to stop putting themselves in positions that require dominant positions. I have a friend who happens to be an obese Black woman. I have experience with weight loss so she sometimes asks me for advice about it. One time she confided in me that she had been thinner in the past, but that she was "afraid people would beat her up."

This is counter-productive in almost all cases. A fit in shape person is gonna give a fat-ass an proper ass-whooping 99% of the time. Size matters to a point, but there is a distinction between sumo wrestler 200lbs, & Brock Lesnar 200lbs. But sure, inner city violence incentivizes masculint behaviour, fair enough. Solution? Crack down & lock them up.

This attitude is so arrogant to me, people do what they're programmed to do, why are you trying to socially engineer their behavior to begin with? She can choose the more sexy masculine dominant male over the really sweet guy, the problem isn't her, the really sweet guy if he's such a great partner needs to man up and express his masculinity in addition to his ability to take care of his mate and offspring at the same time. If someone whose brain is designed to opt for a masculine dominant mate who are you to encourage her to go against her millennia of programming in favor of you and your preferences, the less dominant male? What's in it for anyone but you?

Again, this is a false dichotomy. The goal is for our sweet guy to have both traits, that's basically the whole point of this post. I care for the black community, and I'd like to see them succeed. Having children "raised" by pookey and ray ray is counter productive to this end goal. Do I need emphasize that women aren't only attracted to just the hyper-manly health inspector?

Having children "raised" by pookey and ray ray is counter productive to this end goal.

On the decreasing likelihood of you not actually being a sufficiently advanced troll, thanks a lot. This is the best laugh I've had all week.

Again, on the off chance that you're not actually a troll, you do understand what you sound like, right? You sound like someone who has never actually talked or interacted with human beings enough. I'm serious. This and your previous argument about how "we should get men decent paying jobs". Yes, no shit. But shit in one hand and wish in the other and see which one fills up first.

I don't want to tar men of system or wonks with the same brush but yes, of course the issues you're talking about are obvious. Your fixes, assuming they are even remotely feasible, would do just as much if not more damage. Go on, I'm waiting to see how you can fix black families - and while you're at it, fix income inequality, the prison-profit pipeline, black male incarceration, gang culture and schooling.

Inner city violence doesn't incentivize masculine behavior. Humans do. Humans. Ugly, brutish, cruel, self-interested humans. Black male culture valorizes strength, violence, and in the parlance of their culture, fucking a lot of bitches. Can you offer them anything close to this that satisfies those drives? And don't say Heinlein's bug war, jokingly or not. Let's not pretend those drives aren't shared by a lot of men. Although the vast amount of chemicals in modern food, water, and testicles might have done their part in damaging those drives, it's still up against thousands of years of men succeeding by caving in other men's skulls with rocks and dragging women to caves by their hair. Black men have found a solution that works for their sexual success. Sexual success became divorced from long term stable pair bonding a long time ago, it was called women's liberation and birth control, and as soon as that happened everything else falls into place. And those two genies are never going back in the bottle outside of the business end of a jackboot, so good luck trying.

In the immortal words of Freddie Gibbs:

Cause why have one when a nigga can have two

Three or four hoes I like the ass brand new

Just fuck with me and I'll stay true

“I love you," yeah yeah, I love you too

Usher is not pretty. I was trying to think of someone like Lil Nas X who was all over the place for coming out as gay a few years back, but he's not really pretty either.

Prince was pretty. Little Richard was pretty in his day. There are pretty black guys, but dressing like a gay pimp doesn't make you pretty. Though I suppose if the comparison is with "guy built like a brick shithouse with a face that could crack walnuts", being "normally attractive guy who dresses metrosexual" does come off as pretty.

if you want pretty, male cast of average Chinese historical costume drama is pretty 😍 (this parody trailer for a real show is a smidgeon too on the nose, but they're not wrong about the 'suffering beautifully' part).

Usher is pretty.

Seriously? He's projecting a very typical masculinity. Maybe it's restrained for his race, but pretend he's a deeply tanned Lebanese. Prince was definitely a pretty Black boy, though.

You go on to propose that black men should be encouraged to be less masculine, basically. In other words you are trying to bring him down to a level where you can compete with him as you are a non-black man.

submit to the stark reality that women choose mates based on primal instinct of masculinity and dominance and physical power which you or the less dominant man knows he can't compete at and win.

Come on, this is oversimplified to a degree it's wrong. "Masculinity and dominance and physical power" is only one dimension of what makes an attractive man. There's also charisma, verbal/emotional intelligence, appearance/style, competence, and (of course) status.

If you send the most masculine gangbanger to a party also attended by a sunny boy pro surfer, a lead singer/guitarist of a half-decent band, a frat bro lacrosse player, a male ballet dancer and a navy fighter pilot - and they all agree that gangbanging is low status - the gangbanger will not pull, not even secretly.

I'm not just talking about college, if they cant or wont go, fine. But there needs to be something after high school, with a job that is decently paying lined up shortly.

You can't even offer white boys that! But I agree that, of everything else you've said, that "path to early and stable-enough success" is something that, if you want men to function properly, you need to offer. Early buy-in and rewards for following the system we've set out is ultimately what makes people adopt its values; that's why Boomers still think you can get a job with a resume and a firm handshake, after all.

There are no black pretty boys, like we see with asians. I suspect much of this is because of the toxic environment that was created via the war on drugs & the familial breakdown following the sexual revolution.

No, it's genetic. You literally bury the lede in the first part of the sentence then deny it.

Further,

particularly because black women are in a more violent and aggressive environment, that demands more masculine behavior as a matter of survival

if you're going to go HBD you might as well go all the way. The place they come from is a more violent and aggressive environment and has been for quite some time. Asians (including the natives of North America) had less of that; if having 2000 years of the modern bureaucratic state doesn't convince you of this, then nothing will. The most violent of those groups were living in an area that didn't lend itself quite as well to this- is there any nation the Japanese hadn't gone to war with?

Their ought to be more skills to black masculinity besides "guy with huge dick and a Glock with a gold chain"

What makes you say that? Having a huge dick and a gold chain on my Glock is pretty awesome, actually.[0] It makes reloading harder but that's just the price you pay for fashion.

girl scouts to sharpen feminine attributes

That's not really what Girl Scouts do, and from what I can see black women are very and completely uninterested in femininity that isn't [for lack of a better word] hostile. Part of that's just how they look- there's a particular variety of white woman (compare 'gyaru') who make themselves up like black women specifically to evoke that hostility- but a lot of it is the accent that inherently sounds like sass/will track as a disrespectful tone to anyone who isn't black. I'm not entirely sure where it comes from.

If you want an example of this, go watch a season of the Cosby show; Claire turns this off and on when/as convenient, but the kid characters run it full blast all the time.
(Interestingly, the same is not as true of the men. Watching them trying to turn it down to fit in is strange too.)

Perhaps it's simply a reaction to the [evolved?] need to control men who are themselves predisposed to a more extreme form of masculinity? Explains a lot about the "sleep with them early to secure a mate" thing, because that's [part of] how women force commitment from men... but because the abolition of racism as government policy coincides with the sexual revolution/abolition of sexism as government policy, the women are depending on male relatives to make sure that commitment occurs and it can't.

Well, unless the men do what is natural to them and use the unofficial state-condemned violence to force it... which is the thing you think is the problem with them. Go figure.

[0] I do always enjoy being able to post this on-topic. I will point out, that as patently absurd as this is (and whether the people participating in it are aware of that or not is irrelevant), most of it sounds exactly like what 19th century Americans understood masculinity to be (mostly thinking of dueling here but the fact that was even a thing to begin with suggests a more... offensive and proud form of masculinity as standard). And I'm not even entirely sure they are wrong considering what happened once we moved away from that.

familial breakdown following the sexual revolution

According to conservatives on radio it is Great Society welfare policies that destroyed black American marriage rates. There are old articles asserting such. The government subsidized and incentivized single motherhood and certainly got a lot of black single moms.

I wouldn't be surprised if this contributed. But I'm not convinced that this is the main reason for what happened.

According to conservatives on radio it is Great Society welfare policies that destroyed black American marriage rates.

Also the Moynihan report, which was not by a conservative.

Old-school Welfare treated a family headed by a single mother as deserving poor (having been introduced at a time when most single mothers were widows, or divorced for sympathetic reasons), but a family headed by a man who couldn't hold down a steady full-time job as undeserving poor. The incentive to make yourself deserving poor is obvious.

It remains the case that a single mother is going to be subsidy-dependent (one person can't earn enough to support both her own family and the woman who is looking after the kids while she is working unless she is pulling in an upper-middle-class income) and these subsidies are means tested such that most of the income of a lower-middle-class man who joins her household is promptly going to be means-tested away (or, in reverse, that most of the income of a lower-middle-class partner she ejects will be replaced by means-tested benefits).

Post sexual revolution culture thinks that people should couple up for love and not money, meaning that not redistributing away the (very practical, with a computable cash value) benefits of couple formation is creating a "perverse" incentive. The red tribe agrees with the general principle, but think the required redistribution should be informal through churches (meaning the benefit can be restricted to women who comply with the red tribe's marry-early-marry-often version of modern sexual morality) rather than coercively through the state.

Or, instead of some convoluted social engineering attempt, US GOs/NGOs can provide one-time stipends to black girls and young black women for getting their tubes tied so they can... pursue further education and career aspirations without the tyranny of motherhood, to close the socioeconomic gaps and stuff. The issues related to 12% of the population committing 56% of homicides can solve themselves from there.

You can be ruggedly masculine and kind and gentle and loyal to women(or, as we would like to encourage, one woman). The black idea of rugged masculinity doesn't happen to line up with that, of course, but it's not like ideas that do line up with that have never existed. Chivalry is pretty clearly an example, for example- knights were supposed to be good at fighting first and foremost, and treat women well, and spend their free time hunting, and the courtly graces were often things very directly relevant to being a knight(the dancing that they're expected to do originated as practicing footwork for swordsmanship).

Wait is no one else immediately convinced that this is obviously a troll?

I mean.... I posted other stuff like this before, if you think that this post is bad, your welcome to point out why.

Given all the approving comments on "how to fix the fertility crisis: well, make women economically dependent on men, so they have to get married; do this by denying women access to education and careers of their own, having their parents (fathers by choice) control them so they don't become sexually active until they get married (by age twenty at oldest) to the husband picked by the parents", I can't say for sure any guy putting forward A Modest Proposal For The Problem Of Whomever is trolling.

He, uh, reads like a sheltered(probably by the school system more than by his parents) twenty year old, not a troll.

Might just be a sincere teenager.

The post strikes me as.... naive? Their solutions are utterly infeasible in practice, and their diagnoses of things also so obvious as to be un-novel in this space. I didn't learn anything new or spark any ideas reading this post. I suppose a troll could say things that are obviously true but controversial in order to trigger agreement and then repost elsewhere as rage bait. But usually when we see trolls they are exaggerating and going too far in order to get some truly unhinged takes. This just seems like a bunch of bog standard "pull up by your bootstraps" sort of thing that would obviously work if we had magic mind control beams that made people listen to good advice but won't work because we don't have those.

This is a pattern with this poster.

I'm not sure it's a troll, although I am suspicious. The issues and solutions proposed have consistently demonstrated a lack of experience with the dust, grit, and grime of reality.

Yeah but that's hardly an exclusive attribute. 'I'm mildly autistic and of limited real world experience so I'll link to one study per idea that has clear practicality issues'posting is pretty common.

I don't think he's a troll at all. Based on his post history (and cough him posting his CV cough) you can tell he's very young and probably isn't as familiar with the post and topic history of this (and other similar) forum(s), his posts would fit in the SSC subreddit in like 2014. He reminds me a lot of some of the people I met in the compsci department during my undergrad whom have complex opinions on complex issues but usually display some lack of nuance or overly broad simplification. Without flaming or insulting I just find all of his posts quite boring. I would love an effort post on how you could or should transform the underclass by social engineering the definition or being manly or womanly to induce socially-productive behaviour, but this is just "The government should fund a program to do that."

To add to this, if you are young and have unconventional opinions it can be very easy to not have anyone to share them with, especially these days.

This makes them not very battle tested.

Have them do ballet, painting, and heavily emphasize soft and social skills. This should be done in combination with rugged stereotypically masculine activities such as wrestling or football. Good men have strong elements of masculinity, with some healthy doses of feminine attributes on the side!

This seems like it could backfire considerably. Why not just take whatever resources we would use to fund this and instead promote manly-man masculinity, by which we mean a stint in the armed services followed by a wholesome career as a firefighter or police officer?

This is also considerably more useful to society than teaching people ballet.

The point of teaching ballet and other soft activities, particularly for black men, is to tone down the manly man stereotype that is so commonly associated with them. I'd like for them to realize that you can be more than just a thug. But going beyond this, I think there is a case to be made that men need an element of creativity and softness to aid in their navigation of relationships with women, and with others within society, and that this can coincide with masculinity. The pretty boy archetype comes to mind here. Ideally, we get mostly masculine men, with a dash of sweetness and softness. Kinda like these guys.

I'd like for them to realize that you can be more than just a thug.

When presented with the alternative of "ballet performer (non-remunerative)" it would hardly be surprising if guys (regardless of race) chose "thug."

I'm also skeptical of your case (though I haven't heard it yet). I think creativity and softness can help with women, but I can't help but think you're barking up the wrong tree: as far as I can tell women are, generally, into pretty masculine men. Relevant both to my suggestion and to the question of "what do chicks dig?" military service members are more likely to be married, not less, than civilians.

as far as I can tell women are, generally, into pretty masculine men.

I mean, yeah, but I'm not really denying this. My point here is that, black men in particular are hyper masculine to a substantially detrimental degree. They feel the need to do dumb shit like this. I think, with the correct social policy and guidance, they can become the men i linked previously. Yeah, pretty soft guys, but you can hardly say they arent masculine either.

People have been trying to present alternative-ideal role-models for masculinity for decades with nothing to show for it apart from softbois and performative males in the white population.

The Cosby Show didn't fix black guys, nor did all of Will Smith's oscar-bait drama films, and I don't think Tyler Perry has made much of an impact either. Even the determined black scholar archetype has become a racial-grievance-monger.

It would blow your mind if you could even imagine the quantity and quality of pussy straight male ballet dancers get (yeah, all five of them). But men actually aren't just motivated by that - intrasexual esteem is much more psychologically important than getting laid.

Survivorship bias, assuming one accepts the premise.

Men can subconsciously or consciously, detect occupations like being a male ballet dancer is a tournament profession with a substandard EV, with an even more ambiguous feedback cycle than giving it a go at say, becoming a professional athlete.

Hilariously, while drumming up my earlier reply to Nerd, I had done a quick Google and BAM!

Dancers and choreographers registered the highest divorce rates (43.1 per cent), followed by bartenders (38.4 per cent) and massage therapists (38.2 per cent)

There are some really funny ways to reconcile what you're saying and the first page Google result (people forget that married couples have more and often better sex than single individuals) but none of them sound particularly worth the hassle.

Not that I am trying to dunk on male ballet dancers, but I wouldn't go into the profession purely for the sexual opportunity.

It seems pretty obvious that men constantly surrounded by extremely fit, attractive women who don't spend all that much time around guys (because they're forced into obsessing over their dance) have difficulty staying faithful. But yes, it's not better than marriage - until she starts getting a little long in the tooth and the new ballerina is looking at you all starry-eyed. The same thing for bartenders and massage therapists, of course, just with a more variable field of play.

It seems pretty obvious that men constantly surrounded by extremely fit, attractive women who don't spend all that much time around guys (because they're forced into obsessing over their dance) have difficulty staying faithful.

Dancers in general? No doubt. Classical ballet dancers? Nope. Have you seen what a ballerina looks like naked in her prime? I'm into bonier that average girls, but even I don't find a bundle of springy sinews so shredded she doesn't have periods any more attractive.

Military service members having a guaranteed income that massively increases upon marriage seems pretty directly relevant to the marriage question, especially given their female class peers' poor economic prospects.

Agreed, and I while I don't think waving one's hand and saying "jobs programs" is particularly likely to suddenly solve marriage rates, I do think jobs program education is more likely to have a positive effect than art sensitivity programs.

To be clear, being able to pull off the art museum as a date idea is very very good for your love life if you are a man. But at the end of the day, yes, a man's marriageability is mostly defined in economic terms- not always cash based, but economic.

I agree with the cultural shift required in the black community more or less. But that's not really something anyone outside the community can make happen. I hope it happens, but there ain't much for anyone else to do.

As to greater black participation in college, I think that's a losing game and people need to forget that path as a means of uplifting the poorer parts of the black community. Whatever IQ predicts, it predicts academic achievement. You are not going to get the poorest and dumbest third of black people through any college degree worthy of the name. It is not going to fucking happen, and if that's your plan to help black people, you don't want to help black people.

Better norms about violence, honor, work and family would be great, but as I said, not really much for everyone else to do about that.

It is time to end the discrimination based on college degree, which would do more for the black community than trying to bootstrap 75 IQ hoodrats through a college course.

You are not going to get the poorest and dumbest third of black people through any college degree worthy of the name. It is not going to fucking happen, and if that's your plan to help black people, you don't want to help black people.

Also creates the modern problem where massive expansion of University placements means that a lot of roles that should really need the ability to read and something of a pulse suddenly need a 3 year degree since there's such an oversupply of 3 year degrees.

An elegant solution to all the male crisises, embryonic sex selection. https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/the-y-chromosome-is-dysgenic

Men commit far more crime than women, they are more prone to diseases and they live shorter lives.

There may be more variation in men's IQ scores and they are more common in STEM, so we would certainly need some men for new discoveries and the like but what is the need for 1:1 sex ratio?

Most people don't work on intellectual tasks in civilization which need constant innovation and incredible time spent on them with a singular focus. Most jobs are mundane and of maintaince variety. We can just have few men which work on hard research type jobs where vast majority of population is women. Maybe with lack of men female researchers would lead. Besides if super intelligence arrives we may not need men working at these jobs at all.

This would solve the incel problem since men are rarer, this would solve the problem of dangerous men preying on women.

Note I am not serious here, but talking about this hypothetical seems like fun. It does seem obviously wrong but I can't pinpoint any specific moral principle it might violate.

Surely there is something wrong with this argument but what is it? It seems fine from an purely utalitarian perspective.

Edit: i am again restating that I am not seriously considering this. It's starting prompt for philosophy and a fun writing excercise. No serious person would start their message with "An elegant solution".

Wolbachia, a parasite/symbiont does shift gender ratio for many of its insect hosts.

What about an inversion of the idea?

Men are physically stronger and better for tough industrial jobs like oil production or construction. Men also contribute more high variance geniuses, entrepreneurs, innovators (and criminals too but also a good number of police and protectors).

So maybe there should be more men than women? AI can handle the busy bee jobs.

Women would concentrate on their key comparative advantage, what they can do but men can't, having children. There'd be some kind of polygamous system where men who do better get to have more wives, while low performers don't get even a single wife. Women would have many husbands, 3 or 4 on average maybe? More?

I think this is a bad idea, since having many more men than women would probably cause instability. Presumably the men wouldn't be too happy about sharing wives with other men, even if each could be sure of paternity via modern testing tools. Women would be jealous, upset. The most capable men would probably try and hoard the women... Such massive biological engineering schemes seem sure to have unintended consequences. Social engineering can be quickly undone, whereas biological mistakes are sticky!

Related, Arctotherium on marriage patterns in existing human cultures: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/human-reproduction-as-prisoners-dilemma

An elegant solution to all the male crisises, embryonic sex selection. https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/the-y-chromosome-is-dysgenic

Men commit far more crime than women, they are more prone to diseases and they live shorter lives.

There may be more variation in men's IQ scores and they are more common in STEM, so we would certainly need some men for new discoveries and the like but what is the need for 1:1 sex ratio?

Most people don't work on intellectual tasks in civilization which need constant innovation and incredible time spent on them with a singular focus. Most jobs are mundane and of maintaince variety. We can just have few men which work on hard research type jobs where vast majority of population is women. Maybe with lack of men female researchers would lead. Besides if super intelligence arrives we may not need men working at these jobs at all.

This would solve the incel problem since men are rarer, this would solve the problem of dangerous men preying on women.

Note I am not serious here, but talking about this hypothetical seems like fun. It does seem obviously wrong but I can't pinpoint any specific moral principle it might violate.

Surely there is something wrong with this argument but what is it? It seems fine from an purely utalitarian perspective.

I agree life would be a lot better for men in a world where the sex ratio was 2 or 3 women for every man. Possibly worse for women, though. Somewhere out there there is a ratio which maximizes everyone's welfare and happiness. Given that mankind is a tournament species, I wouldn't be surprised if that ratio was something north of 1 woman for every 1 man.

Anyway, how would an embryonic sex selection policy be enforced? In a world where there are 3 women for every 1 man, lots of people would prefer to have sons.

It seems fairly obvious to me that a ratio that resulted in the total normalization of multiple women sharing one man would result in even more winner-takes-all type outcomes in the sexual market, not some kind of utopia where every man gets two concubines.

(Legally enforced monogamy is a social technology that makes life better for males because it papers over the worst outcomes of unmanaged natural sexual competition. This much should be obvious given the last hundred years of western civilization. In the present day we're still operating on the fumes left over from those norms, and clearly there wouldn't be anything like them left in 3:1 world.)

It seems fairly obvious to me that a ratio that resulted in the total normalization of multiple women sharing one man would result in even more winner-takes-all type outcomes in the sexual market, not some kind of utopia where every man gets two concubines.

FWIW I attended one of those gifted scholar programs and for whatever reason the sex ratio was 2 girls for each guy. As far as I know, nobody had a harem but most of the guys had a girlfriend if they wanted one. Even including a lot of guys who wouldn't stand much of a chance in a typical university or high school setting. I don't know if this would translate in the situation of a society wide lopsided sex ratio, but I am pretty sure a lot would depend on social norms.

I recall reading that in the 1930s, there was a huge man shortage in Germany (owing to World War I) and the Nazis encouraged single women, in effect, to become concubines in an effort to raise birth rates.

Girls mature faster, so I suspect age cutoffs make a big difference in why so many of those programs are majority female.

And of course, there's a simple low-cost way to do this... fight more wars. That was the traditional way society's removed their excess males, and it would be a huge strategic asset for America or any other 1st-world country if we could treat soldiers as expendable rather than a huge national tragedy every time a single grunt dies.

So arrange for combat by tournament to resolve international disputes. Use large hoplite armies recruited for one time cash payments, fighting on glorified football fields.

Idiots aren't useful as soldiers in modern warefare. Has been so since at least WWI, but probably even going back to 1776 you mostly could not have low-intelligence soldiers. The risk of them being near firearms or explosives simply outweighs any physical benefit of them carrying stuff around for you.

There are plenty of accounts of Russia using, uh, troops of questionable ability in the ongoing Ukraine War, which seems "modern" enough for me. I can't make claims on the efficacy of the approach, though, nor do I think accounts I end up hearing are unbiased.

In case anyone reading doesn't know. In the 1960s they rounded up low IQ people and sent them to Vietnam. So they could benefit from military service.

Turns out low IQ people are terrible at modern combat. Whatever quickness or coordination it takes, they don't got it.

I think this would be a huge improvement if it was done moderately and selectively. That is, take the people at the very bottom socioeconomic classes (mostly young unwed mothers), and offer them a financial incentive to choose daughters over sons. Then we end up with, say, 51% of babies being born female, compared to the present situation of 51% male. And that 2% would come from the demographics most likely to commit crime and get into trouble, so changing them to female would massively reduce those risk factors.

Unfortunately I think the people most likely to voluntarily choose this would be upper class liberal women, and that would just be a disaster. Even more girl boss feminist women!

You could also speculate about some fascist government forcing it on everyone, to the point where we end up like 75% female or even more. As a guy I'll admit it sounds like a fun sex fantasy, but... I suspect this would cause some horrible consequences down the line (the women would end up fighting with each other and not cooperate at all in running society).

I think this will would improve things for a generation or so, but likely increasing the fraction of women in classes which reproduce unplanned will increase their fertility.

One juvenile delinquent can easily impregnate a dozen 16yo's, if there are no competitors, after all.

While everything seems to work better with slightly more females than males, I strongly expect that would break down long before reaching a supermajority.

Knowledge workers constitute more of a privilege in modern society than they would have thousands of years ago. Yeah you still had “philosophers” back then, but subsistence labor was still much more prescient and important for the days ahead and was harder to come by. Even today, “all societies are only 3 meals away from anarchy.”

You probably need a lot of men to produce just a few geniuses, so if you want to keep the discovery rate as is, you may not be able to reduce the male population all that much. Also, you might also upset some of the women who wouldn't like the lack of men, so some negative hedons there.

In terms of the moral principle violated, however, I think the small matter of forcing your vision of reproduction on billions of non-consenting people would be the main one!

If you can get everyone to agree to it though, have at it – I'll even sign your petition.

You probably need a lot of men to produce just a few geniuses, so if you want to keep the discovery rate as is, you may not be able to reduce the male population all that much.

Oh, ASI will do all that for us, right? Also solves the "but who will do the heavy lifting manual labour jobs?" since robots will then be advanced enough to do the drudge work.

If we have ASI, all the motivations for this are moot. Crime is impossible, disease doesn't exist, everyone lives forever. Or everyone is dead, women and men alike.

Everyone being dead would solve the Sex Wars, right enough.

I've never read it, but I think Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold covers the idea of a single-sex world, this time where it's all men-only.

Seems reasonable at first pass but I think you end up with a coordination problem. How do you decide who gets to have the male child and thus have their genes highly represented in the next generation?

If you normalise sex-selective IVF for white normies, families wanting two children will have one of each and most of the families wanting one child will choose a girl. I suspect the same is true of black babymamas and well-assimilated Asians.

The problem is that you preferentially need to remove the bottom 20% of males to get the benefits of @Testing's idea, whereas this policy would preferentially remove above average males.

Make life socially a lot tougher for male children. This will result in 45th trimester self-abortions, concentrated among the bottom quintile of men.

Making life socially tougher only removes the bottom quintile if you define it tautologically. You'll remove those who are least socially adept within every stratum, not the least adept overall.

You could do welfare/tax incentives for girl children only.

most of the families wanting one child will choose a girl

What led you to this conclusion?

Media coverage makes three arguments for a mild daughter preference in the modern rich world:

  • When US IVF clinics offer sex selection at no or trivial extra cost, most patients choose girls. (Patients who explicitly seek out sex selection and are willing to pay a premium for it are mostly non-whites with a cultural preference for boys).
  • Adoption agencies say boys are harder to place than girls, and are able to extract more money from adoptive parents who get a healthy girl than they do from parents who get a healthy boy.
  • Last children skew female, suggesting that couples who have a girl are satisfied but couples who have a boy are more likely to try for a girl.

In the west it is an issue where people lie on surveys because "no preference" is definitely the politically correct answer (except for families with one child preferring the opposite sex for the second - "one of each" remains an acceptable, and common, preference for two-child families), but see for example this Korean poll showing a dramatic, recent shift in Korean preferences, with people now openly preferring daughters in surveys.

There is a lot of discussion about mechanism, but my suspicion is the dominant one is that most parents in cisHajnal societies have an own-sex preference, coupled with the feminist norm that having children is something women should make the decisions about.

but see for example this Korean poll showing a dramatic, recent shift in Korean preferences, with people now openly preferring daughters in surveys.

I guess that it's childfree people are saying this in a poll, instead of actually producing daughters.

The benefits of his idea have nothing to do with gene quality. It has only to do with positional status. The idea is just to make men rare so women are more desperate. You don't need to ensure the men are "high quality" -- what could that even mean? As long as the policy isn't making men worse each generation in a noticeable way, it should be fine.

This would be a society where girls are the desired sex and boys are the undesirable one. If we look at that in the real world, what you get is:

(a) Sex-selective abortion. In gender-flipped world, this means if you get pregnant with a boy, you abort it and keep trying for that girl. (b) Skewed sex ratios, which is the point of the experiment. Parents want girl children, boys are a mistake. We see places where that plays out. See China in the one child policy era, where the preference for boys meant that there were not enough women to go round when these boys grew up. (c) Scarcity will not mean the scarcer sex now becomes high-status and desirable. The preference for sons meant that even where daughters were scarce, women were not given high-status due to that scarcity:

The male-skew in India's sex ratio has increased since the early 20th century. In 1901 there were 3.2 million fewer women than men in India, but by the 2001 Census the disparity had increased by more than a factor of 10, to 35 million. This increase has been variously attributed to female infanticide, selective abortions (aided by increasing access to prenatal sex discernment procedures), and female child neglect. It has been suggested that the motivation for this selection against female children is due to the lower status and perceived usefulness of women in India's patriarchal society.

Your "one man for every ten women" world would not be "now even the most ugly, loser incel can have his pick of women", it would be "oh dear, you're having a boy? sorry to hear that" for every pregnancy.

We are talking past each other. What are you even talking about? Your "oh dear sorry to hear that" is just an emotive distraction. Using 'status' to refer to 'children as status trophies' is completely alien to the conversation. It might as well be off-topic. In your hypothetical world, you think men are so low status that no woman would ever want to have sex with one, and the mens' sperm would just be siphoned for IVF?

Status and quality here refer to 'husbands as status trophies' and with scarcer men of course their status would go up. This specific thread is about whether it is even necessary for the male minority to have 'desirable genes.' I argue that merely making men scarce would be enough to offset the hypergamous instinct.

'husbands as status trophies' and with scarcer men of course their status would go up

Unless we start breeding men like thoroughbred horses, and who knows what might be the rule in the hypothetical society, scarce trash is still trash. Let me ask the people complaining about the lack of ability for men to get wives: would you hold your nose and marry a meth addict obese trailer trash woman to have kids with, on the grounds that "this is all I can get", or would you hold out for something better?

Easy, its a lottery.

Then you'd breed unusually lucky people, I guess that could work.

I don't mean this as an attack on you: "Breeding lucky people" sounds like the kind of phrase LessWrong.com would call "a confusion"

The Pierson's Puppeteers tried that, hoping the luck would rub off on them. Didn't work out as they intended.

It's a reference to the scifi Ringworld series.

Larry Niven's gonna have to sue somebody.

Personally you just convince the existing feminists/misandrists to not have male children. Taking it one step further, you could offer to-be-single-mothers incentives for aborting sons, which is morally equivalent anyways. I'm the same vein, you can institute a policy of doctors spending relatively more time caring for female infants in neonatal care, and pushing harder for male children to participate in extreme sports and dangerous behavrior. Heading into pubescence, advertising and subsidizing potentially-lethal behaviors to boys would also work.

[Obviously this is all highly immoral, but I think this is a problem soluble to engineering solutions.]

I'm laughing because guys, this is already happening in parts of the world for women. So if you want to know what the world of skewed sex ratios would be like, you can just look around!

Son preference causes parents to utilize sex-selective abortion to ensure they have their preferred number of sons. The availability of abortion allows parents to abort female fetuses until they get pregnant with a male fetus, leading to a disproportionate amount of female feticide. Although female infanticide, the intentional killing of already-born girls, also occurs in India, research indicates abortion has become exceedingly more prevalent to determine the gender of children. In India, upwards of 1 million fetuses are sex-selectively aborted each year in India out of an estimated total of 16 million abortions in 2015. Additional research shows that the selective abortion of girls increased from the 1980s to the 2000s. Although sex-selective abortion is widely practiced in India, as evidenced by the abnormal SRB of 110, it is illegal to have an abortion based solely on the gender of the fetus. Abnormal sex ratios cause various problems for a country due to a shortage of women, as there will not be enough women for men to marry. One study projected a female deficiency of 6.8 million in India by 2030.

After birth, son preference results in health inequities for women and girls because parents prioritize the well-being of their sons over their daughters. Son preference causes unusually high mortality in female infants and girls.110 Parents are more likely to seek out and provide medical care for sick sons rather than sick daughters.

...In addition to mortality, girls in India experience health disorders and conditions at much higher rates than boys because of a lack of care. For instance, 54% of girls aged 15–19 were anemic, compared to 29% of boys in the same age range. Researchers have also found that son preference also increased the rate of stunting among girls. These outcomes occur because Indian girls often receive fewer calories and less nutritious food than boys. One study on nutrition in India found that, among breast-feeding children below the age of 2, girls were 15% less likely to receive supplemental milk-based solid foods, and 21% less likely to receive valuable meat, fish, or eggs. Girls were also 7% more likely to be malnourished than boys, demonstrating the nutrition disparity among children stemming from gender discrimination.

Ah, gentlemen. 'Gosh wow, what would this unprecedented thought experiment look like in reality? We can only speculate!'

Yes, we all know about son preference in india and china-- and that's why we're discussing installing an artificial daughter-preference in the western world. Tilting the gender ratio away from women has the unintended but in-retrospect obvious effect of increased the demand for and therefore power of the remaining women in the daughter-preference countries, so now male mottizens are considering how to encourage the opposite preference in their own societies to eliminate male competitors and increase their own social power. Obviously that would be terrible and unethical because infanticide, including abortion, is bad, but speaking from a purely self-interested perspective it makes perfect sense.

the demand for and therefore power of the remaining women in the daughter-preference countries

Buddy, when people are still burning women for bride-prices, I don't think we can say "women there are scarce and so have power".

It's really amusing to read all you guys claiming you are being so terribly repressed and oppressed by the new women-first social paradigm, where your major complaint is "I can't get a date" and not "my in-laws will murder me for not handing over more money".

The woman who were burned obviously got a bad deal, but the women remaining had more power than they otherwise would have thanks to their scarcity. That doesn't mean they were powerful in an absolute sense, but it's not necessary to prove that they were to still believe culling younger generations of males to increase the relative power of the older generation of males.

It's really amusing to read all you guys claiming you are being so terribly repressed and oppressed by the new women-first social paradigm, where your major complaint is "I can't get a date" and not "my in-laws will murder me for not handing over more money".

You are clearly engaging with my argument in bad faith if you think anything you said in the paragraph is at all relevant to this discussion. I can tell you very badly want to rehash the "are men or women more oppressed" argument but even if you could prove your side of that argument to everyone's satisfaction, it wouldn't counter anything the other posters have to say about the effects of enforcing artificial scarcity.

We've also done all of those.

The first one is a gimme. Of course, they don't have female children either.

The second one is already law in Blue areas (some nations take it a bit further and only make it illegal if the child is female- it's sold as an anti-Muslim thing, but the incentives align).

The third one is likely already the case for Women are Wonderful reasons.

The fourth one is war-as-population-control (re: white feathers of WW1).

I don't understand your comment. Yes, we've implemented policies similar to the policies I propose for obtaining a lower male/female ratio. That's my point. Your comment has the tone of a counterargument but doesn't actually oppose anything I said.

I don't think I'd want to implement this sort of move unless we had our robot factories up and running.

Maintenance of advanced civilization requires a lot of back-breaking work, constantly, day in and day out.

Fixing roads, disposing of waste, farming, butchering, building construction, fixing cars and heavy machinery, fighting fires, and running and maintaining electrical wires (lowkey, the most important one is that last one).

These needs spike in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster. Natural disasters are not a solved problem.

There's going to be some baseline need for physically strong laborers just to maintain what we have, let alone push us forward.

Here's interesting stats I didn't know existed before:

"Physical strength required for jobs in different occupations."

It looks like "Medium Strength" occupations and above are the ones that really need male capabilities. So we're sitting at around 40% of jobs that will need males to fill them, on the physical side. Then some overage of that for the mentally demanding stuff too.

Not a lot of headroom to start reducing the male ratio below 50%.

"Oh but we can outsource a lot of our industry/labor intensive work."

That just shifts the problems elsewhere, not eliminates them. We already do that in the U.S., and there's still 35+% of jobs that need upper body strength to perform effectively. China did its one child policy and now has an excessive number of males... which we get a benefit from by buying their labor at a discount.

That can't last.

Historically, I think the actual solution was always to create 'tiers' of males. In short, expendables and non-expendables.

So you have one class that is basically or literally enslaved, and was expected to die early after a hard, miserable life. That would reproduce only at the will of their betters to ensure a consistent supply of such labor to maintain the lifestyles of the rest.

Then the upper class, where the male-female ratio WAS much more favorable to those males.

That 'solves' your problem of needing males to do the work that upholds society, whilst also keeping the 'problem' males on a short leash, and giving the upper-class males a favorable gender ratio.

I'm very skeptical that women couldn't do any of those jobs, indeed there are some who do most of them now. Raw physical strength isn't that needed in modern society what with all the tools and hydraulics we have. And even so wouldn't that just let young uneducated men command a premium? Even at a ratio of 75% women to 25% men I'd still expect there to be plenty men to do all those. You'd have less young men working at Fast food or retail but it'd work out fine because they'd have more gainful employment. 25% men is easily enough to fill those jobs because very few jobs these days really require raw strength.

very few jobs these days really require raw strength.

This seems obscenely optimistic.

Even driving an Amazon truck will require some amount of raw strength on occasion.

Moving furniture around the house, let alone between houses.

Trimming trees, installing windows, changing tires, just dozens of systems where physical strength is a massive bonus when interacting with them.

Just because most humans aren't working on farms these days doesn't mean there are a ton of jobs which demand the physical strength, which we all pretty much rely on.

But that's kind of my point? 25% of men are plenty to do the jobs that need doing and most of those jobs women can do as well. There's really only a handful of jobs that require enough strength women actually can't do. Plenty of women can drive Amazon trucks and change tires.

I don't think they are.

Everything is interconnected and degradation in one part of the system will propagate.

You can get that 25% of men to do the core, indispensable jobs but there's still so much infrastructure built on top of that which needs maintenance.

Something is likely to give.

Is it your opinion that women can't do maintenance work? If there was such a shortage of men I think the free market would raise wages enough to find enough people.

It is my opinion that any maintenance work that requires much spatial reasoning and physical/brute force to complete is just far more efficiently done by a male than a female of 'equal' training.

I have watched women try to change a tire. While I don't doubt many could be trained up to complete the work 'quickly' with the proper tools... the steps required to jack the car up, force over-tightened nuts, remove the old tire and position the new one, and then physically tighten the nuts sufficiently, in the proper order, are easily done twice as fast by a dude with median male physical capabilities.

There's that famous examination of grip strength where only the very strongest females are actually able to compete with the overall weakest males.

The average guy in his 70's is stronger than most women in their 20's. The gap is absurd.

Its not hard to extrapolate from there that most women won't be suited for most physical tasks that the average dude completes.

"Physical strength required for jobs in different occupations."

According to this link, carrying 1lbs of weight at all times qualifies for "medium work"... my clothing weighs more than that...

Scroll to the actual list of occupations under that category.

It includes, non-exhaustively:

  • Automotive service technicians and mechanics
  • Construction laborers
  • Water and wastewater treatment plant and system operators
  • Landscaping and groundskeeping workers
  • Refuse and recyclable material collectors
  • Industrial machinery mechanics

The categorization is due to the fact that those jobs would "occasionally" require lifting of "26–50 pounds".

Whereas in order to classify as 'light' work, it never requires lifting that much.

I suspect that much of that can be handled. Workloads adapting for lifting smaller weights at a time where before the weights were as large as men could afford to regularly lift; using more teamwork; employing the stronger women who can actually lift 50 pounds.

So we're taking an efficiency/productivity hit since now entire industries has to be designed around standards based on what slightly above-average women/teams of women can do.

And we can expect a much higher injury rate which means more downtime, and higher medical costs to boot.

Women are just not outfitted for heavy, repetitive labor.

Although this also means exceptionally strong laborers will command quite a premium.

Powered exoskeletons (sorry, physical assistance devices) are advancing quite rapidly already. A lack of cheap strong labourers might encourage that further, and even decrease injuries long term.

Until we have robots that can build other robots, this is all still founded on the need for some core of strong physical laborers who can boostrap the rest.

And the powered exoskeletons we do have (forklifts, earth movers, cranes, etc.) are still overwhelmingly operated by males.

And finally, in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster, when electricity and fuel are hard to come by, humans with physical strength are an absolutely critical resource to kickstarting rescue and recovery efforts.

This appears to me to be like the thing with "economically viable oil fields". If we run out of economically viable oil fields, we don't run out of oil. We just move on to the next most viable oil fields. Similarly, many jobs appear to employ primarily men at the moment because a) women are less efficient and currently not economically viable; b) many of those jobs are shitty and men complain less about them. That doesn't show that women are physically unable to perform those jobs.

There would be some productivity hit, but I struggle to see how the market that can afford to pay so many people to do so many vastly less fundamental bullshit jobs couldn't absorb that hit without total society collapse.

I mean, we could probably take a look at the economic productivity of given nations who lost some significant portion of their male population in a short period of time.

Like, say, after a war.

We usually do indeed see the female population shift in to cover some of the shortfall.

Somehow I doubt that shift actually covered all the missing labor, and more likely certain less critical services were left to languish in the meantime.

More likely, I'd expect the aforementioned wage premium for strong laborers to encourage men to do more work so as to make up some of the difference.

As I said, I suspect there's a baseline hard laborer requirement needed to maintain the workings of civilizations, and as long as a society is barely above that line it can keep advancing.

I do not know where that baseline would be. I honestly do not want to find out.

Look, there's constant attempts to get women into the trades. I see it all the time.

Women do start. Single moms, married women, lesbians. Only the dykes make it(and this is what the ones who make it call themselves). Not necessarily she-hulks.

The idea that the sort of eugenics nerds who want to calculate the optimal male:female ratio in the blind hopes that will get them into the top 75% of males in terms of reproductive sex are going to win a fertility contest with the people who......don't do those things is what's wrong with it.

Well it certainly isn't practically feasible. I am not arguing on that. It's more of an argument against eugenics, most people who consider themselves eugenicists would say there is something wrong with this but not normal eugenics. (Ignoring for the moment the obviously evil state repression which would be required for actually implementing eugenics)

I am thinking what is morally wrong with this plan or is it even wrong? Provided you can somehow convince everyone to follow it, should you? One poster pointed out that this can lead to demonization of men which can be a super small minority. That is one moral problem.

I also posted this because this seemed like the type of policy which would be supported by the most radical of feminists and incels both. Which I find pretty comedic.

Society runs on the energy we harvest from young men during the competition to find who reproduces. We run that cohort at any problem we have, and we can afford to lose most of them in any given generation. If you invert that pyramid, so that there need be no competition for reproduction, you don't have a military. Which means your carefully constructed eugenics program now belongs to anyone who didn't do that shit. None of those men reproduce, and the hypothetical feminists who you think might support it would be the Handmaids of whichever outside power retained a slush fund of young men.

The problem with this is that males become a kind of elite celebrity class, where the average male will have higher social status than the average female. Women would probably get jealous at this state of affairs. Many women would think, "why couldn't I have been born a man?" It wouldn't look like a feminist utopia.

I legitimately think that female envy (which is what drove Western Feminism) requires something of a low-status male slave class to rule over. Similarly, humans only think themselves rich when they have poorer neighbors to compare themselves with.

From this perspective, the humane solution to female emancipation is something like male p-zombies. Of course, that would require a Big Lie, so is it really humane?

Similarly, humans only think themselves rich when they have poorer neighbors to compare themselves with.

But do people really desire this? I would say the evidence points to people in general wanting to live around and interact with people in their own economic class, not live as a king among the poors.

I think women looking for men are mostly similar to this, they might want the best mate they can get but are perfectly fine with having a mate roughly as good as their peers.

But do people really desire this? I would say the evidence points to people in general wanting to live around and interact with people in their own economic class, not live as a king among the poors.

America is unusual among societies with relatively high inequality in that the "rich" class arranges things to make it easier to avoid poors 100% of the time, not to make it easier to hire servants with the tradeoff of only being able to avoid the other poors 90% of the time. I don't know if this is because America has a cultural norm of fake egalitarianism which makes people want servants less, or if it is because America is worse at policing such that people are willing to make more tradeoffs to avoid poors.

This is because of measures designed by real egalitarians ostensibly to help the poor, such as minimum wage and nanny taxes. Of course, if you can't hire poors to work for you (unless you're Elon Musk rich and not just two-doctor household rich), you're best off avoiding them entirely.

Two doctor couples in the UK routinely hire a full-time nanny and a part-time housekeeper, and we have less inequality and higher taxes than you do, so there is something other than taxes or wage compression preventing Americans hiring servants.

Two doctor households in Texas- or one doctor households- regularly hire nannies and housekeepers. Of course, we have very high inequality by US standards. But a cleaning lady once or even twice a week merely requires one to be middle class if it's a priority, or upper middle if it isn't.

Hiring a cleaning lady once or twice a week is hiring a contractor, either under the table (cheap, illegal, but negligible chance of punishment) or through some agency which handles the formalities (expensive and legal). That's different than having a servant or servants who only work for you.

It's not "fake egalitarianism", it's a genuine egalitarianism that a lot of our "elites" and "elite aspirants" think is fake and this discontinuity is a major driver of tensions in the culture war.

When affluent liberals talk about how we need illegal immigrants because they do the jobs Americans wont. What they are saying in effect is that they don't think that people who pack meat or clean toilets should earn American level wages. To put it another way, they don't think they should have to pay "the help". They are saying that what they want is not employees but rather an underclass who they can exploit. And because there is a genuine norm of egalitarianism in the US this desire for an underclass is interpreted by many as a deliberate act of disrespect towards not just the class of people who pack meat and clean toilets, but towards the entire American experiment.

Illegal aliens do not make less than native citizens working the same jobs, but are more willing to work those crappy jobs to begin with.

The law of one price is strong, but the question is whether those crappy jobs would pay more (to attract US citizens) if illegal immigrants were not available.

Some of them, perhaps, but others hire mostly those legally required to work(criminals), which will not push for much wage increase.

In my experience the companies that will hire illegals tend to be less than scrupulous when it comes to things like counting hours and I have yet to receive a satisfactory explanation for why the law of supply and demand supposedly does not apply when it comes to the supply of labor.

We are kind of talking past each other. It is true that the rich do not desire to interact with the poor. But it is also true that a person prefers to be rich than to be poor. When you think about it, that's a little crazy! You'd think a persons preference would be something like "I want a washing machine" but actually, people prefer to be rich than to be poor.

I think it means we do desire to know ourselves to be Kings. We just don't want to be the only King -- how lonely!

Women would probably get jealous at this state of affairs. Many women would think, "why couldn't I have been born a man?" It wouldn't look like a feminist utopia.

They already say all that. Why should we actually give them the low-status male slave class? Go, 1/10 gender ratio fanfiction made reality!

Why should we actually give them the low-status male slave class?

Who is "we" here? If you're posting this then you can just not give women what they want.

The rest of society will just give them what they want though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle - In a sexually reproducing species, the ratio tends towards 1:1.

https://malmesbury.substack.com/p/the-talk-a-brief-explainer-of-sexual - "sexual reproduction is virtually necessary to evolve into a complex fully-fledged multicellular organism."

So we're stuck with this, unless you think (a) we can institute a totalitarian surveillance regime to control the number of male and female babies people have, and (b) we can transcend biology and attain the purity of the blessed machine. Me, I'm not so sure.

How hard can it be to switch human reproduction to parthenogenesis? Then there would be no need for fertile male humans at all. You could keep some breeding stock of Mark I humans in third-world countries, just in case. You could take some of their sons, sterilize them and raise them for male-specific tasks, the way people have been doing with cattle for millennia.

It sounds like a recipe for severe inbreeding.

You can't have inbreeding if children have only one parent (they are a clone of). If you mean that women with heritable diseases will inevitably pass them to their daughters, then yes. But if you have the technology to force egg cells to form with a complete set of chromosomes, you are probably advanced enough to engineer the diseases out of the mother's embryo.

Unlike the harem world, men probably wouldn't vote for that one.

What makes you say that? Men vote for the faction that seeks to trans their kids all the time.

And why do you think that is?

Also you are completely correct about fisher. In a free society if a such a cultural movement arose women who are not selecting against male embryos would gain an enormous evolutionary advantage. The genes which make people not want to abort male babies would propagate and this society would go back to normal.

It's probably trivial to write a simulation to prove this.

Maybe it would take baby vats or something like that to keep the society going.

Any future where goverment is this powerful and uses it for such pointless bullshit is a complete dystopia. This assumes a scenario where very different cultural movements have won out and people are choosing to do this.

It does seem obviously wrong but I can't pinpoint any specific moral principle it might violate.

Chesterton's Fence is the obvious one: the sex ratio, and the genes that cause it, affect so many things that its impossible to predict the effects. Doing such a big change without being able to predict the effects is imprudent.

Even so, I don't really think Inceldom is a problem big enough to justify 'removing' men. If Incels lives really were so bad, they are fully capable of killing themselves. Given that most haven't killed themselves, I think it shows that even for them the issue of being an Incel isn't a life-or-death one. There are counterarguments, such as suicide != never existing, but at that point we are going into Schopenhauer anti-natalist territory and that is a bigger question.

It seems fine from an purely utalitarian perspective.

Two very common issues with utilitarianism as practiced is the issue of calculating utilions, it's very non-trivial and I'd argue practically impossible at scale, and the fact that the world is so complex that calculating n-th order effects quickly becomes practically impossible for tons of activities, especially the more granular you get. I think those two issues are often why utilitarianism, where is a very good heuristic to use when pair with others, often morphs into horror and/or 'I wanted to do this anyway and I can fabricate a post-hoc justification for it using utilitarianism" when it's the sole "guide" or morality or action.

But weren't the genes selected for in an era when mortality was a lot higher? Especially for males? A 50/50 sex ratio at birth might be quite different after a couple of decades of low intensity war and hunting at maturity.

I doubt the 50/50 ratio comes from "male mortality being higher than female mortality." It comes from the fact that the most successful males are just so damn successful that from an expected value calculation, gambling on being a male (from behind the veil of ignorance) is worth it.

This. Every individual in the next generation will have half of their genes from a male and half from a female, so [i]ndividual selection favors equal parental investments in male and female offspring. Obligatory link to the sequences.

Chesterton's Fence is the obvious one: the sex ratio, and the genes that cause it, affect so many things that its impossible to predict the effects. Doing such a big change without being able to predict the effects is imprudent.

Chesterton's Fence doesn't apply here because we know why the 1:1 sex ratio exists - evolutionary equilibrium requires an equal chance of having grandchildren between boyparents and girlparents - and the reason serves no human purpose. At a more basic level Chesterton's Fence only applies to man-made fences, not facts of nature.

This may be my understanding of biology being limited, but while the biological tendency for the 1:1 sex ratio is well understood my understanding is that there are a lot of genes involved in actually causing the human roughly 50/50 sex ratio. My concern is more that messing with the genes could cause unintended side effects due to their, and their interactions, complexity.

Who suggested to mess with genes? Selective abortion is already long here with us.

I mean, Chesterton's Fence in its original form refers to something that was put up with a purpose but whose purpose has been forgotten. Technically, that doesn't apply to things without telos, but the basic conservative principle underlying it does. The lack of greater-than-OMG-available-energy particle collisions on Earth doesn't seem to be purposeful, but I'd still recommend against ending it until one knows what will happen (doing it in space would appear safer).

The conservative principle here actually is satisfied in the case of "substantial excess of women"; male mortality from combat has reached very high levels in the past, such that there have been large female excesses without apparent issues. This is why the objection I made was a purely "it looks like the political consequences of this could be dystopian" one, because doing this with women's suffrage would translate to full political matriarchy, where values that are mostly only held by men are totally shut out of policy, and AFAIK that is unprecedented with perhaps some hunter-gatherer exceptions. I suppose the social justice movement does try its best to centre women's values, so it's kind of a prototype, but it's not a full society, and it's not exactly reassuring.

(I hate staring into this abyss.)

Given that most haven't killed themselves, I think it shows that even for them the issue of being an Incel isn't a life-or-death one.

Being involuntarily celibate is a current state, not necessarily a permanent one. I imagine a non-negligible chunk of them would kill themselves if they somehow knew that they would never have sex/kids (I'd strongly consider it), but that's not actually a thing you can know for sure.

Black people commit more crime than white people, but you will not make similar suggestions about them.

It'd be a bit tricky to do that via gamete selection.

Also, I seem to recall we've had a few people here make such suggestions; whence your confidence?

There is actually a very fundamental reason why the sex ratio is 50:50!

Yes, and that is based on individual natural selection.

The thing is, we are no longer aligned to the imperatives of natural selection. We use contraceptives. We build corrective glasses and synthesize thyroxine for the likes of me rather than letting natural selection deal with them. We have escaped from the yoke of our blind idiot god. Why should we keep this tenet when we have broken so many others?

Let's give it a few years lol

The rumours of the death of God may have been greatly exaggerated.

A fun shower thought I had:

In competitive videogames, "smurfing" is a pejorative for a more-skilled player fooling skill-based matchmaking systems to play (and win) against a less-skilled player. This is seen as a kind of stolen valor: you only look impressive because of unfair comparisons!

I think its interesting that we do not respond emotionally similarly to hypergamous norms: Chad is basically smurfing the ranked queue, no?

If I caught myself describing romance like this I’d go ahead and remove myself from the gene pool.

Actually, incels are the real high-status and valorous winners because only they have the moral fortitude to survive being losers.

I think when encountering Chad "smurfing" in person, i.e. someone from a high-status environment coming to a lower-status one to fish for girls (or even just coming there without the overt intent to steal mates), men did react with hostility historically. The city boy among the country boys; the student from an elite school among the kids from a merely "decent" one, etc.

That's interesting. Do you have any examples? Also, if those men react with hostility, isn't that just simple male competitiveness? What I was talking about was more "society and social norms as a whole" e.g. including other high-status men who think that behavior is unfair.

Furthermore: historically, the purpose of monogamy was to marginalize hypergamous norms. In strong monogamous societies, "smurfing" is not possible, because the society is trying hard to equalize mens' status.

Rather, I mean: it should seem that society that acknowledges and strengthens hypergamous norms (e.g. by legalizing harems, codifying a virgin male underclass, etc.) is self-defeating: wouldn't they realize Chad is just smurfing? That it's all just positional?

So it would seem something primal about status is immune to this fairness instinct. Alternatively, hypergamous societies like this tend to never happen because people actually do feel it is unfair. I do not know.

E: Skill-based matchmaking is interesting because its an admission that high-skilled players are not entitled to high win rates in gameplay. I suppose that is fundamental difference.

Aren't there very few women promiscuous which have sex with chads? Most women have relatively few dating partners. The promiscuous women are selecting for superficial features since they are in for sex and pleasure. Normal women are just not having that much sex and are not available on dating apps since they are taken.

So it gives an appearance that all women are very shallow since only the very shallow women are available for dating.

Number of Partners Men (%) Women (%)
0 to 1 partner 29.8% 25.1%
2 to 4 partners 29.5% 34.6%
5 to 9 partners 19.3% 23.3%
10 or more partners 12.5% 9.5%

How would an incel uprising work in this context? Normal men and women are pairing up. Promiscuous women are choosing to have sex for pleasure instead of dating the bottom 20% since they don't have any societal pressure to do so.

If we lived in a gender reversed world lots of incels would indeed be having sex with female equivalent of chads who are readily available instead of getting in permanent relationship with ugly women.

In this gender reversed world, there would be few hot women who are satisfying lot of medicore men and there would be lot of fat women which are never picked.

This is not even a new thing by the way, even in 1800s there were still an lowerclass of men who never reproduced.

In places like Britain, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and the early United States, the rate of adults who lived to old age without having children was shockingly high—between 15% and 20%

Even then women were not dating poor men and preferred living alone than that.

The behaviour simply makes sense from game theory and evolutionary perspective.

I might be using "hypergamous norms" differently than usual. I don't mean in the sense that women are actually being promiscuous, only that they try to date out of their league. Also I didn't mention incel rebellions anywhere in this reply chain. Did you respond to the wrong comment?

The uprising thing was in another comment by you

You might call this "accelerationism but for the future incel uprising"

I assumed that by hypergamy you meant something close to the meme where there are ten women who are trying to date one man while rest of nine men are ignored.

Some women preferring to date men richer and more successful than them is a much weaker assertion.

That comment is about accelerationism, i.e. pushing for a different future. The idea is that pro-feminist solutions to fertility collapse are necessarily oppressive to men. Done correctly with the right technology though, the rebellion can be probably be prevented.

I mean, even if the top players think smurfing is lame (they are motivated by their competitiveness and do not desire weak opponents), there are still smurfs who are skilled enough to stomp on weak players and driven enough by the desire to simply win, no matter against whom, to do so.

I don't think the metaphor applies to men striving to get women anyway, because most men don't appear to be competitive with other men on this. They want a partner above some baseline level of beauty, and would take several if they can get away with it, but competing with other men is not a motivation. "Trophy wives" only appear to be a male status symbol among the very top elites, who appear to be pathologically driven to competition in as may small ways as possible.

Yes, I think that is another way to see it. "high-skill players are not entitled to high win rates" is a competitive attitude. Since mating is not competitive in this sense, Chad is in fact entitled to a harem.

In gaming it's more like "high-skill players are not entitled to infinite noobs to stomp". Noobs don't like getting stomped, and it doesn't seem to be good for long-term playerbase vitality. High-skill players can always have as high a winrate as they want against bots.

I think I recall variants of that meme in literature, although the initial examples that come to mind (The Great Gatsby, The Outsiders) are upper class boys gatekeeping the lower-class heartthrob from upper class girls.

Although I think it's also possible to see it as Chad smurfing the women: they go in assuming it's a fair matchmaking game, but he's hiding that he's got a separate account with lots of experience elsewhere, but is tired of losing all the time (the tyranny of PvP games: the average player loses half the time, and good matchmaking looks like everyone losing half the time). The classic story (I'm sure there are literary examples, but none come to mind) would tell you that he wasn't after true love, just using her for a cheap thrill.

That's closer to how I'd model it.

A hot, high status guy looking to get his rocks off can find a naive but physically attractive woman with self-esteem issues, and use his talents honed on much more selective girls to gas her up enough to bang him with relative ease. But the sheer truth of it is that being seen with her would detract from his status (and hurt his odds with the more selective girls) so its a bare, unvarnished fact of the universe that he will absolutely NEVER advance a relationship with her.

In a world where physical altercation isn't allowed, the girl's male family, and her other potential suitors, cannot actually slap the shit out of an interloper to discourage this. So males that can flex pure status and high verbal IQ have no real risk here, they don't have to fight their competition like deers locking antlers.

So I'd say the male-male competition aspect is narrowed by the fact that the only two factors you're allowed to compete on are pure attractiveness + status. The real challenge for getting laid is overcome the lady's defenses.

My comments about 'smurfing' are in the context of a female gaze, wherein girls choose according to the result of the ranked queue -- male competition.

"Chad is smurfing" is just a way to phrase the realization that hypergamous norms are positional. That is, any solution that attempts to do away with the suffering of loser men (through abortion, embryo selection, or just plain mass murder) is self-defeating. Chad is not impressive objectively (because "impressive objectively" is a contradiction). Chad is just smurfing the ranked queue.

That our moral intuitions are different about these two things shows us that my clever comments are just: cope.

The research-type jobs are certainly a problem. The blue collar jobs are a bigger problem. Even Houston, Houston, Do You Read had them done by women given exogenous testosterone, which is going to bring back the violence. The creation of a superintelligence as with Banks's Culture solves this, but only by making humanity pets.

And of course if we're taking something as silly as gender eugenics seriously, we have to take race eugenics (which is a lot more practical) more seriously. You know who is about as violent as white men? Black women. Though if men were to disappear I would also suspect they would be the best replacements for those blue-collar jobs.

You also need to consider the female disadvantages, some of which are simply the flip side of male disadvantages (such as a higher risk tolerance).

You know who is about as violent as white men? Black women.

I suspect that this is probably not true, at least when it comes to the more dangerous forms of violence that cause severe injuries and deaths. The male vs female difference when it comes to this stuff is so large that it makes racial differences seem small in comparison.

But correct me if I'm wrong.

I have seen women in the trades, and black women are not overrepresented as successful compared to women writ large. You know who is? White lesbians. There are tons of black women in stuff like dispatching, purchasing, parts houses, etc, but they’re not actually trades- they’re staff hired from the existing pool of functional but lower skilled labor.

I can't tell if this is an exceptionally well crafted troll effort or yet another exhibit of just how broken and toxically effeminate the culture of the liberal striver class has become. The warnings in CS Lewis' Abolition of Man reframed as imperatives. Forget making "men without chests" what we really need to do is make no men at all!

It'd be funny if there wasn't a vocal population who seem to genuinely think like this.

Surely there is something wrong with this argument but what is it? It seems fine from an purely utalitarian perspective.

This where the absence of luminaries like DavidFriedman, BarnabyCajones, Ame_Damnee, Et Al are most sorely felt. As one of their rants on different moral systems, reframing of sin as virtue, or the pernicious evils of utilitarian thinking is what this thread really needs.

From a purely utilitarian perspective Nazi medical experimentation on live prisoners was an unalloyed good as they greatly expanded our understanding of phenomena like Shock and Hypothermia. This understanding has, without doubt, saved many more lives than those experiments consumed. Now you can take this one of too ways, as an argument in favor Nazi style death camps. or as an argument against Utilitarianism. I take it as the latter. To me, utilitarianism looks like a philosophy that was specifically designed for the purpose of allowing high-functioning sociopaths to justify and excuse horrible behavior.

From a purely utilitarian perspective Nazi medical experimentation on live prisoners was an unalloyed good as they greatly expanded our understanding of phenomena like Shock and Hypothermia. This understanding has, without doubt, saved many more lives than those experiments consumed.

The hypothermia research was the rare exception of Nazi medical research in that it had actual value. Basically, it allows you to estimate how long a human can survive depending on the water temperature, which is useful because rescue crews thus know when they can stop searching. Obviously not all the people who was rescued in cold water after consultation of that chart owe their lives to it, people have rescued shipwrecked sailors long before the Nazis. I would say the marginal effect is that (1) you avoid rescuers losing their own lives due to a futile rescue and (2) you avoid opportunity costs of futile rescues -- if you know that all the people from ship A are dead, you can instead focus on rescuing people from ship B, even if it had a smaller crew. Rascher's freezing experiments have killed some 300 people. I think similar data could have been collected through ethical means, but obviously it would have taken longer.

Most of the Nazi medical research was much more dubious. Mengele would be a rather typical example, a murderous SS fuck who spend his spare time on torturing prisoners for his 'experiments'.

I can't tell if this is an exceptionally well crafted troll effort

It does read like something written by Dr. Strangelove.

I recall the Chinese did infant sex selection, and that it didn't require Nazi camps, merely incentives aligning the right way. Their efforts resulted in demographic horrors because they selected against female children, and women are the bottleneck for reproduction. I'd like to hear the actual arguments against OP's proposal without devolving into "that's Nazi shit", or else I would like to see actual Nazi shit such as proposals to expel Jews/blacks treated the same way.

Obviously it is an argument in favor of Nazi style death camps, minus the whole "killing 6 million Jews" bit. Your argument relies on conflating these things.

With regards to the OP, I have (only a little tongue-in-cheekly) argued in favor of various feminist "solutions" to low-fertility: gender ratio control like this poster suggests, and also taxation-based polygyny (see recent paper making the rounds on Rightwing Twitter). When I promote these, the purpose is to show that the solutions require horrendous measures.

You might call this "accelerationism but for the future incel uprising"

No it does not rely on conflation of those things.

It relies on the supposition that evil things are always evil, and that good things are always good. But like others here, you are so steeped in left-wing anti-western propaganda that you do not even see it.

Furthermore removing and replacing an approximate third of the US (never mind the world) population would quickly make "the whole killing 6 million Jews bit" look like rookie numbers.

minus the whole "killing 6 million Jews" bit

Minus? There are 16.5 million Jews in the world, getting rid of most men among them would hit that number pretty reliably.

From a purely utilitarian perspective Nazi medical experimentation on live prisoners was an unalloyed good as they greatly expanded our understanding of phenomena like Shock and Hypothermia. This understanding has, without doubt, saved many more lives than those experiments consumed.

I realize I'm going off topic here but the idea the Nazi medical experiments provided some amazing medical advances is a myth based on the just world fallacy. You're right about them helping us understand shock and hypothermia. However, most of their experiments were closer to macabre torture porn then proper science. The vast majority of their experiments weren't rigorous or documented enough to be of any use.

I don't like this tendency to insinuate that posters with outrageous theses must be trolling/dishonest. If this is not the place to discuss outrageous proposals at face value, what is? Moreover, to begin with, if it generates interesting discussion and the original proposer follows conversational decorum, does it even matter whether it's trolling? Your interlocutor might be honest; he might also internally laugh at you; he might also be a p-zombie and have no internal experience at all. If on the other hand the proposal is so offensive to you that you can't engage normally, that's on you.

does it even matter whether it's trolling?

I would argue that yes, it does matter. and that the failure to police bad actors is often one of the most visible manifestations of "toxic femininity". See Theodore Dalrymple's the rush from Judgment.

I did say in the post itself that I wasn't serious.

Note I am not serious here

I mostly wrote it to hear intresting moral arguments against it or for it.

I am not posting it to convince anyone to do it but because it's a good starting prompt for philosophy and a fun writing excercise.

I can't tell if this is an exceptionally well crafted troll effort or yet another exhibit of just how broken and toxically effeminate the culture of the liberal striver class has become. The warnings in CS Lewis' Abolition of Man reframed as imperatives. Forget making "men without chests" what we really need to do is make no men at all!

Incels often float the idea of getting rid of women once there are artificial wombs. I propose a competition: one country gets rid of their men, and the other their women. Which country wins?

I can't tell if this is an exceptionally well crafted troll effort

It's dated April 2, 2025, but it's possible that's a time zone issue and it is indeed a year-old April Fools post.

It's an argument against Utilitarianism only if you ignore 2nd-order effects. (This happens a lot with arguments against Utilitarianism.)

Take the extreme variant of the trolley problem, where a doctor has 5 sick patients who each need a different organ transplant. In the doctor's waiting room, there's a healthy patient. Should the doctor kill the healthy patient and use their organs to save the 5 sick people? After all, it'll be saving 5 lives at the cost of one; Utilitarianism demands that you kill the healthy person, right? It's exactly the same as pulling a lever on the train track to save 5 people, right?

... except no, because no one wants to live in a society where at any moment you can be righteously murdered for your organs. That's an insane way for a society to function. Everyone would be terrified all the time. No one would set foot in a hospital. There'd be constant revenge killings against doctors. Everyone who could afford bodyguards would hire them. Everyone would carry whatever weapons they could get their hands on. Society would collapse in about two days. The outcome is: you get no organ transplants, because you've destroyed the mechanisms that allowed for organ transplants in the first place.

Same thing with Nazi experimentation on live prisoners. The Utilitarian argument against it isn't just "the prisoners suffering is bad", it's that plus "if your society has a policy of experimenting on live prisoners, that generates a bunch of horrific problems", such as:

  • Significantly increased terror among the population
  • Dehumanisation of prisoners and any social group they're drawn from
  • Slippery slope to even less humane treatment of people
  • Slippery slope to expanding the number of valid targets
  • General breaking of bright lines around things like bodily autonomy, torture, etc

... so it's very much not an "unalloyed good", even leaving the suffering of the prisoners aside. (For that matter, even if we ignore 2nd-order effects, I'm not sure that the medical advances necessarily do outweigh the suffering of the prisoners! Then there's also the fact that there's no single unambiguous way to add up "greatest utility for the greatest number". You can absolutely have a version of Utilitarianism that prioritises additional utils for people at the bottom. And then, on top of that, there's no single way to convert pain/pleasure/satisfaction/whatever into utility; pain might have a much stronger contribution than pleasure. The weakness of Utilitarianism IMO is that it's inherently flexible and ambiguous like this.)

It might well be possible to construct a situation where Utilitarianism does give an unacceptable answer. But I don't think this is it. And typically, when these arguments go "Utilitarian says we should do X, which we can all agree has bad consequences" -- that's almost intrinsically self-defeating, because Utiliarianism is all about weighing up the consequences and minimising the badness!

Then there's also the fact that there's no single unambiguous way to add up "greatest utility for the greatest number". You can absolutely have a version of Utilitarianism that prioritises additional utils for people at the bottom. And then, on top of that, there's no single way to convert pain/pleasure/satisfaction/whatever into utility; pain might have a much stronger contribution than pleasure. The weakness of Utilitarianism IMO is that it's inherently flexible and ambiguous like this.

This is more than a weakness! It's simply impossible to meaningfully compare utility across individuals. It's a category error, like trying to convert the rupees you earn in the Legend of Zelda to USD: despite appearances, they're just not the same sort of thing. Utility is only meaningful in the context of a single agent (or, rather, in the context of each agent separately).

The generally accepted model is von Neumann-Morgenstern utility, which, notably, is invariant under positive affine transformations. For example, any given VNM utility function is equivalent to the same function multiplied by any positive value. A scenario that provides Alice 1000 utilons and Bob 100 is no different from one that provides Alice 100 and Bob 1000, as the scale is arbitrary and independent for each agent.

But even before that model was developed, economists have understood utility can't be meaningfully compared since 1932 at the latest. The 'serious' thinkers in the philosophy department are just engaging in long-debunked pseudo-science, as is their wont. But at least it's not the Labor Theory of Value?

And again, I feel like this is where absence of those luminaries is most sorely felt, because they were smarter and more articulate than I am, and would have a more clever and artful way of making this argument.

It's not about second order effects, or even third, or fourth order effects. It's about Nth order effects. And there is no realistic way for anyone to calculate Nth order effects unless they choose to go down the David Benatar route.

The dystopian take: We are moving dangerously close to the most radical feminist fantasies with this. Keep in mind that feminism seemingly needs to treat men as the outgroup to function, and that most women still identify as feminist. We live in a democracy. Reducing the ratio of men to women means increasing the political power of feminists. That scares me, because there seems to be no end to the slippery slope that ideology is currently on. If something is wrong in society, they blame men. If that doesn't solve it, then they blame men more. Increase their power and reduce the ability of men to organize against it, and we could see some truly dystopian shit.

Why not bar men from high-paying positions entirely? Birth just enough of them so there are people to do the hard and risky jobs, and let everything else be done by women. One man can impregnate hundreds of women after all, so even gradually reducing the male:female ratio to less than 2:10 should be more than sufficient to keep up the population. Any male politician speaking out against this trend can be efficiently cancelled by hordes of women and watch himself slowly lose influence.

You also mention that men are more common than women in STEM. But for several fields this is not true. Women outnumber men quite heavily in medicine and biology for instance, and if you look at science fields overall, women actually outnumber men overall. Also note that the link I have here is 6 years old. As far as I know, women have only moved further ahead of men in the past years. In spite of this, there is still a broad push to get even more women into higher education. I fail to see how a version of the current landscape actually dominated by women would not just result in women dominating academia completely. I can already see the argument: Men is only X% of the global population, so there should at most be X% men in any given degree. Of course if the male percentage is lower than X (or 0) this just goes to show that women are better.

Finally, I think you are misdiagnosing the incel and broader dating problems of modern societies. The culture promotes hedonism, women are taught to fear men, people spend less time in-person socializing than ever, and the way that men are encouraged to act is unattractive to women. Nothing about reducing the ratio of men to women actually fixes any of this. The addictive and convenient nature of social media and gaming means they will continue to be picked over social interaction. Men will still be brought up anxious and scared of approaching. Demonizing men will only be easier as you meet them less. Maybe women will lower their standards purely due to a lack of options, but I honestly wouldn't count on it. That seems more like a male thing to do.

Just in general, screwing with the ratio of men to women seems like a Chesterton's fence of monumental proportions. No one predicted that the one child policy of China and the resulting increase in the proportion of men would turn out as disastrously as it did, even though it seems obvious now. Your experiment would probably result in some very interesting insights into the human mind, whilst similarly blowing up society in spectacular and unexpected fashion.

Fun to think about though.

Birth just enough of them so there are people to do the hard and risky jobs, and let everything else be done by women. One man can impregnate hundreds of women after all, so even gradually reducing the male:female ratio to less than 2:10 should be more than sufficient to keep up the population.

That's more than twice as generous as Sally Miller Gearhart's proposal to maintain the proportion of men at 10% of the human race.

It's actually only 60% more generous.

Reducing the ratio of men to women means increasing the political power of feminists.

No, it doesn't. In fact, it's the reverse.

Remember, men provide, women select.

If less providers, selectors are now competing with each other and don't get to be as picky, (and each individual provider becomes more important), so the political power of selectors in aggregate decreases (a "seller's market"). If more providers, selectors get to be pickier (and providers are competing with each other more) so the political power of selectors increases (a "buyer's market").
This is socio-economics 101.

Right now, even with a rough 50/50 split, men are in surplus due to automation that uniquely affects that gender, and have been for the last 100 years- hence they have no power -> feminism. Communism is the same way, for that matter; too many (male) Russians and too little economic opportunity to sustain a democracy. Implications for China are obvious.

If we were able to automate women out of their jobs just as hard as we did men at the opening of the 20th century, or experienced a massive war where 20% of Western men were wiped out, politics would shift for a generation. As they had from 1945 to about 1990, which is also the reason you don't notice that 2020 is, socioeconomically, closer to 1900 than 1960 because the socioeconomic problems were merely hidden for that generation, and now that the surplus (in power for providers/sellers/men) is all gone they've come back with a vengeance.

Maybe women will lower their standards purely due to a lack of options, but I honestly wouldn't count on it.

It doesn't matter if they do or not. By increasing the number of women, and by lowering their political power without being able to partner up, you've increased the number that will settle to match the number of men. And that, empirically, is good enough.

By increasing the number of women, and by lowering their political power without being able to partner up, you've increased the number that will settle to match the number of men.

if you want someone you know despises you and only settled for you because the alternative was poverty, sure. You're still going to have adultery and affairs and all kinds of shenanigans, because you might be able to make Miss Susan marry Mr Thomas, but if Mr James is hotter or even just nicer to her, things will happen. Marriages where one party is lording it over the other that "I could have had my pick of anyone, I could have done better than you!" tend not to be the happiest. Maybe she'll just let it be water off a duck's back and put all her efforts into the kids while ignoring you. Maybe the Golden Age of British Murder will get a resurgence and there will be a lot of "suddenly, widows".

I don't see how a critical mass of women can't just force the men to do the essential job that require muscles. Guns are the great equalizer, so if you just don't give guns to the men (or let gunmen be the only high-status job available), you can force the new underclass to do hard labor through regulation. It wouldn't have to be total slavery either. Just make it so that producing goods is the only viable path forwards.

I guess I will have to concede that very specific jobs cannot be relegated to an underclass though. Your military and emergency services would probably still require men, and those men would likely have a lot of bargaining power.

Women that are both psychologically and physically fit for a job involving subjugating men through overwhelming violence appear to be very rare, even with guns as the equalizer. I suspect the number of men such a society could control would be too low to do all the hard labor, or else it would be the men in the military who would be the actual slavedrivers.

Remember, men provide, women select.

If less providers, selectors don't get to be as picky, (and each individual provider becomes more important), so the political power of selectors in aggregate decreases (a seller's market). If more providers, selectors get to be pickier, so the political power of selectors increases (a buyer's market). This is socio-economics 101.

@Bombadil is concerned, AIUI, about the possibility of a majority-feminist democracy removing a bunch of legal rights from men. You're using economic theorems that are founded on the assumption that both the buyer and seller are free citizens - that they have the option of walking away status quo ante. A slave can't walk away; his master (or, I suppose, mistress) can unilaterally torture him if he does not accept the deal, which tends to make his bargaining position pretty awful (and let's not get into the abuse of psychiatric drugs to remove his ability to refuse).

I personally, upon reading @Testing's OP, had more immediate/prosaic concerns, although still based on the "one person, one vote" point; the sex disparity in attitudes to liberty is huge (note that it mostly persists even for Red-coded oppression; this isn't just an artifact of the majority of women being Blue Tribe), and I'd worry about all the usual failure modes of hewing the legs from under liberty as a societal principle (including economic stagnation, for starters).

A slave can't walk away

Sure they can. But they don't, partially because there's no better deal to be found elsewhere. (Related: why don't women leave abusive husbands in 1860?)

The thing about one's group being in deficit is that it increases the benefits to defectors. Usually this means "pays a [higher/lower] wage if one is a [buyer/seller]", but it can be other things too, in particular political power.

For the last 100ish years, men have been the defectors, paying women higher and higher socioeconomic wages. They couch this in moral terms, but fundamentally it's just business, just like anti-slavery efforts (and democracy more generally) were back in their day.

Make the economic situation dire enough and people will literally fight to make themselves slaves. Communist countries are a pretty good object lesson in how that works.

We can debate the point that men are completely unnecessary in modern society (which is, in fact, a reasonable question to ask- as automation mostly replaces men, including suicide drone swarms); if they are, this won't work for exactly the reasons you stated. But if they are vital, then my point holds; I'll point to Western gynocracies' obsession with mass male immigration as a suggestion that they are.

and I'd worry about all the usual failure modes of hewing the legs from under liberty as a societal principle (including economic stagnation, for starters).

Yes, I'm fully aware of the track record of Western governance over the last 30 years.

What? If men become scarce, then women will become desperate for men. That would increase mens' power, not decrease it.

The actual problem with the proposal is that this kind of society wouldn't actually be a feminist utopia. For one, women's hypergamous instinct is based on positional status, so making all the men tall or handsome doesn't do anything. There's nothing inherently short or ugly about Western men today. If they don't see the low-status men around, then the rest of men won't actually look high status! There's nothing to compare them to!

Indeed, even if the men are all the same (zero variance whatsoever), it seems unlikely this would make women happy. The purpose of hypergamy is to have a higher status partner than all your friends. If all the men are the same it might as well be a society without any men at all!

So the only thing that would happen is women will become desperate because men have more options. So the women will feel even worse than they do now! In addition to getting pumped and dumped, they will be getting dumped by actual losers! This will not feel like a feminist utopia at all!

It would seem women desire a male slave class.


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