This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Has the Occident betrayed its young men?
I have been feeling intense abjection lately vis-à-vis my culture, and I wanted to explain why here. Much has been said about how the West treats its young men, particularly with respect to feminism and and wealth redistribution. But more and more, I have been feeling that the state of things is truly one of complete betrayal. Complete betrayal is weighty and generally seen as impossible to come back from. This is different from simply feeling that something is off.
My argument for it constituting complete betrayal starts with the following. Humans are fundamentally animals. As animals, they require resources and reproduction over everything else. The West provides a lot of distraction for its young men, that is true. It provides, certainly, a lot of education, whether they want it or not. Many such things are provided better than ever before. But at the end of the day, humans are animals and the true duty of a culture is to provide those it is loyal to with reproduction and resources, namely resources which convert to shelter, food, reproduction access, and child investment. Humans have a useful single number for all of this called money. So for a human animal, it is really about reproduction and money. Culture/society might provide young men with distraction, but does it provide a mate and an income?
I believe the situation is one of complete betrayal, because culture/society actually deeply interferes with young men getting income and reproduction, and does quite a lot to prevent it and keep young men alone and poor. This is nothing less than complete betrayal. Let me explain the specifics as to how this is done.
Sexually, every revision to law and culture in the last 100 years fit the pattern of preventing, delaying, or degrading the marriages of young men. Every prohibition that was dropped was a prohibition that served young men. This includes adultery laws and laws against divorce. Every prohibition that was strengthened is a prohibition against young men. These include prohibitions against marriage at certain ages and prohibitions against the husband's authority in the home, as well as prohibitions against having sex in many other circumstances, especially on university campuses, which in the late 20th century were the last great place for spouses to meet. On top of that, every sexually related cultural movement interferes with the reproduction of young men. LGBT is a great distraction and tells young men to have sex with each other instead of with women. Modern dating culture says have barren, temporary relationships with the opposite sex. Radical feminism teaches women to be functionally lesbian or asexual and otherwise to avoid romance with men. Taboos have been created to ostracize young men who criticize these cultural movements. It is extremely easy to imagine a culture that better serves its young men reproductively. The fact that it only ever gets worse is a sign of the betrayal.
Economically, credentialism has eaten away at the right of young men to have an income. They are now commanded to stay in school to later and later ages. When they work, the tax burden is immense; more and more money goes to foreigners, single women, and the old. Every government handout taxes young men and married men and pays out to women, children, pensioners, and foreigners. More controversially, I also believe young men are systematically underpayed when they do work, although mostly this goes to redistribute wealth to middle aged men, which young men become, so it's probably the least bad of all the problems and is best fixed by reversing the tax burden on young men from heavily taxed to becoming net receivers of welfare even while working. Credentialism also needs to be curtailed, and then younger men can build more marketable skills at younger ages, boosted their base at any given age pay insofar as the age-income correlation is meritocratic.
Young men pay taxes largely so family courts can threaten whatever marriages they do establish, instead of defending them, so that their money can go to the education system that robbed them of several years of income and work experience, so that their money can go to old retirees who set up this system, so it can go to immigrants and foreigners, so it can go to single women who won't get married, and so it can go to police who will arrest them if they ever end up breaking one of these back-breaking rules that were set up to oppress them. That's complete betrayal by culture & society.
What does complete betrayal imply? It means Western young men should never die for their country. Don't ever join the military. If you get drafted, dodge it if legally possible. Young men should never contribute to their country. Insofar as legal, enter a parasitic profession like finance and drain your country dry. They deserve it because they allow it and they hate young men anyway. Young men should leave their country; move away from the west. Start a city-state in Latin America with a charter from Honduras where young men are served and not betrayed. Go help develop a 2nd world country where young men are served and not betrayed. Pay taxes in the new country. If your old country demands taxes abroad, renounce your citizenship, because your country is a traitor.
In other words, young men are like a Jew in Christian Europe. They are hated by their neighbors, so lend to them and charge as much interest as possible. They are hated by their neighbors, so never fight invaders for them, strike a deal with them if they win. They are hated by their neighbors, so they should move between places and never settle in one place. They should demand maximal pay for minimal work, because they are hated by your neighbors. They should be a Zionist, and dream of the foundation of a new Israel. A place that does not despise them.
I appreciate feedback on this. Maybe I am overreacting or got something wrong here and the situation is not so dire. But as I have lived my life, this is the conclusion I've increasingly come to.
I do think it is important to have some perspective here. Individuals, men included, have never been freer. Mandatory conscription has declined since the cold war, education and knowledge is accessible to everyone, and outside of the big cities it is possible to live very cheaply as long as you don't mind having very few material possessions. No job can turn you into a wage slave. You are free to save up, quit, and live your life as you please. Wages are high enough that a single man with good financial sense can build savings over time.
Social mobility has never been easier. No longer are you bound to the same job that your father had. If you are born smart and driven, but low class, you are free to get an education, build connections at university and create a better life for yourself and your children. The social roles of gender and class have eroded, giving you more opportunities than ever before.
Male dominated jobs have never been safer. You are not going to die at 60 because your lungs were destroyed from inhaling dust at the factory. The western world has tons of regulations concerning ventilation, overtime, how much you are allowed to carry at once and so forth. If you do get an injury, modern medicine gives you better odds of recovery than your forefathers could have even dreamed of.
If you do initially fail to create a good life for yourself there are social safety nets that can catch you and potentially allow you to start over and learn from your mistakes. The strength of these depend on your country, but at the very least you are not going to starve.
A man who takes ownership of his life, builds an understanding of the world he lives in, and takes the initiative to improve his station has better chances than basically any man who came before him. The issue of course, is that young men are not raised to do this.
Where I agree with you is that society lies to young men. We are raised to be obedient and easy to manage, then bombarded with messages of how we are the cause of every problem in the world. We are taught to expend considerable effort on providing for minorities (anyone who isn't a white man) due to notions of guilt and fairness. Young men are taught to play it safe, avoid risks, and do only as others tell them. This completely fails to prepare them for a world that actually rewards risk taking, courage, independent thinking, and initiative.
Then, of course, there is the whole dating thing, where men are lied to about women want for their entire childhood, only to be ridiculed as adults for failing to attract any.
I do see problems, but overall I think your message can only hold true for men born into high social status. Historically, the majority of men have been largely considered as cheap disposable labor, and have led extremely harsh and thankless lives. For those, the current world by far outclasses what we had a hundred years ago. It isn't even close.
Well, you might, although ~all of the people who do are also chainsmoking alcoholics who haven't eaten a vegetable since they were kids or run more than fifty feet since they were in high school. But you have options other than the coal mine.
That is one hell of a chainsmoker.
I consider this a sign of great progress personally. The fact that your trajectory in life is not determined by society the moment that you are born, but is largely down to the qualities you develop and the choices that you make throughout your life, is not something to be taken for granted.
Granted, there is still a strong correlation between lineage and life trajectory. Upbringing matters a lot. But the simple fact that society won't actively stop you from trying to break out of your social class is huge.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
https://x.com/xwanyex/status/2003154577604919451
Yeah, I would agree with this for any western country. Assuming you are an able-bodied citizen, while there may be unfair structural disadvantages against you, there is currently no structural oppression so bad that it is impossible for you to get ahead.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I agree with abundance mentality, economic advancement is huge and it's why young men don't move to a Muslim patriarchy. Those people are poor. However, betrayal does not require destruction; merely a plot to offend. It is true that young men are not destroyed, and the gains in wealth in general are greater than the costs of betrayal. That doesn't excuse the betrayal at all. Young men are more free from nature than ever before, but more subservient to their enemies than most times in human history.
Most of what he wrote isn’t even remotely true the closer your analysis actually gets to the ground. If path dependencies don’t exist to you, then yeah everything makes sense. But socioeconomic mobility? Spoken like a person who’s never experienced that problem in their entire life. Yes, wisdom and good decisions can get you pretty far in life on occasion but that isn’t the whole story or even most of it.
This has never been true. All that technology or modern society has empowered human beings to do is lift a corner of nature to momentarily peer behind the veil of things. The idea we’ve somehow become separate or distinct in some sense is exactly the kind of thing groups of people begin to think right before disaster strikes and a calamity smacks them right in the face. His conclusions are ones I agree with but not entirely for the reasons he states.
Regarding socioeconomic mobility, my point was that many structural barriers to social mobility have been removed. You are not going to be denied a job or degree based on family name, and if you don't have the money required to get an education you can borrow them. Just make sure that you get a degree that will enable you to pay it back.
There are absolutely psychological issues that make climbing hard. Your bad decisions can absolutely come back to haunt you too. And like your link to the Star Trek quote says, success is never guaranteed. But it is certainly more possible now than at most other times in recorded history.
Considering what I am arguing against is that society has betrayed men, I think the point that "structural barriers to social mobility for young men have been reduced drastically over time" is a good data point to support my point.
The reality is that while you’re right in that some structural barriers have been removed, what’s replaced many of them as been a trough of artificial barriers that impose other roadblocks to mobility. This is one of the ‘very’ rare instances I actually agree with libertarians.
Just take a look at licenses, credentialism, and occupational licensing that restrict employment. Not that some aren’t necessary but structurally a lot of them are rent-seeking mechanisms that protect those already employed; rather than ensuring baseline competence, which inflates consumer costs and limits entry-level opportunities across the economy.
If you’re an employer requiring college degrees or high-level experience for entry-level tasks, you’re going to inadvertently filter out capable candidates and artificial bottlenecks. Then there’s regulations which impose high fixed costs of hiring and deters companies from bringing on new employees, which is going to slow down economic growth and job creation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, it is almost entirely is.
97% of young people who follow all three steps are not poor as adults
Might want to add 4) "avoid meth, just never try it" to that list.
More options
Context Copy link
On #3, men who have everything going for them but still can't get a relationship I must strongly disagree. I do not know of any man who has achieved career progression and muscles, but who also can't get a relationship unless he is unsatisfied with the quality of the women available to him.
Too much hedging here. You added lifting to the equation. Why should men have to lift in 2026 when it doesn't even matter for raiding another village and taking? Is the quality of woman available to him his looksmatch? Or is he lifting and attracting fatties?
Oh its very much just lifting for looksmatch for a man that can find no willing women otherwise. Physical employment requiring movement and use of muscles will be effective, and a man gets paid on top of it. However, blue collar work can result in injuries and often results in a shorter lifetime earning potential once middle age takes its toll.
Often, a man will have no chance to demonstrate his honor, decency, and other good qualities to a woman unless he can first draw her eye with his muscles. My grandmother often tells all her grandchildren (~15) that the thing that drew her to my grandfather was his big muscles. In her old age she repeats the story quite often as if she was telling it for the very first time, it's deeply etched in her memory.
Hence the adage, "just lift, bro".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
None of that contradicts that wisdom and good decisions gets almost everyone in the US pretty far in life.
Then you clearly didn’t read my comment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Also a huge chunk of people he defines as not poor are actually poor in many ways.
I got into an economic argument with somebody once where I was trying to explain pricing and cost differentials and the different ‘types’ of costs involved in business contract negotiations; and this moron just couldn’t understand what “cost” meant outside of exchanging money. He was completely incredulous. I was trying to explain material input costs in production, energy requirements, etc (you know… like how following a recipe baking cookies requires the resource costs in food to do it?). This dude just wasn’t having it. Or the biggest cost of them all which is time (time is money, quite literally).
If you’ve spent any time in infosec at all it’s a concept that becomes clear. That’s why KPI’s like MTTR, MTTC, ALE, etc., are so important when measuring and calculating the financial impact of system downtime and why high impact business sectors of the economy are willing to pay such a premium for retainer services of incident response companies in the event of getting struck. Can’t fulfill contracts, orders and obligations? Time is money. You’re fucked.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It is not just technological and economic advancement. Liberal democracy, belief in meritocracy, and free-market capitalism gives you opportunities that only people with preexisting wealth and influence would otherwise be able to attain.
The fact that these are under attack is a problem, but their advantages are very much not nullified yet.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not even close to true. Freedom on the frontier blows anything we have out of the water, and it's not close. You cannot have freedom in a panopticon, it's a misnomer.
Plenty of people have been much, much freer than this, and most of them are in the past of this very country.
It’s because ordinary people mistakenly accept a simple “freedom of motion” as an adequate substitute for the [real] feeling of freedom that comes from the absence of financial insecurity, the absence of neighborhood crime, the ability to express a distaste or prejudice without retribution, or simply being empowered to get up on a whim and move somewhere else.
Freedom from want and freedom from fear, as FDR put it, are not freedom but security expressed as freedom.
Reminds me of the quite commonly expressed notion over the last decade all the way to today, that censorship of wrongthink is required for free speech, because for women/POCs/LGBTQ+/etc. to have free speech, they must be free from other people expressing opinions that "make them feel unsafe" or "deny their humanity/basic rights/existence/etc." Another case of people smashing a square peg through a round hole because the roundness is what's been declared as sacred.
More options
Context Copy link
It shouldn’t be any surprise to you I don’t agree with his ideology. An insecure population isn’t one that lives freely either. What the hell kind of freedom is it if I can’t walk outside my door without getting accosted by a criminal? Reminds me of the reaction ordinary Russians had of communism when they saw the plenty and relative abundance Americans lived in when compared with their own. The communists said, “But that’s exploitation…,” and the people shouted back “If that’s exploitation we want to be exploited!”
Who cares what FDR thought? (Damn… that’s deep dawg.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's never been easier for the average person to make enough money to not feel financial insecure.
If this is critical you can move to the countryside, which is much less crime-riddled than it was during the frontier days.
This is a pretty corny idea of freedom
There's nothing stopping you from moving except a way to support yourself financially, and it's easier than ever to save a bunch of money and/or get a remote work gig.
It's not that easy. I'm a white man with a STEM degree that tests at ~135 IQ, had good marks and all of that, and I pretty consistently can't get this right now. Seems to mainly go to people of preferable ethnicities. Statistically I am still better off than a huge majority of men my age. There is just no way someone with a 100 IQ can do what you're saying if it's not falling out of a tree for me.
If you're trying to get your first job and have no better options that spamming resumes online then OK I can see your point, especially if you were unlucky enough to choose computer science.
If you're mid-career or later though, with a STEM degree and 135 IQ then this is really just a skill issue.
Demonstrably untrue.
It was never trivial to support yourself, especially as a midwit or worse. The point is that it's easier today thanks to technology than it ever has been.
Only if you believe that IQ/competence/etc. are equal between those ethnic groups.
More options
Context Copy link
You can always say that, it will still work even when you tell Mr. 1 in 1000 to rank up to 1 in 100,000, just so he can have a decent life, but the point is I have more skill than a majority of people, but it's still hard. So how do you expect the average person to be any better off?
Stats are too vague. What are Asians? Who is white? What about my field? I think Indians and Chinese are hired way more than they deserve in tech, and it crowds out white talent, these stats don't disprove that at all.
Sure, but still not easy.
I can confirm this, my current job is working with about 90% Indians where roughly only 1 in 50 are anything even approaching a competent software dev. Given that the managers are all Indian, this strikes me as pretty naked ethnic bias. The handful of East Asians I've worked with at least usually seem competent though.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
[citation needed]
And the barriers to entry have never been higher.
This is about right up there with just telling a homeless man to flip out his phone, dial up an Uber and go buy a house somewhere. So if you were some rando making say 60k a year, he should just quit his job, forego his bills, drive far out of his way and somehow live on the countryside?
Maybe freedom of speech is a corny idea. People should test it sometime in their society by seeing who they’re not allowed to criticize.
There’s nothing “stopping you,” from having the same opportunity to become as good of a Basketball player as Michael Jordan. There’s no specific “law of nature” that says you couldn’t build an elevator to the fucking moon. There’s nothing stopping you from going to a library and reading every book there is on fixing cars and becoming an auto mechanic, you’re still not going to get hired.
I really think people that speak like you have truly never experienced any difficult life circumstances of the kind that oh, you know… prevent you from doing the kind of thing you’re talking about.
Nostalgia economics is totally wrong.
By "countryside" I meant more of "anywhere outside the urban core". It doesn't have to be the complete boonies. There are plenty of low crime areas out there still relatively close to cities, and it will usually actually be cheaper to buy a house out there than it will be in the city. The downside is a longer commute.
"Freedom of speech" has always been fairly limited if your idea is actually "freedom to express prejudice". It's true that you probably can't expect to shout the word n!gger 20 times in a professional setting today... but I doubt you could get away with that 30 years ago either.
I know about wokes wanting to make any political opinion to the right of far-left verboten in polite society, and I agree that's bad. But your "freedom to express prejudice" is just a complaint about the Overton Window, which has always been mushy and ever-shifting.
What? There's genetics which is a hard-stop, and a ludicrous amount of effort too. That's very different from simply moving somewhere else. I really don't understand your point here.
If someone wanted to move across the country, it's far easier today to apply for jobs before moving than it would be in the 1990s or 1950s. There are of course things that could stop people from moving, but the point of this discussion is what's changed over time for the worse.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The frontier of exploring the US only happened for a very short time. Maybe if you go back to the times before agriculture, you will see men be mostly well respected as members of their tribes. But for most of recorded history it seems clear to me, that the majority of men lived under conditions that would be considered borderline slavery in today's terms, essentially being forced to fulfill whatever role they happened to be born into.
I don't think 300 years is a short time, actually.
You are making a lot of assumptions that I don't necessarily agree with.
Freedom is not safety, and freedom is not leisure, and freedom is not prosperity, and freedom is not the ability to recover from mistakes. Those are all valuable in their own way, but they are not freedom.
Of course not, why would I? They're not me, they're not my people, they're not my ancestors, and they're not what we're talking about.
You are the one who first said "majority." I made no argument about numbers or proportions, just existence.
Some men have been much, much, much freer than I ever have been or ever will be, and I'm not going to sit here and let you say that I'm so free because I have medicine, but I can't own a gun and I have to get a permit to build a house. I say bullshit, that's not freedom. It might be prosperity, or it might be safety, but it isn't freedom. This freedom lasted for generations, and many chose not to take the chance because freedom isn't safety or prosperity. Now that choice is gone, and it's not coming back.
And some men are today as well! What does that have to do with anything? Why are you counting yourself as someone who would have been among the frontiersmen instead of the disease ridden factories or back breaking farm labor of that period? In time people might speak of the spirit and freedom of the startup entrepreneur of today who romantically earned no returns yet lived on VC money with a hope for striking it rich with a buyout. And you'd rightly point out that many of those startup founders failed with nothing to show for it or never got funded in the first place, but what do you think happened to most of the people on the frontier?
More options
Context Copy link
This is a discussion about whether society has betrayed men. Talking about the majority of men then is the point.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You're failing to separate human actions from surrounding abundance. Human parasites make regulations. The way to deal with parasites is judging them as bad and acting accordingly. Abundance has increased because there is more technology. Just because parasitism has not increased as quickly as abundance, does not mean society is not more parasitic than before.
I think you are taking it for granted that most men have access to this abundance in the first place. That is a political choice. It is absolutely possible for the majority of resources to be controlled by relatively few individuals that everyone else must choose to either suck up to, or accept starvation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link