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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   24622 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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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.

… Young men are more free from nature than ever before…

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.

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.

Yes, it is almost entirely is.

  • get at least a high school degree
  • get a full-time job
  • get married before having children

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.

  1. Many people have both a high school diploma and college degree and struggle to find work.
  2. Many have a full time job without a degree at all.
  3. Many men have everything going for them in life and still can’t get a relationship.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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