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I was going to write a post about ripples in the pond of social sciences but plans are on hold due to a happening. Shooter kills one civilian and cop in Montreal outside a Hilton.
RobotsSources say that "the headquarters of Aylo (the parent company of Pornhub) is located in the Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood of Montreal, Quebec." That might place this shooter in the neighborhood of Aylo's headquarters to target Pornhub, which fits with the general anti-degeneracy notions in a 104 page manifesto that surfaced. It has been so long since we've gotten a proper manifesto, and this is a proper manifesto (PDF). Broadly, we are reading the thoughts of a man who wants to represent, organize, and better the lives of "dispossessed" men-- with many topics familiar to this forum about men and women in Western world touched upon in the first half. Moral decay, Chad-Stacy hypergamy, and unfair, undesirable, or dysfunctional dating/mating norms. He wants to do this by replacing the capitalist "neoliberal hypergamy state" with communism, won and run by those formerly dispossessed, which would not be quite as common here. Some highlights I saw while reading.To fix modern gender relations and society he wants to place theories of class consciousness to one side (by no means out of the way) while introducing a new biological consciousness so that dispossessed men can organize and act upon. Put those men to work in a revolution.
It'd be difficult to organize the incel vanguard on a good day, it's hard enough to get men to queue up on video games. To do so covertly, under the auspices of established political movements, seems extra difficult. Our author partly recognizes this, so he offers a stage one insurgent phase. First, pay more attention to women who lie about dating preferences and ruminate on it. Second, self-improvement ("body purification") but no weight lifting, because it takes too much time, is a bourgeois scam, and sports are suspect as well. No distraction from the revolution. After self-improvement there are a few paragraphs reminding future revolutionaries to avoid rap music:
Finally, become an insurgent, which means killing certain people identified later in the document. In short, he thinks the insurgents should kill pretty much everyone in a position of power or wealth including influencers of all stripes. That makes sense, reforming society and all. He also thinks all the drug dealers, gangsters, and so on should be liquidated. The author features many inspirational quotes by Bolsheviks, as well as other rabble-rousers such as Ulrike Meinhof and Robespierre. Following the insurgency comes the revolution.
No mention of government issued gf's. I believe the hope it won't be necessary, though I don't think the author would be opposed.
Someone has probably made this argument on The Motte before. We aren't missing any communists from roll call, are we? This is boring social engineering in the context of the manifesto which drifts into more fantastical theory, like the cyborg-augmented "extraordinary branch" of the new state to "augment both the bodies and minds" as a kind of Stasi/special forces mixture. Did he forget to mention total war or eternal struggle? No, of course not.
I rate the manifesto 6/10 with significant points given for effort in the context of modern manifestos. Points deducted for my personal revulsion to revolutionary Bolshevism, communism, tangents, and reddit posts. He shares a vision that I don't share with solutions I consider disastrous and/or unrealistic, so I could be unfair. Also, a neoliberal hypergamy state theory is not anywhere as novel or cool as the anarcho-primitivism based vision of Ted K. As an expression of deep frustrations in an atomized world I can understand, though I really think he should have made some money, bought some land, worked it, and entered the BAP-sphere with a Substack via Starlink.
EDIT: "I will go over this methodology briefly here, but for a more complete look at it, see my work The Smile of the Dispossessed; or, Further Instruction on the Implementation of Terror." All I can find by the first title is gay genre fiction, and I get no hits on the latter by a Seth Hatfield or anyone else. AI assisted hallucinations?
I read (glanced over and noted the arguments) the manifesto, and it leaves me with an awkward feeling.
Basically the guy is pretty much correct on the pure factual level about everything he's seeing.
Its clear to me that he has directly experienced the modern, toxic dating pool/culture, and was probably caught between the impulse to adapt to it as it exists, or to lash out against it as an unfair, unsustainable, unhealthy artifact of modern culture.
The fact that he analyzed it with lefty-coded language is interesting but doesn't add much insight.
I find his ultimate methods abhorrent, unjustifiable and ineffectual.
But unfortunately I can't readily point towards a more effective strategy that he could implement on his lonesome. Solving the problems he identifies requires coordinated efforts.
So I'll keep my points brief:
I've pointed out how Male Grievances are almost never given any legitimate airing in mainstream publications. Indeed, it is exceedingly rare for a male writer to get to publish a piece on gender issues at all!
As you noted, Men are not allowed to organize around their own interests as a gender.
No politician ever voices male grievances as part of a policy platform.
So as this guy found, if you have not built up a large following a la Clavicular, your concerns will never get heard, your voice will never raise above the din of social media. You functionally do not exist.
And the one mainstream figure who was willing to voice these concerns was Charlie Kirk, and he got murdered by a lefty.
Oh, and add on that Lone wolf shooters like Luigi Mangione can garner significant female attention.
A lot of guys will connect the dots thusly:
"I have no real hope of getting a wife and happy family in my lifetime. I have no political representation. Nobody will listen to me if I speak out myself. No publications will ever stump for my concerns. I can't organize with other males to advocate for my interests, and if I DO become famous and popular whilst speaking out, I can just be killed in cold blood. However, if I do enough damage and spill enough blood, suddenly I have people paying attention to me... and if I survive I might see increased female attention to boot. Worth a shot."
Something something burning down village to feel warmth.
So my ongoing concern is that we're going to see a serious uptick in young male crashouts that involve (attempts at) mass killings or destruction, many of which won't be as thoughtfully targeted as this one.
Quoth me:
This guy was a 25. A Zoomer. The concerns he puts forth in that manifesto are WIDELY HELD amongst Zoomer males.
And these Zoomers are NOT BEING OFFERED A BETTER PATH FORWARD in the status quo.
Solve for Y chromosome.
You don't solve societal problems on your lonesome. You adapt to them. In the modern dating landscape, you either lean into the hypergamy and superficiality of it all, or you reach a mindset where you are okay with staying a virgin for a long time, potentially forever.
Neither is easy, obviously. If you are of a sufficiently analytical mind, you can't just turn that off on command and genuinely believe that everything is fine. But the other option is a degree of enlightenment that is likely only attainable by the few.
Much more likely then that you just kinda suffer from a lack of romance, sex, and community for the rest of your days.
That said, I think most of this pain will be directed inwards. It is very hard to do stuff in the real world when your need for community is unmet. You just don't have the energy. Much easier to rage on the internet. If anything this will probably just lead to more self harm amongst men, which I doubt society will care much about.
The third option is you lash out at the system itself. For a lone wolf this won't be particularly impactful.
I mean, Clavicular is maybe the ur-example of "lean into the hypergamy and superficiality of it all," he's only twenty years old and is clearly depressed at the life he's now 'stuck' in (by his own doing, naturally). This won't hold over the long term.
Where do we go from here?
MY personal belief is that once we start to lose the Boomers, the primary bulwark against political changes in this country, a LOT of political options that were previously stymied will come on the table.
We might be able to limit how extreme those options end up being.
I don't see why women would want the status quo to change though. They benefit in the short term, and the long term damage is hard to anticipate. Especially so when anyone trying to educate about the downsides is shouted down as "attempting to control women's bodies". In a democracy, we do need the consent of both genders for a norm change to work.
It is also not entirely clear to me that there is a better system to swap to. The old one led to what we have now after all, and it seems fairly undeniable that a lot of people used to end up in bad marriages with people who didn't care much about them regardless.
My ongoing modest proposal is RETVRNing to 1993.
Females attending college en masse seems like the nexus of many issues.
That's where they get turned into lefties.
That's where they incur significant amounts of debt.
That's where they rack up a body count.
That's where they acquire inflated standards in mate choice.
It burns 4+ years of fertility.
In short, they become far less appealing as partners in most cases, on the back end.
So it stands to reason that making it harder for women (and people in general) to secure student loans would reduce their attendance rates and would organically, downstream of that, lead to more relationships, marriage, and children.
I could write a manifesto on that topic, but I wouldn't want to shoot anybody to get it attention.
Probably not (see The Case Against Education). They were already lefties to begin with. Alexa, play the George Orwell quote.
My thesis is that they're just way more susceptible to virtually any ideological brainwashing, just as the Orwell quote implies.
And college is completely captured by lefties at every level, so, that's where the brainwashing pushes them.
College is in my view a large part of the problem. Social Media and Tiktok is another. Arguably that's the mechanism through which they police each others' behavior once they're out of college.
It's a nice thesis. It has the disadvantage of conflicting with empirical evidence, though.
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Then the answer is simple: men should now assume the responsibility that was traditionally put upon women, to curb the sensual appetites of the male (or rather, in this case, female). You should have self-respect and discipline, and gently but firmly decline to have anything to do with hanky-panky outside marriage!
After all, women can't "rack up a body count" without guys willing to be those bodies, now can they?
CORRECT.
My modest proposal there is death penalty for such men.
But people find that goes too far, so I would suggest we simply castrate them, as a compromise.
I've already munched on that bullet.
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That's simply not going to fly, for as long as people believe in blank statism. Unfortunately, the belief in blank statism has been self-reinforcing, due to policies under its belief leading to less competent people getting elevated to positions of status and power, leading to less rigor and more nonsense being taught as true, leading to more people believing in blank statism. Unfortunately, the beatings will continue until morale improves, or until enough of society is destroyed enough such that no one has the energy to carry out any more beatings than necessary to fend off starvation for one more day. I have no idea how to escape this cycle outside of maybe pinning my hopes on AI actually enabling fully automated luxury Communism, but that's a long shot.
This is why I've said that if I were to become emperor of Earth, one of my first decrees would be to outlaw all demographic-based statistical analysis, under penalty of summary execution, with all civilians being deputized to carry out this punishment. It probably wouldn't be enough to fix it either, but it seems like less of a long shot than AI saving us.
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Should be return to to 1978 as in 1979 women reach gender parity in attending college. I'm not sure people get how long we've had an egalitarian society, but we are coming up on 50 years. So unless your theory can account for the 14 years prior to 1993 as being ok, you should probably adjust it.
My suspicion is that the rise of 'useless' genders studies degrees and major overproduction of women with degrees took off in the 90's, hence why we didn't really get a swarm of SJWs until the 2010s.
Colleges were hives of leftist thought long before then, but that was counterbalanced by there being ample alternative routes for one's career before that point.
Also, look at the stats on women getting Masters and Doctorate degrees to see where the problem became SERIOUS.
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