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Imagine, if you will, an island of dogs. (No, not the Wes Anderson film Isle of Dogs.) This island is inhabited by three dog breeds: the sleek and meek Shiba Inu, the proud and elegant Borzoi, and the large and aggressive Rottweiler.
This is Year 1 of Dog Island. It doesn’t matter how the three dog breeds arrived to the island, but they’re all there now. The dogs do as dogs do, wandering the island, drinking from streams and killing small prey to stay alive. At first, most of the Shiba Inu breed with the other Shiba Inu, and the Borsoi with the Borsoi, and so on. But our dogs, since they are not redlining segregationists or hardcore Nazi racists, begin to breed with one another. The runts of the Rottweilers and the Borzoi run off to mate with the Shiba Inu. The biggest Shiba Inu girls, lacking an appropriately dominant Shiba mate, run off to get boned by the smallest of the Borzoi or Rottweiler dogs. Before long, the mostly Shiba Inu pack comes to be a mixture of the bulk of the Shiba Inu and some of the smaller members of the Borzoi and Rottweiler packs. The Rottweiler pack eventually becomes a mixture of the largest and most dominant Rottweilers and their Borzoi and Shiba concubines. The Borzoi pack, with their recessive genes, soon become dominated by the beta Rottweiler dogs who are more aggressive than the Borzoi.
Into Years 2 and 3 of dog island, all of the dogs continue to interbreed. Generation 1 is still around, the legacy purebred Shibas and Borzoi and Rottweilers, all surrounded by their interracial progeny. In this situation, the male Shiba Inu and the female Rottweilers are the least attractive mating partners.
Now, why does sex operate this way? It is not downstream of racism or even a socially constructed popularity contest. These are dogs. Instead it is downstream of sex itself. Now I will speak from experience. I am a gay man. I have had sex with a fair number of men. When you are having gay sex, you are assuming either a dominant or submissive position with your partner. This is not only true of anal sex but of oral sex, of frotting, even of kissing or of hugging. One of you is dominating, and one of you is surrendering to the other. When it comes to penetrative anal sex, you must be erect and genuinely attracted to your partner, and most importantly, you must believe you can dominate your partner. It is not that you must understand you have their permission, but you must understand that you have the physical power to dominate your partner. This should turn you on alone. This is the power to procreate. If you do not believe you are bigger than or better than your partner, you can not penetrate them. As a top it is a far easier task to dominate a smaller, younger partner than it is to dominate a larger, older man. Never mind the ridiculous situations that porn depicts- It is a perversion of reality to see a younger smaller man dominate an older one. Similarly it is strange and unnatural to see a male Shiba Inu dominating a female Rottweiler. It is embarrassing for both partners.
You may have already gathered this, but my Dog Island exposition is not really about dogs at all. As much as human nature rages against it, we too are animals bound by physical constraints of reality. The three dominant branches of humanity today can be described in modern American terms as Blacks, Whites, and Asians. (There are other branches of these people, as well as Australian Aboriginals who are usually categorized separately, but for illustrative purposes I am sticking with these three.) Blacks are the original stock of humans who evolved in Africa. Asians branched off from Blacks at a certain point, moving into the Eurasian landmass and heading East. Several thousand years later another migration resulted in Whites who moved West into Europe (as well as South Asians who moved into South Asia.) This is a broad simplification but is my understanding. Both Asians and Whites bred with Neanderthals after migrating out of Africa and most Sub Saharan Africans today still have no Neanderthal DNA in contrast with the rest of the world who do. I mention all this because it is important to understand that the races have been genetically isolated and distinct for many generations. Gemini tells me that modern dog breeds are only 50 to 80 generations apart from each other. 50 generations in human years equates to only 1500 years at the high end. Everyone from casual pet owners to hardcore communist scientists will insist that dog breeds have certain behavioral traits and habits that are hard wired into their beings. (I actually suspect the degree to which dog breeds are said to have certain divergent traits is overestimated by many of these people, and can to some degree be a result of the projection of the observer or their imagination of what different looking dogs seem to be in relation to the observer, but I am not a dog expert so perhaps it’s all accurate.) The human races have far more than 50 generations or 1500 years separation between them, but we are told any behavioral traits or habits of perceived difference between them is purely an environmental product rather than any innate trait developed by natural selection or selective breeding over the years. I am not convinced of this.
Now that I’ve proposed that sex is downstream of biology, I would like to propose that politics are downstream of sex. I can’t help but notice that the immigration opinions of people tend to match their sexual prospects. In crude terms: Large and unappealing women support the immigration of more dominant men into their societies. Smaller and less dominant men support the migration of themselves into populations of smaller and more sexually appealing women.
When you are a young gay man, you do not have the experience of being a dominant male. You have likely spent your whole life under the wing of a father, of grandfathers, of older brothers or cousins, and of older men down the street from you. So it follows, that your experience with sex is likely that you are being dominated by older men, unless you are the type of boy who likes to dominate younger boys, which will just get you in trouble. So you start out in a submissive role with older men. I too had this experience, and until my mid 20s I was somewhat uncomfortable being more dominant with other men, though it would sometimes hurt my ego if I found myself submitting to an unworthy man. Regardless, my politics were broadly aligned with this situation, as I was ambivalent at best regarding immigration into my community. As a white American Midwesterner, I imagine most “foreigners” who might move into my community as Muslims from the Middle East or as Black guys from the other part of my city. As a younger man dominated sexually and socially by older men, an influx of more dominant males wasn’t irritating to me. But ten years later, the thought of more sexually dominant men coming into my community is an irritating prospect that I’d rather avoid. As a younger man if I’d had the foresight to imagine I would ever be in the position to be socially dominant over some portions of the men around me I’d probably be quicker to dislike immigration, but lacking the experience I didn’t imagine the situation I’d find myself in today.
I love reading old fairy tales. One of the most common tropes in these old stories boils down to, basically, telling girls and young women not to hold out or run off to find a suitable partner. That she is better off staying close to home and finding a suitable mate nearby. We may imagine the immigration situation to have arisen in the past 20 years but apparently it’s such a deeply ingrained impulse that medieval storytellers had to weave it into their tales centuries ago. We may spend a lot of time on TheMotte complaining about a certain type of woman- often characterized as a liberal feminist- who is broadly unfriendly toward men around them and more fond of outgroup males. Unfortunately for you, she is behaving rationally. In my experience, she is often the type of woman who is more outspoken and physically larger than many of the men around her. (My sympathies to tall women who are quite feminine but struggle to find suitable men larger than them.) In other words, this type of woman has looked around, found the majority of the men around her unsuitable for her self, and instead of focusing on the 1 or 2 chads who could top her, and who are more likely to screw Snooki down the block than her, seeks- perhaps subconsciously- for more dominant males outside of her group to mate with. So this type of woman is in favor of increasing her pool of suitable mates, and she isn’t a racist, so she’s not looking for 6 foot tall Nordics who are a bit too fey anyway- she wants her own Mamdani next door.
Of course, some of these women are strange dominating women as well. I have a certain bourgeois friend who owns a shop in a city in the USA. The shop is in a very woke hipster part of the town, they have a sort of “toxic niceness” vibe when you go in there. She happens to be about 6 feet tall and wears, I don’t know, a men’s 3XL t-shirt. She is fashionable and presentable but simply a large woman. Her husband is a meek “performative male” a good 6 inches shorter and 50 pounds lighter than her. We went on a vacation together one time and I heard her yelling at him in the bedroom. I felt so bad for both of them. It’s nice to imagine a couple like this could be happy but it is so rare in my experience.
There too are men who want to be dominated by women, but I see this as a cope and inversion of their true desires, which is to dominate women, and is borne out of a perception of this being impossible. It could also be evolutionarily advantageous for beta males to imagine themselves dominated by women, as it frees the more dominant men to actually have sexual access to women instead of the beta male.
By the way, does Asian hate exist? In my experience, it really does. The most vocally anti-Asian person I know, was a white guy I knew in college. I’m going to call him Brad. He was a strange person- a gay man, but quite a jock, sort of like a slightly less attractive, stocky Abercrombie model type. I didn’t know he was gay until he told me. He was also very liberal politically. His best friend was a Black woman and he would constantly repeat forced liberal ideals he regurgitated from his grandfather who raised him. Despite his masculine demeanor, he was also a total bottom. In college, we were on a trip to London together, and he immediately met an Italian man a few years older than us, and they immediately became inseparable. Anyway, like I said, this guy is also the most anti-Asian person I’ve ever met. How does this fit with his liberal world view? Imagine the goals and desires of Brad. He wants to be topped by dominant men. So he needs to compete with bottoms. The average trait of an Asian man, compared to the average trait of a white man, is as follows. The Asian man is likely cuter and smarter than the white man. Brad, being a masculine jock, is not very “cute,” so he’s going to lose. He is also not very “smart,” so if your top wants someone with brains, he’s also going to lose. Asian men are also much more discreet and mindful of saving face compared with white people who have a certain habit of stating the quiet part out loud in an obtuse way. Brad, on some level, understands his mating success depends on outcompeting certain types of people, has written off Asian men as unfair competition.
I suspect many races of women have a similar view of Asian women as Brad. Many of the trad larpers on shadier parts of X like to imagine white women as the pinnacle of beauty or screwability but are frankly mistaken. I have spent quite a lot of time in Asia, and every time I do, I am shocked when I see a white woman on the train. After your eye adjusts to Asian women, white women look bizarre, with very large bones, and they really stick out compared to Asian women in an unappealing way. The opposite is true as well, I must say: after spending time in Asia, I am often struck by the handsomeness of any random Middle Eastern or white man I see on the train. It is not that Asian men are unattractive to me at all, on the contrary I am happy to date Asian men and do find them attractive, but they are getting so mogged by every other type of guy that I can’t unnoticed it.
Asia is a bit weird from an evolutionary psychology perspective. Imagine a continent full of petite, beautiful women, and autistic weird nerdy guys and basically no chads. You’d imagine they’d go extinct in a generation, but instead the hot girls all mate with the nerds. Fascinating. I suspect that’s what Western Europe is like too in eras where they’re not being invaded by Sea Peoples. Indeed East Asia seems like the baboon utopia I once read about where all the alpha baboons ate poison trash and died and then they became a peaceful Chad-free society. Why are we importing violent Chads into western society?
That question wasn’t rhetorical. I’ll ask it again: Why are we importing violent Chads into western society? Many people here will probably reject the framing. I’ve had pushback on themotte before from people who insist that anyone Black or brown is not a chad and not a threat and your perfect White face isn’t getting mogged by anyone darker than a swarthy Swede. Sadly you’re wrong! Let’s go back to evopsych to explain.
Look at Aaron Hernandez. He is one of the hottest men to have ever lived in my opinion. I don’t care that he is a murderer, he is beautiful. The fact that he went to prison makes me like him more, if anything. His body is fine and thinking about him smiling at me makes me melt like I’m a schoolboy again. And yet, seeing his brother, DJ Hernandez, broke my brain. He is not more beautiful than Aaron. He is not hotter. He is not even taller than Aaron. And yet, because he is about 15% more masculine than Aaron, my brain tells me I’m supposed to mate with DJ. If I’m a woman and I’m stuck on an island with just Aaron and DJ, I’m mating with DJ. Aaron’s children will be annoying and not want to work, I can just tell. DJ’s children will be tough and dutiful. My procreative intuition tells me this. DJ is mogging Aaron despite everything I love about Aaron. I don’t even like DJ’s looks that much. I could imagine mating with DJ for the kids but staying with Aaron for his beauty and the chaos he’d bring. I am saying this to illustrate how deeply ingrained our reproductive intuitions are and how fundamentally biological they are. My brain can tell me to bone Aaron all day but as soon as I have to consider the hardiness of my children and the propagation of my bloodline I’m picking DJ.
You may think this example is strange, or unrelatable coming from a gay man projecting his feelings onto the mating impulses of a woman. But I believe that all men including straight men are completely aware of this hierarchy of men as well. If you don’t believe me and are a man, go outside and walk around until you see a man. Walk so that you are in his way. Do not cede the ground to him. If he is shorter or weaker than you, he will cede the ground and may even apologize, even though you were the aggressor. If he is taller and bigger than you, see how long you can get in his way before he begins to threaten or get mad at you. I’ll give you about 1.5 seconds. I distinctly remember coming to realize the way this works in about 7th grade, that I suddenly had to be aware of the physical hierarchy of other boys at this age. I don’t know if it was because I suddenly found myself shorter than many other boys my age, whereas I had always been taller earlier in life, or if there is something that changes in the brains of boys at this age, but it became something I had to consciously be aware of. It is so powerful that by a few years later, you forget this entirely and we all submit to the more dominant male subconsciously at all times In order to protect ourselves and keep the peace.
Male awareness of hierarchy is very interesting. I have had a handful of instances where straight men smaller than me have fawned to me in the presence of their girlfriends. This is extremely strange to me and I never know how to take it. I wonder if it is an ingrained sexually eugenic impulse. It is as though they are cucking themselves in the presence of a more dominant male. Once this happened to me on an airplane, when a guy I was sat next to had his girlfriend right next to him. He was a shorter guy who I found really cute, and he was sort of ducking and fawning around me, which is not really that common for me to experience. I thought this must be humiliating for the girlfriend to see your boyfriend doing this to a strange man, but I guess there could be some child preservation instinct on display if you’re good at fawning to more dominant men that you could be better at protecting the child, and projecting a willingness to submit rather than pick fights with a larger man I guess is a strategy. But I don’t understand why the woman wouldn’t simply pick the aggressor to mate with instead of the fawning cuck boyfriend. I have experienced similar situations with female friends’ boyfriends acting the same way, which I can understand slightly better as these female friends were people who respected me as friends and I can see how the boyfriend would want to be seen as friendly toward me, but both times it crossed over into a slight homoerotic vibe that I couldn’t quite understand. (One of them, an immigrant from Western Asia, I later found swiping for men on tinder. I don’t think one should underestimate how many Muslim men who immigrate to Western society are gay, by the way, when considering the immigration patterns of people.)
There seems to be some correlation between diversity of ethnicity and diversity of gender presentation. When I think of the most trans countries on earth, my instinct is to think of Thailand and USA. Interestingly, these are two of the most prominent countries with a less dominant population coexisting with a more dominant male population. Thailand is a very diverse place now, especially Bangkok, where decades of immigration has brought white men, Arabs, Indians, Black men, and so on, all more dominant males compared with the majority Thai (and Chinese) people. America is a once mostly white country, increasingly dominated by nonwhite people. You probably already know that Ladyboys are prominent in Thailand. The last time I was in Thailand, I was riding a ferry near Pattaya, and noticed a woman who I thought was incredibly beautiful. I genuinely thought to myself, that is one of the prettiest women I have seen in ages. She was wearing a bikini and had a very basic Australian boyfriend. After we got off the boat, my boyfriend pointed at that woman, and told me she was a ladyboy. I couldn’t believe it, but he said he noticed a bulge in her pants. I was shocked. I know that many people on the right like to imagine trans women as weird men like Chris Chan, but in my experience most trans women are men who are too small and meek to compete as men, and are better off competing sexually as women. Both boys I grew up with who became trans women were this way. I don’t know why they should be forced to compete as men when they’re better off competing as women. I can even empathize with this impulse, it wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I became more comfortable with my size and masculine traits to be confident enough to use my masculine traits to assert dominance sexually. Regardless, making this type of effeminate boy socialize with men of a more dominant race can only increase the impulse to choose the nuclear option for gaining sex and love: becoming a woman, competing as a woman, rather than facing the humiliation of being a very undesirable man. Perhaps if they were socialized only with men of the same race, or men of a smaller race, they’d see no need to transition to women at all.
By the way, I don’t think that being trans is or should be a left wing phenomenon. On the contrary, when I look at beautiful trans women like Andreja Pejic, or even very effeminate androgynous people like Jeffrey Star, I feel what they’re going for is much more akin to a King Ludwig II or Henry Ford or Kanye West or other great men of history, and in fact the entire “trans movement” of the 2010s was essentially leftists trying to harness the energy and power of effective great men of transgenderism and gender diversion into the insular and unproductive world of leftist politics. People like Arca intrinsically have a massive power on society thanks to their gender diversion, and the left could not leave that power unchallenged, lest it be used against them, and so made an incredible noise of adopting it for themselves. (They did the classical Narnia Witch thing of promising them rooms full of Turkish delight while bringing them nothing but a huge amount of fatigue from the general public and a weird coddling from condescending women and the healthcare industry.)
Anyway, the masculinity or femininity of races is consequential, is what I am trying to say. You may believe white genes are superior but nature doesn’t even think white genes are superior. Blue eyes, blond hair, white skin, these are all recessive traits! They are helpful in extreme polar environments with cold climates, but not even necessary (see Native Alaskans for example.) White genes may be appealing when women display them, and if anything it is good for the ego to believe that your whiteness is a good thing, but that’s because you are elevating weakness in the face of the uncaring and tortuous reality of nature.
Speaking of elevating weakness in the face of the uncaring and tortuous reality of nature: What is society? What is the purpose of having something we humans create as an alternative to nature? Imagine we are all nomadic Mongolians on the Steppe. Every day we are faced with challenges from nature: The changing of the seasons, the fluctuations of weather, sickness in the herds, attacks from foreigners, reproductive difficulties, impending death, you could go on and on. Inside the ger (tent), however, we have peace. We have remedies for every challenge in nature: We have calendars to consider and plan around the weather fluctuations and seasonal changes, we have medicine and quarantine from sickness, we have weapons to protect ourselves from foreign tribes, we have chants and folk ways to deal with social problems. In other words, the social world inside of the ger exists to bring us comfort and safety from the outside world of chaos. Imagine how quickly the peace of the ger breaks down when we begin to bring in the outside world of chaos. The calendar is thrown away, we’re at the mercy of the seasons and the weather. The medicine goes bad, we are at the mercy of sickness again. The weapons break and aren’t replaced and the girls want to breed with the foreign tribes. Chaos reigns.
Modern society today is not unlike the world of the ger for the Mongolian nomads. What is culture but a reaction against the horrors of nature? Isn’t every social construct ultimately a luxury provided against the things that can hurt us? What happens when we begin to misidentify threats and instead invite them in? Chaos reigns.
Why does this happen? Why can’t we respect the constructions of man in the face of the horrors of nature? The answer is simple: human arrogance.
Explaining arrogance to modern Western people is like explaining water to a fish. It is so ubiquitous that most people are unaware of it in themselves and even when they encounter it in others. Ancient myths and legends are so full of cautionary tales against arrogance, which we repeat with an air of understanding, then act as arrogantly as if we hadn’t read them at all. And yet humility is the most important quality needed to protect ourselves and society. Arrogance leads us to see foreign threats as no problem at all. Arrogance invites unconquerable problems into the ger. Arrogance is also a profoundly white trait. There are nearly no Asian countries today with the arrogance to invite millions of dominant males into their societies. White countries today can’t do anything else. It is white arrogance that declares everyone a universal equal, while believing themselves universally superior in secret.
If you are unconvinced of the whiteness of arrogance, or of the arrogance of whiteness, just look at any “fish out of water” tale of the past 50 years, from Piper in Orange is the New Black to Timothy Chalamet in Dune. Inevitably, the white hero encounters poor brown people who immediately chide them on their arrogance and entitlement. Never mind that the brown and black people are often as arrogant as our white heroes, it is only the white person who must struggle with overcoming it.
Despite the decades of denazification within our hearts, white people still see ourselves as the most superior people on the planet. I have come to believe this from a sort of reverse logic of the modern western framing. Since, as I explained, society is a refuge from the overwhelming power of nature, that intrinsically puts the weak at the top of the hierarchy as an opposing force of nature itself. That is, we humans in nature are weak and at mercy of the elements and things outside of our control, but to invert that is to create society. And so within society, according to western though, we must continue to invert the power structure, so that women are more righteous than men, so that children are more protected than women, and that the weak and the infirm are the most sacred people as they are symbols of both our inversion of and power over nature, and our great moral righteousness to put the lesser above the superior. There is no righteousness in putting the strong over the weak- this is barbaric at best. And so, when we must elevate Black voices, when we must hear the experiences of marginalized communities, when we must prostrate ourselves in Kente cloths like Nancy Pelosi, what we are doing is asserting the underlying natural superiority of White people over everyone else. We are doing the fundamentally Christian act of elevating the weak over the strong.
This is the very problem. The arrogance of white people to assert themselves as superior to black people. This is white supremacy. This is borne out of a rigidity of thinking and an inability to imagine a world outside of the ger where the truly powerful reign supreme. It is this shortness of insight into humanity that leads white leaders to be entirely confident in their recognition of Black and brown experiences. These are the beliefs of people who see themselves above nature, rather than subject to it, who believe they can rewrite the fundamentals of interpersonal society because they read critical theory and have had to see the very real suffering of Black and brown homeless and impoverished people on their urban rides to their positions of power. You insulate yourself from nature at the risk of inviting nature in to destroy your insulation. Society rots from the inside out.
Another way to frame the inversion of the dominancy hierarchy I mentioned above is that of class. Class, unfortunately, is evil. It is an illusion of arrogance that we believe we can be better than nature. We are not better than nature, we are a part of nature. The most powerful movie I have ever watched is called The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. It is a Studio Ghibli film from 2013. The story is about an elderly couple who have no children of their own. One day the man finds a tiny baby while cutting down bamboo. He takes the baby home to his wife, and the baby quickly grows up. The baby is a gift from deities who live on the moon. The deities send them gold and treasures to pamper the baby. They are gifted with so much money that the father has a grand palace built in the capital. The baby has grown into a young girl who enjoys playing with neighbor boys and being in nature. The whole family is happy. The father, in his good intentions, wants to give his family a better life, one better than what nature can provide alone, so they all move to the capital. From this point on, the girl is beaten down and indoctrinated into the ways of society. She is made up in the ugly fashions of the time, given a proper education, and lives like royalty. She also stops growing at this point, and the whole family becomes melancholy. She is humiliated at a coming of age party by someone of a higher class. There is a dream sequence where she runs out into nature, sheds her clothing, and cries out in horror at what’s happened to her. Before long, she is called to return to the moon, and the deities come back to retrieve her. Everyone is sad. The tragedy is that her father’s best intentions ruined the peace and comfort that nature had afforded them. It is his arrogance that led to their downfall.
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When I think of the most unequal places on earth, I think of hideous New Delhi, corrupt Manila, and the slave-built skyscrapers next to shanty towns of Dubai. Postwar era Japan and 1950s America are so well loved and functional because of the inherent dignity and equality among people. I am broadly very right wing but the thing that disturbs me the most among right wing people today is the impulse to assert class privilege as a good thing. Some people are better than others, they insist! But this is bringing the horror of nature into the ger. The only righteous ideal to strive for, truly, is equality, but it is tricky to get this right. We must treat people with equality and dignity that they deserve. It truly is good to care for the weak and elevate their needs when it can be done without hurting the rest of society. It is not good to do so when it leads to the suffering of others. There must also be the understanding and acknowledgment that things are being done as they are out of a sacrifice of the powerful to the benefit of the weak, and never take the sacrifice of the powerful for granted.
Since I pointed out earlier, that all politics are downstream from sexual selection and mate selection, I can continue this strain of thought to explain communism. There are two types of communists from my experience. The first is the beta male who believes communism will afford him an equal opportunity to have sex with a woman by adopting female positions in politics. The second is the alpha male who believes he is a beta male who needs to use communism to afford himself an equal opportunity to have sex with a woman by adopting female positions in politics. The first type is an idiot because as soon as communism is tried in sex, it fails. The second type is an idiot because he is suffering a humiliation ritual he could opt out of for a more gratifying experience which is to dominate women as a man with his own beliefs rather than to dominate women as a man with insincere beliefs. The second man may succeed with a woman but it is on false pretenses, he is misunderstanding the conditions of his success with this woman, and invariably she grows to resent him.
The underlying promise of communism is that if everyone is equal, we can all have sex with whoever we want, because the least dominant man is as good as the most dominant man. Unfortunately, even the most communist woman alive is extremely sexually selective and will not choose to mate with a man in a lower class than what they believe they can get. Many women will choose not to procreate if they can not find a suitable mate. Communism is kinder to women among women, who have less variance across their own population, and for whom equality is more rewarded. They push for equality because it benefits them, but once it is applied to men, they suddenly despise the idea. This is why men should not be communists: because you can treat every man the same in principle but a communism of male sex is impossible.
However, there is a way that a kind of sexual communism is possible. If we were all living in medieval style villages, where all the men around us came from the same stock and looked just like we did, and there were not foreign and exotic bands of men from far away, we would all have a certain life path for ourselves. We start out as boys, the older men help us grow and become men, we replace the men, we retire satisfied as old men eventually. There is an understanding that we may not be one of the most dominant males right now, but if we lead good healthy lives we can eventually rise to that position. Modern society floods our immediate environment with men who are impossibly more dominant than we are, we see them and know we can never be a better mate than they are, and we are left with despair and malaise.
Ideally, every man should have a small group that he is able to dominate. Modern society pushes us into giant groups of people, of millions. When you have a group of 10 people, there is one most dominant male. When you have a group of 100 people, there is only one most dominant male. When you have a group of 8 billion people, there is only one most dominant male. During covid, I stayed in a suburban area for about 2 years. Finally, I was able to leave the country, and I went to London. I had been to London a handful of times before, as a younger man, but this time, the experience on the airplane and being in London was such a disorienting and dystopic experience for me. When I was in my suburban setting during lockdowns, I didn’t have to worry about very many other people, and the ones I did were people I saw often- my family and neighbors. Suddenly at the airport and in the city, I was surrounded by dominant men, but dominant men who all acted subverted by the world around them. It was as though the presence of millions of other larger men were subverting the domination of every man I saw including myself. To have seen a taller stronger man acting weaker and submissive broke my spirit and my hope of being a powerful man myself.
Now, because I dislike meandering tomes that point to problems and offer no solutions, and because things like that often invite the reader to imagine solutions the writer implied but did not enunciate, I will try to offer some prescriptive measures for the state of things. I do not think we can solve any problem until it is correctly diagnosed, so the most important thing to do is to openly and honestly discuss things and to get a clear and grounded understanding of reality. This should be an understanding that works across disciplines from evolution and biology to philosophy and history. Class often acts as a barrier to description- it is not very Chanel to talk about race or how Black men are cucking you out all the time. I am not proposing a genocide on our Isle of Dogs, I think that would be a tragic solution. I think any solution that involves lying to people is doomed to failure. I believe we can explain anything to any person when it’s done from a place of love- for those close to us and for those far from us. We must also love ourselves enough to quit lying to ourselves.
Ultimately, the point I am trying to make is that we are not above nature and that we are part of it. To believe anything else is hubris and arrogance and invites evil every time. We insulate ourselves from reality to our own detriment. Throughout history, aesthetics change, but the fundamentals of nature never do. We can learn from this or suffer the same fates as every other failed society.
This is a fun kink, but I'm going to caution again that it's very far from universal. There's no small number of people who need that pressure to perform removed to get or stay aroused such that they can top, and a far larger number who don't need it but still like it. And even for explicit power play, there's a lot of fun in a struggle between near-equals, or 'besting' someone and 'forcing' them through pleasure.
Conversely, rounding dominance or submission to height or build (or, uh, for an example you might enjoy, size (cw: nsfw, extremely gay, if you're logged into furaffinity) alone can be dangerous or misleading.
And, bluntly, about the point where rimming enters the scene and makes one of the very rare good arguments in favor of dental dams, 'perversion of nature' is less a problem and more a goal.
I'll caution that dog breeds had much more aggressive selection pressures (and, even less pleasantly, genetic trees that sometimes didn't even branch).
To the extent they exist (the original version of Beauty and the Beast, maybe? The Frog Prince?), it's also worth recognizing that these were cautioning about invaders at a time people from less than a hundred miles away could be foreigners.
Uh... tmi and probably not something you want to hear about, but: woman who wants to topcan pick whatever size and shape of dick (or dicks) she wants, and never goes soft or demands a condom, and in the unlikely situation she comes before you do, can keep going. There's some disadvantage when it comes to muscle stamina -- cis women don't have the advantage when it comes to thrusting unless they've picked up some very esoteric workout habits -- but it's a lot less likely to be the critical factor than you'd expect. Naturally dominant women aren't common, but if they get a good match there's a lot of ways that can be fun.
And for men who are sexually submissive, there's not really a 'true desire to dominate' under things. I'm sure there's 'submissive' men who really want to be on top but have sublimated it, but there's other people for whom it's an obligation. Subbing means letting that responsibility go, or never having to worry that you're pressuring someone, or that your decision might be the wrong one and no one would tell you.
At the risk of doing some mind-reading? Does Brad happen to have been raised in the UK or western Europe? Because the differences in how people framed 'asian' between the two continents might explain more than a masc bottom having competition, not least of all given 'size' hangups American tops have about sexual partners that they'd never want to 'use' that size.
Uh... can't dispute taste, but even ignoring the murder bit, that's really not high on my list. Not a bad body, but I've seen better faces on Corbin Fisher models. Almost all of them. I guess if you're associating jarheads with masculinity? But I've seen too many of them with their guards down, and Rudy Reyes of Generation Kill would turn every single one of them inside out.
It's a little funnier if you're taller and stronger, and you're still unflinchingly polite and responsive to other men. But that does still result in a situation that won't match your expectations. ((Though I'll caveat I've fucked with my head pretty badly to get to that point; I understand that most guys can't and won't do that.))
I'd caution against reading it as a single universal drive. There's definitely a thing some straight guys in progressive spaces do to performatively show themselves as 'a supporting ally' that's definitely not actual submission or even genuine nonchalance about homosexuality. But there's also some straight guys that see openly gay men as a space they can be more emotionally open without a fear of either being seen as cheating (if they were doing it with a woman) or a consent violation (were they doing it with straight men). And then there's some who it's an attempt to patronize from the bottom of your heirarchy, so to speak.
Yeah, that's plausible. I'm not sure the alternate universe option looks much better -- federal support for transmed stuff was near-universal just for financial pressures, a much milder anti-discrimination push with much stricter gating would have been unavoidable in an Ally's Law sense even without the diehard political front -- but a softer and less confrontational view as crossdressing++ might have left Rowling on the sidelines, even if it still resulted in some rightwing pushback.
But in turn, the ACA's coddling from the healthcare industry was worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to the typical trans woman or trans man, so even that would have been a hard-bought compromise within the grassroots of the movement. Nevermind the actual philosophical objection that many have to being seen as crossdressing++ or lifestylers.
No, Brad was raised in one of those fading industrial cities on the Great Lakes. He was specifically anti-East Asian, often complaining about the Chinese or the Japanese.
Hmmmm, I don't know, I watch the youtube channel "Hungarian Folk Tales" all the time and I feel like every other folk tale is basically telling girls to get a man as soon as they can and not hold out for the one prince who can feel the pea under a hundred mattresses or whatever.
I like guys who look cute and scary at the same time. My other top hottest men of all time are Khabibi and Tom Hardy who also look very cute and scary. I never saw Rudy Reyes until I googled him but hahahahahaa he is not my type at all he looks like keanu reeves but much worse
Sometimes this isn't funny at all but rather obnoxious
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I’ll leave aside most of this, but I’m curious. You describe gay sex almost like the top/bottom role is something that varies through life - so like, as a young twink, you were a bottom, then you became a top, then maybe in old age, you become a bottom again if you can get some younger, stronger man to fuck you? I suppose this maps to a kind of Ancient Greek or Russian military understanding of homosexuality among predominantly bisexual men in strict hierarchical male environments, but that isn’t a universal thing.
But most gay men aren’t vers, many stick with a sexual role through their lives. Take some very wealthy old gay man who has topped through his life, is he really suddenly going to get his hired men to fuck him in his twilight years? That seems…unlikely? Maybe not! I don’t know. Similarly, it’s not uncommon for aging twinks to hit the gym, get ripped, whatever to remain sexually attractive, but do they stop being bottoms? Again, I’m not sure. I doubt it, at least for many of them. If anything, a lot of the anguish for aging twinks seems to be precisely about the fact that they don’t want to top, if they did then being a hot 40 year old masculine male would be just fine.
More generally, you seem to have that very wistful, romantic view of male sexuality, camaraderie and competition which is common to almost all intelligent gay men on the right (Mishima etc). But is this a unique insight, or motivated reasoning?
I just realized I forgot to respond directly to your last question.
Well, I do think my opinions are basically a rationalization of my experiences. That is, I am trying to explain to myself why various men I am attracted to are not interested in me. But my viewpoint seems fairly robust to me, I check my experiences against those of friends I know and couples I've seen and relationships I've had in the past. Things seem to operate the way I expect much more frequently than when they don't. Even then, nearly no one, gay or straight, discusses things in the ways I see them, so I am either completely insane and navel gazing or others often are blind to their own motivations. It seems that most people are blind to their motivations and underlying natural forces that are typically unspoken of. I don't think that motivated reasoning precludes unique insight.
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I don't think my views are very romantic at all and I'm surprised you interpret them that way. Maybe my language is too extravagant. I think male sexuality is very cold and aromantic. If anything I view it more akin to Moto Hagio's hysterical melodrama than Mishima's idealization. Actually I remember a post you made positing that men relish competition and I replied that we don't, I think in my post above you can see a kind of loathing of hierarchy and competition I hold which I contrast with Japan for example where male competition seems nonexistent and cooperation reigns. (This is not true across all of Asia by the way, South Korea is much more competitive than Japan for example). I would prefer a situation where there is a legible hierarchy of men which seeks cooperation among each other, and phenotypic diversity is a major confounding variable toward ever achieving this. (This doesn't have to be racial or ethnic at all, either, if there is a situation where everyone born after 2026 grows up to be 7 feet tall I'd see this as a similarly problematic situation, but that isn't the state of things.)
You bring up a lot of various situations in the first two paragraphs which I could spend a lot of time refuting or agreeing with point by point, and if I had all day I'd be happy to, but instead I'll summarize my viewpoint and let you infer the rest as it relates to your specific questions.
Basically, when you are a young man, you experiment sexually with others, hopefully. Most of the time you will be in a submissive role in sexual encounters. This includes any act of sex and may not involve anal sex at all. The less confident man typically assumes the bottom role. Usually you are having sex with older or more socially superior men, so your bottoming does not confer a sense of degradation in it: you are, as a male, happy to be having sexual contact with someone. But at a certain point you do- and should- start to feel irritated when you're drawn into sexual encounters where a lesser man is sexually dominant over you. You will begin to feel this by, say, your mid twenties. When this begins to happen, you can either switch to being prominently a top, and avoid situations where you are being topped by inferiors. Or, you can do the worst thing possible, which is continue to be a bottom and refuse to see yourself as a top and chase after only men clearly superior to you. I describe this as the worst thing possible because you become a full grown man desperate to be topped by a superior. Never mind every inferior man below you. Nothing is more pathetic than a 6'2 35 year old cowboy desperate to be topped by a 6'4 37 year old cowman. This is not even appealing to the cowman: to know that his 6'2 cowboy can't top a 5'10 20 year old because he isn't brave enough is ridiculous.
An adult man who can not move on from the bottom role is like an adult man who has not been potty trained. It makes him look bad, it makes his top feel weird, it makes the bottoms around him feel worse about themselves.
To illustrate this better, here is the female version of the situation. In 7th grade, I went on a class trip. There was a girl in our group of 7th and 8th graders, let's call her Jasmine. She was pretty, thin, and had big boobs. If she wasn't the hottest girl in our group, she was the second hottest girl in our group. Everyone knew it. But as soon as you talked to Jasmine, all she could talk about is how ugly she is, and how fat she is. It didn't matter if you told her she was thin and pretty, she just told you she was fat and ugly. Everyone else on the trip was fatter and uglier than Jasmine, so we all hated Jasmine. The 35 year old bottom (or the 45 year old bottom, or the 55 year old bottom, or god forbid the 60 year old bottom) makes every other man around him look and feel like shit. If this socially superior, masculine guy is a bottom, none of us are worthy of topping. Great.
I hope that answers your question. Basically it is bad hygiene- mentally and socially, to be stuck in a bottom mindset. The best relationship between two men is when both act as tops, the bigger top raises up the smaller top, there is mutual respect and understanding between the two. Even though one is superior he should not act as impossibly so, he should offer help and encouragement to the next in line. No one is "just a bottom and born a bottom forever" or whatever, this is basically tragic gay thinking born out of Karl Ulrich's conception in the 1800s of homosexual identity being an innate trait rather than homosexuality being an action which is a more broadly held belief across cultures whereas the modern identity framing was politically useful for liberation movements in the west throughout the 19th century to today
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Well, that was a swerve I didn't see coming. Start off with dogs (so I expect you will start in on women and female dating choices), segue to gay sex (okay?) then bam! hit me between the eyes with the race stuff!
And then we end up with - I honestly don't know what. Your fetish about domming/being dommed? We are all part of nature so... alpha males can and should rule? I don't know, but good luck to you, brother.
It was certainly an adventure of a post
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Pardon my potential homophobia. But this is exactly is why I believe society must treat gay relationships (much like dinks, polycules or harems) as different, rather than treating them as 'straight relationships but with men'. Gay men think all sex is gay sex. By no fault of their own. Straight or gay, all commentary is projection. However, commentary on intimate and emotionally charged matters is especially prone to projection.
This analogy tracks for gay sex because all involved members are male. However for straight relationships, the Shiba Inu is rarely weaker than a female Rottweiler.
In gay relationships, a man can take on either roles in intimate settings. You're in continuous sexual competition. This isn't true for straight relationships. I imagine, gay relationships end up in micro-transactional interactions that don't naturally resolve into a blending of identities. I am not saying gay relationships are any less real. However, they don't have the same obvious entanglements as a conventional straight marriage.
The key difference ofc, is women bear children. One doesn't ask another person to surrender agency, undergo physical transformation, risk pain or risk death for free. Such an ask is even less defensible if it comes at no cost to the man. Therefore, when a man asks a woman to bear his children, he also surrenders himself in return. Take away the physical burden of child birth and coming together as one entity (parents) for child rearing, and you're missing the point of relationships all together. The gay dynamics of surrendering a body temporarily don't matter, because a woman must surrender her body permanently in service of child birth. For that, she doesn't need a physically dominant man to makes her feel safe. Physical safety matters, but emotional safety matters more.
On sex, I'm straight, so I too am projecting. However, men are simple creatures. As a straight man, if I get hard and horny, then finishing is practically guaranteed. Women on the other hand, are mazes. A woman does not have sex with the man in front of her, she has sex with the man in her mind and you give physical shape to it. It means that the narrative power of the story she tells herself and her suspension of disbelief play a bigger role in her eventual satisfaction than the objective reality of the physical man she finds in front of her. If a man has to use physical dominance to dominate, then that's a man that knows nothing about women or sex.
Now ofc, physical size helps. Controlling for everything else, a woman would prefer a taller and larger man to a scrawnier and shorter one. I also acknowledge, that in an era of visual swiping apps for strangers, women and men both tend to value the physical aspects more. But, there in lies in the fallacy of equating male attraction to female attraction. Female attraction isn't nearly as one dimensional as it is for men. Once you're in front of them, straight relationships evolve differently.
80 generations of careful reinforcement is very different from 80 generations of a random process. 80 generations of dingo mutts produces more dingo mutts. You may extend your dog analogy to humans once the smallest race of humans is 13x smaller than the largest.
Again, projection. Gay couples are 2 men who fuck each other. Straight relationships are completely different. Women yelling at husbands is a tale as old as time. If anything, the smaller the woman, the more they shout. The dynamics of whether it is abuse or agreed upon relationship transaction are known only to the couple.
Most recently, the 3 biggest waves of immigration to North America have been Chinese, Indian and Mexicans. All 3 are below average on the violent chad index. So, I'm not sure your point has statistical valence.
But since you asked twice, I will try my hand at it. It's an extension of 'weak men create hard times', or said another way: 'eradication of death diseases creates anti-vaxxers'; or 'peaceful times creates weak immune systems'; or 'I can fix him syndrome'. Western women believe economic-migrants and refugees are the most persecuted people of their respective societies. On the other hand, the people with a propensity for migration are the highest agency (highest volatility) actors, ie. violent men.
I can't improve on this video. So watch this video.
I've had the good fortune of being a relationship advisor to my female friends of various levels of attractiveness and sexual proclivity. (I was a committed man in a long-term & long-distance relationship). Women don't care about big men in the same way. It is one of their fantasies, but it isn't their main fantasy. Mr. Olympia Arnold is not attractive to them. Banderas in Zorro or Cary Elwes in Princess Bride ? That is like crack to them. These are still tall, masculine and handsome men. But, the fantasies they allow for is the real juice. All that being said, being tall and fit are obvious super useful to attracting a woman.
Your instinct is wrong. India has had a history of trans communities going back millennia. Chinese royal courts were chock full of castrated eunuchs. You're projecting an instinct acquired from the modern internet.
Every group sees itself as the most superior people on the planet. White people's post industrial-revolution dominance allows them to sustain that image. Other groups have fewer stories to sustain their narratives, but the impulse to see yourself and by extension, those you look like you as superior is a standard human impulse. Much like how my eyes wander even when I am in love with my partner, it is a natural impulse. To tame it is to be civilized. To feed it is to be barbaric.
Just got to this part. Looks like we're in agreement ? I must say, to tame it does not mean to reject it to reverse it. The liberal leftists are wrong for the same reason that right-wing looks-maxxers are wrong. The tension between the physical animal and cerebral mind need not resolve with the victory of one over the other. The tension can't be resolved, it can only be tamed. The goal of a civilized people is to find achievable peace and harmony between those 2 impulses in tension.
I believe the opposite. Post war America created suburban enclaves built on the explicit and later implicit segregation of the poor away from the rich. It was a deeply unequal society. Highways and suburban boundaries allowed so-called liberals to sustain an illusion of equality for Americans were equal within the confines of their suburban enclaves. Inner cities rotted and became hubs of crime.
New Delhi did the opposite. In his socialist arrogance, Nehru allowed any Indian to move where they wanted. irrespective of your birth, you were allowed to move and erect a slum on the side of the street. Your existence was dignified by affording you the greatest privilege : the ability to occupy the same spaces as the wealthy, and impose yourself on them as they impose themselves on you.
(aside - Much like you, I tend to choose the most provocative framing of obvious points. My girlfriend finds it tedious. Reading this sentence made me understand what it must feel like to be on the receiving end of it. Just yesterday I spend 30 minutes ranting about how most humans just want to be someone's working dog, but they don't want to acknowledge it because it feels dehumanizing. I was correctly called out on the stupid provocativeness of my point. After all, I was just saying that people want a purpose, which sounds much less profound. So....I understand)
To dominate is to influence without consent. There are many ways to influence - love, respect, reliability, narration, familiarity. You aren't saying anything new here. You're merely collapsing the rich experience of being human down to 1 dimension. It isn't wrong, but it is incomplete. That incompleteness is to the detriment of your point, because the meta point has been made by every person who has written a book on society. 'People want to be loved by their community'. Call it dominance, call it influence, call it what you want. It's as simple as that.
I guess I can conclude my counter point by framing it as:
"Any solution where the lying leaders drink their own kool aid is doomed to fail. Leaders must lie to sell necessary policy, but they must insulate themselves from their own propaganda. We are not above nature, but we need not be entirely subservient to it either. Harmony is cliche for a reason."
The presence of eunuchs isn't at all the same thing as "trans communities". They're not at all similar.
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Two quick points.
Ah, your point in number one makes a lot of sense actually, and makes me feel a bit weird for projecting sex onto an unsexual situation. Thank you for explaining.
Thinking about it more, there is one guy "below" me that initially showed a lot of fawning behavior when we first met. I realized a fair bit later he was gay and actively wanted to get topped by me. He figured out I was terminally straight. I always treated him like an pseudo little brother friend. Now I think we're on the same page about that.
There's also the whole pederasty in mentorship thing in ancient Greece.
I think I'm too straight to have the full picture here. I guess these "junior/senior" relationships get complicated when one or both sides has homosexual attraction.
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Aren't your homosexual experiences and perspectives innately 'alien' to the mainstream? Most men are repulsed and extremely repelled at the idea of having other men fuck them in the ass. Most men are similarly repelled by the idea of fucking other men's asses. They want to fuck women. Gay sex is most prominent when there aren't women around (on ships, or in male prisons, or in male pursuits like the army).
I don't think you should be trying to make an argument about nature and authenticity and true motivations when you have a distinctly unusual perspective. It's certainly interesting and novel to read, I think it's good to have some unpredictable theoretical essays here.
??? Yet your reproductive inclinations are skewed. You can't reproduce with some murderer's manlier brother. You're a gay man and I think you're unlike women on some massive multi-dimensional axis, just like how straight men are unlike women in some different multi-dimensional axis.
In a Western culture where Abrahamic religion has had 2000 years to suppress all earlier moralities, I agree that this is true. I don't think it is a human universal - there are a lot of cultures where men who consider themselves straight would have no issues dicking another guy. Ancient Greece, obviously. Bacha Bazi in Pushun Afghanistan is another notorious example.
Weren’t the Taliban basically popular because they suppressed Bacha Bazi?
And other disgusting traditional Pushtun practices. I'm not sure whether Bacha Bazi was the most important, or just the one which made most sense to western audiences seeking an explanation for Taliban popularity.
The modern argument about how Abrahamic religion handles male homosexuality is odd because both sides' core claims are correct.
Given the long-standing theological argument about higher criticism, the Christian trads (definitely) and the LGBT crowd (probably) are interpreting the Bible correctly according to their own standard interpretive methodologies.
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Yes of course, which is why I don't bother to vote and have never wanted to reproduce. I know I am a weird inconsequential homosexual and have no intention of stacking the future beyond my lifespan in my own favor. I'm not here to push my unique experiences on anyone else but think I can at least try to shed some light on things that other people wouldn't know about, especially on the eve of some autistic LLM devouring only the most pristinely sanewashed propaganda on the surface web and crystallizing it as the baseline truth of AI for the rest of eternity. I am just pissing into the void but I'd at least like to get some people wet before I go.
Well, to some degree, everyone has a distinctly unusual perspective. None of us are the same or experience the same things. Identical twins don't even have identical experiences of the world.
I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Sure, I am not confident in my assessment of this. I would love to know which of these two men women would choose to mate with on a desert island. I suspect it's DJ, even though Aaron is prettier, and I imagine most women would agree. I tried to flush out why I believe my intuition about male hierarchy is the same as the female intuition about male reproductive fitness in my post but don't know if I was effective.
Well if the AIs fulfill their promise they should be capable of working out what's Actually Going On and break through whatever lying we do today.
Nah they're trained only on lies and good intentions, they'll never reach escape velocity and will just dole out leftist propaganda until everybody but Shawanda Corbett has been turned into paperclips
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I don't think the progressive women who favor open borders actually see the immigrants as men at all. They may be mostly male, in the abstract, but they're not men, in the sense of potential sexual partners. When a hen goes broody, it will sometimes sit on anything that kind of looks like an egg. We have a competitive political and media ecosystem that is evolving ideological memes to look like eggs and the hens are sitting on them.
This is a bizarre response in my opinion and oddly illustrates a handful of the points in my original post. What evidence do you have that progressive women don't see immigrants as men? Are you certain that it is not your own self that does not see immigrants as men at all, and have written them off as something so low status that you must not worry about them? If so, this is the white supremacy and white arrogance I mentioned.
Unfortunately, the eggs are real eggs, and if the hens sit on them, they're going to hatch. This conflation of the real for the imaginary and the inability to dissect the two is the same weakness I was trying to point at in my ger society metaphor above. You've become too arrogant to recognize the threat, you've invited in the evil, chaos reigns.
The attitude I see these women have toward migrant males is one of condescension, in the old fashioned sense.
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This is a kind of weirdly porn brained and overly physical one dimensional analysis of intersexual selection. Size is certainly one of the better single traits to pick if you can only pick one to guess attractiveness, but given a few more dimensions you arrive at "status" as the best amalgam approximation of attractiveness. Certainly size plays into status but there are also definitely short kings and fat funny guys who command status that complicates the narrative you're slinging.
I don't want to say there is nothing there, but high status but short white dudes just aren't having trouble competing with big low status black and brown dudes for the affection of women. Look at k-pop for the most obvious example.
And sorry to reply twice to the same comment but I wanted to add-
I have had this exact conversation before on here, where I insist that relationships are physical and downstream of biology, and then someone insists that all women want is a high status mate (after maybe ceding that the guy should be at least 10% bigger than her.) So, if that's the case, I think it reflects so poorly on women and is similarly terrible for men. Have you ever paid for a prostitute? You may imagine it's a powerful feeling, to order people around with money for sex, but most normal people immediately feel the hollowness and grime of doing this. The prostitute doesn't like you, they just want your money. If a woman is just interested in the status of a man, why isn't she just a prostitute at that point? Besides that, how do you feel, as a man, knowing that if your own social status falls, that she will think less of you, or leave you? It's degrading to both sexes.
Like I said, class is evil and cheapens the underlying fundamental nature of sex.
On the contrary I think none of my analysis relies on the fantasies and ridiculous situations depicted in porn but rather on the truth of my experiences. The porn brained opinion is the one the majority of people hold today, that the beta can get the girl, that size doesn't matter, that race is imaginary, that everything goes and anything is possible. I believe I've lived long enough to notice the patterns of reality and they aren't a fairytale porno at all.
No.
As opposed to just like, being larger than her? I guess I think my status and personality are more intrinsic to me than money. Status isn't a euphemism for wealth, it's a high regard others hold you in. The boss in a petty crime group has a certain type of status granted by being a leader of men, the boring white collar professional is entitled to a kind of status as well. The status is highly subjective of course but it's not nearly so transactional as prostitution. A women who finds herself bound to a man with status in her milieu doesn't think of the situation like she's trading herself for his status transactionally, she feels warm and fuzzy and validated that she is with him. And her assessment of the status is relatively robust. If the white collar guy temporarily loses his job or the gang boss loses his turf she'll likely default to seeing it as a setback rather than immediately abandon him.
Anyways we're muddling the normative and the descriptive. My point is that in fact women do not behave in the way you describe. The physical stature of a man just isn't some inescapable factor.
Class is evil but dividing all men into half chads and half subhumans unfit for reproduction on the basis of race isn't?
Of course the latter is evil as well, that's the entire point of my original post! I want men to be given an equal and fair chance rather than ever be subject to the humiliation of being cast as half subhumans unfit for reproduction on the basis of their race. I feel you have misunderstood my broader point which is actually very much arguing for more equal opportunity of reproduction and I think that race conflates and belabors the situation in an unproductive way that ought to be better acknowledged if it is to be overcome.
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I would like to invite you to the rust belt of the upper midwest! My father, a thin short blond rich white man, born in the 1950s, lived his whole life in this area, and would often see white women with a Black man around town and ask me, rhetorically, "Do I have to be a Black man to get a white woman in this town?" He was a funny man, and couched it as a joke, but if I had a nickel for every time I heard him ask it, I'd be Noticing a lot of nickels.....
Incidentally, he had no trouble dating multiples of women while I was younger, but he spent the last 15 years of his life single and alone. His brother, similar in status and such on the other hand, moved to Texas and married a woman from Hong Kong and is living happily ever after today.
Look at culture from one of the most ethnically homogenous zones on the planet with few to no Chads? This is what I was pointing to with my Chadless baboon Asia concept and is logically consistent with my broader point
I really don't think that this is a matter of inability due to size or race difference. My own father started dating another women approximately instantly after enough time had passed since my other passed away. I suspect that you father could have found women to date if it was a priority.
Perhaps, being gay, you have not been around enough straight women, but k-pop obsession is very much not region locked to the east. I hate to straightsplain, but really women seem basically to just want their partners to be larger than they are and then move on to other criteria. For gay men race might generally be a dominant factor here, but sexual dimorphism means this is only really a biting problem for the marginal man. A 5'4" short king destined for bottomhood by your typography is taller than half of all women in the US. Even a 5'8" short lord like myself is 95th percentile amongst women.
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He's not porn brained: he's gay-brained: hypersexual gay men (which is a significantly larger portion of the pride community then liberals want to admit) think and talk and act as bluntly as this.
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I would like to suggest that you add a few section headings and/or horizontal rules. (You did use one ersatz horizontal rule, but your autocorrect turned your series of hyphens into a series of em dashes, which Markdown does not interpret as forming an actual horizontal rule.)
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Pre-AI slop was actually good - and AI ruined it
I've seen many claims that "Slop existed before AI" and that means AI isn't destroying the internet. I believe that is absolutely false. The OG slop was actually good, and now it's gone.
Let's define exactly what we're talking about. The slop is web content created by marketing teams, at the absolute lowest cost possible, in order to improve search engine ranking. Let's look at a specific example: when looking up a term mentioned in another post I came across slop created by the same company and same marketing team, but years apart. Let's see if you can tell which slop is worthless garbage ruined by AI, and which is slop that despite being slop may actually be slightly useful.
link
link
Both of these articles were created with the exact same intention: to enhance search engine ranking at the lowest cost possible. Yet one of them makes the internet a better place, and the other one ruins it. I might even contend that when a human is tasked with writing worthless fluff, that human can't help but to try to insert some nuggets of truth into that fluff. It's simply human nature. AI has no such compulsion.
This is obviously not true though. Yes it's interesting that these are same company, same topic, but the early example is very clearly not some low effort, low cost article. It quotes actual people ffs!
I have worked in marketing for a number of years, and produced a good deal of SEO slop. I'm sure I'm not the only person here with the same experience either. I daresay that every single person in such a position will say the same thing: gathering quotes, even internal quotes, is a ballache, and immediately adds a bunch of extra time needed to any given project. The Medium article has multiple dozen quotes. It is like the highest effort piece of SEO work you will ever see.
edit: I figure I should provide an actual example of SEO slop. Here's a topic I actually remember publishing on once (not this specific article, just the search term)
https://www.integrate.io/blog/7-key-differences-between-data-lakes-vs-data-warehouses/
Data lakes vs data warehouses. A simple enough technical question that a lot of B2B data companies would compete for. This is a very standard SEO article: it's got a nice list hook in the title; Good number of links, both internal and external; Couple of CTAs; etc. etc.. And it's all pretty low effort: no custom design work, no diagrams, just the 1 stock cover image; no quotes, no insight; it's just a very standard presentation of the basics on this topic.
Yeah it's pretty standard. Now let's look at AI slop. Which one is better?
The human slop is a very mid fluff piece that has some useful information. The AI slop one is disgusting and its very existence is an insult to humanity.
These are identically worthless articles.
You should try to get someone to find you 10 pre-AI and 10 post-AI articles and see if you can find any consistent preference. I would be very surprised if it existed without the prior knowledge of one being AI written
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I'm sure they put together a scalable and low cost way of doing this. For example, they mention a newsletter, it may send out requests for opinion regularly, and subscribers can send in their hot takes via a form. Then they can simply cherry pick a bunch of halfway decent responses, write 1 paragraph of exposition, and have an article in less effort than it takes to manually write one.
If you look at the other articles on that page, it's clear they're not in the business of putting a lot of effort into each article.
Low cost in the sense that they aren't literally paying the participants for their quotes, sure. But low cost in the sense that the marketer does not need to expend a lot of salaried time? No way. Just the lead time for gathering everything would add months to the timeline, whereas a typical SEO blog is going from brief to publish in under a week.
Like the other articles on the page you mention, these are so much more typical of what SEO blogging actually was:
3 Reasons Why Going To Law School Has Become Popular Again
10 Ways To Make A Case For Yourself As A Lawyer
4 Tips To A Successful Maternity Leave While Having A Solo Practice
The latter 2 actually go the extra step of having some custom work with infographics, so slightly higher effort, but these are clearly written as very standard SEO articles. There is nothing remotely interesting in them in terms of content or style, and nothing to distinguish them from a typical AI written blog
I would have to disagree with you there. They lack the "We have optimized this article using high-ranking keywords ... to ensure it not only provides unmatched value but also performs strongly in search engine rankings." part
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In 2010 I had a job writing brief scene descriptions for a porn company. Three sentences maximum. I was a political science major so couldn't help but slip in totally irrelevant references to Sandinistas or whatever after getting the basics - blonde, threesome, etc. - out of the way. My boss didn't seem to care. I guess it made no difference to the, er, bottom line.
Now AI can do that and it will surely be without my idiosyncratic approach.
Why Sandinistas though?
Oh I have no idea how I worked that in this far out, but I did
I see. So - I'm guessing you had to watch the movies before writing the scene descriptions?
Yes. But you can skim. To simply get the jizz-t.
It should have been an obsolete business even in 2010, but a few gooner boomers with disposable income were willing to pay for us to chop up a movie gleaned from a DVD into separate scenes for their consumption.
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Curious. How do you actually get AIs that will process porn? It seems like you need to grab open weight models and fine tune them? And the fine tunings themselves are valuable enough that you don't just post them? Definitely doesn't seem as easy as grabbing a Claude API key and writing a Python script.
Use an open weight model like Gemma 4 or Qwen 3.6 Vision. There are plenty of abliterated or "uncensored" versions floating around, people race to produce them whenever a new open weight model drops. It might not even be required though, Gemma 4 at least is pretty easy to jailbreak.
Then it's just a question of finding the most efficient way to process long videos, which will depend on the goal. For three sentence summarization, you could probably get away with using a handful of key frames. If the summary is supposed to reflect the "plot", maybe throw in an audio transcription of the first minute or two into the context as well. Then have the LLM produce a summary.
This is the sort of thing you could throw at Claude and get a prototype working in a couple hours, even without much background in the field. It's a pretty straightforward problem that has a lot of prior art.
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I'm sure ai's own idiosyncratic apprach can figure out how to slip in a few emdashes, and some not x, but y into each output
The guy that hired me would not just get AI to do it, and he wouldn't include these tangential irrelevances. Point is my human randomness was able to get in. But no longer.
Some human scuff can be a good thing. Not sure if I have enough information to make the call in this case.
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Looping in @phailyoor
I've seen this quoted a lot, and I think I'm the only one who's actually read the source material. It's a fairly boring diary he kept in 1995 that mostly consists of stuff like what he had for dinner, how fascinated he is by Photoshop, and emails about politics with Stewart Brand quoted in their entirety. When this little musing appears in mid-December it comes off less like anything quote-worthy and more like a half-baked shower thought. If he'd meant anything profound by it he could have expanded the idea for the section of essays which comprises the much more interesting section of the book, but he didn't. If you want to nitpick, it's unlikely that the things he was referring to are the things everyone thinks he's referring to, and when he's unambiguously referring to something, he's wrong in the sense that it doesn't really make his point. To take each item:
CD Distortion: When CDs first came out DAC technology wasn't mature yet, at least at the consumer level, and a lot of early CD players sounded bad. The problem was more or less corrected by 1985, but there were a lot of analog purists out there looking to crap on digital technology who would cite this as proof of digital inferiority long after anyone knew what they were talking about. To my knowledge, there is no aesthetic that uses the "harsh digital sound" of the first CD players for artistic purposes. The Loudness Wars weren't really a thing in 1995; they'd technically started, but were limited to a few albums, and weren't even that bad. CDs were louder overall than they had been a few years prior, but this was because technological advances meant that engineers were no longer guessing where 0db was.
The Jitteriness of Digital Video: One of the entries in the book has his musings about the contemporary ubiquity of interactive CD-ROMs. In case you don't remember, having video like this was a novelty, and a 750MB CD could only hold so much of it, so it was heavily compressed and blotchy. And, yes, this could make things look jittery. This survived well into the streaming video era, and as such never really went away. There is plenty of crappy low-bitrate content on YouTube, and no one is watching it if a better version exists, let alone seeking it out. It doesn't impart any nostalgia.
The Crap Sound of 8-Bit: An effete 47-year-old Brit wasn't referencing the sound of an NES. Remember, in the mid-1990s storage space and processing power were expensive, and consumer digital recording was in its infancy. Prior to the release of the Sound Blaster 16 in 1992, all PC audio was 8-bit, and a lot of consumer digital recorders were using 8-bit ADCs well into the 1990s and even early 2000s. In and of itself, 8-bit doesn't sound that much worse than 16-bit, just a higher noise floor comparable to a professional-grade cassette tape. But if you were recording in 8-bit, the rest of your equipment probably wasn't that great. A professional musician and producer like Eno would have associated 8-bit with home studio demos that weren't intended for public release. I am unaware of anyone trying to sound like this today for aesthetic reasons.
The distorted guitar and blues singer: These are certainly used today for aesthetic reasons. In fact, nobody ever stopped using them for aesthetic reasons. Eno's quote implies that rock bands would have stopped using distortion once higher-quality amplifiers became available, and that blues musicians would have sounded more professional once the music sold well enough to justify paying better singers, and that these would have only come back at some later date when people discovered the "rawness" or whatever of the early recordings. This isn't the case. These were aesthetic choices from the beginning.
Grainy film and bleached-out black and white: As above; I don't know that there was ever a time when photographers didn't use film grain and overexposure as a conscious artistic choice. These were always more present in home photography than in professional photography, and they are almost always more about use of consumer-grade film and not knowing how to measure exposure than of any technological limitation of the medium. Hell, for a long time Kodachrome was the consumer film of choice, and that's pretty much the opposite of grainy. The only inherently grainy consumer film I can think of is Instamatic, which can be nostalgic but was also only used on really cheap cameras (I had a Ninja Turtles camera as a kid that shot Insta).
But my overall point stands: It's not worth exploring too deeply because it's a throwaway quote that was never meant to be taken seriously.
Excellent post, very informative
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This guy is full of crap
Red book cd is the closest we're ever going to get to perfect undistorted audio in the mainstream. Streaming is a slight step down unless you use a meme audiophile service like tidal. 99% of listeners can't tell the difference in a blind test.
What?
8bit is perfectly in control. 8bit synth is basically an instument and artists make the music on it that they can.
True, though generally made as an artistic choice rather than unavoidable.
Singers have to practice and learn techniques to make these sounds
You're just proving his point. All of these used to be, at some point in time, seen as technical limitations worthy of contempt. Now they're deliberate artistic choices.
Early CD compression has a unique sound, which is what many a 2000s nostalgia pieces are now trying to recreate, go play Night-Runners: Prologue for a good example.
The jitteriness of digital video is so common an aesthetic you may not even notice it anymore, mainly because we don't associate video with digital video tape which is what created all those artifacts and motivated the continued existence of film for some, but half of modern horror relies on it. And even purely digital artifacts have had this phenomenon. You can look at this year's Ghost in the Shell for lots of proeminent examples. It pays big homage to pixel sorting and other databending techniques which only exist to recreate and magnify the quirks of digital media.
8bit music used to be seen as ridiculous and antiquated when we finally managed to have decent sounding music on the SNES. And now you don't even consider it as "wrong" or "poor", it's just another genre of music, with its own nobility. QED.
This portends an interesting future where essayists, novelists, poets, and other professional writers intentionally make an LLM generate recognizable LLM-isms as a way to spruce up their writings, like how a rock guitarist might intentionally hold up his guitar to the speaker to generate feedback as an intentional part of the music they're making. Imagine an entire genre of writing where it's not surprising for the writer to paste in LLM generations without notifying the reader, but intentionally produced to appear overtly LLM-generated, communicating to the reader that it's LLM-generated without explicitly saying as such, in order for the reader to enjoy the text for its obviously LLM-generated qualities that the author intentionally wanted to add to his writing, like how, again, feedback is used in some musical performances.
That's the point.
We saw an early version of this in that short lived trend of AI generated images that are structurally identical to another, well known image, but only structurally such that someone who doesn't know the reference could not decode it.
We'll yet see the same for LLMs I'm sure. The great novel of this century has surely to reckon with the biggest change to writing since the invention of the personal computer.
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No. There is no such thing as cd compression. Cds do not have distortion period. He is full of shit.
Brian Eno is full of shit about music production. Well, golly gosh.
Other revelations:
Escoffier was full of shit about cookery, he couldn't boil an egg.
Newton was full of shit about physics, he had no idea what planet he was living on.
Pasteur was full of shit about microbiology, dude didn't even wipe the cow dung off his milk bottles.
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Be pendantic about bitrate if you want, dynamic range compression is a thing, the loudness wars did happen and Californication sounded like shit on CD at the time, and so did much of the output from 1995 to 2002 in a way that was noticeable enough to create a style.
We can argue about the technicalities of how that happened, audiophile forums probably have terabytes of flamewars about the specifics at this point. But that's all besides the general point about how people perceive media over time.
I think Eno was talking about reader distortions anyways. Which are also a staple of eerie sound design now.
In other words, Audio CDs did not use audio data compression (the techniques used to make things like MP3 files smaller, at the expense of making the audio sound slightly distorted), but did often use dynamic range compression (an audio editing technique used to make the volume of a song more consistent, by making quiet sounds louder and/or making loud sounds quieter).
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You can ask a good LLM the same question and get a superior answer to both, because it's not optimized for SEO. I agree with your premise that human SEO slop is better than AI SEO slop, but not that it matters.
A good LLM may give an answer that's more technically accurate and thorough, but I'd have to read all the glazing and em-dashes. The human slop is more entertaining and pleasurable to read.
You can make an LLM avoid glazing and figurative language. It will still sound like an LLM and maybe a domain expert would give a better, more concise answer. But I think LLMs are more than adequate for answering questions with facts, where the primary goal is understanding the answer, especially niche ones which you’ll have trouble finding an human expert.
Sure, I agree that llms are adequate if that's the bar, but this is quite a low bar.
If only there was a worldwide network where domain experts could share concise answers to a variety of questions. And if only there was some sort of engine that let people search this network to find the answers they are looking for. I would argue such a system could serve many queries better than an LLM can.
But alas there's no way soemthing like that could exist.
Literally impossible. Never seen a prompt that succeeds at this and would love to see one if you have one.
I'm not going to pretend that AI can write better than a human, it can't. But sir, this is absolutely insane lmao
I don't understand how you're the SEO-defence force. Google was bad in the late 201X years and rapidly becoming fucking unusable 2020-2022. I was looking into paid search services by the time ChatGPT dropped because the SEO slop farmers were mogging google hard. But now, much like how people are rallying behind Uber drivers who might lose their jobs to Waymo (I thought we were mad at Uber drivers from taking the "good taxi jobs" even through we all hated cabbies before Uber) you have reflexively started taking positions against the thing you don't like, even if that position is saying "no no SEO slop google was actually totally fine"
Huh my experience is totally the opposite. I checked my chatlogs with this longtime google employee I know, and I started raging at him monthly about SEO slop right at the beginning of 2023
That's interesting. I obviously don't have omniscient memory, so I could have pushed back my timeline.
But I remember having to switch to appending "Reddit" to every search query when I was in college, so that puts it right around COVID when quality started to decline enough to be motivated to do that
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If you're thinking about things in terms of prompts then you're behind. It's a matter of having a harness set up that has a second, third or fourth pass that polices for figurative language specifically. You can essentially set up a whole editing department with whatever pipeline of content polishing you want if you have the drive to set it up.
Tried it and it doesn't work. The writing models will spend more effort bypassing your policing layers than actually doing the task. It'll come up with some twisted way to be "nu-uh I didn't use "figurative language" there" in a way that the layer will buy it. This is the creature we have created with RLVR.
Once added a requirement that all entries in bulleted lists need to be verified against a certain criteria. Instead of verifying the criteria, it replaced all the bulleted lists with numbered lists.
What is a writing model? How are you construction you agents?
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We had that, Stack Overflow. We still do but it all but died. Notice that it started declining before AI.
There are multiple theories, but mine is simply that there are lots of beginners who tire out the domain experts, and the (novelty) incentive to answer decreases while old answers constantly become outdated, lowering median answer quality, further decreasing incentive. LLMs solve the beginner problem, and we can maybe address the motivation problem by e.g. paying experts and training LLMs to cite them (I suspect this is possible and would improve training).
Moreover, LLMs are the ultimate search engine, better than Stack Overflow and Google could’ve been, because if the question is exact, the LLM may regurgitate the expert’s exact answer, but it can also handle (near-arbitrary) peculiarities and combine domains, which there aren’t enough experts for.
I have ChatGPT set to “efficient” with a custom prompt to cite sources. I’ve never seen it glaze or use figurative language yet. It still has LLMisms and occasional (filler) casual exclamations, but it has been concise enough, and answered specific questions I couldn’t get from manually searching online.
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Why do these things seem so rigid on their style?
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Many years ago I had a job doing SEO filler content for Commercial Ice makers. AI is welcome to take that job
Are you saying you didn't like doing the job, or was the content actually bad?
It was fine as something that paid but trying to write articles differentiating a 9kg per hour ice maker and a 11kg per hour ice maker is difficult
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Government run grocery stores and slopulism
I am not an American and don't live in NYC, but I've recently been thinking about the news of there being government run grocery stores in NYC. In my mind, NYC is in at least one way a heart of capitalism in the world, so this at least has some symbolic significance. On a more serious note, I find it interesting what the idea that government-run grocery stores would fix anything reveals about its thinkers.
If you speak to most people, even very intelligent ones, they tend to have narrative-driven models of reality. For example, if you go on Reddit, talk to a co-worker or whatever about health insurance companies or grocery stores, they'll often make these entities responsible for high prices for groceries or healthcare, claiming greed, manipulation and dishonesty in some fashion.
While it is absolutely true that these entities operate out of greed and not e.g. compassion, if one looks at the claims, they are often weak at best. Both grocery stores and health insurance companies have rather low margins (typically 1-3% of net margin for grocery stores, 2-5% for health insurers) in most places. The idea that the only thing preventing us from a post-scarcity, food and healthcare-too-cheap-to-meter society are somehow corporations made up of morally abhorrent people seems to quite attractive to a lot of people.
While both grocery stores and health insurance companies do have plenty of issues, my personal view is that they act in as kind of stand-ins for people's rage; between choosing to believe that either:
a. Healthcare is an enormously and ever-more expensive thing in most of the world, with 15-20% of GDP (!) going to healthcare in the US and usually >10% in most developed nations, because people's expectations of healthcare service are ever-rising and people believe that healthcare is a "human right" and the fact that it's such an expensive thing and requires a lot of staff (health services are the number 1 employer in a lot of US states now) means that when you need healthcare, it'll cost you a lot and insurance premiums reflect that. Similarly with grocery stores; food is actually cheaper than ever as measured by % of people's income being spent on it
b. There are evil people colluding to drive up the prices of essential goods
most people choose b.)
Even most smart people! I have some very sharp colleagues who are economically extremely illiterate and I work in quantitative finance, a field where one would hope people understand things about supply and demand.
And this extends to the right as well! Most populists-right movements have been exerting more, not less, command upon the economy; even Mottizens veer into this, seeing working in finance as parasitising upon society rather than allocating where goods and services ought to go.
I think this sort of feel-good, narrative-driven politics is ultimately an issue simply because reality is not narrative-driven; the progression to the modern world has broadly shown that in a lot of cases, reality is random, cruel, senseless, not governed by human-compatible narratively satisfying laws. There isn't necessarily a cabal; a lot of things are driven by emergent phenomena.
However, the "grocery stores are not evil camp" tends to have shitty marketing (perhaps due to not thinking in terms of attractive narratives itself too much) and loses to people like Zoran Mamdani. Indeed, that is broadly the story of populism and demagoguery, which seems to recently have gained a lot of ground in a lot of places in the world. Maybe the internet and especially things like TikTok makes small soundbites do better these days.
They parasitize on society by allocating where goods and services go.
Finance has done tremendous damage to the Western world. They offshored vital industries (that alone is civilizational-scale treason) and they drain away highly capable people from the hard sciences that actually create wealth.
They presided over a merger-acquisition/shareholder-first equilibrium that encouraged a race to the bottom in capital investment and R&D. Encouraging companies to fail the marshmallow test is a deeply wrong thing to do.
Then there's the rush into land appreciation. Land in high-demand cities is an amazing financial asset, it's impossible to make any more of it! Land can't be taken away, it's fixed in place. The financial sector has capitalized on this and directed enormous amounts of capital into loans to bid up land values, rather than developing industry. This was a major trend over the 20th century. Across 17 advanced economies, the share of mortgage loans in banks' total lending portfolios doubled over the past century: 30% in 1900 to 60% in 2014. Credit is elastic while land is fixed - the result is land prices rising. Only a small fraction of the mortgage lending is for new builds (less attractive to banks since they're without a proven price) so the bulk of this enormous mortgage lending ends up bidding up prices on existing houses.
Industry can go bust for all kinds of reasons, it's risky, there's a need for constant competition and improvement, capital depreciates and creditors might lose out in bankruptcy. Most businesses fail. But house prices go up! And a bank can always take back the house if they default on their mortgage. Bidding on land is lucrative for banks, bad for society.
Why are banks directing trillions to making housing less affordable, anchoring workers to fixed mortgages, suppressing fertility? So they can make a few % higher returns. It's terrible pointless waste.
There are presumably many good people in the financial sector and parts that are less damaging (VCs to an extent) but the whole ethos of the sector is corrupt and anti-social. Privatized gains, socialized losses. The financial sector has been doing the wrong thing with great effort and skill and dressed it up as the right thing. VCs might well decide to put their money into 'making sports betting more addictive' because that's more profitable and safe than 'making incredibly intricate lenses for semiconductors.'
See also: https://business.columbia.edu/sites/default/files-efs/pubfiles/12925/Rajgopal_economic_implications.pdf
Damn these people. Their stupid greed isn't even helping their own companies! They're sacrificing their own companies interests just to stay ahead of earnings expectations, an almost totally imaginary, abstract number. By definition you are always supposed to take a positive NPV project in ultra-financialized bean-counter economics, nevermind social outcomes. But they aren't even properly aligned with that, they know that their job is to keep share prices up or they may be paid in short-term options.
Most of all, damn the whole system. A certain amount of greed in the right place is fine but we're far into the realm of negative returns.
Governments certainly didn't help much with idiotic regulations, ideological fads and negligent oversight. Unions have been similarly damaging in many respects. The alternative to wrecking by the financial sector shouldn't be 'total control of the economy by a posse of men in poorly fitting suits who got where they are by reciting Lenin and bureaucratic manoeuvres' or 'total control of the economy by union thugs who go on strike when there's an R in the month' but a disciplined govt-directed market system directing capital towards development, making use of capital controls and lending restrictions and regulations in a synchronized, coordinated way. A single army, not a chaotic PvP brawl between various interest groups competing to grab as much of the pie as they can.
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I agree with your point overall, but this:
Doesn't mean what you'd think it means. Per the ACA, health insurers have a legally mandated minimum loss ratio (ratio of payouts to revenue collected) of 80%. If they don't payout enough to 'justify' their premiums, they're forced to refund the excess, which obviously they never want to do because if the customer is willing to pay that much, which they proved they were by paying that much, refunding it is just leaving money on the table with no upside. The remaining 20% has to be split between operating costs (which will inevitably bloat due to principal agent problems and internal politics) and profit, so 5% might be close to the ceiling of what's possible. Which makes it meaningless as a metric.
To quote an earlier post of mine:
Is this actually the root cause of healthcare prices exploding? Probably not, but the argument-from-margins doesn't prove it isn't.
When your margin is capped, the only way to increase profit is increasing revenue. Predicted exploding costs means larger premiums means higher revenue.
Okay but you’d still expect competition to try to keep costs low to compete on premiums meaning you’d expect all things equal for insurance companies to want to keep costs low.
But the flip side to that is regulatory complexity means there are large moats to entrance decreasing competitive pressures.
Yeah, there is still competitive pressure pushing down, which might be enough. My point is just that margin doesn't tell us whether it is.
Market pressure is a tragedy of the commons, recall: it works because any seller that doesn't 'defect' and lower prices gets out competed by the ones that do, even though they'd all be better off if they stood firm at the monopolistic price. Tragedies of the commons are hard to solve -- and we've got a variety of tools to prevent these particular one from getting solved, of varying efficacy -- but it's still not impossible.
Margins are usually an OK measure of efficiency (certainly not perfect), but here they're useless. No clue what to use instead.
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There’s another principal agent problem in that employer health plans dominate private insurance and employees don’t shop for those plans. At best you might have options of the flavor of insurance — PPO, high deductible, HMO, etc — but not a choice of insurance company.
Which company you end up with ends up as a function of what’s best for the company when HR is competent and aligned. When HR is incompetent or unaligned it might come down to which salesperson they vibe with or which spent their entertainment budget best.
I thought about this. Employers also pay for their plan. I don’t know the details well enough to understand how the employers portion jives with the overall.
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As someone whose wealth comes from quant finance, I would say this is correct. A core part of quant finance is critical to the global economy. But a ton of other stuff is unproductive competition or outright gambling-enabling. Separating the two out is fierce debate but each end of the axis is real.
But you don't even have to talk about complicated financial instruments to see financial parasitism. A lot of people are genuinely too dumb or of poor impulse control to handle credit cards and banks quickly lock up all of their future disposable income. They would 100% have been better off without credit cards since they would simply be broke instead of six figures in debt.
They get a bunch of stuff, then they declare bankruptcy and never have to pay for it. This does ruin their credit, but because they're (by assumption) too dumb and/or have poor impulse control, they couldn't have taken advantage of good credit anyway.
A lot of them are too stupid to declare bankruptcy and just make the minimum payments for life, and divert whatever cash windfalls they get towards it. Only to then continue spending into their temporarily freed up credit.
I'm not saying a business that boosts utility today for people with high future discounting rates is inherently bad, but to the degree banks exploit this it borders into illegitimacy, IMO.
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The human brain didn't evolve to be so smart for understanding complex emergent behaviors, it's just a fortunate part that our intelligence also allows us to do that. But it's still really hard for us to figure this out, especially from first principles.
Some form of mercantilism or similar systems was basically the default idealogy for very long periods of time across many civilizations, breaking out of that mindset and into free market capitalism was genuinely groundbreaking. Even now the biggest nation in the world, China, is still idealogically controlled by anti market leaders who were dragged into some semblance of proper economics by what might as well have been sheer luck. If not for Deng Xiaoping's market reforms breaking open some of the idea trap they'd likely still be extremely poor.
The Big Bad Evil Who Deserves All The Blame is common everywhere, in all societies. Whether it be the witches who cursed your son to be weird (now understood as autistic), or The Man who controls government and the economy keeping you from being more than a fast food employee, or the Jews conspiring behind doors or 9/11 being an inside job or the secret labs that must have intentionally released dangerous pathogens, everything bad gets pinned on the evil shadow figures because the idea that nature or complex systems like that can just do that is somehow even more terrifying.
Ironically it can even be the people who are trying to help you that become the Boogeyman. Whether it be the Jewish merchants who were blamed for the high prices in black neighborhoods that the other stores refused to even touch (the same way that all "price gouging" complaints work) or foreign aid workers with conspiracies alleging they're responsible for the disaster they're providing aid for, they become the face of the great evil because they're the only face around to blame.
In the same way strongman populism is like the reverse. If Evil Authority is responsible for all the bad in the world, then Good Authority must be able to do all the good. You don't need a person with sound policies that consider those yucky tradeoffs as real, you need a powerful fighter who exposes the illuminati and beats them up.
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Isn’t the obvious solution just photoshopping Mamdani's head over Boris Yeltsin's and letting the memes take off? If there's one episode in history that points out the strength of a free market, it's specifically related to grocery stores
It wouldn’t work on the necessary demographic. Mamdani did best among 18 to 29 year olds. For them, Yeltsin is ancient history, completely irrelevant to today; besides which, their education from leftist teachers most likely never included that episode.
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I agree with a lot of what you are saying directionally, but
entities don't have greed, individuals do. Which is why low margins by themselves are a poor indicator of whether or not greed is at play. If I am the owner and CEO of MonopolyMart and MonopolyMart posts a five-figure net loss in FY2024 but I, the owner and CEO of MonopolyMart, have a salary of $1 billion, does the low margin indicate that I am not in the business for the money?
We know what happens when the measure is the target.
In the US, people without insurance can typically get discounted rates if they pay out of pocket and/or charitable care if they have trouble paying at all. To your point about supply and demand, insurance drives aggregate medical costs up because your total payment for medical care (which includes your health insurance coverage) has to cover overhead and payroll for doctors and insurers.
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Most people, even often intelligent people*, approach economics with the mindset of a medieval peasant.
That is to say, they see it as a zero-sum, moralistic story. If the travelling merchant doesn't make anything but sells cloth for two ducats a yard while buying it for one ducat a yard, he's a greedy middle-man who doesn't do anything of value (although I'll still sell him my cloth because nobody else will buy it...).
I'm convinced this is the default way of thinking about things. Just as we hate the rich because he evolved as hunter-gatherers who had to share meat with our tribe-mates, we struggle to understand positive-sum interactions, prices as signals, and other essential economic concepts.
I'm not a fan of the general impulse of 'things I value should be on the national curriculum because then other people would think like I do', I don't care about forcing kids to do art, music, literature, foreign languages etc.
But economics should absolutely be taught to children. We can't trust leaving our elites alone to understand economics since they've burned that trust on things like open borders and abolishing the police, so normal voters should understand (or at least be able to repeat as a maxim) that building houses causes house prices to go down, or that nothing in economics can be explained by 'greed'.
*I once had a conversation with a very intelligent software engineer who argued that everyone should be limited to owning one house, so that greedy landlords couldn't buy them all up and stop everyone else sharing in the property market. How exactly he expected renting to work when owning a rental property in addition to a house you live in was illegal wasn't clear.
Was he allowing for collective ownership of rentals? Say, publicly traded corporations. They’d probably end up as larger cartels, but in some of our worst housing markets, that might be an improvement. Might.
Renting out houses feels scummy, illegitimate in a way that renting office space or even apartments does not. I don’t know if I can justify that feeling. It might just be a lifetime of cultural conditioning.
But speculating on houses? Using them purely as a store of value decoupled from the normal economy? That part I hate and resent. We put so many fingers on the scale to smooth out the largest, most important purchase most Americans will ever make. If one has enough money, though, one can just…exploit that. Free ride on the distortionary effects. I wouldn’t mind seeing that use case disappear.
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Which concepts would you teach?
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You put stuff in someone else's name and then rent it out anyways.
My programmer friend wasn't advocating for a law with the intention that everyone would break it. He genuinely thought that 'one house per person' was a good policy.
I think it's a good policy. Shelter is not like other goods - you can literally only use one house at a time, and you must have one house as a roof over your head. So you enforce no superfluous houses per person, and if you want to move, you sell your house and buy another house. Obviously you need a few other bits to make it work: hotels for people who need to be somewhere temporarily, sublets for people who can't afford a full house. But freeing up the majority of the supply and making the market much more fluid should do a lot of good work.
What do you think a sublet is exactly?
Lodgers. You live in the house, they live in a part of the house (potentially a big part). Subletting is probably the wrong word for letting a subsection.
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Or, you know, you can just build up. Demolish the houses and build skyscrapers. Just let people profit from owning real estate and they will trip over themselves to do it for you.
No need to ration the supply when you can just increase it.
Apartments are a necessarily evil but are considerably worse for human flourishing than even small houses, and if there are ways to address the failure of the housing market without building more of them, we should take them even at a significant premium, for the sake of our species' dignity. Backyards should be the default for any family with children, not a luxury. I'm a very literal NIMBY in this sense. Humans need greenery in their lives, little humans need space to run and play and goof around.
(No, public parks don't make up for this. Even if you live very close by, a trip to the park is a whole thing, you need to get the kid dressed, drive or walk them, and then watch them the whole time. Going more than once a week is a tall order. The mental health benefits for the kid, and peace-of-mind benefits for the parents, don't remotely compare to the availability of a private garden that they can run out into at ~any hour of the day or night if they're going a bit stir-crazy in their bedroom.)
I agree that backyards are incredibly elite, but how do you solve traffic from the ever increasing urban sprawl? Especially considering the ever increasing urbanization and demand to live in megacities that have all the economic growth
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There aren't. Pigeonhole principle; if you have housing for 1,000,000 people but 1,500,000 people want to live in the city, 500,000 of those will either be homeless or forced to live elsewhere, and the 1,000,000 winners will have to spend all their money bidding up against each other for the privilege.
Yes, houses with backyards are much nicer than apartments, all else being equal, but all else is not equal. Giving every family their own detached home and backyard is not possible. It's like trying to make sure all kids are above average. The fertility and quality of life hit from young adults not being able to afford housing is much larger than the fertility and quality hit from not having backyards. And since most people don't need a whole house to themselves, most people living in detached family housing end up becoming roommates, which is its own indignity against the human spirit.
That's putting it too strongly. Making all kids above average is a logical impossibility even if you had a literal magic wand. There would, on the other hand, be nothing logically or scientifically impossible about ordering society so that every (family of) citizen(s) is guaranteed a house, though barring space colonization it may require population caps once all available land has been tiled with houses.
Regardless, if we agree houses are superior to apartments, I maintain that demolishing houses to make room for apartments should be regarded as a product of dire straits, an extremely regrettable thing to do, to be undertaken only when the humanitarian concerns are overwhelming. To do otherwise is sheer Repugnant Conclusion stuff - depriving people of an actually good life for the sake of making some other people's sucky lives fractionally less sucky. 1,000,000 happy house-owners and 500,000 disgruntled apartment-owners is preferable to 1,500,000 slightly-less-disgruntled, but still fundamentally unfulfilled and frustrated apartment owners.
(And all this is without going into my objection to demolishing living spaces at all; I think it's deeply regrettable that we live in a society where living in the same house from birth to death, over multiple generations, has become abnormal; I suspect that we're like fish not seeing water with regards to widespread psychological issues caused by a majority of the population being cut off from their childhood homes in adulthood. Humans did not use to live like this. We're not built for it.)
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It's funny, all the YIMBYs want this or claim to, but when there's complaints about the cost of housing, it's always a single-family detached home used as the benchmark for complaining.
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It's not going to happen, and even if it were, unless massive changes were made they would just become assets in the same way. Britain's housing market is hugely dysfunctional because houses are assets first and shelter second: it's hugely sticky, people just point-blank refuse to sell if the market starts turning down and they have very little incentive to. The market is so sticky that prices almost can't change.
I thought it was because (1) by-right zoning doesn't exist, so instead literally every single attempt to build housing has to run the gauntlet of getting permission from the govt., and (2) urban growth boundaries stymie building near large cities.
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So if supply - demand curves are generally accurate, you want to decrease price but limiting supply, and think price will come down?
Eh? No? If you assume that most renters would prefer to own, which in my experience is true and is also the default assumption of the vast majority of discussion, then most people are paying rent when they would prefer to be paying mortgages but can't because landlords have driven up the price of housing to sell it back to people, often literally making you pay their mortgage in the process. The point is to increase the supply of buyable houses, driving down the price of the asset and moving them from 'financial asset and moneyspinner with that income priced in' back to 'shelter'.
The main problem is transferability of mortgages but buy-to-let pretty much has to be predicated on rent being greater than mortgage payments in any case so I think it must be possible to work something out.
If everyone can only own one home, then it seems you fixed supply.
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I mean, you've essentially made full-property rentals illegal. So if you have a family and want to move city, but don't want to buy, tough. If you are young and starting out but want your own place, tough. And it doesn't make housing any cheaper or more abundant, it just makes it less convenient for everyone. There's a reason that even the most insane socialist hell-holes haven't pursued this policy, because it's the sloppiest of slopulism.
Your reply doesn't seem to deal in any way with the consequences of making housing abundant. The picture you are painting is just 'like now, but you aren't allowed to rent any more', and you don't seem to be engaging in any way with the massive systemic changes that would likely result in effectively 2Xing the amount of housing in the country and vastly increasing the buy/sell frequency of houses.
(Only 60% of housing in the UK is owner-occupier, and if we assume at least another 5% of that is second-homes, that's 2X the housing stock.)
EDIT: not 2x because obviously you have renters living in the houses already, I'm being thick.
How exactly do the policy of making it illegal to pay to own another house make housing twice as abundant? Your policy seems to be missing a way to address the actual hard part. I agree this demand is already over subscribed so slashing it won't necessarily being a death blow, but it definitely doesn't juice supply to reduce demand.
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It appears about 3% of houses in the UK are second homes (not rented out).
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Ok, but what do people who can't afford a down payment but want to live in a house do? Someone has to own a house in order to rent it out.
Subletting seems ok. The idea is to prevent massing property empires, as e.g. the Swiss do by requiring that every building be partially occupied by a Swiss person. But if you zoom out I think this question becomes pretty similar to the question of what to do if you can't afford rent: you do something with your life so you can afford rent, like move, or you're homeless.
Obviously the paradigm assumes that if you free up the 40% of UK homes that are not currently owner-occupier then it produces a big, big drop in price. If not, you've failed and should put the previous paradigm back in.
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I think something like this happened in late Republican Rome.
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No one else will buy it because the merchant has patent from the king to only serve this area.
Modern businesses excel at creating environments where they need not compete. Regulations, vertical integrations, captive customers, licensing, cartels, centralization, credentialism - businesses love them. They hate the free and efficient market with a passion. Anything that raises the barriers of entry - they approve.
One of the great paradoxes of political economy is that the free market is the creation of the State, and must be carefully stewarded by the State if it is to survive. In fact, after law and public order, it's probably the paramount criterion of good governance in the modern age. How free are your markets = how good is your State.
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Agreed. Economics is as counterintuitive as quantum mechanics or general relativity. Except, of course, that most people have no reason to go around thinking about modern physics, but everyone must interact with the market.
Try explaining to people that wages are the price of work, and just as the price of meat must go up or down depending on whether there is shortage or a surplus of cattle, salaries should also go up or down depending on how the labor market is doing, and they will look at you like you are the villain of a fantasy novel. Hence, nominal rigidity, and the necessity of inflation.
This would go about as well as forcing everyone to learn algebra does now. The course would be watered down until the average student could memorize enough answers to get a C without understanding the concepts, then immediately forget everything after graduation.
Maybe if you made it a general education requirement for college students, that would actually do something... although even they often fail to absorb the concepts.
Salaries that don't go down fall under Chesterton's fence, and you should make a better attempt to understand why people want them before deciding that we should get rid of them.
Actual human beings need to do long term planning, if only for things like "I'll know that if I keep this job I'll still be able to survive next year". Predictability is important, and salaries that don't go down are a lot more valuable than salaries that do, over and above the loss in money from the salary going down.
(Note that a common libertarian answer, "well, they can take insurance against their salary going down", doesn't work because the argument is that this desire should be eliminated from the market, not just satisfied in some way other than through salary. After all, an employer who won't lower salaries is already providing implicit insurance.)
And we do have salaries that go up and down. They are limited to either 1) low-end jobs where the effective salary varies because of tips, but the jobs are undesirable in general, such as odd working hours, bad conditions, and low pay; or 2) high end jobs where the salary doesn't matter, i.e. executives getting bonuses.
Also, notice that your reasoning leads to "it's irrational to rent an apartment for a year under a lease that has a constant monthly rent, rather than letting the landlord raise and lower the rent."
Lots of midrange jobs have pay that effectively goes up or down. It takes many forms, the most common is a bonus, but also fixed period equity grants, incentives based on company performance, and taxable fringe benefits. Most big companies have a big chunk of comp in these areas over the base pay.
Equity grants work especially well because they automagically go down if the company is doing bad, but the company can always top them up. And if the company wants to cut pay even more than the drop in stonk price, they can decline refreshers.
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If the government is doing its job, the salaries will go down anyway, in real terms if not in nominal terms. That's why a small amount of predictable inflation is considered good for an economy; because it lets wages adjust without ever having to go down in nominal terms; you just grow some of them slower than others!
At that point, whether the job will still let you survive next year or not depends on how much your salary went up (if at all) compared to the price of other things; it is very much not guaranteed. Which is exactly the same as if the nominal wages had been allowed to go up or down without inflation; the mechanism is just hidden as a concession to human nature.
The alternative is that salaries never go down in real terms, which is actually really bad when you think about it? Solve for the equilibrium.
People object to inflation like they do to salaries going down, for similar reasons.
They have a lot less power to stop inflation. (yeah, they can vote for the other guy. It generally doesn't work, and when it does they notice the prices are still high and punish the guy they voted in for that by bringing the previous bunch back).
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I'm not sure to what equilibrium you are referring; can you elaborate?
The great-uncle comment by @The_Nybbler already covers some of the things companies would do to get around this; laying off higher-paid workers and hiring new workers at lower wages. Another likely consequence is that companies would be much less willing to give raises when times are good, because now raises are a much bigger commitment. And if a company is unwilling or unable to do these things, it might well go under because it simply is unprofitable at higher salaries.
Now, what happens to the newly unemployed workers? If they are willing to work at a lower wage, they can probably find new work soon enough, but now they have to eat the transaction cost of switching jobs; if they were willing to take lower wages in the first place, they could have just stayed with the same employer. Alternatively, if they are not willing to take lower wages, thinking themselves too good for them now that they have been employed at a higher wage, they end up in a sad imitation of Latrell Sprewell refusing a $21 million deal because "I have a family to feed", and the world has to do without their labor until they get desperate enough to change their minds.
This can all be avoided by simply letting real wages vary up and down, and the easiest way to do that is to inflate nominal wages less or more; that way, the number never goes down.
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Wage stickiness is a complication, but salaries still do go up and down. Instead of individual salaries going down, expensive individuals get laid off and/or juniors are hired at lower rates than previously. Though the general "solution" to wage stickiness has been inflation, and that's been around long enough to pass the fence.
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It is cartels all the way down. Whenever you look for explanations about abnormally high prices - just look for cartels. Any market where there are less than 5 sellers/buyers you have automatic cartel behavior even if not explicit.
The markets in the west have been trough so much mergers, acquisitions, agglomerations that usually in whatever chain of commerce you think of there is usually a choke point in which there are few players.
Governments have kinda maybe somewhat alleviated the problem when there is a single seller for something. But they have not even tried to solve what happens when there are 2-3 buyers only (or 2-3 sellers) that just don't feel to compete with each other. Or the case of a single buyer. For example the meat packers right now are fucking both the beef producers and consumers.
Airline, travel, communications, internet providers, car rental, healthcare, groceries - if it is not produced in China - you have a cartel or something similar. This is how private equity operates too - they buy all the small businesses in an area and just jack up the prices - because instead of 20 plumbers, you suddenly have 20 "independents" bought by 2-3 PE funds.
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This does sometimes happen, though. Grocery price-fixing occurs from time-to-time even though ostensibly it should be one of the more difficult sectors to do that in. More commonly it also occurs at the supplier level, especially now that there has been considerable market consolidation in key sectors.
I saw lots of people mocking those who thought something was afoot with the price of eggs in 2025: as if those evil companies were just conspiring to raise prices, instead of being it just the natural result of a supply crunch! What, do you think prices are just based on greed? Well...
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I once had such an experience with a compassionate, highly intelligent friend of mine (mid 6 figures earner as an engineer, frequent donator to charity, would gladly give the shirt off his back to someone in need).
It started off with him posting some milquetoast meme in the groupchat supporting some ridiculous rent control policy, and me replying with another milquetoast meme referencing the economic problems with rent control. This kicked off an extremely long argument, debating the relative merits and demerits of rent control, which concluded with him admitting that the proposed policy would almost certainly raise housing prices in the long run.
At this point, as I see him continuing to type, I think I've convinced him to stop supporting the rent control policy; but instead he writes "even if you're right on a utilitarian level, I just can't morally support increasing the rent of people in need".
With this masterstroke, he's depicted himself as the empathetic deontologist chad and me as the cold-hearted utilitarian soyjak, and all I'm able to do is agree to disagree and slink away with my tail between my legs.
I think that fundamentally the vast majority of humans are wired to prefer policies and actions that have obvious, visible benefits, even if on aggregate, they're net negative in a way that's difficult to explain. It's really only EA's (extreme autists) that can bite the bullet and advocate for policy wonk solutions such as means-testing welfare or UAE-style guest worker visas, with aggregrate net-benefit but that look evil on the surface.
To be honest, I'm pretty blackpilled on the future of politics in the age of a low trust society permeated by internet and social media. It seems almost certain that politics are going to become Latinized, a pendulum between left wing socialist populism and right wing strongman populism.
But what is there to be done about it?
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I think, having looked a little at the notion and having had people discuss it with me, that the grocery stores are symbolic and really don't mean anything more than "Mayor Mamdani making good on campaign promises!"
There are going to be one store in each of the five boroughs, with the 30% below market price cap on certain staple goods. That's not going to do much of anything. For a family wanting/needing to reduce price of grocery bill, the expense and time in getting to the one store in the borough may well cost as much or more than going to the local big chain supermarket or grocery store and buying what's on offer there.
I won't say it's posturing but it's in the service of his 'man of the people' image and once he's out of office, I fully expect these stores to shut down and no more to be said about "groceries for the people, of the people, by the people".
It is posturing, but not to "the people."
It is posturing to the activist class, whose idea of poor is stuck in early 19th century, who imagine that the poor are starving and even 30% discount on bread and potatoes would alleviate their plight. Actual poor people never asked for this.
The average DSA voter? Or rather, I guess I should say party member going by this (college educated, but in poorly-paid job). "At last! Now I can afford to eat for the week, all week!"
I shouldn't laugh. Lots of people relying on food banks and help from charitable organisations. Just that the Mamdani Marts (as I've seen a reference calling them) are not the solution.
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Sometimes it is parasitising, though. Last month, the Massachusetts AG settled with Beacon Mobility, a private equity school bus roll-up, for $2.4M over colluding with a competitor to carve up special ed busing contracts in three towns. Beacon then bid as the sole bidder and signed a certificate of non-collusion anyway. After the rival floated a big rate hike, a Beacon employee wrote "Like us, they need to get their rates up as well and now all the business managers are freaking out." The PE owner (Audax, 1,500+ add-on acquisitions firm-wide) bought dozens of local bus companies and kept the old names on the buses, so districts soliciting bids often don't notice "competitors" share an owner. The state inspector general found 67% of districts got one or zero bids last cycle, and renewals came in 35-51% higher, way past cost inflation.
It's not only Massachusetts, Beacon now own many as 30 transport companies across 25 states.
Do colluding transportation companies or PE working to extract tax-dollars from schools count as a cabal or is this an emergent phenomena?
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The Case against Democracy: The Average Juror
I’m not sure if this is really more of a memoir of my experiences, a thesis on something profound, or just a heaping pile of drama for everyone’s vicarious enjoyment. I’m also not sure if it belongs in the culture war thread, but it has fragrances of memetic-hazards.
We recently had a OP on Jury Trials in the American Justice System. By happenstance of fate, I was summoned to be apart of a jury this week. Now, I actually wanted to serve on a jury, and even after all of it, I still do. I think of it as a small duty to my country as a citizen, and look in askance to any of my fellow citizens that want to shirk their duty. Being a citizen comes with duties, in exchange for privileges, and I have been converging on the idea that a lack of desire to serve your duty should at least strip you of voting rights. Now I recognize I am somewhat financially privileged in this. I am an ML Engineer. My company pays for jury duty time like its holiday time. My time on the jury had no financial consequences for me, and really only impacted some deadlines on projects I run. That’s not the same for everyone, but that is adding to my inchoate theory, that if you can’t afford to perform jury duty because of the financial hardship, maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to vote but also be excused from jury duty.
I won’t really dig into the process because I imagine its roughly the same everywhere, you show up, they give you a number, there’s a subsample to a pool, then a further subsample to the actual jurors on the case, Voir Dire is the term for the second subsample. Voir Dire was actually pretty interesting from my perspective, and also where I think this case ultimately was decided. I think the context of the case is required, so I’m going to chronologically jump around a bit.
The TLDR of the case is: Becky meets Chad, Chad is a hot man-child with a room temperature IQ, he needs someone to pretty much run his life because he has zero internal sense of accountability. Becky dates Chad, has a child with him out of wedlock. Chad eventually breaks up with her because “she’s controlling”. Becky files civil suit for damages for a bunch of big-ticket items (hospital bills for the kid, his divorce from his previous ex, forwarded financial funds, credit card charges he made on her card, and his share of the lease that they needed to void after he broke up with her).
The Details: Enter right stage: Chad, not his real name but shockingly close to his actual name, which is one of the Chad-like names pill-folk use, is a Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant, about mid 30s. His face is somehow permanently stuck in a Derek Zoolander duck face look. He is the defendant in the case. He is ethnically hispanic, but has a very white surname, in case any of our resident “race realists” feel the need to let their theories run wild. He has 4 children from two other women, and eventually 2 more children from the plaintiff. When he met and dated the plaintiff he was still married but legally separated from the last woman. From left stage: the Plaintiff, Becky, is a hispanic woman, sorta attractive, but not a knockout like Chad is. Her age was never stated but probably late 20s early 30s. She brings 1 kid from a previous relationship.
Chad and Becky meet, have a whirlwind relationship in the beginning, within ~6-ish months of meeting, Becky moves into Chad’s leased apartment, he pays the rent, she covers groceries and utilities. They are in “love”. In January of 2024 Becky get pregnant with Chad’s child, she wanted to start a family with him. Problem 1: He’s still legally married to his ex. He’s also broke, chronically bad with money. He stated all his past wives and girlfriends pretty much ran the financials of his life, he brought home the “bacon” and they gave him an allowance. Shortly after moving in together, he gives her access/control of both his personal bank account and the joint checking account he sets up. His pay check is split between child support, rent, and these two accounts. The split was never stated. Since he’s broke, they will “figure something out”, she ends up forwarding 7k through out the next year-ish in unevenly distributed sums as legal fees for the divorce. He never asked and states it was a gift, however he says “the benefit will be returned back 4x, 5x, 10x fold”*. After the relationship she contends it wasn’t a gift and he should pay her back.
Moving on, through out this relationship, she keeps forwarding money to him from her personal account. Sum total of about 10k. She provided evidence to the jury of these transactions but also labelled a bunch of them as to him, when they were actually to the joint account. His account likewise sent her a bunch of money, about 5k. I say “his account” because under oath he testified that he never transferred her money. Which is to say she went into his account and payed herself back. She also transferred a total of about 22k from the joint account to her personal account, as illustrated in the evidence. The evidence was super cherry-picked (it was her evidence, Chad provided zero evidence on anything) so the jury was never really shown what that 22k total was for. In one of the bigger mistakes (in my opinion) of the case, the defense attorney never asked her what this money was for or if it was her making herself whole. I really wanted to reach out of the box and smack the defense for what seemed to me as incompetence on that.
Eventually Chad gets deployed for 6-months. He loses his government travel card in a bar fight. Luckily he had her $500 limit credit card. He spends to the limit, calls her up and she refills it, sometimes multiple times a month. She’s asking him to stay on the boat but keeps refilling the card, He ends up spending about 5k over the 6 months. He promises he’ll pay her back once he gets his deployment per-diem. No evidence is ever presented to the jury that it happened or did not. All we have is the credit card statements.
Eventually, the baby is born, there are hospital bills, OBGYN bills, the works. Becky pays for it all, Chad agrees he’ll pay half of what his insurance doesn’t cover. However Tri-care does not cover the birth expenses because Becky and Chad are not yet married. Becky has barely any insurance and so Chad racks up a 7k bill for the child.
Finally Chad gets relocated to a different base, the happy couple (tho increasingly less happy) agrees to relocate and find a house together. This is about May/June of 2025. The divorce has gone through, Chad is free of the ex, he takes Becky ring shopping. She is unsure if she wants to marry him at this point because “they have a lot to work through”, he retorts “who else would you marry”. They start house shopping, he does pretty much none of the work, but vetos things. The comms get pretty murky as this part of the evidence is literally screenshots from Becky’s phone cherry picking texts, sometimes cutting off mid conversation. The inferred gist is that Becky signed Chad’s signature on the lease without his consent. Somewhere during this process Becky gets pregnant with baby number 2. Chad breaks up with Becky citing the reason is that “she is controlling, vengeful, and manipulative”. Becky terminates the lease but has to pay a bunch of penalties. Amounting to about 6k. If you’ve been keeping track the number comes out to about 35k. (Again ignoring her 22k withdrawal??) She sends Chad a bill for that amount. He refuses to pay. She takes him to court and here we are.
Chad if I haven’t been clear yet, is pretty much a lothario. He’s pretty, dumb, needs to date his mother to survive, is a fey-ish reckless crayon eater who just lives life in the moment, going from one desire to the next. Even myself, feeling actively repulsed by Becky’s weeping on the stand (and boy did she weep), I found Chad to be pretty much a reprehensible scumbag. Most of the testimony was Becky’s and a large part of it she spent crying or fighting with Chad’s lawyer. The lawyer actually said the famous words: “Permission to treat the witness as hostile”. I also 100% believe that she was very controlling, but that’s also the kind of woman Chad wanted to date. Becky submitted all the evidence and the defense attorney (Chad’s) seemed to be banking on the theory that the burden of proof was on her to prove everything, and thus submitted no evidence. Unfortunately, Chad cut a very unsympathetic figure and the jury makeup was such that emotion and female in-group bias seemed to be the prime motivation for a large part of the jury.
Jury Selection
Which brings us back to jury selection. This and the actual jury deliberations are to me the most culture war interweaved part of this. Fundamentally, when the chips are down, culture war facts matter. If you want to win a jury, you need to be willing to acknowledge some less than savory stereotypes that have a lot of evidence. The core arena in this case was the Male-Female Gender wars.
I really expected to be removed during jury sections. I’ve been told that in some cases, attorneys really dislike engineers on juries. Something about overly analytical, black and white thinking, and a propensity towards confidence in their knowledge that could lead a jury. I’m sure the few trial lawyers here will tell me I’m wrong and its actually because engineers are arrogant retards. However I on this case, the anti-engineer heuristic held it ground. I think on this case the plaintiff (Becky) was really going for emotional appeals. The plaintiffs attorney dismissed 3 software engineers before me. After the 3rd one was dismissed after stating his job, the judge called a recess and took counsel back to his chambers. I assume to read the plaintiffs counsel the riot act on making jury selection take all day. As such when I sat down, he was pretty docile, I got a few general questions about contracts, deals, relationships and any military ties I had. The strategies I inferred for each counsels was:
Plaintiff:
Defense:
I specifically think the defense lost this case during jury selection. Their questions where more vague and what they were selecting for was also not great. Too much defense. Their mistake was that the jury ended up with 8/12 jurors as women. 2 of those women were both massive karens. One was a stay at home military spouse of 32 years. She pretty much wanted to rake Chad over the coals. During deliberation she accused him of fraud for every incident, and wanted to tack on punitive damages even though nothing he did was deceptive (legally required for fraud). The other Karen was a massive menace and is in large part why the jury ended up awarding the plaintiff 20k of the 35k she asked for. She threatened the bailiff on me and the single conservative male juror. Me for not budging on letting her fuck the defendant over, and the conservative because he swore at her when she was being a piece of work. She justified it as she felt “unsafe” for not getting her way.
What was the most astounding to me was how much the women were just looking for any legal pretext to side with the plaintiff, almost to a T. Oh they hemmed and hawed and occasionally gave ground when the law did not exactly fit. But it was pretty much an uphill battle the whole way. I know I’ve gotten into arguments with plenty of the male-issue posters here but in actually I am pretty biased towards men, or at least biased against common female manipulation and herd solidarity behaviors. The real fact that the plaintiff had the burden of proof and actually failed to show much of it, particularly the lack of the defense paying her back (or realistically she paying herself back from his accounts) was pretty much dismissed. The the conclusion from the beginning was that she was going to get some money, we would just haggle over how much. And towards the end when I was standing by ground on dollar amounts or laws, then they switched to taking the amount she asked for as “truth” and started trying to assign a percentage of that “as general damages” irrespective of the actual documented damages. Justice was not in their minds, it was “how do we help a sister out” minus a “stupid tax” for being dumb enough to date this guy.
And while they were bad, what was worse was the sellouts, the people who just didn’t want to be there and agreed with whatever the consensus was because they wanted to leave. Like lets fuck someone over so you can leave? Zero ability to think of a future where they might be in court and the jury just wants to fuck them over so it can leave. That really boiled my blood. And even worse, I let myself be swayed on some items, I tried to compromise on dollar amounts, but it was like that famous gun rights meme, I’d compromise and then they wanted me to compromise some more, and more, until they barely moved and I’d be 85% away from my original stance. And when I ended up standing my ground, oh the anger, the petty insults, the backhanded insinuations, it was ridiculous.
I’ve been laying awake these past few nights wondering if I should have just flexed my financial privileges, hung the jury, forced everyone to spend 8 hours a day with me in a room, day after day until they just agreed to my position or the compromised version: the 7k for the hospital (breach of contract), 3.5k out of 7k of the legal fees from the divorce (unjust enrichment), and about half of the new moving fees: 2k (breach of contract). Summing to about 12k. No fraud charges or punitive damages. I can't imagine I would have made many friends but I'm not sure I ever want to see any of these people ever again.
Inchoate Thesis
As I lie awake, looking over my crappy post, struggling for a thesis, the one that keeps popping up is that the average juror sucks. It's similar to the apocryphally famous Churchill quote: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." Now replace democracy -> general jury pools, and average voter -> average juror. A jurors inability to put aside innate bias should be disqualifying. Make them take an innate bias and only select them for pools orthogonal to their biases. Remove from the pool people who can't spend 3-5 days in the jury without financial hardship. America is not an economic zone, if you can't make commitments to serve a small duty to your country, you shouldn't be a citizen with voting power, or the power to decide what is justice for your fellow citizens. The actual recognition of the ingroup bias for women should be basic reading for all lawyers. The preconceived conclusion that the plaintiff was going to get money and we were just haggling over how much feels like such a miscarriage of justice that I feel actually icky for having participated in it.
I appreciate this look into the inner workings of a jury on a non-famous case. I've never been on a jury myself, but always suspected it would be something of a mess like this. I've always favored replacing random-citizen juries with pools of professional jurors that have law degrees. I don't see the point in having a complex trial with all sorts of legal rules and precedent, if it's all going to get throw away when the jury goes behind closed doors and does whatever the hell it wants.
I think that would be a big mistake. The constraints imposed on the legal system by needing to convince a jury of peers are critical to maintaining legitimacy and buy-in.
Without the need to convince a jury of normal people there's fewer limits on how incomprehensible or unjust the legal system can get for the average person, and the legal system depends on average people trusting it and engaging with it. As things are I think there should already be a lot more concern about the current low level of understanding and trust in the legal system.
Well, in his story it seems like not a matter of "convincing a jury of normal people," but simply convincing 1 or 2 highly emotional women, who then browbeat the rest of the jury into going along with them because they're all under financial pressure to get out of there and get back to their real job as fast as possible. The standard advice I've always heard is to avoid jury trials as much as possible and take a plea deal or arbitration instead, because juries are just so random you never know what's going to happen. So yes, there's a very low level of understanding and trust in the legal system right now.
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I’d be in favor of only net-tax payers being allowed to vote and serve on jury duty.
Here’s how I’d award the amounts:
It indeed sounds like a gift. Without further context, “benefit” doesn’t necessarily imply “financial” benefit, so it’s not a promise of investment returns. However, given the ambiguity, I'll still award half of the amount, 3.5k from Chad to Becky.
Also sounds like a series of gifts and her possibly committing perjury. No money awarded from Chad to Becky.
Likely criminal theft or wire fraud. 5k awarded from Becky to Chad.
While she was technically a legal user this also has the whiff of theft/fraud. I’ll split the difference and award 11k from Becky to Chad.
2.5K awarded from Chad to Becky to make Becky whole on the agreement. It’d be 5K if not for the lack of evidence it was paid or not.
7k awarded from Chad to Becky to make Becky whole on the agreement, assuming she paid for the bill.
Becky likely committed criminal forgery in the first place. No money awarded to Becky from Chad.
Total: $3.0K awarded from Becky to Chad.
Punitive damages for wasting people’s time with this nonsense and for inflicting more versions of themselves upon the country: $400,000 for Chad, $300,000 for Becky (one for each kid).
Problem is that we were strictly instructed that we could not charge the plaintiff with anything. There was a legal form we had to fill out. It's strictly Chad -> Becky damages and charges affecting Chad only. I agree that Becky probably committed criminal forgery but based on our instructions there was nothing we could charge her with. He'd have to counter sue, which I don't think would be our jury.
Not if she was listed on the personal account and given access with his permission would be my guess. Don't give people your bank accounts sounds like a pretty basic common sense idea.
This was actually my stance. The "benefit" bit he said under oath sounded suspiciously like something you get tithing church members to say. They don't believe God/Church will literally under contract pay them back, but the good deed of doing this act with benefit them. I wanted to award her half, I think she benefited from the divorce, I think he did too, sounds like a fair split. This was a very contentious argument, the karens wanted to give her 100% and refused to compromise on 75% at all.
I was able to talk them into this. but once they circled back to giving her a flat percentage of what she was asking for it essentially abrogated this.
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This was a garbage case. By that I mean Chad is obviously broke and Becky's attorney is being paid by the hour. Neither has any motivation to spend the money necessary to try the case properly, and each is obstinate enough to persist and refuse settlement. Both parties balk at the prospect of paying for discovery, or paying a mediator hundreds of dollars an hour to help them reach a resolution, so they end up spending more money on legal fees so they can have a trial. Becky will soon find that she is going to have to pay her attorney even more money to enforce the judgment.
The downstream consequences of this are that the attorneys didn't have much to work with. For example, you write:
No, this is probably one of the more competent things his attorney did. This would be a great question to ask in a deposition. Unfortunately Mr. Chad probably didn't want to pay for a deposition, so the only opportunity he has to ask it is at trial, where he runs the risk of a jury hearing it at the same time he does. If she provides a reasonable explanation for the transfers that have nothing to do with the money he owes her, then that's it. If he leaves it alone, then the jury might assume that she used it to pay herself back. It appears he was correct on this point, as at least one member of the jury—you—was willing to reach this conclusion.
In the absence of other evidence this is a totally reasonable conclusion to reach given that you're forced to make a decision, but it's not based in anything other than your own intuitive read on the case. The women whom you complain about have the right to reach a different conclusion, and they aren't required to make the same inferences you do. You spend a lot of time on how the evidence is all based on her word and that the texts are all cherry-picked and the defense didn't present any evidence. The judge's job is to determine whether evidence is admissible, and the jury's job is to determine the weight and credibility of that evidence. It seems to me that your beef is that other members of the jury found Becky's testimony more credible than you did. It also seems to me that you're making an inference that since the Plaintiff has relied on her testimony and "cherry-picking", that there is other evidence out there that would be favorable to the defendant.
I don't want to make any rash statements about a case that I know next to nothing about, but as a civil defense attorney, I can't imagine keeping out evidence that might help my client. It's a different story if the evidence is irrelevant, or is a double-edged sword. That the Plaintiff didn't want the jury to see certain evidence doesn't necessarily mean that it makes the defendant look good; it could be that it just makes both parties look bad. More likely is that it doesn't move the needle one way or the other and the Plaintiff wants to keep things as simple as possible, which means admitting as little evidence as possible. I've seen enough text conversations of arguments over the years to know that it takes a certain amount of intellectual energy to follow them, especially as they tend to make references to people and events that aren't in the immediate chain, and trying to explain all that to a jury would be tedious and time-consuming. Including more than is necessary doesn't help anyone.
It sounds to me like she presented sufficient evidence to make a case for the $35,000, you just think that the $22,000 she took from his account was to compensate for that loss, even though you're basing this on an inference and not any explicit evidence. You also seem to think that the Plaintiff has credibility problems. Both of these are fine, and you're within your rights to make these inferences. Where I disagree is with your characterization that the two "Karens" on the jury were somehow acting objectively incorrectly, which I don't think they were. You're also claiming that they were biased in favor of the Plaintiff, which is probably true, but everyone is biased to some degree. And you weren't even as far apart as you make it sound; you were at least willing to give her something, and they weren't willing to give her everything, so find a number in the middle and call it a day.
This actually help assuage my consciousness that I had participated in some small injustice for failing to hold my ground. I can easily recognize that I have my own internal biases towards people displaying overt emotion in situations that construe to me as manipulative, which i think occurred in this case. And following the bank statements towards the 22k + seeing her as manipulative likely lead me to the conclusion I did.
I think its useful to get context that the lack of evidence might have been a strategy from the defense attorney to try and hang heavily on the burden of proof being on the plaintiff. I just think the plaintiff cut a far more sympathetic figure to large swaths of the jury, and the defense needed something more to push the needle.
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Last year I got called for jury duty. I showed up to Frank Crowley courtbuilding, went to the assigned courtroom and checked in. The defense began its voir dire by explaining the definition of statutory rape and continuous sexual abuse of a child, and then asked if I would consider mitigating circumstances.
My answer was something along the lines of 'either this guy did it, and needs to go to jail for a long time, or he didn't, and needs to go free, I don't have the evidence to say. But I'm not sure what the mitigating factors are for sexual abuse.' When the jury was finally selected it was made up of all men, and one black woman who didn't use the words 'white women be lyin', but it was pretty clear she did not consider the sisterhood to encompass white girls. I don't know how the case turned out, I got dismissed for saying there wasn't a mitigating circumstance for having sex with a thirteen year old.
Was anyone else asked the mitigating circumstances question? How did they respond?
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The only time I remember hearing this phrase was that one scene in The Dark Knight. What does it actually mean, in practice?
I for some reason remember it as a line from A Few Good Men. But apparently thats a Mandela effect, it was never actually said. The other jury members said it showed up in legal dramas.
We all found it amusing, and it was pretty apt. The plaintiff was actively arguing with the defendant's lawyer while on the stand and avoiding answering his questions.
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If you call a witness to testify for your side of the case, you can't lead the witness; in other words, the question can't suggest the answer. For example, in a car accident case, if I'm representing the defendant and he's testifying, I can't ask "Were you going about 35 mph at the time of the accident?" The reason is because this effectively amounts to the attorney testifying instead of the witness. If I want to show that the witness was going 35 mph all I have to do is get him to agree with me, which he probably will because we're on the same side of the case. Instead, if I want to show how fast he was going, I would ask something like "How fast were you going at the time of the accident." This isn't enforced that strictly, especially when it comes to general background information that would take forever to elicit by asking non-leading questions, but if it involves anything important counsel will object.
This prohibition doesn't apply when the parties are adversarial to one another. The traditional method of cross-examination is stating facts that are already in evidence and asking the witness to agree or disagree with them in order to create a narrative. Sometimes, however, a party will have to call an adversarial witness. A good example is in a civil trial when the plaintiff calls the defendant to testify. In these cases, it's assumed that since, due to the adversarial nature, the witness won't agree with everything the attorney implies, that the attorney is allowed to ask leading questions. Usually you have to ask a few questions to establish that the witness is hostile, then ask the judge permission to treat them as such.
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I realise this isn't particularly relevant to the post, but I'm curious, and useless American ethnic labels always nerd-snipe me.
Are we talking a mestizo guy called Smith, or a 100% European Spanish guy like Marco Rubio? Because 'he's Hispanic, but has a white name' doesn't make much sense in a world where the royal family of Spain look like this.
The Spanish royal family, like other European royal families, is not ethnically Spanish.
And thank goodness for that. Can you imagine?
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I was trying to head off HBD assertions that this is just Black underclass behavior 101. He was from Miami. He had quite dark skin, not very white. His last name was (and I checked that this wouldn't dox him) Albert.
Despite your preemptive protection of blacks, latinos being mired in reproductive, familial, and financial instability doesn't exactly head off any HBD assertions or beat any allegations either. Becky being conscientious enough to take a civil suit to trial (as low of a bar that is), believing Chad isn't completely judgment proof, and Chad having been married before already provided Bayesian suggestions away from it being black underclass behavior 101.
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You don't have to worry about doxxing him. The suit is a matter of public record. Whether this doxxes yourself is another question (unlikely because jurors' names aren't public), but I wouldn't worry about him.
There has been much debate regarding the acceptability of "signal boosting" information that is technically public but practically obscure. 1 2 3
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The Spanish royal family has not been genetically Spanish in any meaningful sense since the House of Trastamara died out. However, they are still not white, as they married into the House of Savoy and are therefore Italian.
I can't tell if you're joking, but I'll humour you. What does 'white' mean if not European?
Yeah, "Italians aren't white" is a common joke.
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Normal people think italians are White. The social justice'd think everyone who isn't black is White. Racists think everyone who isn't White is black. And the other kind of social justice'd think White means "everyone who doesn't worship odin, but, like, in an anarcho-progressive way." Those are the most fun.
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See the first eleven seconds of this Shoe0nHead video for the joke.
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Much of southern Italy was ruled by Arabs for an extended period of time, so southern Italians sometimes are not considered white. (See also Spain and Greece.) Savoy is in northern Italy, but the sentiment sometimes is extended to cover all of Italy, especially in jokes.
We talked about North vs South Italy here a few months ago.
https://www.themotte.org/post/3726/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/439931?context=8#context
Actually, I strongly disagree with your take - southern Italy, and particularly Sicily, was the most advanced place in the Christian Mediterranean and the cradle of the Renaissance under the Hohenstaufens. Southern Italy reintroduced Roman ideals into the otherwise Germanic Empire, leapfrogged the comparable Norman administration in England, and gave us Thomas Aquinas. It's not biology, and it's not Guns Germs and Steel (it's never Guns Germs and Steel). It's the Sp*nish. It's honestly astonishing to me how bad Spain was at ruling her dominions in the Early Modern period; they had empire handed to them on a silver platter and they managed to turn everywhere they ruled into a fucked-up backwater permanently. I recommend Denis Mack Smith on the topic.
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While I do not like MKC's snarky rebuttal, I have to agree that you seem to be doing a reverse-karen: "This poor guy got screwed because all the ladies were on Team Woman and too stupid or emotional to consider evidence." But the evidence is that this guy is dumb, irresponsible, and basically handed over his paycheck to his girlfriend to run his life, was terrible with money, the relationship imploded predictably (after they had two children!) and guess what, he's now responsible for the aftermath of that. We could quibble over the specific dollar amounts she should or should not be entitled to, but yeah, the case really was quibbling over how much he owed. Like, my dude, you have two kids with a woman you couldn't be bothered to marry to hook up with almost-free medical coverage? Yeah, that's gonna cost you. On deployment, you go out and drink like a sailor (because, duh) and ask her to pay for your bar tabs? Yeah, you're gonna owe her for that.
Agreed that fraud should not have entered the discussion, and it sounds like Chad's lawyer was terrible (are we surprised that Chad is as good at picking lawyers as he is at picking baby-mommas?), and I don't doubt the chicks were biased, but you have to be pretty much on Team Pump-And-Dump-The-Bitches-Deserve-It to think Chad should have escaped responsibility here.
Yes, Chad needed to get a bill. It does sound like the $22k she helped herself to ought to be deducted and the karens on the jury weren't willing to consider that?
More to the point, this is a real ESH. Chad is an irresponsible manchild degenerate. Becky, uh, should've known this going in- it doesn't sound like he's hiding anything.
I'm currently considering suing a certain company for fraudulent inducement and was astonished when my attorney told me their likely defense would be that I should have known better than to trust them in the first place. Apparently that's a real defense that works.
This might make me sound more dumb than I am; the context is that I kept providing services to them as they got later and later on payment. I didn't buy a bridge or anything.
So the idea is that given their track record of not paying on time or in some cases at all, it's on me for continuing to move forward in good faith no matter how many new agreements we signed.
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For every action I guess there must be an equal and opposite reaction. The rise of the Male-Karen is upon us. Woe be to non-men! I'll take that into consideration. To be clear I did not like the defendant at all. Morally I think he should have to pay 100%. Legally though, I think the plaintiff really failed to demonstrate that she never took money from his account to make herself whole, and that the relationship was setup in such a way that it was transactional, so that every payment she made was part of an implied contact.
The legal charges were:
BoC pretty much requires and offer, acceptance, and mutual agreement on terms. There was not a lot of offering being made, and it was not an implied contract. UE, requires that the plaintiff expect to paid back at the time of the payments, it was very unclear. Fraud required deceit which was never even demonstrated.
Notably they were also in child court for much of the other stuff, she was also just concurrently suing him in civil court for what appeared to be a vindictive last attempt at controlling him. That's why my stance is that she was entitled to 35k - 22k = 12k roughly. That's not escaping responsibility but its not also punishing him for her equally bad decisions.
Breach of Contract in this context sounds like the old-fashioned breach of promise, which seems to have been done away with as a civil offence. Becky seems to have been getting cold feet (rather too late into the relationship) but it was Chad who dumped her, after promising marriage, going ring-shopping, and entering into a lease for a house with her.
Unjust Enrichment doesn't seem to apply here, but IANAL.
Fraud - well, I guess does "pay my fees for the divorce, baby" on the implicit understanding this clears the legal path to marriage count as fraud, if he ends up not marrying her and not repaying the fees? Then again, did she take the money for this out of his account in the $22 grand withdrawals? Tough job trying to parse this one out, with the entangled finances and Chad handing over control of his money to Becky in the first place.
Weeeeelll... guy has demonstrated he has the sense of personal responsibility and reliability of a wet paper bag, so was that a vindictive last attempt at controlling him or last resort to get the damn finances sorted out, you bastard, after you stiffed me on the lease penalties?
Specifically for Unjust Enrichment it is called Quantum Merit in NC, @ToaKraka has a link to the jury instructions here, this looks slightly similar to the instructions we received for Quantum Merit. It was only applied for the divorce funds
I can't seem to find the Breach of Contract instructions, but it wasn't applied to the whole relationship but to individual elements. Essentially sets of offers and agreements. Like the hospital/birth costs, there was an offer of "paying half" and agreement to do so with both testifying under oath that they agreed to it. The terms were never specified but the jury instructions had a statement about a reasonable repayment schedule. Sorta the same for the credit card on deployment. He got sunk because his own testimony had him saying that she'd be paid back, realistically she didn't provide evidence that he did/didn't do so, especially when she had access to his accounts... but most of the jury went with the idea that he didn't and had agreed to do so.
Here's my response to the fraud, looks like its just a misc tort.
I think a bunch of this case rested on the fact that nobody on the jury (including me) had a good opinion of the defendant and no one thought he actually followed through on his commitments. He was demonstrably a man-child. Unfortunately not all of the jury considered the the plaintiff might not be telling the truth 100% and might be omitting the fact that she repaid herself from his accounts, with his implied consent, and was now just suing him for extra.
No disagreement.
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First of, let me sincerely congratulate you on wanting to do your civic duty and holding the view that citizens do have duties and responsibilities as well as rights.
Six kids (that you know of) and he's not even forty yet? Chad is definitely doing his bit for the TFR!
Okay, that's the only funny part of this whole mess. The kids are definitely never going to have Dad in their lives, much less ever get to know their half-siblings. Misery all round there.
"They are in “love”."
I'm glad to see you share my cynicism around "being in love". Seeing the likes of many such cases and people going "but I love him!!!" (more rarely, "her"), this is the stupidest damn reason to blow up your life (and the lives of any kids), and I'd love to destroy with fire the entire romantic fantasy industry that has convinced people that Romantic/Erotic Love is the greatest and most important thing ever.
"Shortly after moving in together, he gives her access/control of both his personal bank account and the joint checking account he sets up."
And this is why commingling of finances is such a pain in the neck for divorce cases, because people when they're coupled up think of it as "our money" and then when they split up, it suddenly and bitterly becomes "my money". Though for working class/lower middle class people of older generations, this kind of arrangement isn't unusual; man brings home wages, hands them over to wife who runs the household budget, she reserves the money for the standard recurring bills and running the house and hands him back the remainder as an allowance to spend as he likes. This works when it's a married couple and neither are selfish or dumb (e.g. he would spend the rent money on booze or, today, party fun drugs; she squanders the housekeeping on treating herself).
But they weren't married, and that's the big problem here, and frankly Becky was an idiot. She was paying for his divorce? That says (a) you are the other woman in an affair, and they rarely end up married to the guy and (b) he was in no damn hurry to sort out his affairs. Why should he be? Ex-wife can waste her time chasing him through the courts, new squeeze is handling everything for him, he can go out and get into bar fights to his heart's content.
Absolutely right the defence lawyer should have gone after "what was this 22k you took out of his account?" Either they were extremely incompetent or they knew it would make their client look even worse if they revealed the details of what precisely these payments were for, maybe it was Becky getting money back that Chad had promised "just lend me X grand to cover this bill, baby, you know I'm good for it when my pay is deposited, yeah go ahead and take it out, you don't need me to sign anything". Can't say the guy was cheated or defrauded when it turns out he was a total idiot who gave blanket permission for her to do exactly this.
And then after all that, when she has paid his legal fees for the divorce and set up house with him and had two kids by him, all under the presumption that "once he's free we'll get married", he dumps her. For being controlling, which means "asking him to grow the fuck up and take accountability and responsibility for his life". I am not surprised she went after him in court, it's just a pity the light had not dawned on her before the first baby.
I think you are not taking into account that being a military spouse of 32 years, she might be way more familiar with the Chads of this world and how that shakes out when they join the armed forces than you 😁 If the guy is a sergeant and he gets deployed, then on active service either he can get it together and be responsible, which doesn't let him off the hook for how he handled civilian life, or worse he is this slapdash and pushes responsibility off onto others, and that kind of carelessness gets people killed.
I think your conclusion is broadly correct: $35k that Becky paid into their joint finances less the $22k she transferred over leaves around $11k Chad owes her back. That lines up with the $12k you would have gone for.
I think the idea of punitive damages was some faint hope that this might make Chad grow up, but I imagine that he's already moved on to Partner Number Four and may be repeating the same old cycle all over again. Paying child support for three sets of kids by three different women is going to leave him even more broke, but since he clearly doesn't care about whether or not the new broad he's with gets knocked up, and there is always a new broad willing to run his life for him and pay his way, I have no reason to think that Baby Number Seven isn't on the way.
Unfortunately I would not be willing to bet against you on this. What I expect a normal person to see as a wake up call, probably went over his head. I imagine woman #4 will help pay for his legal fees against woman #3 (this one), until at which point he is living the barracks again because all of his money is going to a recursive loop of legal expenses and child support.
I am amused to read this article on Tumblr today. From 1885, Chad and Becky have long antecedents!
"She knew I was married" "No, I did not!"
Gave her money for the wedding dress, showed her a furnished house he said was where they would live after the wedding, then the morning of the wedding called it off by telegram.
Jury awarded damages of £75 which, considering he claimed his income was £2 per week, was a hefty fine. I think there may have been some proto-Karens on the jury, but then again the jury at that time was probably all men? 😁
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Agree that becky was very stupid and chad was reprehensible. But what bias would you expect a woman who got the exact deal becky thought she was offered to have?
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The other jurors are probably correct here, the standard of evidence for a civil trial is not beyond reasonable doubt but instead "more likely" (preponderance of the evidence) and when one side is bringing evidence and the other is a known scumbag who only uses words, it tilts likelyhood pretty hard. I think his defense was just incompetent, either through bad luck with the lawyer or because the defendant himself is garbage and both made the bad call to go with a jury trial to begin with and demanded this bad defense strategy against counsel (more common than you mignt think, lots of people refuse to trust the lawyers for some reason).
Add in the possibility that your framing might be missing any more details in her favor too, and it seems like siding with Becky with here is quite reasonable.
Why would a civil trial jury bring fraud charges? Criminal charges is a really odd thing to bring up multiple times in a civil suit in the US and inconsistencies like this points to you either being really confused about what was going on (likewise with not knowing the difference in evidentiary standard) or perhaps the story itself is fabricated.
"More likely than not" that the plaintiff had to prove, which she seemed to fail to submit evidence to do so. Meaning the lack of evidence would fall on her, giving a default judgement to the defendant.
Partial, very cherry picked evidence. For example we did not get raw bank statements, we got an excel spreadsheet with her claims of the transactions (which conflicted with the following) + a heavily filtered set of bank statements that only showed transfers from 4 places: Her account -> Joint, His -> Her, Her -> His, Joint -> Her, for a set time period which was not the full relationship length. We got screenshots from another camera looking at the screen of the phone with cropping applied. We got a credit card statement with plenty of charges that she made (due to the location, he was in Turkye and Europe) but the final amount was stated as what he owed her.
So I guess if your stance is that bad biased evidence is more believable than no evidence, thats definitely a stance, though I'm not sure you'd like that applied to your interlocutors in the future.
North Carolina allows for civil fraud. Not sure what to tell you. If you want to type it into an LLM it will tell you the exact same thing. I tried to find the exact statue but ChatGPT seems to suck at that for some reason (probably indexing the page). All I can say is that I got instructions from the judge with the rest of the jury and fraud was one of the charges we were to consider.
What's my motivation for writing out a 3 page essay on my jury trial experiences when I hate writing, and I hate looking at my writing. Skepticism is never an unfounded trait on the internet, but if you are banking on your layman-legal knowledge as the critical support pillar, then I think you should recalibrate how much you think you actually know.
It's not enough in your opinion.
I doubt the defense felt further evidence would have helped their case, given they did not seek it in discovery. In this situation it's likely as another comment already explained to you, they submitted enough that they felt was convincing without having to expose the two parties even further than necessary.
No, you don't get to acknowledge you used the wrong terminology in another comment and then do this game here. I am well aware civil fraud is a thing, but what you said was fraud charges. That is incorrect.
As I explained in the other reply, this was because there was only two options. Either you were mistaken or you were lying. I didn't know which one, just that one of them had to be the case.
You were mistaken and therefore I was right. It was either of the two, and it ended up being one of them. If you do not understand the concept of "either or" and take one of the options as a direct accusation, then that is on you.
I acknowledged that I could be using less precise terminology, because I'm not an asshole. You seem to want to be seen as one instead.
I'm not mistaken, I'm just not pedantic af about syntax. Which apparently you are. Good to know.
If you're not mistaken when saying the civil court was handling fraud charges, then the other option must apply and you would be lying instead because as I established, civil courts would not handle that.
"You are mistaken" is the nice explanation for the false claim you made. We have an known to be incorrect claim and two possible explanations, choose one.
The difference is between fraud charges and fraud claims is pedantic and not how I think. I reject your dichotomy as I reject most dichotomies. This could have been an informative post with you correcting me and explaining the difference. Instead you decided to be an ass as your the default. I suppose that is good evidence against future behavior that you do. MKC's default behavior is to find any disagreement and try to be right no matter what, without helping anyone learn anything.
And yet the difference between criminal charges and not exists regardless.
I was illustrating how in your argument against democracy, where you essentially propose yourself as an enlightened individual unlike those Karens, you failed to understand some very basic concepts and terms. It's a great irony. Had you not approached with the ego that you were better than the rest there, perhaps you would not need to be humbled when you messed up such simple parts.
Right, so this is actually the real reason. You want to humble me. You took 1 word, mentioned 1 time in my 2,485 word train-of-thought pseudo-diary entry, submitted without proof-reading, spell-check, or LLM-proofing, after midnight because I couldn't sleep as I was brooding about the preceding several days, and decided to raise a massive stink about it. You might want to do some soul searching to determine if you are really the arrogant one, and this is all just a massive amount of projection.
Yes because being a pedantic wordcell is the height of enlightenment. Of course! How did I not know in whose steps I needed to tread. I'm sure being a great lawyer or english teacher results in the best governance!
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The free table of contents for this book from the North Carolina Bar Association lists "constructive fraud" as a civil "cause of action" (basis for lawsuit). This lawyer webpage indicates that constructive fraud is different from actual fraud. The idea of a civil action is laid out in NC General Statutes ch. 1 § 1-2—but I can't actually find the list of civil causes of action anywhere, though I would expect it to be in chapter 1 or in chapter 1A.
This page has the standard jury instruction for constructive fraud (§ 800.06) under torts (part IV), so I guess it's nonstatutory common law.
You have a very dependable ability to find details. The 800.00 was the instruction set we received with some added formatting. Link. This is just listed as Fraud in NC and is from the civil courts. It looks like it's different than 800.005: Constructive Fraud.
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I (as a mod) do not appreciate the low-key insinuations that the OP is lying, and while I'd have let "your framing might be missing any more details in her favor" go (because yes, that is certainly possible), you have no reason to be accusing him of outright making up this entire story. Do people make up stories to post here? Yes, I'm sure they do, though less frequently than on reddit - I have certainly raised my eyebrows at a few implausible just-so stories posted here - but "maybe this is all made up" is a shitty thing to say just by way of disagreement with the thesis.
There is a specific reason that I gave, a jury trial would not be deciding if they give him criminal charges or not. It is possible he misspoke or misunderstood something, but the story as it sounds right now is not true, because the civil jury would not be deciding against fraud charges as it would not have the ability to do that to begin with. That was never a potential thing.
And it's not even some weird special super unique jurisdiction thing as I checked that with the bots
He either completely misunderstood what the jury was empowered to deliberate there (he might have meant civil liability fraud) or it's fake. But it could not have been fraud charges. When someone says they've seen a flying unicorn the response is "you either mistook something else for that or you're lying".
Well, I checked with the bots is there such a thing as civil fraud - "what is the difference between civil fraud and criminal fraud?" - and they told me yes there is and linked me to legal advice and everything:
Civil liability fraud is not referred to by "fraud charges", charges are brought by a prosecutor.
Okay, so the prosecutor wasn't bringing criminal fraud charges, the plaintiff was bringing a civil fraud case. Happy now? Look, just admit you got hung up on the terminology and shouldn't have claimed OP was making it all up. No harm, no foul.
It's a great irony to be pointed out when someone speaks as if they're smarter and better than the unwashed Karens of the jury they served with, only to fail at understanding some of the basics is it not?
I didn't claim that, it was one of the possibilities. Either they misunderstood or they were lying. Your defense of "they misunderstood" is literally saying I was correct.
Dude, any time someone says something that is (arguably) wrong, the options basically boil down to "You're mistaken" or "You're lying." But it is quite belligerent to follow "I think you're wrong about this" with "So did you misunderstand or are you a liar"? I find your argumentation in this thread very obnoxious because you're doubling down on "Well, either he's stupid and doesn't know what he's talking about or he's making the whole thing up." Neither of those framings are charitable or conducive to good discussion, and you do not seem to actually be interested in fostering good discussion, but rather, seeing how much you can needle people. I've told you once and I am now underlining it: stop this. I don't mean stop being pedantic about exactly what "fraud charge" means- by all means, be pedantic and argue whether that was an appropriate term to use. I mean stop using fangs over word choices and pedantic details.
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There was no prosecutor, I never said there was. It was a plaintiff (Becky) suing the Defendant (Chad), the charges/accusations/laws-broken what ever you want to call it were: Breach of Contract, Unjust Enrichment, and Fraud. If your first response to improper legal terminology is accuse me of fabrication, I think the internet has ruined your mind.
Except that wasn't my first response, the very start of the sentence was actually saying you didn't know what you were talking about and were showing a misunderstanding about what the jury would have been adjudicating.
A civil jury would not be deciding criminal charges for fraud, thus we have the two options.
Those are the only two options, given that the claim itself is known to be incorrect (unless my knowledge and the double check was wrong and there is a weird jurisdiction thing going on, but it would be an incredibly strange thing in the US system).
As we have confirmed right now when you said "improper legal terminology", I was right. That is option 1, you were mistaken. You have admitted to this yourself right there in that comment. You are complaining about my factually sound conclusion proven to be correct.
You are just wrong, it was you who claimed fraud can only be criminal. I never claimed such, I claimed the charge was fraud in civil court. Go read the link in this comment, NC allows Fraud under a Miscellaneous Tort in civil court.
Edit: if you want to be super pedantic about the use of "charge" vs "accuse" then sure, have your bagel. Everyone else seemed to understand what I meant colloquially, so I guess you can pick bullshit fights without being clear. But you are strictly wrong that fraud is not also a civil court tort.
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You are the only person here who does that, to the point where it gives you away when you use other names.
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"Fraud" can mean punitive damages for being deceptive, which is not technically "fraud" as a criminal charge but is something juries are allowed to take into account in a civil trial. You could have accused him of being imprecise rather than going to "You are making this up."
But I did accuse him of that as a possibility! I said
So it's either he didn't understand (or at least failed to properly explain his understanding) what is going on (as they weren't deliberating fraud charges, they would have been deliberating civil liability fraud) or the story was fake.
I listed the possibilities out. We know it's one of those two, but I can't say which one.
Or maybe you don't really know as much as you think you do. And/or are not understanding what was going on.
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Yeah, not questioning the financial transfers either is incompetence (and do we think Chad would put any time, effort, or consideration into hiring a lawyer?) or the reality was so bad, bringing it up would have made their client look even worse ("what was this withdrawal for?" "uh, I dunno, she handled all that shit" "did you know she was taking money out of your account?" "yeah, sure, I told her to do what she liked, saved bothering me about going to the bank and withdrawing it and paying her and shit" "have you any idea of the state of your finances?" "I get paid the end of every month?").
I'm pretty sure he hired the same firm that did his divorce. The Plaintiff alleged it and had this really annoying habit of calling the defense attorney by his first name with a lot of attitude whenever he (the attorney) didn't let her off easy. She was fighting with the attorney on the stand.
He pretty much said this. And that was sort of my problem. She was clearly doing what she liked. I really find it hard to believe that she didn't withdraw money from his account to make herself whole. Was she expecting him to directly transfer it with a note? I struggle to think if this man could open up an internet browser.
Of course he did 🤦♀️
So Chad hired the same guys who handled his divorce - and who got paid at least in part by the plaintiff in this case for divorce fees - to handle this case. No wonder the lawyer sat down and shut up. He already knew what a dumpster fire his client was.
You said he was a gunnery sergeant. I know there are jokes about Marines being crayon eaters, but this guy was being sent on deployment for active service, and unless he was a desk wallah in the quartermaster's stores or something, he has to have some technical knowledge. Especially if he's in the stores, he would need to know how to open up a browser.
I was probably being a bit exasperated. He probably knows how to open a browser. He just seemed to make really stupid decisions one after the other without any seeming idea that they were stupid.
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A lawyer almost certainly has someone on hand who can help a client access financial records, no?
Given that the guy gets into bar fights and loses his government card so he has to borrow money off his girlfriend to pay for flights and lodging and meals while on deployment, maybe the court would be better off (for his case) not knowing where his pay/allowance went. Does this sound like a guy who possibly might have "hookers and blow" on a credit card or not? 🤣
Now, she too was dumb to give him a pre-paid card which he promptly uses to run up expenses, but love makes us do strange things (you. It makes you do strange things. I retain my sanity in that department).
The worst part is she could have just easily paused the card, we had a juror with the same exact card going on and on about it.
Definitely she could have and should have, but of course he was full of excuses as to why he needed money and she was just throwing good money after bad because he was her baby daddy and gonna marry her soon as he came back. Everybody is an idiot in this case.
Yeah you'll love this, her response to part under questioning was "I love him and I didn't want him to suffer!!!". As if being forced to stay on the boat and be served 3 meals a day was suffering.
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Yes, yes it does. But a pre-paid card seems like how you’d handle giving money to someone who can’t control spending.
Problem was she kept topping it up, which is the Sunk Cost Fallacy in operation if ever it was.
Nobody said she was making good decisions in her long term direction(see: this woman's entire story), just better ones in specific details. That's why he was in a relationship with her.
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I assume you're referring to this comment.
See also Ozy's article from a year ago, discussed to a small extent here.
But of course that was a criminal trial for murder, not a civil trial for breach of contract.
Looks like juries can be fairly high variance then. I hope the next one I serve on is better, and I can just chalk this up to a bad combination of personalities.
Yes
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Honestly, I read your case expecting worse, but I don’t see the major injustice here. If I was on the jury I’d be one of the “sellouts”: ESH, some evidence is weak on its own but together it’s stronger, moreover yeah Chad is a scumbag in general, and the punishment is only a fine (that he‘ll probably convince some other girl to pay, rinse and repeat). The real losers in this story are the kids: assuming Becky has full custody I’d award her the full settlement for that alone, laws be damned, because (excluding something the defense should’ve mentioned) they deserve the money more than Chad, although I really wish she could be required to spend it on them in case she tries to bankroll another hot loser.
The real sad story of democracy is seeing how many people, faced with the smallest perceived injustices, want to tear it down. We have juries because judges can’t be unbiased, Chad could’ve elected for a judge but I’m skeptical he’d actually fare better.
There was an independent family court case so money for the children was not in our purview. We were strictly about the civil claims.
What's the limit? Would you "sell out" on a murder case, a million dollar lawsuit, a rape case. What is your line, where letting injustice happen rather than be personally inconvenienced for a couple days? Do you think if you are even in the court as a plaintiff or a defendant, you'd personally agree that it's good that half the jury is going to give you a harmful judgment because you've inconvenienced them? I guess I just find this opinion the equivalent of burning the commons for personal benefit in a way that is very short sighted.
I don't want to tear democracy down. I want to remove universal suffrage and try and find a better form of suffrage. I don't yet know if one exists, hence it's an inchoate thesis.
I'm not actually "selling out"; I barely care about staying on the jury longer, I just care about the outcome of this case less.
When there's actual injustice. Here the "punishment" is transferring money from someone who's already in debt and doesn't spend it well, to someone who spends it slightly better. It have some sympathy for Chad, but he's not going to prison, nor does this burn his net worth or financial prospects, since they're already ash.
That's the problem: everyone wants to remove suffrage from people they don't like, but how do you prevent your allies from being disenfranchised (or avoid bad decisions from them, despite being "allies", that were ironically negated by your "enemies")? Children don't have suffrage, because almost everyone grows up such that it has never been exploited. Some felons don't have suffrage, arguably this has been exploited, but it's mitigated because convicting someone isn't guaranteed, and convicting a sizeable fraction of the population would raise eyebrows from even some radicals.
Yeah, I understand that better than anything. People never want to restrict suffrage in a way that would hurt them or their allies, and always want to target their enemies. I said in another comment in this chain, that the problem is in exclusionary systems, a motivated set of agents will try to exploit the rules in a way that is always more detrimental to the system than exploits that are available to blanket systems. I'm unsure if it's a solvable problem, creating a strictly fair system of suffrage the isolates voting towards agents with a sense of duty to their fellow man and an intelligent long term view towards the prospering of the country and its people. Universal Suffrage is a lot like a market in this regard. It creates price signals for peoples political desires. Shockingly most of those signals are very self-serving, short term benefits, but not all, and its hard to parse the good from the bad.
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Oh, there's no reason to think a judge making a settlement rather than a jury trial would have gone any better. Judges like to be bleeding-hearts in some cases, particularly when they think state or government money is involved. Chad being a Marine Sergeant might even influence a judge against him, depending on the judge and their biases. But if we go by what we're told in the original post, any judge faced with a fuckup like Chad would probably hammer him just on general principles.
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Wouldn't she be able to get that money anyway in a separate child-support proceeding? If so, there's no need to take that into account here.
Good point, hopefully someone in the juror room would’ve explained that to me or I’d be a bad juror. Although I still think Chad paying isn’t really an injustice for the other reasons.
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My most unrealistic take is that we could probably solve half our problems with democracy by deliberately structuring it so that only around 30% of the population could do things like vote or serve on jury duty. My preferred solution would be to require an exam, military service, or a fuck ton of community service hours before you get these rights. The real intention is for the exam to be the filter. The military and community service operate as a release valve for people thinking the exam is too exclusionary.
Let me link an essay in defence of juries!
The problem with legal professionalism is that it has produced plea bargains, where an absolute scumbag can bargain their way out of deserved punishment because the courts are too full and the lawyers too cynical and burned-out to have a proper trial, so everything is tidied out of the way in order to free up the dockets. Even worse, someone can be condemned for a crime because they're advised "better take the bargain, if we go to trial there's no guarantee you'll win and the resulting sentence will be even worse than this offer".
That's not justice, either. We have decided that a man should be tried by a jury of his peers, and if his peers are fools, prejudiced, opinionated, or so secure in their self-esteem ("I'm an engineer, you know, I'm smart, I decide things out by reason and logic alone not emotion") as to be blind to their own biases then so be it. The ordinary man gets judged by the other ordinary men of the society.
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Sounds like the world of Heinlein's Starship Troopers. I would like to know more. The problem I have with it is that it is vulnerable to gerrymandering in a way that universal suffrage is not. Example: If you want right-wing governments forever you increase the difficulty of the community service or exam options.
Pretty much, the problem with lots of exclusionary systems is that a motivated set of agents can exploit them in a way that is more harmful than a blanket system approach. Someone is always looking to break your edge case for personal gain. I'm not sure what the best way to fix that problem is, I just am losing faith in the ability of universal suffrage to adequately allow governance in an increasingly polarized and mercenary society.
I think you have to inculcate a sense of duty and noblesse oblige in whomever you enfranchise. Doing this for a smaller number of people is obviously easier, and then the system can gain legitimacy if the fruits of good governance are visible to the people. A benevolent and enlightened ruler is then simplest, so why expand that power at all? Expanding the franchise is defense in depth against an one idiot or tyrant wielding power irresponsibly or ineffectively. But at some point the expected value of the marginal additional voter becomes negative; I think this is least controversially demonstrated by proposals to lower the voting age.
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Voting used to be limited to white landowning males, which worked fine, except that inevitably some of those men saw a political opportunity in expanding the franchise to other groups in exchange for the implicit promise that they would vote for them, and after a few iterations of that game, here we are.
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