This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Love it or leave it, but woke.
This weekend, The University of Texas played The Ohio State University in Austin, TX. A screen shot went viral on Twitter showing a crowd of Indian students celebrating the victory.
"Heritage Americans", the dissident right, the Woke Reich, or whatever you want to call them went crazy, pointing out the massive demographic changes in Texas that are happening. This is true. Anyone who has been to Texas knows whites are a minority here in any medium sized and larger city. The changes have been stunning and within 30 years, it is unrecognizable.
Critics rightfully pointed out that they were pretty much just being racist. You talk about integration, and here are immigrants and children of immigrants celebrating a victory in football wearing cowboy hats. What is more American than that? You clearly just don't like Indian people.
An Indian politician said that this is what Texas is. If you don't like it, LEAVE! There is some truth to this. This is what Texas is now, but historically the South Asian population has been tiny. This is a very recent development. Is 20 years all it takes for Texas to become something new? If you are 30 and above, you probably grew up with almost no Indians. Now this is what Texas is and you have to leave if you don't like the changes?
This reminds me of the UK. Pre-Windrush, the UK was 99.9% white. As recently as 1991, it was 95% white. Now though, if you complain, you are going against British values. For thousands of years, the UK was essentially 100% white. Within a few generations, it is a multi-cultural country and if you don't like that, LEAVE! We are not a white society, and actually never were. I could go on and on, but with the exception of Reform, that is the general consensus now.
Back to Texas. It's crazy how quickly this can happen. Mass migration can happen and within one generation, this is seen as the new default and any complaints about this are seen as against the new values. Of course, the biggest gatekeepers of this isn't the left. They really have no control over their outgroup other than canceling people and social pressure, but if you don't care what they think, what can they really do? The center-right has also rushed to condemn people criticizing the massive demographic replacement in Texas. People like Dan Crenshaw rushed to condemn the racism and call out this anti-Indian racism and essentially sided with the left, who hates them. They have essentially said the same thing as the left and that these aren't Texas values to be racist. So basically, love it or leave it, but woke. If you don't like the new Texas, leave.
But where will they go? You basically have to live in a state like Texas for access to the best jobs. schools, dating, etc. It's insane to me how fast we can accept something new that is unprecedented as the new normal without considering the consequences. Only weirdos and disagreeable people point this out, and by the time people start to see the consequences, it will be too late (assuming there are negative consequences, which should be obvious is my POV).
Only tangentially related to your overall point, but what I've noticed is that a large portion of people essentially desire to be passive contributors to a community. They want to a community that fits their exacting standards but they don't actually want to contribute anything more than passively paying taxes and maybe if they are feeling generous, show up to events other people organize. Unfortunately that doesn't work. Communities need active participants, people willing to get their hands dirty, run for local office, organize the social events, run third spaces. Is it any shock that the community is transformed by people who do want to participate? These larger areas have access to better things because there are just more people participating. in large part because there are more people.
The other point is that you need to decide what is important to you. If you want all the best amenities then you are going to have to compromise, that or build your own Texas-but-whites-only with blackjack and hookers. I have a conservative friend, in our largely progressive city. He constantly complains that his dating options are basically zero because all the women here are progs. He, like plenty of my other conservative friends, could move more out to the country where it is just generally more conservative. But then he'd have to give up his FAANG job, his FAANG salary, all the great amenities he can buy with this FAANG salary etc. He is obviously against that. He wants our area to just become more conservative, through the power of wishes. God forbid he actually become an active participant. He wants to eat his cake and have it too. People making this complaint about Texas and it being Non-White central have a similar vibe.
I am unsympathetic to that line of argumentation.
Moving out to the country does not prevent women from having internet or accessing dating sites. Attractive girls don't often stay in their small towns either. Especially now that they can have infinity dating options that they can access through the tips of their fingers.
Your conservative friend is correct, and your comment implicitly says as much. You can have a conservative girl, just abandon everything in your life that makes it materially better, and hope that there is a diamond in the rough that hasn't been warped by modern day society. For most average Joes, you cannot be materially comfortable and in a spiritually comfortable relationship and live in a highly populated area. You can have the material goods with your decent job, but you are still competing against the field when it comes to attractive women your age. The alternative, which you present, is that you can move just out to the country and find that diamond in the rough. That is mostly false though.
Funny I have plenty of conservative friends in the country with conservative spouses. Turns out conservative women are not liberal women, and actually have conservative values... So rampant materialism, consumerism, progressive values, striver culture, has not really "infected" them.
Or you can just move to some mid sized midwest city or large town and it will be fine. It's not like its the sticks. Yeah there isn't a FAANG job paying 400k, you'll have to settle for a decent midwest software engineering salary of 60-90k. No SWE is an average joe either, in many ways they are below average in some areas but above average in intelligence. Which is why the Bay (Mecca of SWEs) places such an autistically high emphasis on intelligence as its metric of grading.
Turns out urban areas optimizer for more strivers. One would expect strivers in one area to often be strivers in other areas. Meaning they want the best. Complaining that you are super competitive in one area but lackluster in relationship/sexual/looks/social areas is you wanting to reap the benefits of being a capitalist where you are strong but a communist where you are weak.
This is hard to really quantify in a way that is productive. If you want some mega hottie, LA-10 then unfortunately you are trying to optimize, you are going to have to compete with the rest of the optimizers. I personally don't think my friends wives are all that attractive, but they are not-fat. They look like normal women, for normal men. If having kids and starting a family is important as many of the more urban conservative men I know state, then they need to get their head out of fantasy land. Look for compatible conservative values, of which, more will exist in conservative value ecologies. Which are not large urban areas.
I know plenty of women are not 5'4''. That is, however, the average height of a woman in the US. Point being, your examples don't counter broader statistical trends.
You comment comes off like advice, and if it is I appreciate the words of encouragement. To clarify though, I am married to a non-leftist blonde woman, I live in a moderate to large-size city that is trending leftward, and (at least to my eye) she is attractive. I am a lucky man in this regard. On an individual basis, it's not hopeless to find a woman like mine, it's just that the general trends have undeniably gone in the other direction.
The incentive structures are such that you must often choose between a materially comfortable life or a wife and children, and the potential wife pool (especially for normal and attractive ones) is slim pickens. It's achievable, but you have to really want a wife and kids and be willing to sacrifice those other, material (and sometimes spiritual) comforts to get it. Again, on a societal level this is just not happening.
Worse still is that to whatever extent this is true for modern men, it is even more true for modern women and their incentives. Dating for them is like shooting fish in a barrel. Online dating and career advancement has led them to not value their potential male partners and it has made men in general too expendable in their eyes, except of course for that top 10 or 15% of men that are killing it. This is the setting young, average Joes are up against right now.
What you are saying isn't wholly false, it's just generally untrue for the masses now, and that has major societal implications.
It's more of a royal you. I don't know enough about your situations exactly it really feel qualified to offer advice. But I have heard to arguments, and to some extent I've even made them before. I guess this is me communing lessons learned to the folks out there stuck in the blackpill-doomerist feedback loop.
Yes, but as I think people are pointing out in other areas, broad statistical metrics aren't actually that good of indicators of what is really happening. Off the top of my head, most dating statistics about "percentage of the population with xyz trait" essentially smooth out cofounding factors to such an extreme degree as to be useless. Sub-populations of attributes are neither independent nor evenly distributed. For example 0.8% of the 18+ population in the US identifies as trans. Many people on here talk about having never met a trans person irl. I have met probably 6-7 in 100 people because I live in a prog-ish area and have hobbies that are more nerdy. I have an 8.75 times higher than the base stat. Broad trends are of course broad trends, but when folks date, they aren't dating broad trends. If that makes sense.
I think this is really true for everything. It's possible, but rare that you are going to get everything you ever want in life in all the perfect amounts. You need to order your priorities and then make sacrifices to get there. Personal example, I really wanted to do AGI research as a younger lad, + top-tier pay (At the time AGI research was not high paying), not have to grind the rat race, work life balance, to live in a city with a good gender ratio, a nerdy wife, to own a house, several more extremist political goals etc. In my 20s I realized I had to choose, I couldn't get all of those, several were contradictory with each other on first order basis, others were contradictory on 2nd and 3rd order basses. Others competed for the same free-time. I think you always have to choose, make compromises and find the minimally viable configuration that makes yourself happy. One needs to be pragmatic about it all. However whenever I hear people complain about this, they explicitly don't want to have to choose. Idk if its because our culture raised a generation so rich in material wealth that it coddled them, made them believe in a fantasy, or is this just a lesson that never got passed down.
I know enough single women to say that this is a fairly biased stance. Young, single, women suffer mirrored difficulties to young, single, men. Much like young men, they want it all, in unrealistic proportions, with contradictory factors. They deal with a different side of the matching problem, a ton of signal but also a ton of noise and a lack of social and cultural infrastructure to filter a signal from that noise. Part of this feels like an urban/rural divide as well. I hopefully have already conveyed that urban areas seem to attract far more "optimizers" for a lack of a better word.
Young average Joes need to digest and learn that trying to standout in a generalist stance is probably a fools errand. Find a niche, a community, a hobby, a sub-culture, etc. and stand out in that. Hypergamy is a thing but its also not the only factor. Assortative mating is the name of the game. Hypergamy can occur in that localized niche, and in-person interactions are far more real than online ones to anyone but the most brainrotted of doomscrollers (do you really want to date them??)
They are good indicators of what is happening broadly. Individually, no, they cannot predict what will happen between your conservative friend and his next date. If we look at 10,000 conservative males, or even males of all political affiliations, and we collect data on their relationship statuses over the course of a decade, and we apply variables like where they live, we can get a pretty good idea of what generally happens relationship-wise within that group.
Yes, but what you must sacrifice now compared to what people had to sacrifice in the past has changed. It's not that young males are materially worse off than their fathers or grandfathers. It's that young males are materially worse off in comparison to their female peers today. That makes it more difficult for guys to appeal to girls in their group.
Your comments keep coming from anecdotal experience, and you're using those anecdotes to argue against what I am claiming is happening at scale. You're right that women face their own set of issues, and I'd agree that they're unhappy in a lot of ways. I don't imagine it is particularly satisfying to swipe left 500 times just to find one guy to swipe right on that's attractive enough to match with, only to get annoyed at his second reply and start all over again. It seems deeply unsatisfying. This is how we've set things up for them though, and we've done it at the expense of their male peers. It's not their fault. Society has placed a major emphasis on their freedoms and rights, and they're just responding to what has been made available to them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I have to travel for work to rural red areas all the time. There are not a lot of attractive, conservative white women there that are young, intelligent, and fit. This is shown in statistics too. This just isn't a reasonable option.
Regardless, doing this is admitting defeat. You will basically just see the changes maybe one generation later. Every single city in the US is diverse now or will be soon. All these areas in Texas were areas white people moved to to get away from the changes in CA, NYC, etc. 30-40 years later, it's just the same. The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.
Pick two or something. I think commonly intelligence means that you move to an urban area to get a better paying job.
Idk without straight up doxing my friends wives, I'm not sure what there is to say. I think 3 of them met their wives on dating apps, it was their first date (both wife and husband) they liked each other any just started dating.
Who cares, people should focus on achieving a level of happiness with their own life first.
In my experience, living near a city that has a massive dump of NYC-ers. They bring about the changes when they move here. They want it to be the "good parts" of NYC without the "bad parts" but the bad parts often follow from the same policies as the good parts. They are like a fungus. They create the environment that causes them to spread in the first place. In the NYC-er's case they bring their shitty pizza with them too.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link