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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7459 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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I’m somewhat familiar with the work of the reactionary blogger Jim and one thing I definitely never expected him to do was to use the Japanese light novel series KonoSuba and its anime adaptation as a talking point. But now it’s here:

In the anime Konosuba, Kazuma and Megumin frequently find themselves alone together and have a lot of physical contact. Kazuma, who is the main male character, is identified in the storyline as seventeen years old and is drawn as slightly younger; Megumin, who is the primary romantic interest, his waifu, his best girl, is drawn inappropriately young, and is identified in the storyline as inappropriately young even for a seventeen-year-old boy, but all the fanservice women, for example Aqua, are drawn as about Sydney Sweeney’s age. They are all drawn as obviously older than Kazuma, and most of them are identified in the storyline as inappropriately mature for a seventeen-year-old boy. All the other girls perform fanservice, and Megumin does not, but only Megumin gets time alone and extensive platonic physical contact with Kazuma. The storyline could be interpreted as the young main male character preparing her for a future marriage, while at the same time being distracted by all those attractive, far older eye-candy women, particularly Aqua.

One aspect he left out is that Aqua basically exists a comic relief character and not as a potential romantic interest (also the notion that she is ‘drawn as about Sydney Sweeney’s age’ is questionable at best) and that the other main female character who can be called a fanservice woman (Darkness) is basically a delusional pervert which rules her out as a love interest as well.

Anyway, that’s not the main reason I’m linking to it here and I also know this subject matter has been done to death here. The reason instead is the reference therein to mainstream accusations about the ‘Peter Pan syndrome’ among single men. I think it’s a fascinating culture war phenomenon and I also think Jim misses the point about it here. It’s not that it’s a pretext for aging and frumpy hags to whine, it’s that it’s based on the assumption that women are innately mature enough for marriage. I’ll quote a 2011 blog post from an Australian Catholic social conservative author who is also critical of the Manosphere:

On the other hand, what alpha Christian male wants to be sloppy sixth's to the modern shrew? The problem for this type of guy is the lack of quality women out there. He wants to get married but the pickings are so slim. Hymowitz thinks that today's average girl is "quality" product, however I think that there is a fair amount of legitimate disagreement as what constitutes quality No matter what her career achievements, a woman who has ridden the carousel and perhaps made a few trips to the abortuary is not quality material from a Christian point of view. A mature and responsible christian male would think such a woman is high risk material for infidelity and divorce and by-pass her. If there were an en masse movement to alpha up, the following would happen. The hedonists would pump and dump while the Christians would become more choosy; the pool of marriageable suitors for women would shrink.

Where Hymowitz errs, is in the assertion that today's woman is in some way more "mature" than the pre-adolescent male upon which she rightly heaps her scorn. She labours under the illusion that the modern woman is some sort of prize that men will aspire to. Hymowitz has framed her argument in such a way that would be laughable to the good men of the past.

Men and women of the past would both agree that men today leave a lot to be desired, but the fall in quality has been most marked amongst women. From the vantage point of the past, the modern woman today is vapid, slutty, superficial, unfeminine and hence extremely poor quality material.

What marks the transition from adolescence to adulthood is the gradual assumption of responsibility, maturity and independence. What separates the child, the adolescent and the adult is the increasing influence of reason over emotion. The mature adult takes his emotions into account but is not ruled by them. Enter the concept of the Rationalisation Hamster. The concept needs to be understood as the cognitive mechanism by which thought is subordinated and aligned to emotion. The function of this "hamster" is to provide a superficially plausible (if not logically consistent) series of thoughts to align and justify whatever action is required by the emotional state. It is effectively the thought process of an immature adolescent.

The "triumph" of modern Feminism has been to culturally and legislatively legitimise this rationalisation hamster. Marriage is no longer seen as a reciprocal relationship amongst two people, but rather a flexible arrangement of convenience based on the emotive state of the parties. The logic of abortion as a woman's rights issue (ignoring the rights of the father) is another example. The furthering of women into fields that they are totally unsuited to, such as the military, police and firefighting services yet another. Feminism has also been able to reframe feminine identity; what previous generations would have thought trampy and flighty, modern feminism has been able to portray as mature.

When Hymnowitz points to the Star Wards nerds, all I can think of is the "mature" female SATC equivalents. I admit that men sitting in mom's basement jerking off to online porn are pretty shallow, but so are the women who spend their lives shopping for bags, clothes whilst riding the carosel waiting for the enabling supplicant whom will provide them with lifestyle to which they are accustomed. People from a less enlightened age would consider a person who endlessly obsesses about their looks, the latest pair of Jimmy Choo's and who Brad is dating now, pretty superficial. It's the pot calling the kettle black.

Anecdote: I was recently at a dinner with a family and their early 20s daughter... the level of bitchiness was off the charts. Bitchiness directed towards her own parents mostly, which was unbecoming. Seemingly every second sentence she spoke was some kind of expression of above-it-allness, disinterest, disdain for explaining some topic further. Very unattractive. Even allowing for the fact that she probably didn't want to be there, that's not at all how you're supposed to behave at dinner even if you don't want to be there.

They aren't making women like they used to. Nor men for that matter.

Women learning more cute anime-girl mannerisms would likely raise fertility and supercharge pair bonding. Probably we need more anime-boy mannerisms too, which means a good deal more fighting and high stakes competition. Women like handsome, confident 'the greatest of all time' characters like Gojo Satoru.

But we do all this social engineering for what? Children? Fertility could drop to zero tomorrow and there would be no true existential consequences. There are many reasons why it'd be bad, people not caring about the future, the intrinsic good aspect of raising children. Many people not falling in love is a bad thing too, obviously. From Jim:

It should not be this way, and it does not have to be this way, for seventy years ago, it was not this way. But this is what we have now. It is horrifying. This has to end, or our race and our species will end.

OK, that's kind of true.

But we won't need new 18-year old human workers in 2044. We hardly need them today, there's a huge oversupply of young people relative to actual demand for labour. Employers are acting like the pickiest hot-girls on dating apps with all the bullshit they're pulling because they simply do not want or need more people. If they actually had a labour shortage, they'd act like it and scrap the 'we interview you 5 different times and make you pass 3 tests' approach. The modern dysfunction in dating markets and the workplace reflects a breakdown in the core assumptions of our civilization, rooted in the technologies we have available and how that affects the social system. The combination of mobile phones, social media, mass automation, deindustrialization, microplastic/chemical pollution would surely be disruptive to whatever we had 70 years ago, just from first principles?

Whatever gross dysfunction going on with our civilization's inability to reproduce or pair up properly doesn't really matter at all, it'll be blown out of the water by AI.

Imagine if we set up anime battle schools to turn out legions of super attractive, cute couples. Men are men again. Women are women. Korea has TFR 5. Even if that was somehow possible, so what? Either AI goes well or it goes badly. Whatever mild or gross dysfunction pales in comparison to being dead or immortal. I think a functional society would do better - but a functional society is also going to get torn to pieces. It's like spaghettification when one gets close to a black hole. How could ASI not disintegrate our society at minimum, when it nukes all the basic assumptions we have about the role of people, labour, economies, even what it means to be human?

Or imagine even that I'm wrong about AI. Even if AI is a nothingburger, there are still way more people than there are jobs for them. There's this gigantic disability/welfare architecture built up for this very purpose, ever expanding layers of education to keep young people out of the labour market, ridiculous regulations requiring employment of useless people that necessitate even more to fix up their mess and still huge oversupply. As time passes, we get more machinery that can do more work in agriculture, manufacturing, more robots and so fewer people are needed. I think the root cause of the dating market dysfunction is driven by technology destabilizing all old equilibriums simultaneously. A mere social fix isn't going to work, it's like building a castle on the sand in an hourglass. And especially Christianity cannot work, since that's the very thing we observed completely failing!

Either AI goes well or it goes badly. Whatever mild or gross dysfunction pales in comparison to being dead or immortal.

There's also the option of "it goes banned", with countries that refuse to implement the ban having their independence revoked.

In that one, fertility actually does matter to a reasonable extent.

(From where I sit, aligning neural-net ASI - i.e. figuring out whether it will produce omnicidal outputs, and then tweaking semi-randomly until it no longer does so - is almost certainly flat impossible. "What does this program output when run" is literally the (proven-impossible-in-the-general-case) halting problem, and here you don't even know which outputs are omnicidal because reality is complicated and the ASI is smarter than you. So the "it goes well" case is ruled out, and the only case worth planning for is "it goes banned".)

We are so far away from 'it gets banned' though. Trump commands US nuclear forces and Trump has made clear that he's all for AI development, bigly and with great speed. Who wins AI, wins! And then there's Jensen whispering in his ear.

China doesn't want to get left behind and they consider US AI progress a strategic threat, Dario especially they fear and hate. They spent the last 100 years trying to catch up in technology to the West, they're not likely to stop now. A pause is to their advantage if the US halts and they catch up in semiconductors. That makes the situation more volatile. A Chinese leader is hardly likely to say 'we accept an inferior position indefinitely in this valuable field of technology by treaty', that would be humiliating.

This is not something we can hold back from, AI is obviously lucrative and potent and beneficial. More potent and lucrative and beneficial as the danger rises. It's not like competing to stack up H-bombs in deserts somewhere, where you pay lots of money and get very little for it.

It seems much more likely that we just have to go through the event horizon than a ban being manageable or sustainable. In the worlds where anything vaguely human survives, it's more likely that 'something mysterious and good happens beyond our ability to predict' than a ban being sustainably implemented.

Trump commands US nuclear forces and Trump has made clear that he's all for AI development, bigly and with great speed. Who wins AI, wins! And then there's Jensen whispering in his ear.

Trump could still flip. He could also die (he's 80 and there have been... what, a dozen assassination attempts on him already?), or be impeached/removed (the Republican Party and even the Republican base are not really behind him on this).

China doesn't want to get left behind and they consider US AI progress a strategic threat, Dario especially they fear and hate. They spent the last 100 years trying to catch up in technology to the West, they're not likely to stop now. A pause is to their advantage if the US halts and they catch up in semiconductors. That makes the situation more volatile. A Chinese leader is hardly likely to say 'we accept an inferior position indefinitely in this valuable field of technology by treaty', that would be humiliating.

There is the possibility of agreeing to parity, or to a gap that's smaller than currently exists. There is also, as you're probably sick of hearing from me, the possibility that we have WWIII over Taiwan and nobody has to worry about China for the next 100 years.

This is not something we can hold back from, AI is obviously lucrative and potent and beneficial. More potent and lucrative and beneficial as the danger rises.

The international moratorium on human gene editing is holding up pretty decently IIRC.

*gets banned not goes banned

Good luck «revoking» Chinese independence. Anyway it getting banned is impossible but if it happened it would increase the salience of eugenics because the fundamental risk is human alignment / relative untintelligence.

*gets banned not goes banned

He said "goes well" and "goes badly". I was following the pattern.

Good luck «revoking» Chinese independence.

I think the Chinese could be convinced to sign on; they don't want the world to end any more than we do. In extremis, though, I will point out that the USA does possess enough nukes to return China to the 1930s in population and infrastructure.

Anyway it getting banned is impossible

Then we're dead. The fact that >99% of humans don't want to be dead is the reason I think it's not impossible.

but if it happened it would increase the salience of eugenics because the fundamental risk is human alignment / relative untintelligence.

Maybe. So?

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