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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   25270 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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The Culture War Singularity is already here

I was once very interested in the culture war, and in many aspects of the culture war. I am a staunch atheist so I cut my teeth in online debates arguing about evolution and the existence of god in the early 2000's. That felt like a side topic to all the important policy debates at the time. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The national debt. Censorship of free speech by the religious right. How to deal with islamic terrorism. George Bush and Dick Cheney. The military industrial complex.

Many of these overlapped, but they also generally felt like separate and distinct things. I ended up stumbling across libertarianism because I ran into someone complaining about government spending, and anti-war. I felt like they kicked my but in a debate simply because they didn't allow for my easy auto win argument at the time "oh you care about government spending, then why don't you care about the massively expensive war in the middle east?"

Nowadays it feels like the culture war is collapsing. Not like a structure collapsing into the ground, but a star collapsing into a black hole. Everything is funneling into fewer and fewer topics. The main two that have come out of it all are Donald Trump and AI. You can collapse most people's views into what they think about Donald Trump. If you know that you basically know all the rest of what they think about political topics. For the few where this is not true, the dividing line is instead AI.

I find myself ambivalent/uncertain on both topics. But my ambivalence is not a path out of the stereotyping. It just leads to a different set of assumptions about me, and most of them are probably pretty accurate.

Both topics feel like they will either come to a conclusion by 2028 or implode in such an epic catastrophe that they will continue mattering for the next century at a minimum.

Or is this all just me becoming jaded and bored with the culture war? Ignoring topics like Transgender, feminism, race relations, metoo, and global conflict to shoehorn my pet theory into the world.

I still know a fair amount of people that I'd almost describe as "squeamish conservatives;" people who are not liberal, but who were nevertheless put off by Donald Trump's personality and style. I think they'd have been happy if history had simply stopped during George W. Bush's time as president. The same people, while ostensibly conservative, are unwilling to grapple with the consequences of modern progressivism: institutional capture, demographic change, longhousing, etc., preferring, in my experience, to put their heads in the sand on these matters.

I don't really disagree with your framing, but at the same time this population is pretty large and doesn't fit readily into the model.

Donald Trump's personality and style

Also the dishonesty, personal corruption and incompetence. I don't think NeverTrump Republicans' main objection is that Trump is uncouth. In this cycle, most non-lefties who are NeverTrump would say that "he did January 6th" is the strongest argument for opposing him that isn't about policy.

The whole Van Jones "character matters" critique of uncouthness is validated by Trump's later actions.

It's not like the man lied. He was quite adamant about refusing to even contemplate losing, or being transparent about certain things. Some people saw that as a game, while others argued that such a basic failure of character would show itself.

Runs into credibility problems thanks to the sheer number of people who claim that position, and coincidentally also thought he was the worst politician ever in 2017, and have turned to oppose other Republicans who had no relationship to J6. I'm sure the genuine category exists, but the people wearing it as a mask outnumber it by large counts.

IME most of these people vote Republican in other races.

NeverTrumpers like the Bulwark guys were vehemently opposed to him long before Jan 6th. Their hostility feels much more in line with the old adage that the worst thing that can happen to a socialist is for socialists to come to power who are not his friends.

Also the dishonesty, personal corruption and incompetence.

This is an incoherent stand to take for anyone who voted for Biden and Harris. It would be like MAGA insisting they despise '28 cadidate AOC because she lacks gravitas and decorum.

Also the dishonesty, personal corruption and incompetence.

This is an incoherent stand to take for anyone who voted for Biden and Harris. It would be like MAGA insisting they despise '28 cadidate AOC because she lacks gravitas and decorum.

What are you talking about? If every single corruption allegation against Biden and Harris were true, they still would have been collecting multiple orders of magnitude fewer dollars off of their political power and been involved in orders of magnitude fewer corruption scandals. Or, well, not sure "scandal" is the appropriate word for Trump's corruption as the media has pretty much given up on highlighting it as "Trump pardoned yet another person in exchange for $X million dollars." or "Trump openly took $X00 million from some country for a trade deal." is just not front-page news anymore.

Trump seems to believe the point of being president is personal corruption and doesn't get why he would even try to hide it.

Trump is more corrupt than Biden in petty ways. And in those petty ways, like his crypto scheme, he's possibly the most corrupt President ever. It's all a bit puzzling since Trump is already rich and he'll be dead before long.

Nevertheless, the scale of the corruption is quite small.

Biden's corruption was categorically different. He didn't benefit financially. But the scale of his corruption was much larger - trillions not billions. Build Back Better was one big grift. It's just that the beneficiaries of that corruption were Democratic party clients, not the President personally.

Trump doesn't want to loot the state like Biden (or more accurately his handlers) wanted to.

This is not a defense of Trump's corruption which is indefensible. Only to say that Biden's was even worse, but perceived as acceptable by many because the gibs were spread around to all the important members of the coalition.

and he'll be dead before long.

He has kids. One of the things I'll give him (insofar as it's a compliment: a pseudo-aristocratic clannish mindset is perhaps not ideal for a POTUS? not that Biden was better on that front) is that the guy seems to genuinely care about the wealth and welfare of his family, not just about his own.

In a 2016 Presidential debate:

When asked to praise Hillary, Trump said she's a fighter and he respects that.

When asked to praise Trump, Hillary said she respects how capable his children are and how that reflects on him as a father.

There were three clauses in that quote. I'll accept your admission for the first and last.

For the second... yes, you can make a strong argument for Trump's personal corruption, as porkpiehat said, though in Biden's case it wasn't for lack of trying. Also as PPH said, the institutional corruption Biden/Harris facilitated is unprecedented, on the level of "civilizational ruin".

There were three clauses in that quote. I'll accept your admission for the first and last.

Sorry, I figured the "dishonesty" and "incompetence" parts had been beaten to death in this thread and elsewhere but had not previously seen an attempt to claim Biden was corrupt on remotely the same scale as Trump.

Fair enough. The corruption argument has also been exhaustively covered, from a few different angles. I do think the "public corruption vs private corruption" angle is the strongest one for Trump supporters to lean on there, but I don't think The Motte has discussed Hunter Biden's memecoin rugpull yet.

"10% for the big guy", Hunter calling his dad in front of Ukrainians as proof of their influence peddling operation, Biden's all inclusive pardon of Hunter exactly windowed to the month Hunter started his Ukrainian influence operation.

I'm not saying Biden is more corrupt than Trump. But he's damned corrupt to the point that he's a real contender.

I can't remember who said it, but I once saw a quote to the effect of "if you tell me one of your political opinions, and I can accurately guess every other political opinion you hold, you are not a serious thinker".

I get heavily-downvoted comments on this website frequently enough to reassure me that I haven't fully surrendered my higher brain functions to the Motte Egregore.

Do you have a position on turf cutting?

I do not.

I will down vote this comment for its failure to support people who spent five thousand years shaping the bogs and have some claim to keep warming their homes from it.

I can't remember who said it, but I once saw a quote to the effect of "if you tell me one of your political opinions, and I can accurately guess every other political opinion you hold, you are not a serious thinker".

It's a take Sam Harris used to hammer on about.

Not sure if he lived up to it, since his anti-Islam takes flow pretty well with his zionism and other commitments.

His take is consistent and unrelenting atheism, and he criticizes Christians and Muslims alike, which these days makes him homeless, politically. I've listened to a lot of him and there's a lot of criticism of Islam and Islamic terrorists, I don't remember anything specifically Zionist. Do you have a reference?

I actually went back to remind myself by skimming his Why I don't criticize Israel post.

It's more ambiguous on Zionism than I remembered. Basically: Zionism is wrong but understandable for Jews given the situation they're dealing with. Which is Zionist, we count those!

A lot of people seem to let themselves be slotted into a "NPC" type role where they more or less just subscribe to all the tightly and loosely associated positions that have connection to a couple of core positions in some neural network. There are a few easily identifiable types. E.g. the redditor who cares desperately about 'the Gaza genocide' (currently). This type also subscribes to feminism (and will combat any mentions of disparate societal impacts against men), covid zoonosis, pronouns, opposition to mass immigration being 'Islamophobia', respect for higher education and credentials as a basis for credibility rather than actual mental rigor, BLM and denial of race/crime stats, etc, etc.

It seems to have a term: package adoption. It's supposed to reduce cognitive load, provide cognitive closure and the comfort of motivated reasoning (going backwards from group belonging to 'make sense of' issues rather than go bottom-up from evidence), while reducing social costs and providing tribal identity. Almost like religion, I guess. And I'm guessing there's a strong influence from higher education institutions here: In order to fit in and not have your chances at romance and future employment harmed, you need to conform to the dominant politics in the student/staff body.

Perhaps this is a bit of a biased take, but if the political parties that actually matter can be counted on the toe thumbs of one person, the "singularity of political debate" is either already in place, or is more likely to occur.

Americans already only have the choice at the ballot box between only two parties. (I admit that in Europe political parties that differ only marginally inflate how many truly distinct parties there are, but in the ideal such a singularity is less incentivised.) In a two party system, you can oppose exactly one of transexuality and Palestine, but when the X needs to placed, you have to make a choice. And once the choice is made, mind works to justify it, make you think it was the right one.

And so alignment between ones opinions and the opinions of the political party increases.

I think you are correct in your suspicion that an annoyance with FTP is biasing you. The reason that Europe has so many parties with only marginal differences is that the policy platform of parties is broadly the policy platform of the people who make up these parties. Broad cultural consensus causes these people to all think basically the same thing, and then they create new parties with some bullshit differentiator to try and get an easier climb to the top.

They actually have parties that challenge the orthodoxy, but that may make it worse. Germany's attempts to quarantine the AfD forces coalitions that cannot really be that ideologically coherent given the inherent compromise needed to neutralize the votes of a growing share of the electorate.

Germany's just created a 2-party system, the AfD and everyone else.

Seems deeply unwise compared to letting them into a coalition and having them disappoint people through governing, like the Tories did the Lib Dems, and Trump is doing now.

But, hey, I'm a naive observer of German politics. Maybe in a decade this'll prove some genius move. Maybe Germans really cannot handle their liquor and even a sip of the far-right will be a jump off the slippery slope.

Keeping them out means the entire veto vote ends up being AFD. Which yes is very risky.

The way it works is the more people vote for the AfD, the further left the ruling parties can govern, which they love. Only fails if the AfD gets an absolute majority, which isn't likely to happen (and I'm sure they have contingency plans).

The main difference between the American and European systems is where the coalition building happens, not whether it takes place. At the end of the day, a parliamentary system will have "the government" and "the opposition" as two more-or-less coherent blocs made uo of several parties acting in a coalition. America just does its coalition building within the context of the two parties. The DSA and abundance dems (or the libertarians and the MAGA conservatives) are at least as ideologically distinct from one another as Germany's Greens are from the Left, for example. American parties tend to be substantially weaker than their European counterparts, and are almost completely powerless to force members into line, so individual American politicians also tend to act with a lot more independence. They just do it from within one of the two major parties rather than spinning off their own splinter group.

It could be that we are less into the Culture War, perhaps? I also find that culture war topics seem to come and go far more frequently. It's like the speed with which things fade into irrelevance has dramatically increased.

Or from another direction perhaps our collective attention span has gotten shorter. I do think people have their own hobby horses but yeah, the political coalitions are all in a total upheaval which puts things up for grabs.

I don’t think this is true. I think it’s much more common in vibes based semi autocracies like Turkey and Russia. In America there seem to be plenty of Trump supporters who disagree with him on AI, or the Iran War, for example.

Most Trump supporters disagree with him about the Iran war and about half of them do about AI.

I suspect part of the issue is that things seem to be moving too quickly. If you were cutting your teeth in the early 2000s you likely remember at least the tail end of the Cold War, where the big over-arching question was "will capitalism or communism prevail" and "when, if ever, will the nukes fall?" These were not issues that would be resolved over the short term. If you read some Cold War science fiction, you find the Soviet Union there, just because the authors sort of assumed it wouldn't knuckle under in the span of a few short decades.

The transition in politics and culture war over the past decade has been extremely fast and unpredictable and the crisis of the times seems to loom much closer temporally (COVID, Ukraine, Iran, AI, all things that seem as if they should resolve short-term). Because of this, having takes becomes more fraught because the speed at which you will be proven right or wrong is much faster and in many ways it becomes easier to just sit back and see what happens.

(Also we're getting older and I think this also becomes easier as you age.)

You can collapse most people's views into what they think about Donald Trump.

Donald Trump's personal approval ratings poll at minus a gazillion, but the GOP is still going to get well over 40% of the vote in the midterms. There are a lot of double haters out there, many of whom voted for Trump in 2024 and some of whom will vote for their local Republican in 2026, and an even larger number of grillpilled normies.

In real politics, there is no shortage of centrist Democrats who either signed the Harper's letter condemning wokestupid or secretly wanted to, and the only reason why there are so few NeverTrump Republicans and conservatives is that MAGA successfully purged them from the movement.

Something about the current online environment (probably the algorithmically mediated impact of what midwit political junkies click on) tends to turn online political spaces either 100% wokestupid or 100% MAGAtarded. The Motte isn't immune, although we are holding out better than 99% of the competition.

Trump does not poll at minus gazillion, nor are his polls an outlier among recent second term Presidents.

https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/trump-obama-bush-second-term

I don’t think it’s possible to get approval above 40% in America anymore. Also one reason I don’t think everything collapses into your opinion of Donald Trump.

You can’t sustain >40% for long because the death of American monoculture has occurred. There are two cultures. Add in some splinter groups that hate both. Then a small bit of disapproval from your side and you approval quickly falls below 40%. Multicultural tribal politics will severely limit the amount of time any POTUS is above 40%.

You forgot Israel/Palestine as the other big axis. Personally I hope for massive im or explosion. I am sure that the main issues of Europe can't be solved democratically so we need some proper chaos to even have a chance of solving them.

I couldn't have imagined Israel/Palestine becoming huge in the US back in the 2000s. That was very much a European lefty thing to care about. One of those ways in which European politics influenced the US, not the other way around (BLM in Germany, etc.) You could say shifting views on free speech by the left in the US is another way.

Apart from politics, US music being so electronic-sounding now is another Euro>US trend. European radio in the 90s was far more dancey than American radio, which was full of rap and rock.

Israel/Palestine conflict was an American lefty thing to worry about too. In the MetaFilter heyday around 2010 it was (along with declawing cats and male circumcision) recognized as one of the "third rail" topics that could be expected to start heated fights on that (American-centric, though leftist enough to feel ashamed of that) forum.

Not so much on The Motte since it's a, uh, motley crew around here, but the real life correlation between "Free Palestine" and the rest of the lib-left omni-cause is remarkable. Like when I see people in real life with that bumper sticker or slogan somewhere, I have a very solid guess where they stand on the 2nd amendment, trans stuff, DEI, Elon Musk, immigration enforcement, and datacenters. I'm even confident they were in favor of mandatory masking, vaccine mandates, government suppression of "misinformation," and believing the lab leak hypothesis to be a racist conspiracy theory. As you say, Palestine is now a major axis that all topics revolve around.

The other day I saw an old white guy (either elder Boomer or last Silent) driving in a Prius and he had a "Free Palestine" sticker, a rainbow flag sticker, and a sticker that was an impenetrable wall of text (I couldn't even make out what it said--it was the meme about leftist memes to a T). I can't track him down to prove it (well, it's a rural area, it's possible I could see him again and ask), but I have a good guess at the rest of his beliefs.

This is a result of one group of people getting to decide what's right and moral. The only thing that matters is whether you agree with them. They have Decided that Trump is wrong, Israel is wrong, Palestine is right, AI must be controlled, the rich are evil, immigration is good, etc. It's hard to overstate their power -- Trump won the popular vote and yet at no point has it been acceptable to admit in polite company that you voted for him.

Maybe in the New Jersey liberal bubble. But lots of people support trump in polite company.

I think it is quite the opposite. The Culture War is more alive than ever. There still are woke progressives although they want to rebrand to Woke 2.0 silently distancing themselves from some of the more stupid stuff, but it is still there only bubbling beneath the surface. You have revival of Christianity either in form of true conversion but also silently in form of "cultural Christianity". You have other stuff especially in Europe with regards to rising popularity of Mumdani style socialism, you have literal Islamists popping up more often as Muslims especially in Europe get more power.

In terms of policies you have age old stuff like immigration or wars. But there are various interesting issues rising up, like for instance the gender wars stemming from huge divergence of voting patterns between men and women which are driven by completely different worldviews as attested by Lindsay Clancy trial. You have Palestine vs Israel conflict creating strange bedfellows between progressives, Islamists and alt-right agreeing on who is the source of all evil in the West.

To me it seems not at all clear which ethos and ideology or culture will rein in let's say 20 years. Will it be the same GloboHomo technocratic coalition trying to hold the post war liberal consensus as outlined in official UN documents such as 17 Sustainable Development Goals? Will it be some sort of right wing conservative nationalist coalition? Will it be rationalist technobros developing AI overlord who will rule with iron hand of utilitarianism where everybody is hooked on some sort of UBI and robot hookers? Will it be some sort of South African style of failed country split in tribal conflict over diminishing resources in the middle of failed AI dystopia and demographic crisis?

Do you think there just may be something like generational cycles at play here, in the background?

I distinctly remember there being a pretty widespread sense, around 2000, from a lot of people I knew that the neoliberal Democrats, and the compassionate conversative Republicans, were actually pretty similar when you got down to brass tacks. Like the Florida recount was a big deal, and of course people are still activated by partisanship during election cycles, but in the background, the two establishment flavors still seemed to have a lot in common. Regardless of political stance or opinions, the amount of time most people I knew actually devoted to following politics was rather limited in terms of actual minutes per day, compared to everything else they cared about.

The Bush years coincided with 1) the Cheney crew in the background being much more radical than, I suspect, the weak figure of George W Bush actually would have been had Cheney and crew not been so skillful at using the levers of executive powers (and how W behaved after 2006 as that group got sidelined), 2) the rise of the mass popular internet and the blogosphere making a new, non-corporate space for people to rehabilitate the idea of politics as being the site where mass societal change happens (so essentially dismantling the Reagan grill-pill consensus from the 80's on), 3) a generation of younger Millennials coming of age with a background of the collapsed cold war, American's unipolar new world order, mass affluence and college for a huge chunk of them, a Reagan-Clinton mini-baby-boom, and no memory at all of the 70s and the previous round of sour radical politicization ruining everything, and 4) the Iraq War and then especially the trauma of the 2008 financial crisis really discrediting the old 80s Reagan consensus that "public politics is the problem, private ownership and finance are the solution".

So the deck war cleared, so to speak, for another round of the same politics-uber-alles that had swept through from the late 60s through the 70s. And Barack Obama was there to act as a quasi-religious spiritual leader for, especially, those younger Millenials (but also scores of older progressives who had effectively been disenfranchised and marginalized during the Reagan consensus). And the internet really came into full flower as social media and the rise of pervasive smart phones meant people could be politically agitated 24/7, and as political organizations in the background became really adept at pulling those levers. And because all of this is systemic, in a sense, even if you weren't any more persuaded about infinite politics being the solution to all problems, the new media environment, and generational change, meant there was a sense you flatly couldn't opt out even if you wanted to. Everyone around you was going to be raving like a recently converted cultist about whatever their political fixations were, and whatever the outrage du jour was, and there was no way to stay socially connected to humans, and hold a normal job, without keeping an eye on all of this. Once everything becomes public, aggressively, performatively political, you don't really have an option to opt out, which of course was much of the point of those tactics. You need to be seen putting the black square on your profile or whatever to show your stance on these public, unavoidable, binary political issues (non-binary is for gender, not for political stances, apparently).

And so the culture war mattered and ran hot, not because of the issues, but because of the meta-issue that you weren't allowed to not care, and you weren't allowed to opt out, and you weren't allowed to shrug and say "I don't understand those issues, and I don't trust any of the propogandists pushing these agendas". And so you were made to care about the meta-issue of the culture war, even if you had long been exhausted by, or made up your nuanced opinions about, actual culture war issues, including the opinion that you had the right not to have an opinion.

But this whole process of infinite invasive politicization is, in some fundamental sense, exhausting and inhuman. It starts with a bunch of assertions about humans as infinitely political animals that are really at odds with reality. It eats its seed corn rapidly - there are a lot of con games at play, essentially, or emperors-new-clothes games, because it requires certain people to speak in ways that suggest that they have authority and are speaking for a much larger body of people. And that becomes self-defeating after a while, as more and more people finally pull back the curtain and understand that its a con. So it rests on a latent trust for certain kinds of authority by a much bigger mass of people that is drawn down as that authority loses respect. And it's also a machine for producing enemies exponentially - the purity spirals are real. Eventually that mass of enemies is a fatal weakness.

And the emperors new cloth element means that enough public indifference becomes a fatal weakness to the power being wielded. If activists shout JUMP! (RACISM!) and a critical mass of people don't argue or resist or fight but instead very publicly shrug, and then see a critical mass of other people shrugging, then those activists are relegated to where they had been back in 2000 - annoying gnats that everyone sort of ignores.

And then that public knowledge filters out to sympathetic but more politically minded liberals, and to amoral corporations, and they all get and transmit the signal that we're done with this cycle again (just as happened by around 1980), and so the actual muscle behind the "you're either with us or against us" energy is removed.

And then with that muscle gone, people who never cared about the culture war but cared intensely about the meta-culture war of being made to care finally get to take a deep breath, take a step back, shrug, and going back to caring about what they cared about and take the grill pill.

At the very least, this is a long-winded description of my own personal experience, and why I'm entirely checked out from culture war stuff by this point. I read a ton of books along the way, I did a lot of thinking, I learned a lot... but ultimately, I engaged because I felt the tremendous, overwhelming force that I was being made to engage. Younger progressives that I knew, especially, behaved like they had tremendous wind at their back. And now my sense (fingers crossed, god willing, and if I'm wrong the future probably involves a lot more political violence) is that regardless of what happens next, it won't and can't look like the 2010s and the life cycle of woke - all that seed corn has been largely drawn down, and that we're in the burned out phase of this cycle. I simply can't be made to care or be even slightly respectful of something like this again - I'm now convinced the costs of going along with this stuff are way, way, way higher than I thought back in, say, 2012, and I think I'm far from alone in that, too.

I am a staunch atheist so I cut my teeth in online debates arguing about evolution and the existence of god in the early 2000's. That felt like a side topic to all the important policy debates at the time. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The national debt. Censorship of free speech by the religious right. How to deal with islamic terrorism. George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Have you reflected on this era? I have. My basic thesis is that New Atheism happened because of Bush. If Gore wins in 2000, online Atheism is completely absent. This frame helps make sense of the dissolution of the movement during Obama's first term. Without an outwardly religious president, the movement quickly lost steam.

This provides an interesting frame for interpreting the popular reaction to Trump. Since Trump's popularity with his voters isn't based on him being a good Christian, there isn't an obvious target besides Trump himself, and this has turned out to be a problem for the commentary class. They can only attack him directly, so their attacks are more nakedly political. This is unappealing for people who aren't already on your side. I think what was so successful about New Atheism was that it felt completely apolitical in the moment. Sure, the current president was a Christian, but that was incidental to their arguments. It felt like we were all online debating the real merits of Biblical historicity, etc., not just engaging in democratic political influence campaigns... but maybe a little bit the latter, in retrospect?

I'm not saying it was an organized operation; things can just happen naturally. And I'm not saying we actually weren't all internally dealing with our religion in a sincere way. But these last 10 years with Trump have really made me reinterpret my time online as a youth.

This post of Scott's about New Atheism is required reading, if you haven't read it already.

New Atheism was a failed hamartiology.

"Hamartiology" is a subfield of theology dealing with the study of sin, in particular, how sin enters the universe. Orthodox Christian hamartiology says we all have original sin because Adam and Eve ate the apple. Gnostic hamartiologies say we sin because we are ignorant of our true nature as celestial beings. Some heretical hamartiologies say that all of this is irrelevant, and we sin because we choose to.

We watched the US population elect George W Bush and act like this was a remotely reasonable thing to do. We saw people destroying the environment, leaving the poor to starve, and denying gay people their right to live as normal members of society. We saw people endorsing weird ideas and conspiracy theories, from homeopathy and creationism to the Clintons murdering their enemies. We were always vaguely aware from reading the newspapers that some of these people existed. But now we were seeing and conversing with them every day.

And so we asked ourselves: what the hell is wrong with these people?

And New Atheism had an answer: religion.

That was it. It was beautiful, it was simple, it was perfect. We were the “reality-based community”. They were ignoring Reason and basing all of their opinions on three thousand year old fairy-tales because people told them they would burn in Hell forever if they didn’t. There was nothing confusing or unsettling at all about the situation, and we did not need to question any of our own beliefs. It was just that some people had been brainwashed by their church/mosque/synagogue to believe transparently wrong things, so they did. Sin began with the apple tree in Eden; conservatism began with the Bible in Jerusalem. Language separates us from the apes; not being blinded by religion separates us from the Republicans.

Scott's writing sometimes annoys the shit out of me.

There are certain tics of his that get on my nerves alright. What specifically annoys you?

I think largely it's his self-satisfied voice, and my sense that he imagines his own glistening bubble of experience generalizes. He's at his best I think when he doesn't simplify or draw satisfactory conclusions. That shows intellectual rigor, and I expect intellectual rigor is why many people read him to begin with.

I'd add that New Atheism is also failed metaphysics and epistemology. I also agree that it was a substitute for hamartiology and to some extent narrow axiology. However in a very funny ways it adopted the overall cultural flow of other philosophical traditions, ranging from hermeticism to humanism to naive empiricism, namely that you can get to "The Truth" by critique and negation. All you have to do is to identify the Big Bad (e.g. religion), remove it, and then everything will be "better".

Of course there is no grounding for what better means, what is "The Truth" or anything like that. What happened next is the search for the replacement. Sam Harris tried to tie it to Secular Humanism, utilitarianism and the rest of it. This is the same what Big Yud and Alexander tried to do in their own way reviving Quine with addition of quantum physics and a lot of parables and stories. I see a resurgence of some new grey tribe attempts at philosophy, mostly going for some sort of idealist monism be it Sean Carolls "universal wavefunction is all that exists" or Max Tegmark mathematical realism or computationalism of Joscha Bach. These are all some sort of RETVRN to previous philosophical traditions dated even to presocratics, but instead of "all is water" or "all is flux" we now have these new monadic entities. Only they are even stupider as they want to have legitimacy of empiricist tradition without addressing arguments from Hume or Quine. Of course there are other splinters, including roundabout return to religiosity and Christianity, the latter of which I consider a more robust paradigm.

However significant part of the crowd was captured by the thrill of the hunt and went over to Critical Theory tradition, it just provided other Big Bads after the original project failed. That is why I sometimes called these philosophizes as theological conspiracy theories - they evade all the hard questions just assume that things can get better if we tear down "bad" things around us.

So New Atheism failed, because in the end it was always broad tent "anti-something" coalition and there were internal fractures regarding where to move next.

Online atheism would not be absent just because New Atheism was absent. Online atheism long predated New Atheism. Online atheism was always going to be a thing because the people who formed the core of the early Internet -- people who tended to be socially liberal, distrustful of government, and interested in questioning what they saw as dogmas -- had a high proportion of atheists.

Or is this all just me becoming jaded and bored with the culture war?

Probably, yes. You can ignore much of it. I know I do.

What you describe are (at least) two different things. I understand your suggestion as the topical discourse which has condensed into a few topics and because of that the Culture War is receding. On the first point, I believe you are wrong. Discourse is narrative, the stories we choose to tell and feed and build and listen to. Sustaining a discourse is cheap these days, but an individual can only be interested in and sustain so many extra important things in their head. Three, maybe four big narratives at a time can be managed-- of those, a couple are short-term and tend to flame out, while longer lasting or more impactful ideas can stoke the flame of commentary for years.

Whose discourse do you share? Discourse was democratized and decentralized. You choose AI and Trump, but now there is curated discourse each for Anorexia TikTok, Turkish nationalists on X, and lynching-in-21st-century-America enjoyers on Threads. You might argue they are all moot against AI and I'd probably agree, although for any individual Important Things have multiplied.

The Culture War is how the average American perceives conflict in the world and their position according to the tribes therein. America exported the Culture War so now many other hundreds of millions share certain aspects of it in their own cultural contexts. Perhaps in a village in Slovakia cultural conflict is experienced differently, but over here in the center of the universe even the sections of society with strong cultural cohesion and homogeneity are not immune. In our culture, it has been proven the absence of conflict is an invitation to the Culture War. Something must be wrong if my ideas or my people are not represented in an area of our democratic society. There can be no escape from the ideas monster or the values monster.

The result is the most well documented history of human cultural conflict ever created. We can view it granularly, down to every nook and cranny. We understand cultural conflict as something much more grand, possibly due to exposure to discourse, and thus we find the Culture War in knitting clubs, lesbian bars, workplaces, and church.

The Culture War had its Cambrian explosion. I don't think there's anything to derail it except the kind of catastrophic hardship that radically reshapes the world. Gay Space UBI Millionaire Communism might just help better resourced, funny looking creatures grow legs to where they can bicker on land instead of underwater. If the robots put 100 million well armed people out of work and it goes poorly... a radical change in the Culture War understanding or an alignment of values for a time seems plausible.

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.

Could you please make the point you're trying to make more explicit?

See the reply from Hieronymus and the response I posted here.

I saw the preface of reactionary and thought I'd be reading some Yarvin-slop, but this guy is reactionary-reactionary. Certainly it's the case that when you hold up the state of the world to the light in just the right way, a few reactionary glimmers appear. Speaking this strongly, though, seems irresponsible to me and there are so many disagreeable assumptions made that undergird this article that it's hardly possible for me to respond to it in a meaningful way. If there was one claim in particular that you wanted to highlight, what would it be?

Edit: I saw "reactionary-reactionary" and thought you meant the second blogger, but after posting I realize you may have meant the Dread Jim. I am leaving this post up in case I got it right the first time.

disagreeable assumptions made that undergird this article

I'm not the O.P., but I would be curious to see how you frame them, if you've got the time and energy to make it legible to folks like me who probably share many of those assumptions.

If there was one claim in particular that you wanted to highlight, what would it be?

My summary of the central claim: The complaints that modern men are immature or poor marriage material aren't wrong, but they are incomplete; modern women suffer similar faults, but they aren't discussed because socially prevalent forms of feminism excuse them, or even laud them, in women.

I'm using "reactionary-reactionary" as repetition for emphasis. Like how on the schoolyard people used to say "like-like" when they mean you have a crush on someone, that sort of thing. And yes, I was referring to the first article.

...I would be curious to see how you frame them, if you've got the time and energy to make it legible to folks like me who probably share many of those assumptions.

What else is The Motte for than writing a treatise on gender relations on a weeknight? Unfortunately, I attempted to write this reply and found that I was unable to do it sufficiently. I've been sitting at my computer for an hour and am simply not satisfied with the argument I've constructed because it effectively requires me to describe my worldview from first principles. This is proving to be a task too great for right now. I'll give you a bit, but it's not my best work. Feel free to ask me to clarify as necessary.

The nugget I can share is this: paying attention to the behaviors of "women" and "men" as a whole, when examining the dating world, is an incredible fool's errand and bound to produce resentment. I have a lot of respect for the courtship woes that swathes of modern men have experienced. Certainly, we can examine studies on hypergamy and track fertility rates and bemoan the state of the world when the latest ragebait Hinge exchange populates our Reddit feeds. However, that does not mean that anger is the appropriate response, nor do I think it necessitates wholesale societal revolution or a RETVRN of some kind. The pessimism that these authors radiate is entirely voluntary.

Let's say you are a conservative, marriage-oriented 25-year-old man. It behooves you to not give a shit about what the median woman is doing. It is incredibly easy to view the bad behavior of many women online, the vapidity, the promiscuity, the double-standards and essentialism and the blah blah blah. You can sneer 24/7, if you so choose. But you shouldn't. You likely aren't going to date those women. You absolutely won't marry those women. If you think modern woman is dooming herself to romantic suicide borne out of the sexual revolution, you can think that. But you wouldn't marry her anyway, so why sneer? Turn your gaze elsewhere.

Fundamentally, this is a multiculturalism and visibility problem. Past people had minimal exposure to dating norms outside of their community. The gentry did not pay attention to how the peasants were dating, and yet we insist on examining "men" and "women" as a whole. The women who get riled up at comments from traditionally minded men, too, are playing this game of vicarious imagistic anger. But she wouldn't date or marry him, either. We're driving ourselves crazy by looking at people who hardly exist in our dating sphere in the first place, with entirely different values and goals. The reality is that dating norms are so much more granular than that.

For the man struggling, the solution is to find your tribe as quickly as possible and be social within it. Find people, institutions, and places that give you the best odds to meet people with the same norms as you. Living in a coastal city and think the women are too feminist? Move. Having a hard time meeting religious people? Move. No luck on dating apps due to demographic asymmetries? Move. Dating and marriage, on the experiential level, have so little to do with the aggregate behaviors of the sexes, and everything to do with how one spends their time and the people they surround themselves with.

In the past, perhaps it didn't take as much effort to find your community, so I suppose there is some justified anger there. However, this appears to me a much more economic problem, borne out of our increased social atomization a la Putnam's Bowling Alone. Perhaps there used to be greater numbers of dateable women in one place. Interconnected economic networks result in more transience, less community, and more variance in local values, making it harder to find a mate that aligns with you. I just don't think "feminism" is the appropriate target. For every man that decries feminism, there is another man who finds the modern, liberated woman attractive. For every woman that decries traditional marriage, there is another woman who remains committed to those values. We can get into the fine-grained demographic data about how values are shifting between the genders, and so on, but again: what's the point? Know your place, surround yourself with people with similar values, and work hard at putting yourself out there. You will have a much better success rate than if you direct your attention toward those whose lifestyle you disavow in the first place.

I'll add:

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.

This made me laugh. If anything, modern woman is less concerned with her looks than women in eras past. If anything, modern woman is less parasitically materialistic than women in eras past. If anything, modern woman is less of a gossip-vulture and has far broader interests than women in eras past. In eras gone by, when marriage was an economic institution above all else, women had so few opportunities to be interesting. Yes, perhaps the life of the historical homemaker was, in a sense, honorable, which hedges against accusations of shallowness. But her primary purpose was to be a womb, a pretty thing, and a domestic servant. Now, marriage is about romantic love - an extremely contemporary development. Consummate, equitable love is much harder to achieve with women who don't have lives of their own. We take for granted the extent to which feminism has encouraged increasing numbers of women to have dynamic personal lives, a developed intellect, and the inner richness necessary to be an equal partner. I cannot deny that there have been some unsavory excesses produced by the sexual revolution, and vapid, unscrupulous women exist. I just harshly question the hypothesis that if not for feminism, we'd be better off.

Feminism excuses women who aren't as well-suited for marriage because feminism is broadly about giving women more paths forward in life than dependency on a man. It's practically tautological. Further, women suddenly getting careers, delaying childbirth, or even having more sex doesn't make them fundamentally unattractive, even if it alters their trajectory vis a vis marriage. In contrast, the ways men are dropping the ball - gambling, porn, anger, laziness, isolation - are extremely unattractive. I don't think it's a double standard for precisely this reason, even if there is some sociological analysis to be made about how these behaviors affect marriage. I'll save that for another post. My hands hurt from typing. Cheers.

Further, women suddenly getting careers, delaying childbirth, or even having more sex doesn't make them fundamentally unattractive

Attraction is in the eye of the beholder. Many men are repulsed by women having more sex. Thus they say 'ran-through', 'whore', 'roastie'... Same with girlboss for that matter, with regard to careers.

Women are often repulsed by virgins. Their opinion isn't illegitimate. They use it as an insult: 'virgin' or 'have sex, incel' how could they be lying about what they believe?

Things that give men the ick aren't illegitimate while things that give women the ick are fine.

See my reply to ThisIsSin.

reactionary-reactionary

You have correctly identified that DreadJim is a male feminist. Feminists take the posture that women are better than men and tend to take "well, what are they good for" for granted. So does DreadJim, with the valence swapped.

Anyway:

Further, women suddenly getting careers, delaying childbirth, or even having more sex doesn't make them fundamentally unattractive

Yes, it absolutely fucking does.

It does in the same way and for the same reasons as the listed behaviors make men unattractive to women. You're making the same tired mistake the social conservatives and feminists (though I repeat myself) do where they fail to weight the desires and worth of men and women equally in an environment where they by all rights should be.

Which is why the assertion it's a double-standard is correct: what you've listed are all the ways men want to skip the bill for providing what women want, and you claim that's bad, and then you list all the ways women want to skip the bill for providing what men want, and you claim that's good.

Now, in the before times, "it's worse for men to skip the bill" was OK because there were external factors that balanced it out; mainly that, because women were not capable of primary resource extraction, women were dependent on those resources and had to sell (which is why you correct observe marriage is an economic bargain).

But, exactly coincident with the dawn of feminism, men destroyed that constraint in a massive wave of automation. So the instinctual double-standard remains, but now nothing else exists to moderate the impulse.

I'm not really going to bother refuting the rest of the post since most of it's just a word-for-word transposition for why the dead weight loss in a market that a cartel inherently creates (the cartel here is "all women" and the product is "family") is morally justified.

The nugget I can share is this: paying attention to the behaviors of "women" and "men" as a whole, when examining the dating world, is an incredible fool's errand and bound to produce resentment.

I really don't believe you are as free of resentment as you claim to be. Systems design begins with observing the users.

... Yes, it absolutely fucking does.

That is completely acceptable and is reasonable as an individual preference. I am not so stupid as to suggest that no one cares about promiscuity when thinking about family formation and long-term relationships - read me charitably here, please. I'm not trying to moralize: every person's icks and turn-offs are acceptable in my books. I'll admit it wasn't a very well written sentence. I'll clarify:

It's a matter of prevalence. I imagine there are far more women who are turned off by the median man than there are men who are turned off by the median woman. Of course, there are women with stratospheric body counts, and for those hoping for virgins, any number above 0 is too high. Still, I am doubtful most men would throw a fit that their girlfriend wants to have a career or slept with 4 or 5 people. These women are not "skipping the bill" for most men - the bill has simply changed as attitudes have shifted, and perhaps your attitude has not shifted with the majority. That is completely fine.

Truthfully, this idea is not a lynchpin of my views if you still find yourself in opposition. What follows is more important and definitive to me.

... [the] rest of the post [is] just a word-for-word transposition for why the dead weight loss in a market that a cartel inherently creates (the cartel here is "all women" and the product is "family") is morally justified.

If one is a family-minded traditionalist, it's fair to say that one's values have decreased in influence over the years. That's certainly upsetting if one wants to preserve that way of life. That said, these values haven't decreased in frequency just among women. This is a society-wide change, with plenty of men along for the ride. The idea that there is some grand war in incentives between women, as a class, and men, as a class, is precisely the mindset that I think is fallacious.

If you honestly think that "all women" are in a sort of cartel where they determine the cost of entry for "family formation" or engage in "resource siphoning," I'm not sure we will ever see eye to eye. Cartels coordinate. Certainly, social movements have developed since the 50s, feminism among them, but I don't believe that the outcomes of feminism were a coordinated effort to create intractable dating standards for men. I have not observed any sort of unity in female behavior. Instead, I think there are loose federations of women with their own sets of values, who coordinate to the extent that their values change concomitantly. Perhaps you find some of these federations virulently offensive to your preferred way of life. My suggestion remains the same: disassociate from the federations of women you find disagreeable, and associate with the federations of women that you find agreeable. Otherwise, it just is an utter waste of time to talk about "the women." It's a floating signifier, so broad as to be practically useless on an individual level.

I really don't believe you are as free of resentment as you claim to be.

I'm not sure where you're deriving resentment from my comment. I think it's fairly lucid, even if you disagree with it.

If you honestly think that "all women" are in a sort of cartel where they determine the cost of entry for "family formation" or engage in "resource siphoning," I'm not sure we will ever see eye to eye. Cartels coordinate.

Slut-shaming is an obvious case of such coordination, isn't it? Not the slut-shaming done by angry incels online, which is a huge social crisis existing only on the minds of feminist journalists, but slut-shaming done by other women.

I imagine there are far more women who are turned off by the median man than there are men who are turned off by the median woman.

This has always been the case though.

Cartels coordinate.

That's called an in-group bias. Women have one, men not so much.

Since the amount of available product on the market depends on women and not men (also for biological reasons), we put women on the selling side and men on the buying side.

If sellers co-ordinate, then it's a cartel, by definition. Slut-shaming (a classic practice among women) is kind of the basic example of this: given women form a union, that is scab behavior [it's working at a discount from the cartel's perspective, defeating the power of collective bargaining], and discouraged accordingly. See also the concept of a "pick-me", where the woman throws in some other value-adds to gain an individual advantage, and the chain is similar: why would you do that, unless you want to sell -> you're trying to undercut everyone else = slut = scab -> punish.

If you honestly think that "all women" are in a sort of cartel where they determine the cost of entry for "family formation" or engage in "resource siphoning,"

The idea that there is some grand war in incentives between women, as a class, and men, as a class, is precisely the mindset that I think is fallacious.

This isn't really a conscious thing; it's merely human instinct. Revealed preferences by the relevant actors (as buyers compete with buyers, as sellers compete with sellers, and as both negotiate between each other) demonstrates the collective negotiation between men and women has the character of a market, so economic analysis is the correct framing with which to make predictions.

perhaps your attitude has not shifted with the majority

'What the average market participant is willing to afford' is actually kind of the central issue here, so 'attitudes' are inescapable here (and again, this has biology/instinctual roots). Sexual attraction obviously has a lot to do with that, and that's something you simply don't get to decide.

In this case, the clearing price of the sexual marketplace has risen to the point where it's created a much larger proportion of men and women who are either unwilling or unable to afford each other; even when they can, they have far smaller families as a result.

Feminism is to blame for a little bit of that (in the "why bother buying into someone they're only marginally attracted to" and "government-enforced wealth transfers from men to women handicaps buyers and frustrates price discovery for sellers"[1] senses- this also matters on the seller side, particularly when considering [2], but inherently affects buyers far more than sellers), but a lot of it is that the substitute goods have become far better and cheaper than they used to be (and the cost of everything else associated with supporting a family has become far higher), so the value each party must bring also must be correspondingly higher.

Which means that, at the clearing price floor, attraction (and perhaps the compromises thereon) is making most of the difference (and perhaps providing more of the buyer's remorse upon purchase), so the fixation on it at that point makes sense.

[1] Forced-diversity initiatives as well as intentional subsidy of college degrees increase a seller's perception of their real value; once they realize they're overvalued, their more advanced age has devalued them further (again, this is a thing men value, and no, you don't get to pretend they don't). Discovering this is more likely to lead to their leaving the market entirely, creating further distortion.

[2] Divorce laws in the "she took everything including the kids" direction result in buyers perceiving more risk than there actually is. This should actually decrease the price a woman can charge due to fewer buyers willing to take that risk, and can lead to sellers competing with each other in ways like "known adherent to a religion where divorce is a sin".

The idea that there is some grand war in incentives between women, as a class, and men, as a class, is precisely the mindset that I think is fallacious.

feminism [exists], continuing significant political split between men and [particularly unmarried] women

If you can't agree on the facts there's nothing further to discuss. Having interests is not inherently malicious; good and evil are not life's concern.

I’m sorry but the female equivalent to male gambling, porn, anger, laziness and isolation is by no means merely ‘getting careers, delaying childbirth, or even having more sex’; it’s credit card debt, female anger (publicly directed at men and usually getting zero social pushback), (obsessive) female porn consumption (of trashy YA literature, dark romantasy or whatever and emotional porn marketed to women in general), social isolation (see the latter example), trashiness, frumpiness, OF ‘modeling’, camwhoring, pigging out, getting addicted to painkillers and alcohol etc.

What getting careers, delaying childbirth, or even having more sex represent on the part of women is simply them abandoning the social roles that the bygone Christian patriarchy expected of them – it does not necessarily entail personal degeneracy and dysfunction. Men abandoning the social roles that the bygone Christian patriarchy expected of them simply manifests as one no longer interacting with women from the perspective of responsibility and protection but from the perspective of pleasure and fun – in other words, delaying marriage and fatherhood, not marrying your first sweetheart etc. It's an overall situation where women no longer feel accountable to men and men no longer feel responsible for women.

Living in a coastal city and think the women are too feminist? Move. Having a hard time meeting religious people? Move. No luck on dating apps due to demographic asymmetries? Move. Dating and marriage, on the experiential level, have so little to do with the aggregate behaviors of the sexes, and everything to do with how one spends their time and the people they surround themselves with.

Do you think it's a reasonable request to be made to average single men or women to upend their entire lives just to supposedly increase their personal chances of finding a suitable partner?

Do you think it's a reasonable request to be made to average single men or women to upend their entire lives just to supposedly increase their personal chances of finding a suitable partner?

Honestly? Yes, because that’s probably not their only tension with their local community, and the alternatives (changing the rest of the community for your niche, or resigning to loneliness) are more unreasonable.

We should normalize people intentionally moving to regions with like-minded individuals. It would reduce tension and restore community, desperately needed in this era. Already, moving once or twice in a lifetime, like leaving for college then working somewhere else, is fairly typical and not hard for most people, especially with fast travel and instant long-distance communication. Moving more shouldn’t be necessary.

We should normalize people intentionally moving to regions with like-minded individuals.

This has actually been happening on such a scale and for such a long time that a popular book was released on its harmful effects back in 2008. I know this is somewhat off-topic but still.

Interesting. Looking at district maps like this, I had the impression that even many “one-sided” areas had a decent share of the other side: the darkest red and blue regions still have 1 of every 5 members voting the opposite.

That link is dead for me, just fyi.

People prefer those like them, attempts to disturb this amount to the Berlin wall, the argument against it happening within the US afaik is «it's bad for undesirables» whether they be blacks (in the case of white flight) or the dumb (in the case of whatever Charles Murray was complaining about in the first part of the Bell Curve). Personally if you want me to be around such people you have to grant me elevation and authority, or else I will resent it and try to escape. From what I see of arguments like the one you link to they tend to refuse or ignore the authority component and instead they want people like me to accept some kind of duty to lower ourselves by living equal among people we don't want.

"elevation and authority"? Are you a fan of feudalism?

More comments

+1, fair elaborations. I'm not claiming that the current dynamic is perfect, just t

Do you think it's a reasonable request to be made to average single men or women to upend their entire lives just to supposedly increase their personal chances of finding a suitable partner?

I suppose I was speaking a bit harshly in my haste to respond. My ultimate point is that changing one's voluntary associations is likely to have a far greater impact on one's romantic satisfaction than paying much mind to aggregate female behaviors. "Moving" in the sense of physical relocation is one way to do that, and perhaps the most dramatic way to do so. To those unwilling to move, there are still many ways to change one's voluntary associations.

You're correct that in many cases, it is unreasonable for one to move and it's a highly personal decision. However, for the motivated partner-seeker, taking concerted steps to engage with more potential mates, up to and including moving, is hardly upending one's life - it's choosing the life that one wants. Under the age of 30, it pays to be flexible.

Now, there may be some dissatisfaction that such a suggestion is even necessary these days. Again, I don't think this is "women's" fault any more than it is the fault of cultural balkanization in the U.S., and women often find themselves in similar demographic quicksand that they have to escape by moving, too. For example, many young heterosexual women bemoan the fact that NYC has a highly skewed male-female ratio, making dating much harder.

Unfortunately, I attempted to write this reply and found that I was unable to do it sufficiently. I've been sitting at my computer for an hour and am simply not satisfied with the argument I've constructed because it effectively requires me to describe my worldview from first principles.

Oh boy, I can relate to that. I appreciate the effort.

I want to give your post some more thought, probably review it after I've slept. But two differences stand out to me: One is that I think that different relationship practices vary in their conduciveness to human flourishing far more than you do. The other is that I'm not looking primarily at potential mates but at other people I care about being led into costly mistakes by a society that encourages them.

Sure, I did my best but judging by other responses, it leaves a bit to be desired.

I'll add that I don't believe in a libertine blank-slatism where all relationship types are created equal. I will assume that you believe marriage or stable monogamy are ideal for human flourishing? I don't disagree. I just think that the excesses of a state in which traditional marriage is enforced or even encouraged are less tolerable than the excesses of a state that is permissive of individual relationship choice. I do not believe experimenting with casual sex or premarital sex generally in your 20s, as a man or woman, is an inherently detrimental event, so long as it is done within reason. I do not believe that matters of the heart ought to be addressed with market-style approaches, wherein we examine the "price" that "women" "set" on "men." It's far too broad a level of analysis to be personally useful. Call me ignorant if you wish, but I think this is a situation in which ignorance is adaptive.

You could argue that marriage is unfairly pilloried these days to our societal detriment, which is fair, but a different conversation.

I think this false notion that women are somehow innately fit for marriage by virtue of having been born with an uterus whereas men need to basically be domesticated into this role is remarkably widespread even among people who should know better. I’m guessing there are two main reasons for this. One is that most people are capable of noticing that the average woman is only interested in one man at a time and thus practices monogamy even when she’s not interested in marriage. (Serial monogamy = promiscuity, as practiced by women.) The other is that when relationships are formed, the man is usually more averse to initiating commitment (averse to making this big change in front of his entire social circle, that is) than the woman is whereas the woman is more likely to be averse to staying committed. This means men and women are actually equally picky in this regard but it’s men’s pickiness that manifests earlier in the process which creates the notion that the average man is somehow a ‘commitment-phobe’.

Aqua basically exists a comic relief character and not as a potential romantic interest

I think it's interesting to try to figure out how this works. Kazuma is totally a pervert, yet he doesn't have any romantic or even sexual interest in the apparently attractive and well endowed fanservice characters. And us as the viewers empathize with him, agreeing with him on that aspect. Why is this?

Nearly every anime girl is designed to be impossibly hot. With such an abundance of superstimuli, it's easy enough to look over the hot and crazy women for the merely hot ones.

That being said, I think you're operating on bad priors. There are still plenty of fans attracted to aqua, and dedicated kazuma/aqua shippers. The same goes for darkness.

She's given the nickname 'Useless Goddess' for a reason.

Ie, sometimes character design isn't enough to save a character. They have to actually be likeable. Unless that's the point, like we get with Aqua.

I haven't read the manga, but in the anime, it's spelled out that intelligence is Aqua's dump stat. It's pathetically low and she is "max-level" so it's never improving. It's also strongly hinted that basically all of the problems in the world have all been caused by Aqua, through various short-sighted acts. Several of her previous choices for reincarnations created civilization-ending disasters, her followers/cult are pretty much responsible for the demon-king, and I read some theory that the demon-king is actually someone she reincarnated.

Essentially Aqua is on the hot-crazy scale where her crazy-selfish-stupidity needs to be graded on a log scale, relative to her hotness. That's the joke.

I'm pretty sure he's shown as being into Darkness and Wiz physically. He just doesn't like their personalities. I think the non-attraction is specifically towards Aqua, on account of her being a massive dumbass.

As other posters say, Kazuma is shown having romantic and sexual interest in a number of characters. But I'm not sure there's anything to take from it, since the show at its core is a comedy and parody of the Isekai genre, not something with any serious intent. That Megumin "wins" in the end is probably just a reflection that there are a very large number of paedophiles creating and watching Japanese anime. And technically that might not even be relevant, given the anime is an adaptation of a novel in which I believe all the characters are teens

since the show at its core is a comedy and parody of the Isekai genre, not something with any serious intent

Yeah, the worldbuilding of Interspecies Reviewers was much more serious. (Konosuba isn't actually that thoughtless though I stopped watching it after S1.)

That Megumin "wins" in the end is probably just a reflection that there are a very large number of paedophiles creating and watching Japanese anime.

Yes- by the social conservative and feminist definition, "wanting a decent-ish relationship with a relatively-close peer at any age where you'd actually be attracted to said peer" is absolutely indistinguishable from pedophilia. She was only barely post-menopause, you sick fuck.

The reason men tend to watch anime is mainly because it's free from this bullshit. Even though their birthrate is relatively poor Japan really doesn't seem to be a country whose men and women hate each other. Perhaps it's because women look way younger for way longer, so there's correspondingly less temptation for the collective of older women to re-enact Snow White on everyone younger.

Which, it turns out, is easiest to do simply by pathologizing natural attraction to them (by any group whatsoever).

Megumin is a character that looks 12 and acts 12. As mentioned, the original material had all the characters being teens and perhaps different descriptions, but in the anime Kazuma and many of the other characters are basically depicted as adults. I struggle to believe anyone would consider Megumin a suitable partner or find her attractive without serious paedophilic tendencies

but in the anime Kazuma and many of the other characters are basically depicted as adults

I am not sure what you are talking about. When I watch the anime Kazuma seems like a boy and it explicitly starts with him getting run over coming home from school.

Megumin is a character that looks 12 and acts 12.

The joke is that she kind of looks 12, but I think she acts a little older being the most intelligent member of the party and so on.

In the show I think she's 14 and acts 14. IIRC Kazuma is 17 in the show. It's less weird they end up together, considering they're both NEETs at heart.

I dated a girl once with the megumin body type. She was 28. And starved as a child. Whoops.

Yunyun best girl.

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!

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.

I suspect this undersells how the economy works. The economy in a free-market system is a network effect; more able-bodied workers generates more opportunity, all else being equal. A better demographic pyramid requires less taxation per capita to support a social safety net for the elderly, allowing more reinvestment into other economic opportunities. It also would create different, potentially beneficial governance effects in democracies.

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

It seems quite possible that AI goes fine and that humans are still a valued or even necessary part of the economy. But even if it turns out so "well" that most people do not need to engage in labor, I think it behooves us to figure out how to get romance and childrearing right. In a good AI takeoff scenario, that will quickly (over civilizational time-scales, anyway) become the focus of most human beings, in all likelihood.

And especially Christianity cannot work, since that's the very thing we observed completely failing!

What are you talking about? When practiced, Christianity shows better results in dating markets (and tfr) – this is pretty well known social science. Broadly speaking steady religious practice (not limited to Christianity) correlates well with better life outcomes, at least in the United States.

The economy in a free-market system is a network effect; more able-bodied workers generates more opportunity, all else being equal

Even China can't find enough work for all their young people, they have high youth unemployment despite an enormous pool of well-educated young people and intense capitalist pressure.

If the economy is primarily acting like a network effect, then why don't we see the network effect in action? Why can't Johnny walk in with a firm handshake and get a good job with all these opportunities being made? The US has a pretty free market and a pretty large population. I don't deny that there are some aspects of a network effect, certainly with elite talent there are. But adding merely able-bodied workers is not helping much at all.

This is the mass-immigration school of economic thought. Adding 10 million able bodied Haitians or Hondurans isn't going to make America much richer at all. All the Arabs and Africans going to Europe aren't bolstering the eurozone economies, largely because they don't work. Even if they did, it only impedes automation of low-value labour. Domestic births are naturally better but even then, automation is already chewing through these roles.

In a good AI takeoff scenario, that will quickly (over civilizational time-scales, anyway) become the focus of most human beings, in all likelihood.

I agree but it's a lot easier to handle that later. There will be all the time in the world to fix that up.

When practiced, Christianity shows better results in dating markets

So why isn't it being practiced, then? Church attendence rates fell from 70% in the mid 20th century to 30% today. Even these remaining nominal Christians are mostly not acting like it's 1950 either, they're largely feminists and progressives who show up for a sermon about progressivism from a priest. They don't act like Christians used to act with regards to divorce, marital roles or the things that Jim is calling for.

It's true that small pockets of highly religious-reactionary people are high fertility. But there is no evidence that a technological country can be run this way by usually-isolated population of the highly devout. Why would the Mormons or Amish or Hasidic Jews not immediately act like everyone else when they end up having to run a whole country?

Even if they did, it only impedes automation of low-value labour.

Oh, so that's how mass immigration serves the lower/underclass.

So why isn't it being practiced, then?

Because the State has incorporated most of Christianity's community-building aspects. You don't make the choice to donate your time to the soup kitchen any more; the government simply confiscates your time (through a process known as "income tax") and runs that program itself (at times it will pay religious groups to do this). Same thing with permitting crime, actually- the way Western society donates to the poor is simply by permitting them to walk into any store, take what whatever they require, and the cost of that is redistributed through something called an "insurance premium".

they have high youth unemployment despite an enormous pool of well-educated young people

The education, of course, was mostly just to dissuade young people from dealing with unemployment the traditional way. Education to those who can't use it provides no bonus.

so that's how mass immigration serves the lower/underclass

I think the lower classes would rather have robots doing their jobs than a flood of immigrants rendering them strangers in their home towns, not to mention abusing their daughters. Everything gets automated eventually but there's no need to import populations with wildly different values.

Because the State has incorporated most of Christianity's community-building aspects

Well, if you squint at it, single mothers are now married to the state who provides benefits for their offspring. But this is not really what Christians mean by 'marriage'. The modern state does perform some community aspects but in a totally different way to how they're done under a genuinely Christian society. A mountain of abortion here, euthanasia there, pornography on the left and fornication on the right and directly in front of us a great big Pride Parade... doesn't sound very Christian to me!

Because the State has incorporated most of Christianity's community-building aspects. You don't make the choice to donate your time to the soup kitchen any more; the government simply confiscates your time (through a process known as "income tax") and runs that program itself (at times it will pay religious groups to do this).

Most Christian Churches do still do things like soup kitchens and community meals and similar things. The Mormon Church has a whole internal welfare system and huge pressure on members to volunteer for the Church which most do. Churches actually can do these things if they are vibrant and organized. Also Christianity first grew under the oppression of the Roman state. If the Romans couldn't kill it do you really think it's JUST income tax?

Sorry for the delayed reply; I was traveling.

Domestic births are naturally better but even then, automation is already chewing through these roles.

You can't get domestic births without good fertility to begin with, and the US is adding jobs, not losing them, right now. Interestingly the latest stats show additions in construction and manufacturing even as we lose jobs in financial services. In fact, right now there's a skilled manual labor shortage in the US that is slowing down datacenter construction.

Church attendence rates fell from 70% in the mid 20th century to 30% today.

What's your source for this? "Church attendance rates" is very vague, but only somewhere around 40% of Americans never attend church (as of 2022), whereas "past seven days" attendance in 2020 or so dropped to 30 percent from...40 percent in 1940 and a high of nearly 50 percent in the 1950s. I suspect you're indexing on non-American data. There's definitely been a real religiosity shift in America, but a lot of that was "vibes" as the not-very-engaged shifted from being nominal to nones.

It's true that small pockets of highly religious-reactionary people are high fertility. But there is no evidence that a technological country can be run this way by usually-isolated population of the highly devout. Why would the Mormons or Amish or Hasidic Jews not immediately act like everyone else when they end up having to run a whole country?

This doesn't really describe America at all (it certainly may describe other nations; my recollection is that you're an Aussie.) In the US, the conservative religious (which are a large fraction of the population - evangelicals alone are >20% of the population, and there are of course plenty of conservative Catholics, Jews, Mormons and other minority religions as well) is roughly at or above TFR, and they are basically "normies" - they use modern technology, go into the armed forces, work at Lockheed and Boeing, serve as cops and judges and legislators, go to grad school (in the US, higher education is correlated with religiosity) and generally take on roles that fill the "full stack" that a modern civilization needs to function, from farming to forging to fighting to filming. (Mormons in particular are very valued by the intelligence services because they often know a second language and have been abroad for mission work; as a result, the FBI, NSA, military etc. is swarming with them.) And they're not isolated; the doctrines of evangelical Christianity, traditional Catholicism, and Mormonism basically prevent the isolation you might seem from the Amish or some Jews.

Interestingly the latest stats show additions in construction and manufacturing even as we lose jobs in financial services. In fact, right now there's a skilled manual labor shortage in the US that is slowing down datacenter construction.

The US right now could do with more electricians, more doctors, more semiconductor fab workers, more shipbuilders, more engineers to make optics, missiles, R&D. All high-skill jobs. Automation will get through to them eventually, automation is probably working faster than human reproduction. We're not just talking about an 18 year lead time, for skilled labour it's a 22, 25, 30 year pipeline.

What's your source for this?

https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declined-religious-groups.aspx

It says three in 10 Americans say they attend religious services every week (21%) or almost every week (9%). I confess that it doesn't show the 70% figure, I don't know where I found that, it does seem wrong. Probably not comparable statistics anyway, adding in almost every week would push it up to 55% or so. But let's say 50-55% down to 30%, that's a pretty big drop. Christians trend older than other groups too:

there are of course plenty of conservative Catholics, Jews, Mormons and other minority religions as well) is roughly at or above TFR

https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secular-fertility-divide

Indeed, religious fertility rates simply are not high enough to offset losses from conversion to irreligion. Data from the 2014 Pew Religious Life Survey suggest that net conversions in and out of American religions lead to about a 16% loss in religious people over the course of a generation. To offset that, religious American women would need to have, on average, 2.44 children each.

See also: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-religious-composition-has-changed-in-recent-decades/

You can see a fairly steep fall in US Christianity and a rise in 'unaffiliated'.

More generally, my point is that if Christianity worked, then we wouldn't see that drop in religiosity in the first place. Losing the commanding heights of the social landscape is a pretty serious blow. I recall the 1990s Simpsons, it was notably more religious than most shows today.

I agree that Christianity is, for individuals, more functional and appropriate. I'm confident the church girls are happier and better off and innately better than the tattooed danger-hair goblins. But as a systemic solution on a wide scale? Why are there any danger-hair goblins at all? Why are there Pride Parades at all? Why aren't there hate crimes being prosecuted for anti-Christianism, like there are for anti-black, anti-feminist, Islamophobia? Once the first couple of Baphomet statues go up in state legislatures, then I think that's a pretty good sign that Christianity is in steep decline.

It's not like the US lost a war to the Soviet Union and the Soviets imposed this. Christianity as a system (the old kind of Christian system that Jim talks about in the OP link, considerably more conservative than any conservative Catholic accepted in the mainstream) was a good systemic solution a few hundred years ago but why should we expect it to work today? We wouldn't imagine that a liberal democracy could work in Bronze Age Greece or that Japanese Shogunate-era samurai Shinto society would fit Japan today, so why should Christianity be any different? Why should it be appropriate for an even more radically different post-ASI society?

Christianity doesn't seem to compete well against progressivism and that alone is fatal. Waiting for progressivism to burn out isn't working since progressivism has a higher conversion rate and elite capture. We see church girls becoming danger-hair goblins but not the other way around nearly so much. Or more commonly, we see perfectly well-brought-up respectable men and women switch their ethos to unaffiliated and do as they please.

The US right now could do with more electricians, more doctors, more semiconductor fab workers, more shipbuilders, more engineers to make optics, missiles, R&D. All high-skill jobs. Automation will get through to them eventually, automation is probably working faster than human reproduction. We're not just talking about an 18 year lead time, for skilled labour it's a 22, 25, 30 year pipeline.

Correct.

Some of these (particularly electricians) will be very hard to automate, even if AI pays off. I do not think electricians will be 100% automated in 25 years.

You can see a fairly steep fall in US Christianity and a rise in 'unaffiliated'.

Certainly.

I agree that Christianity is, for individuals, more functional and appropriate. I'm confident the church girls are happier and better off and innately better than the tattooed danger-hair goblins. But as a systemic solution on a wide scale?

It's entirely possible that "doing the right thing" is a good thing to do and also not the systematic solution to anything because it cannot be forced - even if it would solve systematic problems if a critical mass of people did it.

why should we expect it to work today?

Well, as I said, because it does! It's one of the very few things that does (as you seem to agree). And one of the neat ways in which it works is that it works regardless of systematic solutions. The West can be going to hell in a handbasket and church girls can still be happier and better off (and more importantly grow to know and love their Creator).

Christianity doesn't seem to compete well against progressivism and that alone is fatal.

I don't think this is true.

Just an illustrative anecdote: this summer I went to a legal conference and rubbed elbows with people on both sides. One of the things that was interesting was the degree to which the progressives were interested in compromise.

Now, I think there was some selection bias at play here on multiple levels. But generally speaking, you don't pursue compromise when you think you are crushing the opposition (which in the United States includes but of course is not limited to conservative Christians).

Waiting for progressivism to burn out isn't working since progressivism has a higher conversion rate and elite capture.

Except the unaffiliates aren't hardcore progressives - people often miss this. Unaffiliates tend not to be engaged. People who are engaged religiously vote; peeling people out of their religious engagement doesn't make them vote (D) it makes them not vote at all. (In the United States, voting is not mandatory). From a raw political angle (which, frankly, is a horrible way to view religion) the disengagement of religion is potentially in fact very for the left because the churches that are increasingly fragmenting are left-wing organization hubs. We could see a future where the conservative religious right shrinks but loses little if any political power simply because they still turn out to vote.

We see church girls becoming danger-hair goblins but not the other way around nearly so much.

Well, it's funny you should say that. Recent polling in the US is very interesting - youth identification as LGBTQ (and positive sentiment towards LGBTQ) is going down and interest in religion is rising.

I think the former was a fad and so it makes sense that it will regress towards the mean. I'm not sure about the latter. I think there's a good chance that automation increases interest in religion, for fairly obvious reasons, but it also might hollow it out, for equally obvious ones.

I don't think that the future is set in stone, though. I tend to think the trend lines for the conservative right in the US are actually looking better now than during COVID. But it's unclear to me which way those trend lines will go.

The West can be going to hell in a handbasket and church girls can still be happier and better off

The main goal is not to have the West go to hell in a handbasket, in my mind. That's what Jim was writing about I think. I'm sure there were plenty of people having a normal one in Nicholas II's Russia and that was fine but it wasn't sufficient to avoid disaster.

So far as I can see here, there's a slow and steady trend downwards in roughly all aspects of religiosity/Christianity in America, up to 2026: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1690/Religion.aspx

This doesn't seem like the vital aspect that can save the West.

Furthermore, if in 25 years electricians, shipbuilders, engineers and so on haven't been automated, then it follows that AI was not that big of a deal. We are talking about a fundamentally different scenario.

a slow and steady trend downwards in roughly all aspects of religiosity/Christianity in America, up to 2026

On the whole, what's been remarked on in the most recent years isn't that this trend reversed, but rather that it slowed or stopped, and you can see it in this data. For instance, there's a five point drop in importance of religion between 2012 and 2016, but only a two point drop between 2021 and 2025, and the trend basically stops after 2022. The number of people saying that religion's importance was increasing actually spiked massively in 2025; the past-seven-days question numbers have roughly returned to pre-COVID numbers, etc.

I worry that you're taking me as overstating things – I'm optimistic on this, not triumphalist. I recommend Ryan Burge on this, he tends to have decent takes that I think don't overstate the evidence.

This doesn't seem like the vital aspect that can save the West.

The goal of Christianity isn't to "save the West" today it's to save souls forever. The beneficial effects on civilization are a byproduct of this, not an end goal. Twisting it to political ends is (I think) likely to fail at both (for instance, Catholicism triumphed very briefly in Ireland; a few decades of formal authority did what the British never could). If you want Christianity to save the West, let it start by saving you.

Furthermore, if in 25 years electricians, shipbuilders, engineers and so on haven't been automated, then it follows that AI was not that big of a deal. We are talking about a fundamentally different scenario.

I think that AI can be a big deal and fail to automate away plenty of aspects of our society. For instance, if AI made every man a coder whenever he cared to set his mind to it and dropped the price of all industry and manufacturing by 50%, the economy would be radically different! But humans would still be pulling wire and unstopping clogged toilets.

The economy in a free-market system is a network effect; more able-bodied workers generates more opportunity, all else being equal.

They have to generate more than they take, not just generate some. Most people do not. How many people have ever created even 1 job?

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".)

*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?

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.

Either AI goes well or it goes badly.

Well this is an externalized locus of control. I don't think this is random, I think a functioning society is better able to get its priorities in order and not fight about petty stupid stuff, and therefore is significantly more likely to figure out how to make AI go well. Imagine if all of the culture war stuff was absent and AI was the ONLY serious issue people were discussing, debating, arguing about, and talking to politicians about. People would spend more time learning about it, educating people about it, discussing it, understanding it. It doesn't guarantee we'd get it right, but it would surely up the chances. It would also prevent people from getting confused and thinking AI "alignment" means making it not say offensive things for PR reasons.

Obviously this is an unrealistically exaggerated scenario, but on the margins every amount of less time people spend hating each other for gender reasons is more time they can spend figuring out other things. Also, having stable happy marriages with children would get people more invested in the future and long term thinking which would adjust their priorities to care more.

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.

I think a functional society would do better - but a functional society is also going to get torn to pieces.

I said basically what you're saying... it's true that getting our act together would probably help. But the extent to which it would help is pretty small compared to the magnitude of the problem.

It's automatically proportional because it increases the probability of

  1. Making a properly aligned AI
  2. Putting in exactly the right level of socialist (or Georgist...?) policies at exactly the right time to ensure that the massive productivity of AI is shared among the people and not monopolized by the winner-takes-all investors.

A significant part of the reason why socialist policies are awful and doesn't work in real life is because it disincentivizes work, and people need to work in order for the economy to function. In a world where these assumptions are no longer true, the conclusion that socialist policies are awful won't necessarily hold and the balance will shift. If we increase the chance of doing this properly by 10%, then that's 10% multiplied by the magnitude of the problem. To the extent that current problems don't affect AI they will be blown out of the water by whatever AI does, but to the extent that they do, they matter proportional to their impact. If 1000 fent zombies in San Francisco cause $1 billion in damage (summed over property damage, consumed welfare, hospital bills, court costs, economic friction of people not wanting to be near them, etc.) and ten years from now AI can produce $100 quadrillion per year, yeah we can just pay to repair everything and solve the issue and undo long term damages and whatnot. But if 1000 fent zombies cause harm, discomfort, and disgust in AI researchers and cause them to become more reclusive, selfish, and less sympathetic to people with less than themselves, decreasing the probability of a good outcome by 1%, that's a HUGE deal.

All of this stuff affects people's thoughts and behavior, which in turn affects the direction we travel in as we attempt to navigate a future with AI. We're not trying to build enough of a solid economic and cultural foundation to weather the storm, we're trying to build a steering wheel and steer the ship away from the storm in the first place.

Love existing doesn't interact negatively with AI. If anything it does positively, which means AI makes fixing this problem more important, not less. Under superabundance people will still want romantic partners, it's of terminal value, unlike jobs.

I’ll quote a 2011 blog post from an Australian Catholic social conservative author who is also critical of the Manosphere:

This is by no means a Catholic critique at all. There are two completely different ways of how modern feminism or even modern thinking breaks down intersexual relationships. The first one is that the basis of Catholic teaching is not some maturity or anything like that, our morality is Virtue Based. Both men and women should strive to be virtuous: humble instead of prideful, chaste instead of lustful, generous instead of greedy, kind instead of jealous, balanced in moderation instead of gluttonous, patient instead of wrathful, diligent instead of slothful. Above all these virtues we have Christian love, caritas as guiding principle. There are of course other virtues such as courage or wisdom which are subsided in there. The point is that Christian ethics is Virtue Ethics, it is not utilitarianism or harm reductionism - it is centered around personal virtues related to deification and individual relationship toward God and other people.

Catholic anthropology follows this in sacraments. In baptism, a child is introduced into a community where mother, father, godfather and godmother take responsibility to educate the child toward these virtues in form of caretakers utilizing methods of discipline and consistency to teach the child. This results in first communion around age of 7 o 8, this tracks the ability to discern between good and evil, the child is capable of sacrament of confession and to decide on what is good and evil. From there there is the period of theological grounding for child's decision making, the parents are there as teachers with the child having more autonomy to explore these realities. The child is a catechumen and this period ends around age of 15-16, where he is considered and adult but still to be mentored by other people, including parents and the community.

Now the point is that in terms of maturity, by age of 16 you as a Catholic should be fully aware of what is Christian moral teaching, what are vices and virtues and live you life accordingly. There is no eternal "kid" mentality where somebody can be 28 and still "exploring" as some forever university student, it is preposterous. You can be 17 or 18 years old and preparing yourself for marriage and taking care of children in the same loop. Maturity is not about wealth, "responsibility" in terms of being a manager of team of 50 people or anything like that. While this is of course one way to grow, it is by no means implied in catholic teaching. You are mature as long as you posses ability to discern good and evil and as soon as adult Christian you know the doctrine to live virtuous life. The catholic teaching of responsibility is stemming from subsidiarity, by age 15-16 you are fully capable of thinking and managing yourself, and you are preparing to take care of your closest family such as husband/wife and even children and whole community. But this is reciprocal, The Church is proper way to live Christian life and the community is helping everybody till their last days. The process of deification is a lifelong process where the whole community including your priest is helping you in this endeavor.

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.

That is not lack of maturity, these young adults are mature enough to have capacity to understand what is going on. It is lack of virtue. You can be 80 year old alcoholic bum jerking off on your pissed matrass doing stupid shit. We do not think that such a person did not mature, they are just lacking virtues.

My main gripe with arguments along these lines is that they're basically cope. "From the vantage point of the past" doesn't matter. From the PoV of the Aztecs, we are colossally fucking up. But who cares? The same goes, to a lesser degree, for catholic social conservatives.

The reality remains, the average young man is attracted to the average young women in a way that is not reciprocated. For literally all my acquaintances who are or were single for a sustained period of time, the problem was always that in their peer group, the single women do not judge the single men as worth it. The men are single because they got rejected; The women were single because they are rejecting.

Just to be clear, I even think the argument is largely correct! With the benefit of being a father and family man who has no interest in dating ever again, it seems obvious to me that most young modern women have an inflated image of self-worth, an excessively negative view of young men, and a serious problem with even just acknowledging that any perspective but their own might matter. And, to be further clear, the men aren't great, either; They're merely not worse.

Starship Flight 14 is in orbit; it's just finished deploying satellites as I type. Looks like @TheDag won his bet with @ArjinFerman, with about 3 months to go. Recent discussion of this and other bets.

IMHO I'm still on track to lose my bet with Arjin, though there's three years left for things to get more interesting there. Things got a little more interesting in the wrong direction this morning, with SpaceX making a last-minute call to do the final (only 19 seconds long! Their suborbital trajectories really are really close to orbital!) orbital insertion burn after an ascent in which one of the six upper stage engines shut down early.

An early engine shutdown or two (they had one on the booster too) isn't the end of the world for the ascent - they carry extra fuel reserves for that contingency, and just keep the other engines lit a little longer if it happens - but it does mean a higher chance that the most exciting potential failure here is still to come. Starship did go to orbit, but we have yet to learn for certain whether Starship should have gone to orbit. They're hoping to do about 8 more hours of orbital coasting, then relight an upper stage engine for a deorbit burn. They also get to a "checkpoint" every hour or two where they can do an early deorbit burn and an early controlled reentry over ocean if they anticipate any issues with the full-length mission. But, if there's anything wrong with the upper stage that prevents the relight, then instead of another nice reentry and splashdown, we'll have the largest individual vehicle to make orbit (at least 25% heavier than the Shuttle orbiter, and something like a quarter the mass of the entire International Space Station after all its individual parts were assembled) stuck in orbit, eventually reentering out-of-control. This would be the largest event ever of that nature (Skylab was maybe 75% the mass of the Starship orbiter) and would be by far the largest recent event (the series of irresponsibly-littered Long March 5B upper stages were something like 20% the mass of Starship).

For some reason no 8 hours, they will deorbit early, so only another 30 minutes from now to coast in space.

You beat me to it; thanks! I'm trying to actually get work done and not just get nerd-sniped by the livestream, so I missed the deorbit burn too. Looks like it went fine, thankfully; they're nearly down to 100km now and probably 5 or 10 minutes away from hitting atmosphere.

Damn, I meant to buy more SPCX before the launch went off. Maybe it's still early.

Down 4% this week, up 3% this month. It's about at the IPO.

For some reason the price actually fell today. Never could make much sense of stonks.

They got satellites into orbit right? Seems badly misjudged to me. Give it a few more months (maybe when they finally catch Starship on return).

I don't know about "misjudged", SpaceX is mixed up with a bunch of things, including insane levels of AI spending, but yeah, I can't find any logic to it. On previous launch the stocks fell because they scrubbed the flight - a pretty normal occurrence for any launch provider. I imagined that if the market is this sensitive, prices would soar upon reaching a new milestone, but apparently not.

The hype of a mostly-successful launch is at war with the broader market anxiety about data centers and the cost of debt right now.

Remember that per their S-1, SpaceX is an AI company with rocket side business, not the other way around.

And companies would never lie on their S-1s...

As an aside, that form was the best piece of fiction I've read in a long time. Swap the numbers between AI and space valuations and it might approximately resemble the truth.

In every rational market the reaction of prices to news doesn't hinge on "is this news good" versus "is this news bad", but rather on "is this news better than expected" versus "is this news worse than expected". This was their best v3 launch so far, even aside from it being their first operational launch, but I'm not surprised if it's not the best by as far as the market was expecting. Flight 12 had 2 engine shutdowns on ascent, but massive (dozens of) relight failures on the boostback and landing burns, Flight 13 had an aborted ascent but then had a fine ascent on their second try and had slightly-less-massive (boostback shutdown when only 80% done, fewer but still too many landing burn engine failures) failures on the relights. Flight 14 had only recoverable failures (2 engines shutdown on ascent, 4 relights aborted on boostback and landing), but it still had enough failures that they didn't risk completing the full planned testing phase of the mission, and I wouldn't be surprised if investors had been hoping for a little better than that. There's now a good chance that SpaceX won't even try for another catch on Flight 15, of ship or of booster much less both.

Getting satellites into orbit is huge, though. They're still not getting the payload margins they want (they launched 26 Starlink v3s from a ship that's supposed to be able to do 60 eventually), but what they did get to orbit is roughly 3 times the mass and 10 times the additional bandwidth capacity of a Falcon 9 Starlink launch, which is a pretty nice start.

IMHO the biggest question right now is cadence. They've been doing v3 Starship launches every 2 months since Flight 12, but before this flight they were talking about NET October 19 for Flight 15 and (in a "super provisional" schedule) October 30 for Flight 16, the first Starship launch from Florida. I'm sure those will be delayed, but I'm hoping it'll be delays of weeks rather than months.

It's a meme stock. These equities are broadly detached from fundamentals and the market as a whole was down today for various interest rate related reasons.

Eh, I think a company's valuation can be broadly detached from fundamentals without being a meme stock. Generally meme stocks have nothing really of value other than flash in the pan popularity. SpaceX, regardless of their AI valuation, is still the undisputed leader in a rapidly growing, extremely high moat, extremely high future valuation industry (launch and space transport services). $SPCX is overpriced becasue all techy stocks are overpriced, but there is substance behind the hype.

An unrealistically absurd amount of the stock valuation was based on xai. It doesn't really work as a directional windmill for how well the rocket business goes. I was disapointed because I wanted exposure to the rocket business but buying 5x as much exposure to xai to get it feels insane.

Aaaand ... they're going to bring it down early. Aiming at the Northern Pacific contingency zone for splashdown, after a deorbit burn, about an hour from now, for a total time in orbit of only 3 hours instead of 8.5. Not sure whether this means they actually are seeing sensor readings that suggest the relight will be riskier than they'd expected, or whether they're just having the same "if this goes wrong it'll be literally the biggest failure of its kind ever" thoughts I outlined above and decided not to push their luck after an imperfect launch.

and decided not to push their luck after an imperfect launch.

Seems like it. A youtuber I follow for the space news predicted / guessed that this is what they'd go with as the situation was unfolding. The logic being that between the multiple engine failures, and this amount of time causing everything to go ice cold, would indeed be pushing their luck.

Beat me to my concession speech! @TheDag, if you're still here, send me a charity of your choice, or if you prefer to get the goods directly, some privacy-preserving way of transferring the money (happy to buy you a game on Steam, or something).

Things got a little more interesting in the wrong direction this morning, with SpaceX making a last-minute call to do the final (only 19 seconds long! Their suborbital trajectories really are really close to orbital!) orbital insertion burn after an ascent in which one of the six upper stage engines shut down early.

This one was a real nail-biter, originally they actually called off the orbital burn, only to change their mind again and go ahead with it.

I'll go ahead an concede a few more things. Over the years my opinion on Elon / SpaceX improved. Originally I was sure that Starlink was a gimmick, but between the Ukraine war, and every competitor trying to get their own version of it running, it seems pretty obvious like it's here to stay, and so no matter what happens in the coming years, I have to give him credit for implementing an idea that, frankly, seemed deranged just a few years ago.

This one was a real nail-biter

As a bet, maybe. As a live-stream, not by their standards.

They set the nail-biter bar way too high in the last 10 minutes of their first controlled reentry, Flight 4, starting at around T+57:11, when you can see the back side of a forward flap start to glow. The live-stream stops swapping between 3 other cameras and now focuses solely on The Flap as it's torn completely through by the plasma intrusion.

Fifteen seconds later I'm seeing whole thermal protection tiles ripped off into the slipstream ... but it's still going. At T+58 I'm warning my kids that that plasma temperature is thousands of degrees and the video is probably about to stop abruptly when the whole ship explodes, but so far it's still going. At T+59 I'm squinting because the lens cover is partially obscured by spatters of what must have been molten steel, but it's still going. Just before T+1:00 the video does stop abruptly, and I'm sure the thing is dead ... and 5 seconds later it's back, still going. 2 minutes later we lose video again, for 40 seconds this time, but just as I'm wondering if we're merely seeing telemetry from a falling black box amidst wreckage, ship video comes back; it's still going. Soon it looks like it's nose down, surely too far to be a maneuver, probably out of aerodynamic control ... until, though the cracked and splattered camera cover, you see a near-skeleton of a flap actuate again, and the ship levels off, 15km up, still going. At T+1:04:07 the host literally says "This is a nail-biter!" Ship's slowing to subsonic, but still plummeting into the Indian Ocean night, video pure black, telemetry hitting 1km altitude and surely about to end with a dead belly-flop into the water ... but then the black is lit up by engine light, the flap is clearly visible (minus what looks like half its heat shield and a quarter of its structure), the ship flips sharply and stabilizes at vertical, and water spray fills the view for a moment as the ship comes to a stop.

At T+1:06:06, the ship tips into the water post-splashdown, and the decimated-but-still-working flap appears to tear loose, job complete and permission to die finally granted.

Wooo lovely! I will DM you my friend. I am still here but have mostly moved to another account. Thanks for being a good sport, I was definitely sweating with how close things came. It's wild that if they didn't get it this time I probably would've lost.

I'm very glad your opinion has changed! I have become less focused on Elon / SpaceX over time, but I do still deeply admire the work they're doing.

It's wild that if they didn't get it this time I probably would've lost.

Depends on why. If they'd just decided to be extra paranoid and stay suborbital, they'd have gone to orbit in October instead. If some wild disaster had blown things up on the pad, Starship would be shut down for investigations for at least the rest of the year for sure.

As I've said, Starship can't not work.

Don't get carried away. Plenty of projects died because they couldn't iron out all the kinks, or couldn't do ao fast enough.

An old staple of the culture war has resurfaced: District attorney reopens case of alleged Cornell University 'gang rape'. The core allegation is that the girl went to a frat house, got pressured to snort ketamine, passed out, and was raped by multiple people while unconscious.

I first heard about this case from someone at Cornell a bit after it happened. She was adamant that the frat boys were guilty and that there was conclusive proof (though she didn't personally know what the proof was), but the administration went easy* on them because of misogyny. Obviously, this set off alarm bells in my head because it pattern-matched well with Duke Lacrosse, Mattress Girl, etc. I said that it sounded like there wasn't enough evidence to tell, while in the back of my mind thinking that the accusation was probably false.

I was somewhat surprised when I read today that this conclusive proof does sort of exist, in the form of a Snapchat screenshot wherein someone in the fraternity's group chat posted that there was "free pussy upstairs". It's not quite conclusive proof, but it's much better proof than I expected. At this point my assessment is that the accusation is probably basically real.

This got me to thinking about whether it was time to update my model of the world, and whether the discourse around campus rape has changed over the past 10+ years. In a media environment where Jezebel is dead and Rolling Stone irrelevant, should we still expect the mainstream media to be biased to the point of uselessness? What about the power dynamics? Who is Cornell more afraid of, feminists or Republican OCRs?

There're also the evergreen questions, like what the responsibility of a university should be in cases like this, or what the police department or justice system should do. Seasoned culture warriors will point out that wanting to be hard on this kind of crime correlates with wanting to be soft on other kinds of crime.

Another thing that came to mind was the question of how grievous a crime we should consider rape to be. In my lifetime, rape has generally been considered equivalent to murder in severity ("rape and murder" usually being used to indicate the category of "super serious crime"), and the question of whether that's a good thing has been debated to death. However, Zoomers are famously more prudish than Millennials. Does it follow that Zoomers also regard rape as a greater crime, relatively speaking, than Millennials do?

*I see people claiming on Reddit and other places that the alleged rapists' only punishment was that they had to write apologetic essays, but this is not true -- at least two members of the fraternity were expelled. Whether this is a light punishment is up for debate.

there was "free pussy upstairs". It's not quite conclusive proof, but it's much better proof than I expected. At this point my assessment is that the accusation is probably basically real.

Proof of what exactly? It proves that there was train happening upstairs - which no one has disputed I think. Whether it was rape depends on whether she was capable of consent and if she gave it. That exact quote doesn't swing in any direction.

Points against that being rape is that during the woke era in a woke institution administered and ruled by woke people trough and trough - that this was covered up is strange.

For is that she did drugs.

I hadn't been paying close attention to the details of the story and I was under the impression that her being unconscious (and therefore incapable of consent) was an agreed-upon fact. Upon closer reading it does seem like the unconscious part is under contention, with the DA saying that when the incident was originally reported, she did not report being unconscious, which seems like the classic story-changing pattern.

Maybe I was too quick to update.

I've seen a bunch of posting on social media indicating that a recording of the sex act exists and shows her conscious and enthusiastically participating, though might just be garbled twitter stuff.

While that could be true, I would hope her attorneys would've determined what evidence was floating around first before filing suit as they are presumably working on contingency. It's bad for business to get 1/3 of $0.

What are the odds Cornell settles anyway, for the sake of ideology and bad press?

Yeah. Big enough target and sensitive enough topic you don't need a ton of merit to have a decent chance at getting a settlement off somebody to shut up and go away

Assume it’s free money. But it’s a weird place for colleges now and it would be easier to get the payout a few years ago.

Schools do want to capture some of the southern school rise of not be dominated by wokism/me-too ism. But parents also don’t want their daughters going to schools where their daughter is having consented ketamine-booze gangbangs. Except for a few EA types.

So Cornell probably doesn’t want to look like activist can just bully policy. Internally Cornell’s ideal social experience is being seen as fun on the weekends but sex is monogamous.

Yeah but consider some of the absolutely insane frivolous culture war cases lately. Karmelo Anthony's family suing and leading to a bunch of evidence entering the record that made him look worse, or whatever the hell is going on with the Nolan Wells situation. All you need is one desperate/aggressive enough lawfirm.

There were almost certainly actual crimes involved in the Nolan wells situation. Hes not an innocent victim, but transportation provided by an intoxicated teen is one of those things that isn’t an innocent explanation.

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Actually I’m loving this case. Because based on the police report that she consented to everything there really isn’t a coherent liberal moral framework that they can apply to this case.

Their not allowed to say girls don’t have agency or academia should restrict the sex life of adults or people shouldn’t do ketamine.

But what do I know I just went to a school that made it illegal to have premarital sex so we have a framework that makes this bad.

I was somewhat surprised when I read today that this conclusive proof does sort of exist, in the form of a Snapchat screenshot wherein someone in the fraternity's group chat posted that there was "free pussy upstairs". It's not quite conclusive proof, but it's much better proof than I expected. At this point my assessment is that the accusation is probably basically real. One guy says "there's free pussy," therefore seven men must have raped her.

A picture someone posted online that has no provenance except a viral twitter mob is actually really bad proof. This is really, really flimsy proof. The worst part about it is that everyone believes it must be real because they've seen the picture, and seeing is believing. The story would actually be more believable if there were no picture at all, because then it would rest on the simple usual he-said-she-said and not the stochastic Rorschach test of things that are half-known.

Even if the picture is real and not taken out of context at all it's entirely possible to construct a benign interpretation. (One guy saying to his friends that there is "free pussy" upstairs is really, really far away from proving anybody actually raped her.)

This got me to thinking about whether it was time to update my model of the world, and whether the discourse around campus rape has changed over the past 10+ years. In a media environment where Jezebel is dead and Rolling Stone irrelevant, should we still expect the mainstream media to be biased to the point of uselessness? What about the power dynamics? Who is Cornell more afraid of, feminists or Republican OCRs?

It has less to do with media dynamics and more to do with teenage anxiety about sex combined with bureaucratic neuroticism. We take teenagers away from home and put them in high-pressure career-study stress then ply them with booze and free condoms and tell them not to worry, college is a great time! Let's give them matches and dynamite while we're at it. Out of this mix you get a wide variety of responses, which includes lots of normal excess that people regret for lots of reasons. From the outside it's impossible to really tell what's going on, it's impossible for me to say when a girl is having fun she regrets or if a guy is actually a creep or what. I hear all sorts of stories from my girlfriends, and half the time they are clearly BS, and half the time the men really are pigs, and you can't ask too carefully at all or you're part of the problem. So, from the inside, the colleges invent this insane bureaucratic machine that puts men through impossible burdens of proof that assume they are basically guilty by default.

Let's not forget the Lois Lerner "Dear Colleagues" letter and everything that came down on college campuses during the Obama years.

However, even then, even putting aside the bad-faith bureaucracy and taking the worst for granted... -- the events described at Cornell University are a six sigma event. They are extraordinarily unlikely. Seven teenagers drugging and gang-raping a random girl unknown to them? I actually find it more believable that Jussie Smollet was innocently walking around Chicago when two thugs assaulted him and shouted "This is MAGA Country". Do you know how hard it is to organize the alleged events? Teenagers do not think like this. There is not a single man on this forum who would participate in something like this, and probably not a single man anybody here knows who would participate in something like this, perhaps even to a 2nd or 3rd degree. I've known men to do some pretty heinous things to woman but gang rape is really a step above in improbability. How many people here would commit a life-ruining crime with their roommates or even strangers? You can throw infinite alcohol and drugs into this mix and it still remains extremely improbable because unlike an episode of Plato most people do not lose their moral sense when you grant them total anonymity and repercussions from consequences.

Basically, I call BS, UVA Lacrosse, "A Rape on Campus," Jussie Smollet, etc etc etc.

at least two members of the fraternity were expelled. Whether this is a light punishment is up for debate.

What else is the college supposed to do? The cops looked into it in 2024 and concluded there was no criminal case, expulsion is then actually the maximum possible punishment. This is actually evidence of hysteria because you can be expelled for things which the legal system concluded had no merit.

Yes, I should have looked deeper before giving my personal opinion on the likelihood of guilt.

What else is the college supposed to do? The cops looked into it in 2024 and concluded there was no criminal case, expulsion is then actually the maximum possible punishment. This is actually evidence of hysteria because you can be expelled for things which the legal system concluded had no merit.

When the type of punishment is already maxed out, the next variable is the number of people being punished. They can't expel the expelled students any harder, but if they wanted to project a stronger anti-rape message, they could expel more of them (in this case, other frat members for their alleged involvement).

Do you know how hard it is to organize the alleged events? Teenagers do not think like this. There is not a single man on this forum who would participate in something like this

Not knowingly, not with full consciousness of the heinousness of what they're doing. But many rapists lie to themselves to maintain plausible deniability within their own minds - they tell themselves soothing stories. This is what she wanted, this is what she came here to do, slipping her a little something to loosen her up is just insurance to make sure she follows through on what she implicitly promised already. In an environment where casual sex and casual drug use are already normalized group mentality could easily reinforce that sort of self-deception rather than unravel it.

Indeed, in a scenario like this, some participants might well be earnestly unaware that the encounter is non-consensual - that when the group-chat guy told them "I've got a girl up on the bed, naked and high as a kite" they might have honestly assumed the implication was that the girl had gotten high on purpose, and preemptively consented to sex before the drugs kicked in. That sort of thing probably happens fairly often in its own right. And the relative reasonableness of that assumption feeds back into the self-deception/plausible deniability: even if the non-consensual-roofie hypothesis has occurred to them as a more-or-less-distant possibility, horny boys will feel a strong incentive to continue to operate on the assumption of consent rather than double-check and find themselves unable to proceed without guilt. Schrödinger's Pussy?

This is what she wanted, this is what she came here to do, slipping her a little something to loosen her up

The allegation is that they made her snort ketamine off their dicks. I've heard some people saying they put ketamine on their dicks before they fucked her. This is not normal stuff. This is up there with knives in the Halloween candy and Satanists in the pre-schools.

But to your broader point -- no, I don't think this is common, I don't think this isn't something people rationalize. I don't think rape is a casual slippery slope down a simple rationalization.

that when the group-chat guy told them "I've got a girl up on the bed, naked and high as a kite" they might have honestly assumed the implication was that the girl had gotten high on purpose,

Most men want nothing to do with group sex cumdump porno fantasies, media narratives about male barbarians and ancient primal caveman urges aside. We can actually judge by comparison three cases where we do observe this behavior: Pakistani rape gangs, Aella sex parties, and gay orgies. In none of these cases are the men involved psychologically normal. It takes a huge degree of filtering to get men to exhibit anything close to the behavior alleged at Cornell. You could probably give out free booze and ketamine to college frats across America and you would not reproduce the behavior alleged here. It would be more likely that if you gave everyone in America a billion dollars a few of them would build SpaceX.

You're misremembering Obama scandals. Lois Lerner was the IRS lady who targeted right leaning non-profits. Russlynn Ali was the author of the Title IX "Dear Colleague" letter.

My two cents remains that catching rape charges for participating in an impromptu gangbang sounds like (literally)fucking around and finding out, and that universities are not the people to handle this.

Viral story, sûre, but not actually much to see here.

that universities are not the people to handle this.

What baffles me about all these situations is that in any sort of sane world (ie. how things work at least outside the US) the university should have zero say in anything that happens between students. Rape allegations would be investigated by actual police and the university's role would be reduced to the same role as eg. a regular apartment building's (ie. providing possible security cam footage etc to the investigators).

The administration literally couldn't go "easy" on a perpetrator because they would be nearly completely outside the process.

In this case the police were involved. They even did a grand jury and grand juries are sometimes used to show that there is not credible evidence for a charge. A grand jury standard of evidence appears to be the same as a civil lawsuit - 50.01%.

A grand jury has to find probable cause that a crime has been committed, which is a lesser standard than preponderance.

Don't think this is possible under Title IX (which is what I believed Obama used to get them to get more involved in these cases). Universities need administrators to manage compliance like any other business and the government will react to lobbying for more interference in captive institutions.

Viral story, sûre, but not actually much to see here.

It does tell us that there's only so long the media can resist before sticking its hand in the "lurid story about college men that may or may not be true" jar.

The UVA rape case was...twelve years ago? Mattress Girl was 11. So about a decade at max stretch.

And Brock Turner was convicted in 2016.

universities are not the people to handle this.

"In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important, groups: the police, who investigate crime; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories."

Where in the expletive does 'the university adminisphere' enter into it‽

They even had this episode in 1991.

And that episode was based on the St John's Lacrosse Case (what is it about lacrosse?)

It's the intersection of athleticism and upper-class coding. Think of the stereotype of a desirable man from a romance novel. Tall, handsome, rich, jacked, with the arrogance and domineering attitude that results. Get a lacrosse all-star bit by a werewolf and he's basically the ideal man to a large portion of the women in America.

The snapchat message is not indicative of anything. Plugging ["free pussy" until:2026-05-28] into x search, having picked a random date, I see that there are three usages of the phrase which convey consensual intercourse on May 27th alone. Two examples:

• “Free Pussy scare me, u don't want ya nails done or nothing ?” — a user indicating that he is afraid of women who offer intercourse without asking for something in return, like funding for a nail salon appointment

• “Men stay to get free pussy. Convert a serious girlfriend to friends with benefit. Why throw away the pussy when you can demote it.”

There are two more references on the 26th and two more on the 25th. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were no online usage of this term to refer to non-consensual intercourse. Or perhaps it refers to non-consensual activity a small percentage of the time. But yeah, “free pussy” is how AAVE-influenced young White American refers to promiscuous women.

This is why I would prefer to live in a Christian monoculture nation where getting gangbanged in a frat house is such a taboo that you could reasonably assume no girl would do that and therefore they are guilty.

Her behavior would also highly correlate with an effective altruist who rationally experiments with drugs and sexual pleasure.

Who knows? There was an investigation at the time and reports are she’s significantly changed her story. Two frat bros being expelled doesn’t really tell you much because schools were really harsh on those accused for a while.

There’s another story going around of a girl who did the same thing in college and got gangbanged at a frat house. She’s upset they took video and put it on snapchat not that she was gangbanged. So girls do happily get gangbanged today.

She’s suing for millions so maybe she’s just concerned about AI and trying to get her bag in time.

I’d prefer strong social norms against gangbangs but feminists won.

I think you're probably underestimating how much non-feminists are responsible for culture in which consensual gangbangs are permissible, and overestimating how much feminists are responsible for it.

I am technically a feminist, by some definitions, because I think women should have equal legal rights to men. But that's probably not what you mean by "feminist". I am guessing that I am not a feminist in your sense of the word.

I am nearly 100% in favor of culture being permissive of consensual gangbangs.

Why? For selfish reasons: I like wild sex. And for philosophical reasons: I like liberty.

The sexual revolution was caused by many factors of which feminism is only one. Certainly there were many men who supported it out of selfish or philosophical motives, and were not really part of the feminist movement in any substantial way.

No, you sound like a feminist. Not all feminists are pro-sexually liberalized society, and not all sex libertines are aesthetically interested in girl power narrative, but both are part of the same fundamental school of thought:

Women (and men) should be understood as atomic individuals first, and social or cultural expecations that restrict liberal expression in favor of traditional, Christian-based, role-based hegemonic ideas are to be rejected as oppressive.

Peter Baelish’s brothels existed for poor girls thru probably nearly every human society. So I do see how from a human evolutionary environment the female mind would be adapted to this. We have the prior accusations and it basically sounds like she agreed to party with the little lordlings and consented to all of it. And sometimes they end up having Roberts bastard.

So I do think females can find this enjoyable because it was a successful historical reproductive path. But I’d prefer the Christian society we once were as overall better for people than the pagan route we are going down now. Whatever path we went down that has unleashed this form of feminism is collided with a society that still has elements of Christian social norms.

We are in a weird time where a memory of Christian norms still exists while paganism is returning. A society with two moral frameworks is a weird society.

Christian societies had brothels. Thomas Aquinas even has a lengthy digression about why they shouldn’t be banned.

You should probably explain your point if you are going to quote something completely out of context.

I am technically a feminist, by some definitions, because I think women should have equal legal rights to men. But that's probably not what you mean by "feminist". I am guessing that I am not a feminist in your sense of the word.

Does anyone actually believe that definition anymore? Does anyone here, at least, believe it? As far as I'm concerned, that definition is one of the biggest motte and baileys that exist. It serves both to shield feminists against criticism, while they pursue an agenda that has nothing to do with "equal legal rights", and it serves to convince normal neutral people, who haven't thought too hard about the issues, that they are feminists, too, and that there's actually a bunch of evil people out there who don't want women to have legal rights. I speak from experience, as someone who briefly bought that definition for myself back in 2012.

gangbanged in a frat house

Weren't the frat houses set up by a Christian monoculture nation ? This is extreme, but frats taking advantage of drunk girls who wake up with no memory of the night before is incredibly white christian coded.

All the major schools were Christian at one point. But Harvard hasn’t been explicitly Christian etc for decades at a minimum and Greek are obviously not named after saints.

frats taking advantage of drunk girls who wake up with no memory of the night before is incredibly white christian coded

I don't know what you mean by this and can't think of any sense in which it might possibly be the case.

He means it's been a stereotype for a long time, back when the US was more Christian, that many people take as a presumed truth about the world in spite of never seeing any stats or details.

Wouldn't say explicitly Christian Coded, but 'Drunk College Escapades with Frat brothers go too far' is a massive cultural lynchpin and has been for decades.

Weren't the frat houses set up by a Christian monoculture nation ? This is extreme, but frats taking advantage of drunk girls who wake up with no memory of the night before is incredibly white christian coded.

Frats are explicitly Greek, or one could extend that to Greco-Roman, the other side of the western canon that sometimes works with and sometimes against the Christian side. In any case, the modern frat culture emerged in the 60s and 70s, deep into the feminist era, when savvy pervs realized being male feminists = getting laid.

Frats are explicitly Greek

"Greek" refers to the Greek letters in the name, not to any intended connection to ancient (or modern) Greek culture. Different frats have different origin stories, and I haven't heard of any which claim to be a modern implementation of a Greek concept.

The use of Greek letters for college societies originates with Phi Beta Kappa, which is not a frat and per Wikipedia used Greek letters to contrast itself to the Masonic "Latin-letter societies" that were a thing at the time.

I'd say "frat boys running train on a drunken co-ed" is traditional-elite coded, which is why the prog left hates it so much. Pre-2016, it was a reasonable assumption that frat boys (except historically black frats or heavily black athlete frats) were mostly Republicans, but I suspect this is no longer true because post-2016 there are fewer educated Republicans.

I think "running train on a drunken woman you collectively don't respect" is primarily associated with groups of men of any variety who think they can get away with it. Traditional-elite undergraduates and outlaw bikers have a strange need to do it according to Robert's Rules of Order in a way most rapists don't.

I’d prefer strong social norms against gangbangs but feminists won.

To add to @Goodguy's reply, both gangbangs and feminists are different:

  • everyone gets drunk/high enough and does shit they later regret: all feminists hate them
  • everyone fills in a consent form and does what the bracelets let them: feminists are split
    • some think women should be free to be gangbanged with their consent
    • some think women are being gaslit into liking gangbangs by manipulative men
    • a tiny minority thinks all women should try a gangbang to see if they like it

Just because a “group” has multiple fragmented views on an issue doesn’t mean I can’t broadly blame that group for a change in society it most of their push was in a specific policy direction.

The culture is obviously different than the 1960’s. I get to blame someone for that. Feminists and sexual revolution ideology seem like a proper group to pin that on. Things just don’t magical happening.

If I want to blame someone for the US giving huge amount of military aid to Israel it’s probably fine to blame it on US Jews even if not all US Jews support Israel.

Can you quote a 1960s feminist that said gangbangs are great?

Germaine Greer.

But I am reminded of my Milton Friedman: “ One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results”

I don’t judge communism by their stated goals and what they believe their policies will create. I judge them on the results of starving tens of millions of Ukrainians and general poverty versus the US economic system.

The result of feminists tearing down a Chesterton Fence of unrestrained female sexuality and paternalism is gangbangs that some girls end up regretting their choices.

It's stories like these that remind me how completely out of touch I am. Every aspect feels equally implausible.

Setting aside the drugs (where do people even get drugs, anyway?), and the violent crime... How does a man on a modern university campus, who is presumably smart enough to attend that university, receive a text message saying "free pussy upstairs" and not instantly nope out of that situation? That is so obviously and transparently a trap! Getting arrested for rape is the best-case scenario, because at least then you'll get to be processed by an actual legal system with a presumption of innocence.

I suppose these kids could have been just the right age for Depp v. Heard to be their formative experience of feminism, and early-2020s Internet censorship might have stopped them from learning about how society works, but that feels like a stretch.

It's cool that frat parties are real, though.

where do people even get drugs, anyway?

From drug dealers.

receive a text message saying

While sus it's not incompatible with consent and active engagement from the lady, some people in college (especially when high or drunk) just go for that kind of stuff, both as the deliverer and receiver.

Think about girls gone wild and old school campus porn videos. Some people are into this even if it sounds alien.

I genuinely don't believe Girls Gone Wild has been possible to make for at least a decade.

For one thing, I still remember the news cycle about how the creator of Girls Gone Wild fled the country amid a constant stream of accusations from women who regretted appearing in the videos. For another, it only takes one 17.9-year-old with a fake ID to turn everyone who watches the video into a felony sex-offender pedophile.

Probably the closest modern equivalent would be when an OnlyFans star personally organizes, promotes, films, and publicizes an event over the course of multiple weeks, because that's how far they need to go before it's plausible to believe they consented. It is nowhere near good enough to simply appear to be consenting and actively engaging on the day! History abounds with stories of women who were forced by their abusers to generate mountains of convincing-looking but false evidence that they consented to a sexual act during and immediately following its commission.

I'm not saying it's wise I'm saying people are down, and they are still down it just becomes riskier for a variety of reasons (including videos on the internet).

Ketamine can literally just be ordered from a tele-health provider (just AI it but assumed was true). Even many of the “illegal” drugs have websites that you just click on to order and they send you in the mail or if local it’s like uber eats.

presumably smart enough to attend that university

I don't think that's saying much especially when we're talking about some meathead on a sports scholarship.

Setting aside the drugs (where do people even get drugs, anyway?), and the violent crime... How does a man on a modern university campus, who is presumably smart enough to attend that university, receive a text message saying "free pussy upstairs" and not instantly nope out of that situation? That is so obviously and transparently a trap!

You look inside the room, and the girl is loudly and explicitly consenting. She's slamming her hips against your fratmate and screaming, "I want more cock, bring me all the cock you can find! Fill me up like an eclair! Someone shut me up with another cock!"

Okay, maybe it's her first time on poppers and she had no idea they turn her into a raging slut. But you've also had one shot too many and would utterly fail the breakfast question right now.

These sorts of cases where there is ambiguity really paint a nice picture of where the societal incentives lie: she can either lean toward admitting that she partied too hard, wanted to be a slut in the moment, and that she regretted it later, or she lean toward being the victim and a bunch of feminists and liberals will run their default settings and try to ruin the lives of every male involved. There is no incentive for her to lean into the former. None. Zero. Why would she? Why would anyone in her position take responsibility for their actions?

Whether there was a rape or not, there is actually substantial incentive for her to lean into the former. Legal cases are unpleasant. Victory is uncertain. Becoming a nationally known culture war figure who is alternately valorized and defamed by people online is something that many people would want to avoid. Being famous for having been raped is something that many people would want to avoid.

Was she raped? I have no idea. I'd have to look at the details and even then possibly there is no way to come to a convincing conclusion. But I don't think the incentives are as one-sided as you believe.

You comment as if she has the experience of having played the victim with no agency before and it turned out horribly for her. I doubt that.

It's the default setting because that's where the incentives lie for women. The choice between taking responsibility vs. hiring a team that will make someone else take responsibility and absolve you of facing the shame of what you did is a no brainer. She's already been branded as a slut and, if you did have sex, there's really only one way out of that label: accuse the other party of rape. Even if it is found that there is not enough evidence to charge the males involved, she can still play victim and people online and in the media will believe her.

Based on what I've seen, it's hard to say whether she was raped or not. I don't know what she was wearing or how she was behaving either. I assume she was dressed like most other college-aged girls dress during a night of drinking when they are seeking out the allure and possible risk of sexual shenanigans. It says she had been drinking.

The stuff I've read has a lot of "she was pressured" type claims attached, meaning that she had no agency. That's how these cases go. You can drink like a fish, dress like you're DTF, go to a house with a bunch of young 20s males who all want to have sex, and then if the sex doesn't turn out the way you had hoped and things got a little messy you can pull the "I was raped." rip cord.

“Becoming a national known culture war figure”

  • She is suing multiple deep pockets: Cornell, multiple frat/sorority organizations, individuals involved.

Money is a potentially motivating factor as opposed to being a cultural warrior.

If I had to guess she will end up with well north of 7-figures.

She might be into it, or maybe she's making the best of a bad situation. But this doesn't mean that women have no incentive to avoid making false rape accusations, as the person I responded to believes.

Obviously, women also have incentives to make false rape accusations.

But they don't lack incentives to not make false rape accusations.

But they don't lack incentives to not make false rape accusations.

I think you looked past the part where I said "These sorts of cases" and "anyone in her position" and broadened it to any woman who could make a rape accusation.

She is making the best out of a bad situation. The incentive is that she's no longer a slut, but a victim, and it's someone else's fault that she snorted Ketamine off that guy's penis and had a threesome. She might even get a massive payday for it. It's because in these situations society's default assumption is to blame the male participants. So much so that the female can retroactively decide that she was raped once some type of consequence happens that she can't tolerate.

I noticed that. Suing the tri-Delts. Was she actually in that sorority? Suing her own sorority is going to cut into her fan base. Or maybe they'll all rally around her; it isn't as if logical consistency is always required in such matters. (I mean by this that certain subgroups of progressive white people will profess to despise everything that characterizes their own lives, e.g. "whiteness," wealth, capitalism, and so on.)

she can either lean toward admitting that she partied too hard, wanted to be a slut in the moment, and that she regretted it later, or she lean toward being the victim and a bunch of feminists and liberals will run their default settings and try to ruin the lives of every male involved

This is why slut-shaming is such a bad idea. Give women incentives to make false accusations of sexual assault, or even appear to do so, and women who have actually been assaulted will find the matter treated with much less gravity than it deserves; the perpetrators will then have the opportunity to victimise more women, who otherwise would have been spared such horror.

Many people here will probably disagree with my philosophy, but I do not believe that there is any amount of 'deterring inchastity among consenting adults' that can outweigh 'preventing one instance of rape'.

(TK: an elaboration on this involving a certain controversial Yuletide duet.)

Two issues I have with this that:

a) It's not clear to me it would prevent any rapes on net. If sluttiness becomes normalized any "she's a slut, she wanted to do it" defense becomes more believable by default, and can be abused by actual rapists the same way pathologization can.
b) Somehow these ideas to abolish shame never include things that liberals consider shameful.

I do not believe that there is any amount of 'deterring inchastity among consenting adults' that can outweigh 'preventing one instance of rape'.

You misunderstand the purpose of slut-shaming (which is generally [collective] women vs. [individual] woman, not men vs. woman). "Deterring inchastitty" is not its goal.

Somewhat counterintuitively, the collective benefits from more instances of rape, not less (though only to a point).
"See what happens when you price yourself too low, or give your only worth away for free?"

And yes, it does result in scratch-and-dent models having to sell at a discount, but it reinforces the idea that collective bargaining for the worth of sex is collective bargaining (and the rape is simply justification/encouragement to be maximally mercenary when selling), which benefits all women except the raped one. Who, naturally, deserved to be raped for working outside union protection.

In that case, it's natural the woman in question would then proceed to attack targets of opportunity to recover some of the damage. Her product can't be repaired, but she can, correctly, tell herself it was all the buyers' fault. (The only weirdness here is that the collective will attempt to back her up when she does this, but then again, buyers tend to fall over themselves claiming rape devalues the collective so maybe that's not as weird as it sounds. It'd be in the buyers' interest to lie.)

Men doing this is kind of a legacy thing. Their moral opinions fell out of favor around 1900, but so long as people believe in them, they can be used to launder the above operation.

I'd also suggest looking at this from a slightly different angle. I think the grave mistake this girl realized she made was not merely that she decided to be a slut in the moment but that she did so with guys that were either within her social circle or directly connected to it. Because it's not the act of slutting in itself that classic (women-on-women) slut-shaming seeks to suppress but slutting that has a detrimental effect on the social status of any member of the female social group in question. (Because the erosion in the social status of even one member reflects badly on the whole group.)

This is why slut-shaming is such a bad idea. Give women incentives to make false accusations of sexual assault, or even appear to do so, and women who have actually been assaulted will find the matter treated with much less gravity than it deserves; the perpetrators will then have the opportunity to victimise more women, who otherwise would have been spared such horror.

Yes, this is the feminist argument for not slut shaming. The problem is that other feminist reforms to the status quo make false accusations more likely. It's a difficult crime to prove. The feminist line that we should just believe women (or even shower some lucky ones with fame and attention for lurid stories no one can criticize) creates an incentive in and of itself. If women are people, not saints, this cannot be avoided.

The actual purpose of (male) slut-shaming wasn't just to deter inchastity. It was to create an incentive towards behaviors that would not create ambiguity about what happened to a woman in the first place, which was rational given that men were expected to take on the burden and risk of avenging the honor of their women if they had been raped. So the women is expected to take on the burden of not behaving in a way that both puts her at risk directly and implies that maybe she just was a slut who changed her mind and the blood feud/investigation wasn't worth it.

This obviously cannot work in a world where nobody follows those rules. If a woman can choose to get drunk and get a train ran on her and later claims rape, the ambiguity is much harder to resolve.

The only solution feminists have settled on that lets them have their cake and eat it is simply assuming the man is prima facie guilty. Someone is going to have to be responsible for some of these unfortunate cases.

I used to think this as well, but nowadays I think it is not only wrong, but literally the opposite of reality, i.e. the tabooing of slut-shaming has made it much easier for predators to victimize more women.

The key point to realize about "sluttiness" is that it overwhelmingly describes a women who willingly puts herself into situations where it would be easy for men to take advantage of her. If you're a woman who mostly socializes with people she knows well, who goes everywhere with friends and acquaintances, who rarely gets drunk or otherwise blasted and if she does, only with close friends, who is only flirty if she has serious interest, who only has sex once in an actual relationship, and so on, then it is extremely hard for a predator to take advantage of you. If such a women makes an allegation, it will be taken serious even in a slut-shaming society.

On the other hand, if you get drunk in a club full of strangers, you're flirty with many of them, and you already had clearly consensual casual sex with one of them, you are easy prey. If I'm your friend, I can't protect you if I'm not present. Even if I'm around as a benevolent stranger, I lack critical information to discern whether you simply like whatever happens, or whether you got unduly pressured.

Modern "slutty" culture is basically optimized for two things: 1) Giving predators easy access to hapless women, and b) taking away any and all responsibility from women. Arguably, the former is merely the result of the latter. There is a reason "male feminist" has the connotations it has.

Does it follow that Zoomers also regard rape as a greater crime [than murder], relatively speaking, than Millennials do?

Anecdotally, the answer is yes. A while back, a Zoomer coworker told me about how one of his acquaintances had SA allegations bubble up and that trying to respond to the allegations destabilized his friend group. Verbatim, the coworker said: "I think if he killed someone in a bar fight, I'd feel less upset than I do right now," and remarked how others felt similarly. There you have it.

Killing someone in a bar fight is not murder in most cases. And certainly not in just cases. Murder requires intent, as does sex crime. That is why they are so charged. Its possible to be a lil too drunk and punch a guy a little too hard and he hits his head on the table. Its not possible to be just a lil too drunk and get your penis hard then trip while trying to kiss a girl and end up with your penis inside her while she struggles until your completion without knowing.

But this is, of course, why the consent framing of sex is a complete failure with these edge cases (and edge cases are the only hard ones, which deems the whole consent framework a failure with regards to sex crimes). People imagine sex crimes as intentional acts of violence and sexual penetration, but the more common sort of allegation is an act of dubious intent with no objective indicators of violence.

Yes, full-blown forceful rape to completion is a different beast. The SA in this situation was exactly the dubious sort where drugs were involved, so the bar fight comparison was apt.

Replying to you @the_others.

It's not generational IMO. Take the Berserk series, for example. Its earliest readers in the west were Millennials and Gen X'ers, followed by Gen Z (I discovered the series around 2019ish). Griffith’s violent rape of Casca, committed in front of Guts after he has already sacrificed the Band of the Hawk, is one of the most viscerally hated acts in the entire series. It is personal, deliberate, and performed largely to wound the man who called him brother. Now by sheer body count and scale of suffering, Emperor Ganishka’s genocidal atrocities carried out against nameless victims eclipse anything Griffith does. Yet Ganishka is treated with a certain dark intrigue, while Griffith reliably appears on every “most hated anime villains” list.

To most people, the act of rape is uniquely contaminating because it is viewed as pure appetite. The perpetrator could have simply not done it, and the physical and mental damage suffered by the victim could've been avoided altogether. On an evolutionary level, rape imposes the costs of unwanted pregnancies solely on the victims. But male-on-male killing has historically occupied a different category. When committed within the group, it is deemed murder and is punished. Between rival groups it was treated as ordinary and recurring, even heroic.

Guts had romance with Casca, so it's like your wife or girlfriend being violently raped in front of you (the audience experiences the story vicariously as Guts) vs. Netanyahu killing tons of Palestinians. This does not correspond to people reacting more severely to the alleged «sexual assault» of a stranger compared to the death of a stranger. And not only because the former can't even be known to have happened and also is not violent, unlike the latter. Even if the former happened for sure, it still is not equivalent, because it is a stranger.

But what Griffith did to Casca is the imagery that rape invokes for most people when they hear about it, not the dubious "He was drunk, she was drunk, she said no, then said yes, then they banged, then she felt bad about it the next morning" grey area. Even if the victim wasn't a main character, rape by an antagonist in fiction is explicitly meant to establish their wickedness (eg: Wyald, and the goblins in Goblin Slayer).

I was somewhat surprised when I read today that this conclusive proof does sort of exist, in the form of a Snapchat screenshot wherein someone in the fraternity's group chat posted that there was "free pussy upstairs". It's not quite conclusive proof, but it's much better proof than I expected. At this point my assessment is that the accusation is probably basically real.

Does this screenshot actually exist? The articles I saw referencing it were so vague and carefully phrased and caveated that I can say with certainty is that someone claims that such a screenshot exists, and implies that it is in reference to this woman.

I'll also note that those articles said that her initial interview with police described everything as consensual, including the sex and drug use, and specifically included language that her request to stop was respected.

I'm still leaning towards "girl had quite the party, then weeks later after conference with her friends/suspicion from her boyfriend decided it was rape."

New York Post has the alleged picture of the screen in their article

Ah. That specifically looks like a quote reply. Why not show the actual quote?

I've seen claims on twitter that the whole thing was filmed

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/09/28/nyregion/tompkinscornell.html

While there, Jane Doe opened one previously unopened can of beer. She and Male Number 1 “danced a little" in a way that “was definitely flirtatious in nature.” Male Number 1 brought Jane Doe to a “quiet area” and “asked how [Jane Doe] would feel about having a threesome with two male partners." Jane Doe "agreed due to how attracted [she] was to [Male Number 1] on top of [her] drunken curiousness.” When she learned that Male Number 2 would be the third participant, Jane Doe "remembered being excited because [she] thought that [Male Number 1 and Male Number 2] wanting to have a threesome meant that they were gay."

Is it gay to have a threesome with your bro?

It is not gay.

Evidence at 2:14 might indicate otherwise.

No

Your link is broken because you wrote the formatting backward.

Thanks. Fixed.

Not as long as you keep the lights off and don't cross swords.

Yaoi and it's consequences...

She seems to be a usual middle-class white female NPC who reads too much female-oriented porn. Maybe she assumed the two guys were about to have sex with each other and were merely inviting her to watch?

Meanwhile, actual gay guys: What? No. Hell no. God, fuck no. Get your gross-ass pussy out of here. No one wants to see that.

There's a bit more variation on that than you'd expect. The median falls that direction, and one of the (thankfully few) things I know about my brother's preferences is that he turned down a threesome with a guy he really wanted because the guy's girlfriend wanted to watch fully-clothed.

But there's a lot of gay exhibitionists, and a surprising number who either don't find it that much of a turn off or where the taboo is part of the point. And it's moderately well-known that if you're an exhibitionist guy posting pole, about a third to a half of your viewers will be women.

That said, skeptical here.

There's a bit more variation on that than you'd expect.

I'm sure it's not universal, but I've had a fair number of gay acquaintances explicitly call the female plumbing "disgusting", with no real prompting. Made it seem like a common and commonly expressed sentiment.

Was the girlfriend an experienced watcher of homosexual sex or just liked the idea? Also I feel like whenever girlfriend gets invoked in these sort of stories there's a very high chance it's a Trans person which further complicates it.

Don't know the couple in question that well, so didn't ask as to MMF threesome (or MFM, for that matter) experience, either before or after. I know they've had kids the conventional way since, so given that and the time period, presumably not trans.

That said, I do know a decent number of cis women into watching, being a spitroaster rather than spitroastee, or into the 'forced bi' kink, and have taken it past the 'that's a nice porn/written smut trope' stage. There's more than enough selection bias going on I'm not even going to pretend it's representative -- and I've heard people complain about women that thought they'd like it and got really complex feelings afterward, enough to believe my samples aren't representative -- but it's enough of a demographic to show up.

Only if the balls touch.

You have to be really careful about that (NSFW).

Maybe further tags to identify that it's MLP art.

Rape is a bit of an odd crime, in that in theory almost everyone agrees that it is an extremely severe crime - nearly as bad as murder, if not worse. My armchair theory is that this is because the prototypical crime people imagine is entirely gratuitous. They can conceive of circumstances in which they might think murder is acceptable or even good (likewise for theft, etc...), but it's hard to imagine a "virtuous" rape unless you're a psycho. Even when people joke about things like prison rape, the victim is a bad person being victimized by other bad people.

However, when it comes to actual, concrete accusations, things come apart. Circumstances are usually far more ambiguous than "creep jumps out of the bushes", accused rapists are often otherwise respectable members of their community, and different people have radically different views around consent and sexual ethics. You've got very stringent views of consent, where both parties need to be sober and vocally assenting. And on the flip side, you've got very loose views (the extreme cases being things like "being alone in a room with a man is consent for whatever happens next" or thinking that women secretly want to be raped).

However, when it comes to actual, concrete accusations, things come apart. Circumstances are usually far more ambiguous than "creep jumps out of the bushes", accused rapists are often otherwise respectable members of their community, and different people have radically different views around consent and sexual ethics. You've got very stringent views of consent, where both parties need to be sober and vocally assenting. And on the flip side, you've got very loose views (the extreme cases being things like "being alone in a room with a man is consent for whatever happens next" or thinking that women secretly want to be raped).

Sex crimes are certainly some of the hardest to prove from a prosecutors perspective. While I was a prosecutor, I had a brief stint in sex crimes (a bit ironically against my wishes) and there are only two cases I touched that I'd describe as slam dunks. One was a CSAM case were the guy left his phone with the material on it at a bar, on camera, and had thousands of texts etc soliciting, purchasing, etc. The other was a case where a kid was raped in a public bathroom on a secret camera set up by the rapist that a 3rd party found the camera and called the police. The rest, I think I know what happened, but it is certainly hard to prove.

My armchair theory is that this is because the prototypical crime people imagine is entirely gratuitous.

It's the same effect whereby people imagine the average robbery to involve a gun and the words "stick 'em up", and ignore the fact that most of it's done through means diffuse (white-collar crime, embezzlement, contract violation, etc.) or direct (scams, fraud). They even blame the victim, usually saying "well, they should have noticed the signs/paid more attention" or "people who fall for get-rich-quick schemes deserve it".

Rape, as a subtype of theft, is exactly like that too. Forced entry is obviously criminal; but that's more because it clearly involves assault. The others, as you mention (and for the same reason), are far less clear; justice in cases tackling who consented to what is arguably best handled as a civil matter as well.

(Perhaps surprisingly, this is also a feature of Deuteronomic law; "pay her father some amount and must never divorce her" for casual sex the woman feels wronged by has the character of a civil violation, not a criminal one. One notes the modern standard for this is 'preponderance of the evidence' rather than 'beyond a reasonable doubt'.)

nearly as bad as murder, if not worse

This is more downstream of an human instinct to Protect Women more than anything else. In an environment of equality, this is wage theft.

means diffuse (white-collar crime, embezzlement, contract violation, etc.) or direct (scams, fraud)

None of those are robbery. The legal definition of robbery is theft involving the use or threat of violence. Certainly in the UK, the archetypal thief is a burglar (theft involving breaking and entering buildings), not a robber.

Come to think of it, this means that

The legal definition of robbery is theft plus assault

Which I think kind of proves the point that it's specifically the assault that makes the theft notable, where theft itself is boring, abstract, uninteresting, and provokes "well, didn't the victim deserve it a little?".

Swedish law makes the distinction between "rape" (defined the way you would expect Swedish feminists to define rape) where the normal sentence on conviction is <5 years, and "assault rape" (defined sensibly) where the normal sentence is 10 years or more.

The archetypal thief is a burglar and not a shoplifter?

Rape is a bit of an odd crime, in that in theory almost everyone agrees that it is an extremely severe crime - nearly as bad as murder, if not worse. My armchair theory is that this is because the prototypical crime people imagine is entirely gratuitous. They can conceive of circumstances in which they might think murder is acceptable or even good (likewise for theft, etc...), but it's hard to imagine a "virtuous" rape unless you're a psycho. Even when people joke about things like prison rape, the victim is a bad person being victimized by other bad people.

There is an old joke, normally told about Texas but which applies to any frontier justice culture.

"Why are horse thieves more likely to swing than murderers?" "I've met plenty of people who needed killin'. Never met a horse that needed stealin'"

Whether it is possible for a woman to need rapin' in this sense is, in fact, controversial.

Rape is seen as an extremely severe crime committed against the sacred honor of the victim and her family in patriarchal societies (IF the woman in question is seen as having honor). Alternatively rape is seen as an extremely severe crime committed against the sacred sexual autonomy of the victim in feminist societies (unless the perpetrator is the member of the ingroup). This is a rather big difference.

Rape is seen as an extremely severe crime committed against the sacred honor of the victim and her family in patriarchal societies

Illicit sex, not rape. The consent of the woman is not the point, and in general patriarchal honour codes make no distinction between seduction and rape.

The concept of "rape" first existed because some patriarchal societies (including cisHajnal Christian Europe) carved out a near-empty subset of illicit sex where she is wholly innocent and he is wholly guilty. But the most common patriarchal norm is that the victims (i.e. her male relatives) punish both perpetrators without bothering to investigate. Naturally, in these types of societies men mostly stick to raping/seducing women with no living male relatives or whose male relatives don't have the ability to punish them.

The treatment of the two blend together because there's often no way to tell.

But rape was still seen as outrageous. The story of the expulsion of the last king of Rome could be legendary, but it's interesting then that they chose to have the whole thing kicked off by the rape of a noblewoman if seduction alone would suffice.

The most common ancient patriarchal law codes treat rape, seduction, and kidnapping as the same crime, and punish it with a fine and a requirement for the rapist to marry her. One must imagine that not infrequently the ‘rape’ was entirely consensual, not even dubiously so.

Rape is seen as an extremely severe crime committed against the sacred honor of the victim and her family in patriarchal societies

This is true, but I don't think it's particularly relevant to the modern American (or more broadly western/European) context - even very gender trad conservatives still conceive of rape overwhelmingly as a violation against the individual victim. The most salient relic of this mindset you're likely to find in western countries is the attitude that a woman's ability to claim victimhood is contingent on her respectability.

The fissure in the US is not really about who the aggrieved party is in a rape but what constitutes rape and what constitutes consent (and also the practical difficulties of prosecuting sexual violence).

They can conceive of circumstances in which they might think murder is acceptable or even good (likewise for theft, etc...)

Murder is unjustified killing. There are sometimes acceptable reasons to kill people (e.g. self-defense), but those are by definition not murder. Generally, acceptable reasons to kill people involve either defending yourself or preventing worse violence.

Meanwhile, I can't think of any situation where raping someone is somehow the least bad option out of all the options available.

Murder (at least as I am using it here) is legally unjustified killing. I am claiming (maybe I am wrong, but I really suspect not) that most people can imagine a homicide which would legally be murder but which they would consider morally justifiable.

Sure, but at that point you're arguing that the law is wrong, that it shouldn't consider your morally justifiable killing to be murder even though it does. Which is of course perfectly fair, different people can disagree on where that line should be.

Killing enemy soldiers in war is okay. Killing in self-defense is okay. Killing in defense of your property is something that some people think should be acceptable, but other people think it shouldn't be. Killing for fun, however, is something that nobody except a psychopath would think is okay.

But rape is always for "fun", there is no other goal, that's the difference.

Rarely there can be forced intercourse at gunpoint. I believe there were cases of this in Nanjing during WW2.

"free pussy upstairs"

Free for the taking or giving out free samples?

Free as in speech or free as in beer?

A summary of her original written statement to police was just released today. Her statement to police does not allege that she was unconscious or was forced to have sex or take ketamine. She describes her refusals as being respected:

“[Male Number 1] would eventually wake up” and “said he wanted to take part and asked about making it a foursome, to which [Jane Doe] said ‘Hell No.” Jane Doe rejected this request “because [she] knew that a foursome meant that [she] would have to take part in anal sex.” Jane Doe then remembered Male Number 3 leaving the room.

And them stopping as soon as she said that she no longer wanted to have sex:

“The threesome continued until at some point, around 5:45am, [Jane Doe] said [she] was tired and needed to turn in. At that point, both guys stopped the threesome with [her] as far as [she] can remember.”

This is how she describes the ketamine use:

Male Number 2 “asked [Jane Doe] if she wanted to do more Ketamine.” At that, Jane Doe remembered “that [she] had taken Ketamine at some point on the couch with [Male Number 1 and Male Number 2] during this night” but she could not remember “where or when that took place.”

Jane Doe thought that she “had already done Ketamine once so why not do it a second time.” “At that point, [Male Number 2] poured a line of Ketamine on his erect penis, implying for [her] to snort the line. [Jane Doe] snorted the line of Ketamine, which was a heavy amount of Ketamine.”

I'm guessing that her going to the police was under the idea that intoxicated sex is rape even if she verbally agrees. However that does not actually constitute rape under New York law, which is why no charges were filed. Note that, for those who classify drunken sex as rape regardless of the law, reading the statement summary makes it seem like some of the other participants were probably drunker than her:

The three engaged in a “threesome” involving oral and vaginal sex in a room of the fraternity. At the start of the threesome, Jane Doe described her intoxication level as “5 or 6 out of 10” and that she was “pretty ok with having this threesome.” The sexual conduct ended when Jane Doe “noticed that [Male Number 1] appeared really sleepy and was no longer fully erect.” She told Male Number 2 “[they] needed to stop having sex in order to make sure [Male Number 1] was ok. [Male Number 2] then stopped having sex with [Jane Doe].”

Male Number 1 said “he was going to take a nap and refresh himself” and “would eventually stumble his way from the couch to the bed.” While Male Number 1 slept, “[Male Number 2] began to dry heave as if he was going to vomit. Jane Doe “began to take care of [Male Number 2] by patting his back while also waking [Male Number 1] every few minutes to make sure he was okay.”

In other news, per TMZ one of the accused was just fired from his job at Wells Fargo.

some of the other participants were probably drunker than her

you silly goose, don't you know consent is only applicable to women, men always consent even when intoxicated! /s

Classic case of male hyper-agency and female hypo-agency.

I am reminded of the usual reddit "Am I the Asshole" threads. What usually happens is that in any given story everybody is an asshole in there. It ties to a very good article of jugaad ethics, which uses the Indian word of tying the new to the old one as a workaround, such as having a donkey or a bull trying to tow a modern car. This is what happens when you tear down Chesterton fence and observe the aftermath.

What I see lately is percolation of various worldviews into ethical system informing morality, which ultimately has reach toward law as law is "minimum of morals". One of them is the overarching result of various forms of physicalism - there is no free will, we are all just atoms in motion, sometimes imbued by various outside sources and "systems" of oppression. So a psychopath murdering her own children has no true agency - it is all failure of systems that did not provide help. And at the same time there is visceral need to put some personal blame somewhere, there has to be some agents - even unwitting ones - perpetuating some systems. Like in this example - we are talking about minutiae of what constitutes a "consent" and who has ability to clam systematic influence as opposed to agency.

It is a car crash waiting to happen, where some people are for the first time confronted with their worldviews and moral presuppositions colliding with reality. If anything, it is fascinating to watch.

It is a car crash waiting to happen, where some people are for the first time confronted with their worldviews and moral presuppositions colliding with reality. If anything, it is fascinating to watch.

That's victim blaming. The culling of young men with sex drives must continue until there is nothing left but the new feminist man.

What victim. A moron who lets some random chick snort ketamine from his dick before gangbanging her with his 3 equally moronic friends? I am sorry that I do not have much sympathy for such a victim. Neither do I have sympathy for said chick who voluntarily went into such a situation. I am not thinking of any of them as some victims.

Like I said, everybody is an asshole in this story. Or am I supposed to be male or female feminist who thinks of a college men and women like that as "kids having fun" and at the same time as unthinking victims of systems of oppression who are just bunch of atoms in motion inevitably dancing to the tune of power structure of Patriarchy, Rothchilds, GloboHomo power brokers and TechBros who beamed subliminal messages about ketamine orgies into their empty heads via TikTok? I dont think so.

Another thing that came to mind was the question of how grievous a crime we should consider rape to be. In my lifetime, rape has generally been considered equivalent to murder in severity ("rape and murder" usually being used to indicate the category of "super serious crime"), and the question of whether that's a good thing has been debated to death. However, Zoomers are famously more prudish than Millennials. Does it follow that Zoomers also regard rape as a greater crime, relatively speaking, than Millennials do?

I think basically any sober analysis will conclude that murder is fairly obviously worse than rape. However: I think most people will think that someone being a rapist (without additional information) makes them a worse person than if they were a murderer (again, without additional information).

I think a large part of the reason is that there are a lot of circumstances where murder is morally permissible or even necessary (self defence, military action, the cops shooting a hostage taker, not to mention the shitloads of revenge stories where we cheer when the protagonist murders the antagonist). There are no similar situations where rape is morally permissible (in most people's views). It's really hard to argue that you raped someone in self defence.

I'd argue that raping the local women in the conquered lands of a heinous defeated enemy is mostly seen as not objectionable in most patriarchal societies especially if we apply the feminist definition of rape to the matter at hand.

Sure. My reasoning is in the context of modern western society, in which very few people believe that central examples of war crimes are bad.

Not quite. They may have understood that rape and pillage are bound to happen so the men can cool off, and looked the other way, but it was still morally objectionable.

Is it really morally objectionable if no one's actually gonna do anything about it, including those who could do something about it?

People frequently did do something about it, up to and including killing the rapist soldiers. Generally speaking, officers/generals who kept their soldiers from raping conquered women have often been portrayed as positive.

They also frequently didn't do anything about it, but AFAIK it has been a point of contention in many cultures. Definitionally, nobody can keep the conquerors from doing what they want in the moment (that's the whole point of conquering!), so the only thing you can do is portray benevolent conquerors heroically, and cruel conquerors negatively after-the-fact.

IMO the key difference to today is that it was overwhelmingly seen as one vice among many, not as that singular horrible crime that overrules anything else.

Perhaps in part because treatment of civilians by conquering armies was just generally extremely poor- the looting, massacres, enslavement, etc would also not be acceptable today.

They generally limited it for pragmatic reasons and not for moral reasons such as offering terms of surrender without raping will get the city to not fight you.

Welcome to the real world, I suppose. If we were all prosecuting every morally objectionable act regardless of how inconvenient and impractical it is to do so, we'd have unlocked world peace a long time ago. Unfortunately, you need those soldiers guarding your village when you're the one getting invaded, raped and pillaged.

I think "raping the defeated enemy's women is despicable, even if it is a normal incident of war" is a specifically Christian thing. The Iliad treats the practice as unobjectionable - the driving conflict is over whether the man who captured the girl gets her or his commanding officer does. Islam explicitly condones it, at least according to the simple, obvious reading of the Quran and hadith.

This is a good point because almost all arguments in the American context are still within a “Christian” moral framework. Honestly think the right is better at making arguments that are foundationally pagan.

The left runs into an issue here that a women can be a free creature able to make her own decisions and then do something so unvirtuous and choose to fuck a dozens guys.

A lot of human rights the left like are just corruptions of Christian ethics. A Roman wouldn’t have a moral thought bending over his slave girl.

Morality laws and norms varied a lot over the course of the Empire. Augustus criminalized adultery, for example. And the later part of the empire literally adopted Christianity, although I assume that wasn't your intended comparison.

The Greeks took slaves during their conquests and some of the unmarried female slaves became their concubines. Even though the modern world might describe both situations as rape, the Greeks would have sharply distinguished this from e.g. randomly grabbing a fleeing woman and forcibly having sex with her during the sack of Troy. It's possible that the latter was also treated as unobjectionable but your example doesn't prove it.

I don't think most of the examples you gave of "murder" are actually murder. Murder implies unlawfulness and malice and lack of justification.

Someone who murders someone else in a fit of [justified, but not to the point of murder] rage can still be regarded as less of a bad person than a rapist.

That's manslaughter, not murder. Examples: NJ ("committed in the heat of passion resulting from a reasonable provocation"), PA ("acting under a sudden and intense passion resulting from serious provocation")

That depends entirely on the jurisdiction, and not really germane to what people think the morality of the act is.

Driving a get away car from a robbery gone bad isn't more or less evil if you do it in Chicago versus if you do it in Oslo, despite you being charged with felony murder in one jurisdiction and aiding and abetting a robbery in the other.

You're using murder as if it were interchangeable with the word "homicide" and it just isn't. You're making a category error. Self-defense is not murder, it is justifiable homicide. I understand the point you're trying to make, you're just using the wrong word to make it.

Murder and homicide are the same act under different circumstances. If we're discussing the morality of an action, the jurisdiction in which it takes place is immaterial.

We're not discussing the law.

Rape and consensual sex are also the same act under different circumstances. I don't understand your point.

"What if killing people... but bad" is the same as "what if having sex with people... but bad"

That's why I'm objecting to your inclusion of using the word murder to cover acts that are decidedly not murder.

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Regardless, they are examples of murder but for the unlawfulness. There are no analogous examples for rape, is my point.

You can rationalize the act of premeditated killing, whatever you want to call it, but you can't rationalize the act of rape.

The "free pussy" thing doesn't strike me as proving anything except that there was some sort of group/sequential sex going on.

It may strike some sheltered folks as crazy that there are women who will turn up to a mostly-male venue for a gangbang of their own volition. First one I saw was in the hotel at MEPS, some aspiring airwoman made good use of the free hotel room. I passed a few guys waiting outside in the hallway and got the lowdown, and "free pussy" was about the extent of what they'd heard. I didn't figure to bat sixth at best.

Leftism struggles with the hole their deracinated religion removed from sexual mores. We have an intuition that women should not be doing that, and neither should the guys. People with sexual mores in their belief system can chalk it up to weakness, sin, moral failings, just bad ideas, daddy issues, unhealthy behavior etc. For leftists, the only value in sexual morality is consent, and thus all bad sex has to be rape, and if consent was explicit there must be some arcane emanation from a penumbra to make it not count.

Was consent explicit?

Like sûre, doing drugs with a guy and stumbling off to another room with him voluntarily is one thing, but it doesn’t imply consent to group sex.

It seems that in her initial interview with the police last year, she said she was offered a threesome and accepted (at least in part) because she hoped that meant the two hot frat guys were going to be gay with each other, too. A third guy asked to join in. She said no because she assumed that meant upping the ante to include anal, and Guy #3 left without a fuss.

Like sûre, doing drugs with a guy and stumbling off to another room with him voluntarily is one thing, but it doesn’t imply consent to group sex.

But if group sex happens, as one might predict, and she's not screaming no and is not unconscious, should the men in the situation specifically be locked in a cage? If so, long should they be locked in a cage for?

But if group sex happens, as one might predict, and she's not screaming no and is not unconscious, should the men in the situation specifically be locked in a cage?

Yes.

Look, I don't know what actually happened here. But as a general statement, I think the more extreme/unusual a sexual encounter is (especially if it involves strangers), the more incumbent it is on you to make sure that everything is above board. If someone says there's a gangbang in the guest bedroom and you uncritically dive right in, you've got the spirit of a rapist if not the legal status.

If someone says there's a gangbang in the guest bedroom and you uncritically dive right in, you've got the spirit of a rapist if not the legal status.

So you think horny men deserve arbitrary violence from random people who wear cheap tin badges? Do you think the human race must be non horny? Why?

Do you think the human race must be non horny? Why?

Not the human race. Just the male subset. Women are allowed to be as horny as they want. Men must not act like women...

I agree with your point, but technically culling horny men will reduce the mean horniness in the population which will reduce the horniness of women and men at the same time. I'm pointing this out explicitly because I'm getting at how arresting men for small sexual torts is nothing other than a barbaric dysgenics project. The whole point is spitefully interfering with these young men's reproduction and if you use POSIWID you get that the point must be to reshape the human race to be less horny. Because they are being targeted merely for being horny.

You don't cull the horny men though--you cull the men whose social status isn't high enough to permit them to ignore the general ban on male horniness. Effectively you cull horny men who are highly conscientious and/or agreeable and select for horny men who aren't.

No, I think if a woman showed up and did the same thing, they should go prison all the same. It is deeply unfortunate that sexually predatory behavior from women is treated even more lightly than the same behavior from men. It is just less common.

Why don't we just arrest people who act like voluntary sex is actually bad? Aren't horny people far more victimized by such people? Like after centuries of state backed terror?

It is deeply unfortunate that sexually predatory behavior from women is treated even more lightly than the same behavior from men.

Yes, the male version of sexually predatory behavior is not treated as seriously when women do it.

The entire problem here is that you have no concept for the similarly-exploitative female behavior; given men and women are morally equal, we should expect this to be 50/50, so where's all the crime from women we're ignoring, and what does it look like?

(The answer to that question has a lot to do with "intentionally suppressing men from trying in the first place", of course; were the world fair then every single progressive teacher would be in jail for sexual interference, but we prefer feminism instead because it's easy.)

The ability to control your impulses is a crucial element of participating in society. If the desire and prospect of getting laid causes you to throw out discernment or consideration for other human beings, you are one of the people who make the police necessary.

Do you think the human race must be non horny?

I think it would be a better world if we had fewer people who thought that being horny was some kind of excuse.

The ability to control your impulses is a crucial element of participating in society.

So should failing the Marshmallow Test be illegal then?

If the desire and prospect of getting laid causes you to throw out discernment or consideration for other human beings, you are one of the people who make the police necessary. ... I think it would be a better world if we had fewer people who thought that being horny was some kind of excuse.

Afaik no harm came to the woman. From the evidence presented in the thread, she enjoyed the encounter and was there voluntarily. Real rape really sucks & should be illegal but a lot of these «rape» cases lately (as in since gamergate at least) have less negative qualia in them than a bad day at school. Them being illegal implies that bad days at school need to be illegal as well (handcuffs out for asshole teachers, bullies?) as many other things we take for granted as a part of «being in society » like having a shitty boss or your spouse cheating on you or being dumped or rejected.

So should failing the Marshmallow Test be illegal then?

I feel like you know this is a bad comparison.

If you wanted a marshmallow so badly that you ripped out of someone else's hand, that already is illegal. It's unlikely to be prosecuted, both because few people would bother reporting it and the matter is probably too trivial for any prosecutor to take up the case, but in most states it could absolutely win you a trip to the big house.

a lot of these «rape» cases lately have less negative qualia in them than a bad day at school.

I don't think that's true. I think what's actually going on here is that there's a significant body of sexually predatory men who don't care about women, don't believe that sexual violence is actually harmful, and who don't like the fact that shifting norms means their already-dodgy behavior has been clarified as predatory. They'll cling to the most marginal accusations as if we're about to outlaw sex, but the reality even after decades of effort, effectually prosecuting sex crimes is pretty hard.

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The "free pussy" thing doesn't strike me as proving anything except that there was some sort of group/sequential sex going on.

It doesn't even prove that. It just means there were horny girls around.

I’ve always had that problem with the whole “victim blaming is bad” thing. It’s just pretty well obvious that going to a fraternity house, getting high and blackout drunk, etc. are things that will end very badly for you. I’m sure this is a surprise to absolutely nobody. And I don’t feel all that bad about “shaming” a woman who does that kind of thing and has the predictable happen. Like, why shouldn’t that be pointed out? It’s done routinely for every other crime out there. You would not think twice about “shaming” a guy who walked down a street in Compton in fancy clothing and flashing cash. Of course he was going to get robbed. Nor would not think twice about shaming someone who got robbed after posting that they were going on a ten day cruise. Things that are bad ideas should be pointed out. It doesn’t mean they deserve to be robbed, but at the same time, if you insist on being an idiot I don’t feel much need to feel bad for for pointing out that you are or were being foolish.

It’s just pretty well obvious that going to a fraternity house, getting high and blackout drunk, etc. are things that will end very badly for you.

A coworker of mine, a conservative church-going married woman, said in response to some of the original MeToo/Weinstein allegations, "you went up to a strange man's hotel room at night? What did you think was going to happen? A game of monopoly?"

On Weinstein I'm kinda shocked by how long the sentence(s) he's received have been. I've no doubt that he's a bad guy who crossed the line a bunch but a defacto death sentence (15-20 years for a 70 year old) for cunnilingus with dubious consent is pretty clearly a hit on him specifically.

I mean he's the face of the MeToo movement they were always going to obliterate him hardest, add in the fact that he's objectively a creep, ugly, and victimized some of the most influential women (well sort of, but close enough) he was always going to be drawn and quartered.

I'm not sure if "victimized" is the right word, given he provided the quid for the quo.

I mean I'd be shocked if in every single one of his dealings he managed to deliver on every single promise. There's only so many A-list slots to go around and he's not a magical wizard, but I also feel that the women largely knew what they were broadly signing up for.

Weinstein did take punitive action against those who refused him (on top of the reports of his generally violent and unpleasant behavior). So there was at least an element of coercion.

The thing Weinstein shows is being an actress anyone can do. It’s not a scarce resource. It’s not like Musks needing a key engineer to build rockets. If Weinstein can charge a blowjob for the lead in his big Hollywood movie it means there are 50 other girls than can do the part without costing Weinstein money by making a bad movie.

He also broke rules one and two:

  1. Be attractive
  2. Don't be unattractive

He is a balding Jabba The Hutt. When a man like that gets accused of a sex related offense, the coefficient for "throw the book at him" is 10x.

If you follow rules 1 and 2, you can do all sorts of crazy shit and people will call you "one of the gems."

I’ve always had that problem with the whole “victim blaming is bad” thing. It’s just pretty well obvious that going to a fraternity house, getting high and blackout drunk, etc. are things that will end very badly for you

I tend to agree, although I would point out that some women might legitimately and truly want random sex with a bunch of men. So one could argue that for such a woman, things aren't ending badly at all.

The other area where this comes up is before-the-fact advice to people. So it's pretty uncontroversial for the police to advise people to lock their doors; to make their house look lived-in while away; not to leave valuable-looking things in the back seat of their car; etc. But the moment you start advising women not to go out late dressed revealingly; not to go alone to the residence of a man you just met; etc., suddenly you are a victim-blaming misogynist.

Anyway, it's interesting because these examples show that there is a distinction between what's best for women and what's most flattering to women. And when these two things come into conflict, feminists tend to go for what's most flattering.

The issue with such advice is that it comes across to single women as tone-deaf exhortation to capitulate in the sexual rat race by not even putting themselves in situations where desirable men notice them. This is why their reaction do this is snark, anger and resentment.

It's exactly that. If they want to participate in the sexual rat race, they must run the risk of, you know, actually having sex. What they seem to want, by a charitable interpretation -- to be able to participate in said race and have only sex they won't ever regret later -- is not possible to assure. What they seem to want by a less charitable interpretation -- to be able to participate in said race and then punish the men if they do regret it later -- is evil and should not be provided.

'Women want fried ice' - old Arab proverb, supposedly

I agree with this. What a lot of women seem to want, especially on the liberal end of things, is to be allowed to be as “sexy” as they want, act all slutty, and then get the community to go after the men who treat her like she was acting. Im half convinced that most women, Especially women raised in a sheltered, liberal environment have never heard the phrase “consequences of my own actions,” or if they did, only in reference to men.

Im half convinced that most women, Especially women raised in a sheltered, liberal environment have never heard the phrase “consequences of my own actions,” or if they did, only in reference to men.

Well I think that as a general matter, there is a problem in society with women not receiving enough negative feedback or criticism. Nobody likes criticism, but a lack of criticism can really mess a person up. A while back, feminists convinced mainstream society that any criticism of women as a group was "misogyny" and should be made taboo. As a result, women (as a group) are in a situation roughly analogous to that of a dictator surrounded by yes-men; or of a person who engages too much with a sycophantic AI.

The modern west in general has a problem with consequences and hard limits. Women are getting it worse only because they have cultural protections that men are not given as much, or not in the same way. It’s still sort of there, but for the rest of culture it’s about allowing a lack of self control and self discipline, but it’s still sort of there, for example when parents just don’t care if there kids try in school, or for college kids when they’re told they can study anything they want in college and it will be fine and don’t worry about the job market or the loans. It’s the same message of “you shouldn’t face any serious consequences for a choice you make.”

It's two separate things, morality and risk mitigation. "Victim blaming" begs the question, the answer in many cases is that there is no victim, just two people in a weird situation created by hormones, drugs and alcohol. Which is why most moral systems have a web of rules about that sort of thing that don't make much direct sense but serve to reduce such craziness.

If there is a clear crime, the victim is not morally responsible for it, but may have contributed by carelessness or sheer idiocy. We shame them for being dumb, not for provoking the crime. The criminal bears the moral responsibility. The equivocation between the two papers over the differences between and holes within moral systems.

The sheer idiocy provoked the crime though. If she’s not there, dressed in provocative clothing, blackout drunk, the rape doesn’t happen.

If she’s not there, dressed in provocative clothing, blackout drunk, the rape doesn’t happen.

Or in other words, if she's not wearing a billboard that says I'm ready to sell and taking the actions that declare the bargain is drugs for sex, that transaction doesn't occur.

Again, the problem is privilege taking this far more seriously than it deserves. Sex offered at a bargain price was accepted; it's the female inability to accept that some women aren't maximally mercenary about sex that is the fundamental problem here. (Men can't figure that out either, but they have no power to enforce their inaccuracy.)

I think a lot of younger men including myself just don’t have sympathy here. I just came across this [Cernovich] (https://x.com/cernovich/status/2104974412806054398?s=46) tweet. Basically the dating market is awful for young men if you don’t have money or celebrity. His tweet is saying every young girl has celebrities and sugar baby offers in their DM. I can confirm.

Modern man never asked for unrestricted female sexuality. Call me a misogynist and a paternalist but part of the deal of unrestrained female sexuality is you don’t get to shed tears of regret when you don’t like the bad results on your side of being treated poorly. As a man I have benefited and had negatives from the sexual revolution. The old deal was sexual restrictions but societal male would defend you against bad male behavior. That deal simply isn’t in effect anymore. With freedom comes responsibility and that’s the world we live in.

The great liberal sexual paradox:

Remove all sexual social norms and traditions, remove 'slut shaming' so people, especially women, can enjoy their sexuality in whatever way they decide is best as rational, liberated men and women.

But wait, what's that? A woman has been involved in a sexual act which I, like most people, find disgusting and shameful and wrong? Clearly it must be rape. No rational, sane woman would freely choose to consensually engage in such harmful, morally wrong debauchery with the sexual freedom she now has! Humans will always use their rational faculties to make the best decisions! Rape must be therefore the only logical conclusion (which the men must have freely rationally chose to despite clearly being an irrational choice but ignore that).

I'm also guessing that many of them actually did not believe women would feel sexual shame anymore once the external social tools of shaming are removed.

Associated Press:

Cornell rape allegations lead to renewed scrutiny of laws on intoxication and consent

Under state law [1 2], rape charges generally need to involve force or a clear refusal of sex, unless the victim is physically helpless due to being unconscious, or mentally incapacitated due to being drugged without their consent.

Those limitations have led to something nicknamed the “voluntary intoxication loophole”. Prosecutors can’t easily bring charges against someone who engaged in sex with someone who voluntarily became intoxicated to the point where their ability to say “yes” or “no” to sex was compromised.

Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten cited that law as he defended his office’s initial decision not to file criminal charges against any of the men sued by a woman who says she was the victim of a gang rape at Cornell in 2024.

Van Houten said that in her sworn statement to campus police in 2024, the woman didn’t allege that she became intoxicated against her will, or was physically forced into sex or was unconscious when it happened.

“That’s victim blaming, straight up,” in state law, said Stefan Turkheimer, vice president of public policy for RAINN, the largest anti-sexual violence organization in the U.S. “It prevents a lot of cases from coming forward, where prosecutors are reluctant to try to push forward on a case where the person is incapacitated due to voluntary intoxication.”

[Infographic: States (plus DC) where an intoxicated victim is considered mentally incapacitated for purposes of rape only if she became intoxicated without her consent]

StatusCountNotes
Yes19Including NY
No26
Not defined in law6GA, MA, MT, NE, NM, NV

“That’s victim blaming, straight up,” in state law, said Stefan Turkheimer, vice president of public policy for RAINN, the largest anti-sexual violence organization in the U.S. “It prevents a lot of cases from coming forward, where prosecutors are reluctant to try to push forward on a case where the person is incapacitated due to voluntary intoxication.”

I completely agree. It is unconscionable to allow this predator to roam free after she raped those two men. After all, her own description strongly suggests that they were drunker/more drugged than her. The fact that they made the offer doesn't absolve her of the fact that they were too intoxicated to be responsible for their choices.

The fact that intoxication itself doesn't legally mean it's rape (at least in some states) is surprising to me given how much it was hammered into me during college that any amount of alcohol meant that consent was impossible (as long as the person was female, though this part I knew couldn't be literally written into the law).

The girl would be arrested too if sobriety is necessary for consent. It’s an obviously unworkable standard.

There're also the evergreen questions, like what the responsibility of a university should be in cases like this, or what the police department or justice system should do. Seasoned culture warriors will point out that wanting to be hard on this kind of crime correlates with wanting to be soft on other kinds of crime.

The most awful part of this, in my mind, is the lawsuit being filed by Jane Doe against the national fraternity, the bar, the university, and her own sorority for failing to "prevent her from binge drinking." I guess that statement might make sense in a lawsuit against a rehab facility? But not against a voluntary organization that you chose to join, which I've no doubt had a code of conduct that you personally signed stating that you would not binge drink or do illegal drugs.

If we really expect Frats and Sororities and colleges to control the behavior of students against the students' own will, then the culture is rotten and they need to be abolished entirely.

There is no small amount of irony in modern college students calling for the return of universities acting in loco parentis.


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