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I'm not sure why you expect your experience as an older gentleman to have much to do with the experience of twenty somethings which is more central to the original point, family formation. Things change greatly as you age.
The repeated insistence by posters of all stripes and their refusal to engage with the central argument, the crux of the matter is really making me just about fed up with this body of ideas.
Post about young male sexlessness -> Post about TFR
Post about young male sexlessness -> Post about older male sexfullness
Post about young male sexlessness -> Post about women's rights
Post about young male sexlessness -> Post about how to pick up ladies
No one wants to discuss what can be done about the fact that young male sexlessness and datelessness have both gone up by 100% compared to the historical base rate (female remains roughly same with a slight increase recently), and what are the implications of this.
Seriously let's go back to the fucking basics. Refute the central point, not some weakman or weak proxy of it.
I'm about to get real uncharitable here but here's my true unfiltered thoughts on the matter;
My cynical side says that no one but the group getting fucked actually has any incentive to fix it. And by that I don't mean the obvious personal incentive, but all of the other groups greatly benefit in the short term from not fixing it, at least on a superficial level. Old men have a wider pool to choose from, younger women don't want to temper their expectations, older women also don't want to temper their expectations. So all you are left with is token condolences and strawmen just getting beaten often brutalized to absolute shreds. This asymmetry in incentives doesn't allow ones minds to honestly tackle with the arguments (even if their hearts are in the right place) because that would be a stupid way to operate for a human. Why understand something if your livelihood relies on you not understanding it. I also think there is a signalling play here, you make a post about widely discussed {problem} and feign disbelief or obliviousness, it's letting everyone know you are high status enough to not only not have that problem, but to not be able to comprehend its existence.
I would be interested in hearing what your proposals to "fix it" are. I think the reason few to no people offer solutions to the issue is that there are not any solutions people operating in a broadly liberal framework would find permissible.
From my own liberal perspective, nobody is owed a girlfriend, or relationship. If you (or a lot of young men) are unable to get someone you want to be in a relationship with to also want to be in a relationship with you, that's a you problem. Relationship formation is that good old double coincidence of wants. It's not enough that you want to be in a relationship with someone, you need to find someone who also wants to have a relationship with you.
We've banned leaded gasoline, even though it was certainly economically advantageous for every individual driver, and our liberalism calls for less market regulations. We've outlawed OTC cocaine, and made sexualization of minors taboo, with a rather expansive definition too. It's not inconceivable that we could prohibit OnlyFans, Tinder and TikTok. Maybe some more elegant approach is preferable. New problems are born of new clever exploits and profit-making schemes, and after the cost of that profit becomes clear, they call for still newer solutions (which are often enough illiberal on their face). The first step, inescapably, is to allow that a problem be recognized as such, as a problem worth discussing; which is why the space of allowed concerns is so bitterly contested.
Suppose applying this reasoning to literally any other consensual relationship with high stakes, like employment. Do you think it isn't a «poors problem» when working class people feel they've got a raw deal in the contemporary economic arrangement? Do you think it's a «youths problem» when higher-status Muslims build harems and watch contently as the red-hot madness sizzles underneath their feet?
Ultimately it doesn't matter what you think. Either the dissatisfied party can intimidate you into concessions – or wreck your neighborhood, or tank your economy, or straight up burn your McMansion together with your family – or it can't, and the point is moot.
Rights are merely an issue of negotiation via credible threats. There's a fake oath attributed by Russian bloggers to 15th century Catalan nobility: Nós, que valem tant com vós per separat, i junts més que vós, us investim sobirà i us jurem lleialtat per tal que ens protegiu, defenseu i treballeu pel nostre progrés, i si no, no. Allegedly it means something like this: «We, who are worth as much as you separately, and together more than you, invest you as sovereign and swear loyalty to you so that you protect us, defend us and work for our progress, and if not, then no». This probably wasn't the case in Catalonia. This is definitely the premise of representative democracy (rationalizing the democratic way is the intent of this fiction), and of your liberalism today. People who are not represented by the operating system of the society, who are not protected, defended and aided in their progress, can just say: i si no, no, withdrawing their pledge. It is valuable to minimize the frequency and magnitude of this second «no». There are various means to that end. It is possible to delude them into thinking their problems are negligible or shameful (just as it is possible to provoke a group with no legitimate complaints into a righteous fury), drive them to suicide, prevent their self-organization. Up to a point.
I think the reason for this performative callousness is precisely the intuition that men who don't cut it in the sexual market are pathetic non-threatening worms (at worst, some outliers will become school shooters or rapists) and can be safely utilized as fuel for minor self-affirmation in glib offhand remarks. This has worked well enough in Western polities, historically. I posit that when the cutoff is at 30% and climbing up, and in the context of there being essentially no other self-actualization tracks in a postmodern society, this tactic isn't quite as sound. Sexually frustrated young men are a moral problem, but even if you don't agree, they are a well-known political problem. Your problem too. You are playing with fire.
For the record, I guess I'm roughly in the same place as @4bpp, in that this isn't a pain point for me. I don't much care about how I look or score on some bullshit «you must be this tall to ride» plot: to eventually receive sexual attention even from fairly attractive women in the vicinity (of course, not exclusively attractive… and not only women), I've only ever had to start speaking. (I speak roughly in the same manner I write, although lacking the edit option for typos and l'esprit d'escalier is a bummer; then again, my voice has its own perks). Naturally this works best in dense mixed-sex environments where long-winded conversations are not frowned upon. So that's education and less male-biased sections of the academia, and adjacent gatherings. (In fact I believe that's what many women seek in higher ed in the first place, even if they've been gaslit into thinking otherwise). Not fucking Tinder, which is the go-to platform for matchups now.
Of course, inflating the educational pipeline even more would be insane for a whole host of other reasons. Also, «I got mine» is a not an argument even if true.
@f3zinker is correct that the effect of online dating is already disastrous and we've only began to feel it, and that you all are intent on dodging, downplaying and misrepresenting the core issue. Last but not least, it's frankly disheartening that I feel the need to write this disclaimer to preclude another tedious discussion about personal frustrations, inadequacies and attractiveness scores.
It seems you’re denying the entire category of legitimate claims. If it all comes down to power relations, there is no fundamental difference between single women complaining about fatphobia, black activists threatening to burn down cities if they don’t get handouts, incels, and groups genuinely wronged.
I don’t think a threat makes a right. You’re going to need more than that. At present, on that issue, the case for why their interests should take precedence over those of others is unclear to me. And even if you’re the hardbitten realist and my beliefs are false, those ideals will determine my actions in the political struggle.
It does matter what people think. After all, women didn’t attain what we believe to be a privileged position in society by threatening to burn it down, did they? And it wasn’t the power and threats of the slaves that brought about their emancipation.
Pretty much, yeah. I mean I have a sense of intuitive morality that I believe is informed by the deep structure of the world, simple things like reciprocity being objectively desirable, the first aggressor being in the wrong, etc., – but in the end, such sensibilities are arbitrary aesthetics and can only be legitimized and normalized by political fiat. The only way it could have been otherwise would be if there was a Creator whose intentions for the Universe include ranking of its elements along some specific moral axis.
I have never been able to tell if people who act as if they have access to objective morality (one that others will recognize as such, even!) are more Machiavellian, or just lacking meta-awareness (and whether there is any difference).
That's the neat part: a sufficient threat can make you reconsider, at least for purposes of political action – and in a generation or two, for all other purposes too. Sufficient threats effect concessions, and concessions become norms, and norms become the letter and the spirit and the legitimizing justice behind the law.
I agree. Right now, your best bet is that 30% of young men who are effectively emasculated will think «fair enough, I am not entitled to anyone lowering their standards». And perhaps 40 or 50% next.
I think they very much did, violence, intimidation and support of far left terrorist movements was a significant part of it. Although mainly it was still social shaming, public disturbances (shrieking, vandalism), and abuse of the male sense of pity – options obviously unavailable to young cis hetero men, who are also vastly more violent by default.
Incidentally, women have been having a pretty noisy demonstration just the other day here. I think they'll get all they want, and more, and then discover it hasn't made them any happier.
I’m unsure whether you think our beliefs about fairness affect us or not. It seems to matter for women, and you concede that we could convince incels to accept the status quo (might be sarcasm, though) like they do now, but you maintain that justice consists of nothing but threats.
I can’t help but notice the similarity to woke discourse (now I have to page @HlynkaCG ), which likewise never grants that some rights were handed over graciously. They deride beliefs as an irrelevant superstructure, which leaves nothing but identities exerting power in self-interest, leading to such crushing arguments as ‘you’re a white male’. In these discussions it’s more like, ‘My lady, due to your wonderfulness and the relative cheapness of the gametes, you could never understand my plight, thus I only have my sword’.
They do, and they are subject to change because of threats and other external stimuli.
There's no contradiction here. «Incels» or like @urquan properly says young sexless men who may one day stop being incels, accept it conditional on the sense of the threat being enough to outweigh the sense of unfairness and vague promise of potential upsides from chaos that men under pressure sometimes feel (and more importantly, conditional on availability of copes, which is why wokeness in games is such an irritant).
If the pressure increases, or more capable men are demoted into incels (even if the bottom 30% on attractiveness perfectly coincides with the bottom 30% on general ability to get shit done, which it does not, the 30th percentile man is not nothing, and the 50th percentile man would be more of something). it may not be enough.
The woke are of course rational to do so, because the claim that your rights have been handed over graciously serves solely to imply that they could have been not handed over – or may be withdrawn, if you don't behave as was expected upon them being handed over. It's usually a negotiation tactic to overstate your degree of control over the situation and discourage escalation of demands.
But I also think they are correct objectively. Some people can be persuaded by peaceful means. Heck, some could even be proactively sympathetic while not sharing your burdens in any way, like white Abolitionists were.* In the end, there remains at best a minority of disagreeable profiteers of the status quo who seek to maintain it, and you should hope they will be intimidated into submission peacefully, by the new consensus. But, well, you see – when intimidation is necessary, violence is always around the corner.
This reminds me:
Ultimately, though, women needn't use violence the way that men have to.
* Notice how this possibility is effortfully mocked and denied when applied to this topic. No, the only reason one could be willing to speak in incels' favor is being one, a filthy lying
nigfagincel, ergo inherently undeserving of anything better than sensible chuckles and strawmen.I think it's a completely reflexive, unthinking, subhuman reaction, just a monkey dangling his balls in the interlocutor's face because the situation feels like a natural opportunity to show the goods.
But again: it is informed by the wisdom of public negotiations, and thus rational, even if not quite helpful specifically here.
Not percolating, sorry. You’ve got this bucket, and into it drip some threats, and from the other side arguments about fairness. Both are real things with visible effects, in a complex causal relationship, but each can be independently generated. (At any time, there are always a small number of pure altruistic arguers and completely self-interested blackmailers.)
Why then do you describe the resulting liquid as being composed entirely of threats? Why is the man who argues wasting his time, and the pirate the only true champion of the cause? Both can theoretically achieve the same goal. (But the pirate’s way is a lot more bloody, and results in a law of the jungle society where morality and justice mean nothing, and individual outcomes are not good.)
You attempt to reconcile the contradiction by insisting on seeing arguments as merely another power play, and making the threats the ultimate cause of the arguments. The panglossian mirror version would view threats as nothing more than political enforcement of fairness concepts, entirely generated by those.
It’s like the different perspectives scott wrote about. You can see the corruption of the state as the exception, or as the default. I prefer the former, but you seem to go farther than the latter and say corruption is the entire story.
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