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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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They gain nothing from being an edgelord because (as has been rehashed on these pages and infinitum) women get points/mates/security just for existing. If you want anyone to notice you as a man, you must stand out from the crowd, and this is the biological basis for male edgelord-ism.

I wish we could just make this a permanent sticky post. This explains the majority of questions that one might have about gender dynamics.

Only if we can pair it with this one.

Frankly, I expect the reasoning for “but women have it so easy” is pretty motivated. I don’t think the actual evidence for it is very strong, either, but it’s better than appeal to consensus.

Frankly, I expect the reasoning for “but women have it so easy” is pretty motivated. I don’t think the actual evidence for it is very strong

This will sound totally audacious, but the concept of privilege, and all the work that leftists have done to defend its coherence over the years, is very useful here. It's just female privilege instead of male privilege. Obviously women have problems too, and no one has it so easy that they can just lay there and have things handed to them; but women will still have it easier in many ways as compared to men.

What do you think of this post? (And some of the surrounding ones where people discussed the same issue)

"Women aren't actually bizarre aliens from the planet Zygra'ax with completely inexplicable preferences"

Absolutely, that's what I'm always trying to tell people. Sticky it. Once you understand that sperm is cheap and eggs are expensive then everything else follows in a very natural and rational manner.

That would be consensus-building.

More deeply, one of the founding ideas of this place is that fundamental social ideas should be questioned, constantly. Social science is bad. We know it’s bad. I am not a huge fan of Popper’s “scientific theories can never be proven, only falsified,” idea, but that’s about as good as we’re going to get in social science with current levels of technology. I consider it immensely valuable to point out “this observation does/does not falsify theory X, Y or Z”, whenever novel social information is obtained.

It was a more elaborate way of saying “This!”. I wasn’t actually being serious.

I’m all for constant questioning. There comes a point where continued questioning is no longer that useful though, barring a major new discovery. Biologists have better things to spend their time on than questioning evolution; better to just teach it as truth and get on with other things.