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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   30480 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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Earlier this year, the Swedish publisher Natur och Kultur released a new book discussing the rise of male sexlessness by the name of “Man går sin egen väg: riktningar i sexlöshetens dimma.” The title is an untranslatable pun on the Swedish word “man” which means both man as in “a man” and “one” as in “one does not simply walk into Mordor.” Rough translation: "Going your own way: directions in fog of sexlessness." The topic is one in which I am both deeply interested and deeply invested (the same way one might be invested in curing a debilitating disease) in, so I thought I’d relay the content to the Motte. Here's a link to the book if you want to check it out: https://www.nok.se/titlar/laromedel-b2/man-gar-sin-egen-vag-92ad4e66/a2ada8af-b732-488d-8a0e-937d6558b675

First off, the book does a good job of giving a concise overview of the situation for young men and forces at play. If you’re at all familiar with the ideas contained within, e.g, The Selfish Gene, these thoughts will hardly be mind-blowing, but it’s refreshing to see someone approach them with frankness in popular science/sociology. (Though if you’re unfamiliar here’s a good link to an interesting study https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/12/health/young-americans-less-sex-intl-scli-wellness/index.html).

The author also commendably takes a refreshingly global view of the problem, and has a lot of interesting facts from Japan and India which shed light on the broader dynamics of the sexual marketplace. For example, many of you might know that Tinder in the West has a verification feature for your face: take a selfie and prove you’re really you, and you get a little checkmark! Apparently, a Japanese online dating has adopted a similar feature - but for salaries. That’s right, just send a picture of your payslip and you get a checkmark letting all the women know you’re not horsing around with your six figure income. I don’t know if I should applaud the Japanese for their honesty, or deride them as crass. Maybe both.

Beyond that the book doesn’t have much new data to offer. The exact extent of the problem is difficult to assess given it relies largely on self-reporting, and the causes are equally difficult to pin down (though in India and China the uneven gender ratio is an obvious culprit, and the broader trend is also clear). Internet porn, Metoo, men being outcompeted in academia, rising obesity and women gaining status and increasing independence are all suspects, but the exact extent of their involvement in the conspiracy remains unclear.

The author doesn’t dwell on this. The book is more interested in categorizing and understanding the male response to sexlessness than in explaining the root causes: and it actually does a pretty good job of creating a frame to discuss and understand the problem on an individual level. The idea is that men without sexual success have four different strategies at their disposal (or copes if you want to use incel lingo) when faced with want of sexual success, namely

Folding: what it sounds like. the core of this strategy is simply giving up on ever really wooing a woman to whom you’re attracted, and doing something else instead. There are many variants but at its center this strategy is about recognizing that “it’s over” and trying to scratch the sexual itch with other and perhaps more attainable pursuits.

Fraud: unsatisfied with simply surrendering, some men instead turn to various forms of deception in order to overcome their predicament. This similarly diverse group includes pick-up artists and various other fraudsters who rely primarily on manipulation. The common denominator for this strategy is insincerity: the whole point is to trick, nag or fool women into sleeping with you rather than convincing them by improving the package on offer. Nowadays I see few “red pill”-folk proclaiming that all you need to do is learn to neg women correctly in order to get laid. Probably this way of doing things didn’t work very well to begin with, and the realization has set in.

Resentment: you already know this one. This is the strategy of Elliot Rodger, the violent rebellion of Cain against an uncaring God. Though seldom taken to its logical conclusion, this response has gotten a disproportionate amount of media attention since it often involves violence and hatred towards women. The attention paid to the worst of the incels have clouded the fact that many feel negative emotions affter rejection.

Improvement: Lastly, we have the most intuitive strategy. If no one wants to buy what you're selling, improve your product! The author neatly exemplifies this strategy with the cult of JBP and “12 Rules for Life”, and I think the connection between sexlessness and the rise of anxious self-improvement is fairly natural. Keep in mind there are many different ways to improve the odds. Improvement can also involve throwing a wider net, and doing other activities to improve not yourself but the general chances of attracting a mate.

This is by far the most optimistic and pro-social strategy, and it’s the overwhelmingly most common reply when men complain of sexlessness. Just get stronger, wealthier, cooler and smoother, and you will start to see success. If you’re a semi-nerdy intellectual guy – and if I understand the demographics here correctly you probably are – you’ve heard this one many times, I’ll bet.

Nevertheless, it’s evident the author himself is skeptical. He spends a lengthy section of the book detailing how JBP himself collapsed into a highly dysfunctional and disorganized existence. If you don’t have Tinder and never go outside you’ve got some low-hanging fruit to pick, but what if you have Tinder and you go outside, but still fail? In the end the book seems to purport that, whatever it is that causes women to reject a certain man en masse, it is quite difficult to change.

Summary

All the categories above represent extremes, and inescapably simplify complex human behavior. The book is well-aware of this, and makes a big point of emphasizing that most men employ a decidedly mixed strategy when faced with female rejection. After a particularly long dry spell the average man is more likely to spend some more time with other pursuits (folding), edit his photos to make them more attractive (fraud), vent his frustration to friends over a beer (revenge) and slowly build wealth and status (improvement) rather than going all-in on any one extreme.

Another point the book makes, which I mentioned before, is that no strategy really seems to pay clear and great dividends (though one is clearly worse than all the others). The book never says it out loud, but the data and the narrative it presents appears to hint that the only correct move in this sordid game is to not become sexless to start with. I think this might be correct. Constantly getting rejected by all women you consider attractive is something most men consider very, very bad, and for good reason. In evolutionary terms that form of harsh sexlessness is a strong signal that something is going terribly awry, and we should expect most young men to react very strongly if they were told, right now, that they’d barely have sex in their life.

Last but not least, I have a few closing remarks regarding the different strategies, and on the broader problem with male sexlessness.

To start with, I think folding is by far the weakest approach to the problem. In another type of society ignoring your sexual desire and doing something else might be workable as a last resort, but in a modern welfare state it is for many reasons a humiliating and degrading proposal. It’s well-known that women (at least in Europe) receive far more money from the state through welfare, maternity care and health care than they pay in tax, and that means all tax-paying men inevitably support women with their hard work. This has far-reaching implications. To put it bluntly: if you spend your entire working life as a man giving desirable young women your money while other men fuck their brains out, what does that make you?

The simple fact of the matter is that most men have no way to cut women out of their life entirely. What opting out really means is accepting all the drawbacks of having a girlfriend without any of the benefits. That’s barely even a strategy: it is more of an unconditional surrender than an attempt to actually handle the situation. Maybe I need to look at more OkCupid statistics to really get how “over” it is for most men, but the profound despair hidden in this sort of response does not appeal to me. I’d rather rage against the dying of the light than quietly accept defeat.

Improvement is the other strategy which deserves a response; and my response is that I’m far from convinced. The few instances in which I’ve had success with women have had an almost random quality to them, and have been seemingly unrelated to any obvious self-improvement project. Lately I’ve greatly improved both my wealth and general status, and yet success has been sorely lacking.

Frankly, if you’re having trouble with women as a young man – and I speak as a young man who has had much trouble with women – the problem is likely to get worse with age. It seems likely that for every step you take forward in self-improvement you will take another two steps back through aging. Another weakness in this strategy is that if you’ve gone without sex for several years then, well, that’s several years without sex. You are not getting those back! Dwelling on the past is never good, but I am unsure if investing large resources in order to marry 30 year old woman who would have rejected you if she was 20 is a sound or sustainable way to move forward.

Last but not least, a question to open further discussion: what is the optimal strategy, both in general and in more detail (i.e. should you improve, and what aspect of yourself or your dating approach is most fruitful to improve?).

The disproportionate attention paid to the worst of the incels have clouded the fact that most sound men have a negati

I believe this paragraph is unfinished

You don't have negati? How do even pursue a woman without negati?

Is this one of those nonsensical zoomer words for simple concepts like "rizz" or are you joking?

Genuinely can't tell.

I think it's probably the beginning of negative, but not positive.

It's a joke.

The Matrix took my Negati, very sad times

Indeed it was, thank you. This 10 000 character limit is playing tricks on me.

Consider dating women from more traditional societies with marriage and children as your goal, and adopt some more traditionally male traits, especially the kind that would make a woman feel as if you can provide for and protect her and your future children.

Where do you even find such people? Do they even exist?

The answer I've been given most is religion, which I guess makes sense in broad terms but is totally impractical if you're a modern westerner. Much as I like cult hopping myself, you can't just join random foreign belief systems until you find one with chicks. Especially if you actually have beliefs of your own and limited time.

I think it's kind of ridiculous that I personally know not just one but three very wealthy western men, of good character, with looks that vary from decent to could-be-a-model, that could fund a tradwife and kids no questions asked and yet can't even procure a girlfriend.

Maybe it really is that much easier for passport bros and they'd find instant success in a more enlightened country.

Myself I'm this close to falling for one of these matchmaker scams on the off chance that somebody can source the mythical tradwife and not the sea of single moms dating sites have condemned me with.

Where do you even find such people?

Refugee camps.

A rare sight in the US (I hope).

Do you know anyone in a long term marriage to a mail-order bride? She might have a niece who needs a green card.

When did you start pursuing women?

I started basically as soon as puberty hit, when I was about 12. It was another 5 years before I had sex.

Having sex at 17 isn't so bad, certainly felt like forever at the time. It was another 5 years and two girlfriends later before I could reliably have sex with new women after just a few dates. It was about a year of me being a bit of a manwhore before I met my now wife and settled down.

It took me about ten years and usually 40+ hours a week of dedicated practice to get good at it. I broke 6 figures in pay at a job faster than I broke into chadhood (and a very mediocre chadhood too, I've had only 20-30 sexual partners, but I was always a little more interested in long term relationships than just sex).

Being able to have sex with willing women is the most difficult thing most men will accomplish in their lives. And I think most of them have only managed it by sheer dogged determination.

And this is fine. Because on the other side of this endeavor is women, and they have at steak the most difficult thing most women will ever do: raise a kid.

Yes birth control exists, but it hasn't sunk into our evolutionarily thickened skulls. And why should it? Raising a kid is still at stake in the modern world. A woman wasting three years dating a loser might mean some prime fertility years are lost.

Improvement is the only option. The progress won't be fast, and it probably won't even be slow. It will be glacial. Circumstances and luck will always play a role, and the best you will ever do is to tilt luck in your favor. At best you might raise a 1% chance to a 5% chance. So instead of striking out 99 times you only strike out 19.

I'm running out of good advice to give to young men, and coming back to the one thing that I think made me successful: I was relentlessly horny and wanted nothing more than willing sex with attractive women. It was only once I got there that my fog finally cleared from my mind. I realized i wanted more (and needed more) after i obtained the goal.

It was only once I got there that my fog finally cleared from my mind. I realized i wanted more (and needed more) after i obtained the goal.

Is there anything more you can say to elaborate on this?

Sex isn’t everything.

Not having it is.

Prior to my sexual maturity I would say my main goal in life was sex. Afterwards I would say sex was part of my life but no longer the main goal. I could have other goals. Like having a family, a good career, and a happy life.

I think many men live through the same thing. Either they settle down with one woman and give up on the single minded pursuit of sex (marriage), or they can achieve sex so easily that it ceases to be a meaningful goal (chadhood).

Wouldn’t 25 be in like the 90th percentile of partner count for heterosexuals, if not higher? Most men (and women) never come close, they have a few long term relationships, maybe a hookup or two, then get married. Often these are with friends or friends of friends, with classmates and coworkers and fellow students or with friends or siblings of all the above. Most men aren’t cold approaching women and never have.

I think if you set yourself a target like, persuade 25 very beautiful women to sleep with you as an average guy, that’s probably a hard goal, and might be the “hardest thing” a man accomplished in his lifetime (I mean I hope not, but it depends on what he’s working with, I guess). But that doesn’t really describe the lives of many men.

Maybe we've had quite a cultural shift in the past ten years, but the most recent data I could dig up shows the median number of partners for a man is about 6, and men are probably inclined to inflate that number.

About 20% of men have had 15+ partners, and about 70% 40+, so 25 being 90th percentile feels about right.

See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5795598/ and https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/n.htm#numberlifetime

I'm not sure where I am in percentile amounts. I know men who had hundreds of partners (and I believe them because I've met dozens of their partners in the short time I knew them). But I probably know way more men who have had fewer partners than I have. Being in the 90th percentile wouldn't surprise me.

Often these are with friends or friends of friends, with classmates and coworkers and fellow students or with friends or siblings of all the above. Most men aren’t cold approaching women and never have

I'm not entirely sure what qualifies as a cold approach. Like I have never met them before? Or they have no social connection to me? I've succeeded with women I've never met before, but it was often in situations where her friends knew my friends and some even knew me as well.

I had some success with okcupid back when Tinder was a new up and coming dating app. I suppose that is sort of a cold approach.

I think if you set yourself a target like, persuade 25 very beautiful women to sleep with you as an average guy, that’s probably a hard goal, and might be the “hardest thing” a man accomplished in his lifetime (I mean I hope not, but it depends on what he’s working with, I guess). But that doesn’t really describe the lives of many men.

I think to be in the position to do that, or to just have one successful relationship with a woman can require a lot of work on the part of a man. It's emotional growth, career growth, physical growth, social growth, and just general personal success. Starting from having only a working dick at puberty and getting to the point of being a mature adult is what it takes.

I've talked about this subject before and compared it to getting a job. To some extent getting a job is easy. Submit a resume, have some job skills, and be able to show up and work. But that requires a whole bunch of assumptions, and you realize just how many assumptions when you give that advice to a three year old. There is a decade of learning and growing they need to do before that advice can apply. The same is true of sex and relationships. You can't just tell a freshly minted sexually active teen boy to go be confident and talk to a bunch of women in order to have sex. That boy needs about a decade of growth before they are good marriage material, or sexual chad material.

What seems to be happening in our society is that we have been pushing the age of early teen sexual dynamics later and later. This is maybe a good thing for young girls. But for young boys it means that the moment of their sexual maturity is also being delayed. They aren't doing the growing and learning soon enough.

To clarify why I think it is the most difficult thing:

I consider the completion of a man's sexual journey to be the difficult thing. That means a successful monogamous marriage, or sexual chadhood. They have done what they need to do to either swear off the pursuit of many women, or they can successfully engage in the sexual pursuit of many women.

When a young person applies to college all they are doing is submitting an application. The process of submitting an application is not very difficult. It takes less than a day. However, they can rightfully say it is the hardest thing they've ever done, especially if that application gives them a good chance of getting into a great college. The pre-requisites are the difficult part. Taking all the standardized tests, completing over a decade of school, the extra curriculars, the essays, etc.

The same is true of men reaching sexual maturity. The final steps are usually easy and straightforward. It's the previous decade of pre-requisites that was the hard part. Learning how to be funny, hold a conversation, learning how to read all the social cues, learning how to be a productive member of society, etc.

But many of the most promiscuous (straight) men haven’t done any of the above complex personal work, they’re just somewhat hot dudes who spend their twenties as bartenders or in an unsuccessful band or hanging around the cheaper parts of Brooklyn where they live with roommates doing various low skill jobs. I think this is a misunderstanding of ‘what it takes’ (not that I oppose self improvement for its own sake).

With the exclusion of star athletes or musicians/actors successful enough to have large numbers of groupies, the straight men who have the most sex (with women who aren’t prostitutes) are those who spend the most time around large numbers of drunk young women late at night. I don’t mean in a predatory way, necessarily, just in general. The jobs these people do are almost all low paid. The bartender who lives with four roommates in deepest bushwick and moonlights as an UberEats driver is getting laid more than the banker who lives in Murray Hill, all else (looks, charisma) being the same, just because of opportunity, even though the latter has more ‘of his shit together’ in the financial/career/etc sense.

My suspicion has always been that many men see it as an indignity to have to try to get laid, and that’s where the hangup is. Having to pursue feels like an insult. I don’t have any strict evidence of this, it’s just a gut feeling.

Having to pursue feels like an insult. I don’t have any strict evidence of this, it’s just a gut feeling.

Counterpoint- pursuing is really, really fun, and our society has to put a moderately high amount of effort into preventing men and older boys from doing so in inappropriate times, places, and manners.

I agree lots of men like it, but I’m talking more about those who don’t or who dislike having to do it.

And also those who have had a string of strikes (starting the vicious cycle of self loathing).

Yes there are some men who acquire sex easily. I have known some. But you can't always be sure some of them weren't previously ugly ducklings.

My suspicion has always been that many men see it as an indignity to have to try to get laid, and that’s where the hangup is. Having to pursue feels like an insult. I don’t have any strict evidence of this, it’s just a gut feeling.

Indignity feels like totally the wrong word. It certainly feels like a chore or a useless set of tasks after a while. It's also not much of a challenge after a while.

The requirement of a pursuit is a filter, but it's sometimes a filter that has entirely stopped working for certain men. And why wouldn't those men start to view the filter as a waste of everyone's time?

My suspicion has always been that many men see it as an indignity to have to try to get laid, and that’s where the hangup is. Having to pursue feels like an insult. I don’t have any strict evidence of this, it’s just a gut feeling.

I’m also sure that many women see it as an indignity to have to try to find a husband/boyfriend. After all, it’s something that should just, you know, happen to them. And the thing is, they aren’t wrong, because a well-functioning society puts various structures in place in order to facilitate mating long-term and short-term, so that nobody has to structure their entire lifestyles around finding at keeping a mate with high and concerted effort. At the very least, it doesn’t sabotage male attempts at pursuit in various ways.

that’s probably a hard goal, and might be the “hardest thing” a man accomplished in his lifetime (I mean I hope not, but it depends on what he’s working with, I guess).

For a lot of American/West European PMC types, sex is the single meaningful area of "free play" in their lives. I think that's where the definition of "hardest" comes in. It's true for me for a certain portion of my life.

Getting into a T14 law school, graduating from it, and getting a job at a well ranked law firm were all "harder" than getting laid in the sense that fewer people can do them. Getting laid was harder in the sense that there were no guides, or only marginally useful ones.

I know a fair number of my classmates who fit this definition, who have achieved amazing things professionally but can't fuck their way out of a paper bag. The K-JD student, extraordinary in talent but on rails in life from helicopter parents to academically strenuous schools to SAT prep courses to selective colleges to LSAT prep to T14 law school to Vault-10 firm associate to partner-track or In-house-counsel at a Fortune 500. Every step of that path is INCREDIBLY hard in the sense that it requires a huge amount of intellectual ability and hardworking discipline, but incredibly easy in the sense that there are prescribed steps you take, guidance from mentors or parents or online forums, and if you complete those steps you get what you wanted.

Getting laid is the opposite. There are no steps. The mentors and online guides are mostly useless or hucksters. It is free play, unguided by society, the rules are made up as you go. You have to figure it out on your own, figure everything out on your own.

A lot of men I've known were very well adapted to following rules and steps, and very poorly adapted to improv. I know a shocking number of men making nice six figure salaries in NYC big law who are sexually and romantically frustrated. Because the things they are good at aren't romance.

I know a shocking number of men making nice six figure salaries in NYC big law who are sexually and romantically frustrated. Because the things they are good at aren't romance.

Are they hot, though?

Eye of the beholder and I'm pretty heterosexual, but I'd say so? At least fuckable? I mean thinking of my law school roommate, right, he's taller than me and slimmer than me, dresses well, he makes more money than me, can perform intellectual tasks that I cannot, he has clear skin and good posture. ((I guess Korean is a downgrade for some people, but racism can't be that prevalent right? And I feel like I know white/black/hispanic examples but not to the same degree of certainty)) I never saw him succeed with a girl through all of law school, and after law school he's had only sporadic and difficult success with women. It's insane to me.

He succeeded in doing things that most people would find literally impossible, like passing the patent bar. Dating is the harder thing for him.

I guess East Asians have a reputation as being less attractive. Koreans are still seen as handsome, though, see Kpop obsessions and so on. I’ve found (some) Korean men attractive but I think if I met a straight-laced Korean biglaw lawyer set on partner track who seemed more trad (socially/culturally) I’d automatically write him off as probably only interested in Korean women. East Asian men who do well with white women often cultivate either a kind of artsy intellectual vibe or a tattooed vibe (male equivalent of ABG, say) I think because it’s kind of like saying “I’m not the stereotype”.

I think it’s interesting to think about the kind of people you’re attracted to. Something that seems true for both sexes is that while hotness is based on physical features, it also has a lot to do with vibe. I’ve seen women go from being largely invisible to men to doing better with them (not just sex but relationships, dating etc) without changing their physique just by changing the way they do their makeup, changing their fashion, acting differently and seeming less closed off to men.

If I look at Cjet’s profile picture he seems like a handsome guy and I know many people who would go for that kind of thing, but I’ve never been attracted to the default American male vibe, even if their facial features are great. I like tall, skinny, sometimes slightly androgynous white (sometimes jewish) guys with pale skin and long dark hair, at the top end maybe men who could be YSL runway models, I don’t know. This isn’t an uncommon preference among women I grew up with and know, although it’s not the norm. Men who could be described and who might even describe themselves as ‘beautiful’, or at least going for that vibe. In my experience, these men always do quite well with women, even if they’re only average looking, because they have a lot of women friends and are into things that women like like fashion, the arts, literature. So it’s possible I have an inflated (or deflated in this case, I guess) view of how hard it is for the average man to get laid, because in general the men in my life who seem to cultivate a vibe of some kind do well, while the plain, default American kind of guys, even if they have good features and height, might struggle.

I’m not going to universally recommend ‘move to Brooklyn, grow out your hair, cultivate an air of mystery’ to young men struggling with women, but it probably would work for a substantial number of them.

Taking up a vibe isn't as simple as you make it out to be though! You have to find a vibe that is solidly in line with what you're working with. As a (presuming from your writing) gorgeous and intelligent woman, you have more ability to take up whatever aesthetic you choose, and being attractive you will carry it off.

For men, it is just not that simple to pick up a new style. It's not as simple as reading a magazine guide, buying the stuff, learning the lingo, and going to it. There are a great many styles that, even if I put effort into it, just don't match with who I am. A big part of my growing up and becoming attractive to women was realizing that the vibe/aesthetic I should be going for was trad all-American boy. Blond, blue eyed, broad shouldered, sweet, well-read, good family; God help me I spent my teenage years trying to be punk and failing completely. When I started playing to my strengths, I grew into it fast.

But finding one's unique vibe isn't easy for many men, and it isn't the sort of thing that one does simply by following orders. Which is where my old roommate failed. He did his homework in high school, studied hard in undergrad, worked incredibly hard in law school. But in his personal life, no one can tell him what to do with any successful odds.

I agree with most of your post. But this...

But in his personal life, no one can tell him what to do with any successful odds.

Isn't really true. He's a tall, skinny, relatively handsome Korean guy in his late twenties (with money)? Kpop-maxx. Clean-shaven, get the cross earings, the Kpop star haircut, the rockstar clothes (but slightly lower-key). There are girls writing fanfic about a slightly modified version of this guy. In NYC? Some pretty white girl will go for it, probably many more than that. He's a rare niche in the middle of a huge cultural fetish. What do you say to a hot white guy who can't get laid in Southeast Asia? "Go outside"?

More comments

Can he inspire people? Can you see him succeeding at high end sales or in politics? Also: how tall is he?

I think our Korean hero has deeply unrealistic expectations. Is he insanely charismatic: could he become a politician, or not? Is he making or on track to make a million a year before age 35? If not: he needs to be looking for the type of person that can just barely hold down a job and live independently, not thin, pretty UMC women. Passing the patent bar or the USMLE or running a marathon or even climbing Everest are often a lot easier than finding a partner that is sane, not morbidly obese, works a job, and isn't addicted to drugs.

Wouldn’t 25 be in like the 90th percentile of partner count for heterosexuals

Its impossible to say. All the data is self reported and both sexes have massive incentives to lie, though in different directions. Short of tracking chips implanted at puberty this one will remain a mystery. I did read some interesting research once about the topic of lying on self report surveys about sex and relationships, hinting that perhaps the dishonesty was somewhat uniform and predictable. I've since tried to find this paper multiple times to no avail and much frustration. I do remember that they determined men tend to double their partner count and women reduce theirs by 2/3rds, but lacking the methodology at present these figures can't be trusted.

No idea what papers you read, but I've seen some research along these lines. I think the most amusing was when Fisher and Alexander found that college women hooked up to a (fake) lie detector reported an average of 4.4 sexual partners, vs 3.4 for women who expected their answers to be anonymized and 2.4 for women who expected their answers to be read.

There are other factors influencing self-reporting (women report more and men report fewer lifetime partners on the GSS when they have a male interviewer? Male overreporting is massive when asked about lifetime partners, large when asked about recent partners, and maybe only 20% when asked about very-recent partners?) but I'm not sure what methodology could let anyone properly calibrate any of this. Bayes says "women are underreporting and men are overreporting" is the most likely explanation of the discrepancy between the two, but either "women are honest and men are grossly overreporting" or "men are honest and women are grossly underreporting" would be consistent too.

I started basically as soon as puberty hit, when I was about 12. It was another 5 years before I had sex.

Having sex at 17 isn't so bad, certainly felt like forever at the time. It was another 5 years and two girlfriends later before I could reliably have sex with new women after just a few dates. It was about a year of me being a bit of a manwhore before I met my now wife and settled down.

Out of curiosity, is the picture in your profile you IRL?

I would call myself someone with modest but certainly above average success with the ladies, I don't know the exact percentile value, but I wouldn't be surprised if the number of partners I've had at this point in time put me in the 90th percentile for Indian men, even if in absolute terms they're an OOM lower. India is a rather sexless country after all, and a great number of perfectly average men (and women) don't get laid till they're packed off to an arranged marriage.

I certainly suffered from severe horniness as a teen, largely fruitlessly, but in my defense very few Indian teens hit third base, let alone get laid.

It took until I was in med school for things to change, something I'd certainly classify under "improvement", since it indisputably increased my status.

And since I've spent the majority of the last 7-8 years in a longterm relationship of some description, I count myself comfortably well off. While I wouldn't sniff at more ONSs, they're so difficult to get unless you're a 99th percentile dude here it's a bad standard to hold one's self too.

As such, while I wouldn't go as far as to call myself a Chad, I'm certainly further on that end of the spectrum than the other. I still have immense sympathy for incels/average dudes, because I had to deal with raging, all consuming libido for years, and still had dry spells afterwards. I look at the latter, and think "there but for for the grace of God go I". The Chads (and women) simply don't understand what torture that is, how corrosive it can be to your self esteem, even if most of your peers are in similar straits.

Improvement is the only option. The progress won't be fast, and it probably won't even be slow. It will be glacial. Circumstances and luck will always play a role, and the best you will ever do is to tilt luck in your favor. At best you might raise a 1% chance to a 5% chance. So instead of striking out 99 times you only strike out 19.

Agreed, you have only yourself to blame it you don't at least make an effort. I'm sure there are some poor buggers so cursed by genetics that they still can't get anyone to sleep with them, but the advice is sound for the average man who isn't getting laid much if at all.

It was another 5 years and two girlfriends later before I could reliably have sex with new women after just a few dates

Much the same, albeit those trysts usually ended up in relationships. I find myself immensely more successful through IRL approaches than the apps, though I have successfully slid into DMs and charmed panties off. This is likely true for most men, since Tinder and the like are all-you-can-eat buffets for women with 10% of the men getting 90% of the attention, and being hypergamous enough to satiate the needs of the majority of women.

I used to be highly envious of my brother, who got all the handsome genes, and I gape at how asexual he is despite the oodles of female attention he receives. It makes me mildly yet irrationally angry, I want to shake him by the neck and act like a 90s suburban mom telling him that he's doing the equivalent of throwing away his food while orphans starve in Africa. But at the end of the day, he's not hungry, so good for him. I wouldn't wish the curse of male libido on my worst enemy, even if I don't want to remove it (or, I would, if there was an simply, temporary pill without real side effects that did so, instead of the only real options being castration of the physical or chemical nature).

I myself, which distinctly average in the facial department (4-5 if I'm not putting effort in, maybe a low 7 if I am, going by a normal distribution of attractiveness instead of the typical right skew), but every day I thank myself for being tall, intelligent and charming with a deep voice. I appreciate and count the chickens that did hatch, because I see a lot of poor bastards pecking in the manure pile to this day.

Out of curiosity, is the picture in your profile you IRL?

Yes, that is me, in India actually. Random museum in Dehli, some back room had that portrait.

I wouldn't wish the curse of male libido on my worst enemy, even if I don't want to remove it (or, I would, if there was an simply, temporary pill without real side effects that did so, instead of the only real options being castration of the physical or chemical nature).

That pill is a low dose SSRI. I've had some mild depression my whole post pubescent life. Never really treated it until I met my wife and was planning to settle down. I thought I always had a low level of background unhappiness because I wasn't getting the amount of sex I wanted, or sex with the type of woman I wanted. Once I had that covered and still felt depressed I realized it was something more. It took me from like 9/10 libido to a 6/10 libido. Which is still higher than my wife who is probably like a 3 or 4. I don't know if it would have been a good idea to take it in highschool.

I still have immense sympathy for incels/average dudes, because I had to deal with raging, all consuming libido for years, and still had dry spells afterwards. I look at the latter, and think "there but for for the grace of God go I". The Chads (and women) simply don't understand what torture that is, how corrosive it can be to your self esteem, even if most of your peers are in similar straits.

I feel the exact same way. By all metrics I am currently successful. But it certainly felt like it took a long ass time to get there and I was pretty miserable that whole time. I think it is quite likely that I was even viewed as one of those "chads" that just effortlessly got women. People mostly stopped saying things like that because I got unexplainably angry at what they thought was a compliment. No! It wasn't effortless, that was a decade of my life I spent getting good at that! And I was miserable the whole time I was learning! (okay that last one is obviously a lie, there were some fun moments of temporary success)

That pill is a low dose SSRI. I've had some mild depression my whole post pubescent life

Oh boy. I had and have mild to moderate depression since my late teens myself, and SSRIs not only didn't work for me, they gave me ED while not changing my libido. Hell, that probably made my depression worse!

They're not a drug I would in any way recommend for that purpose, as the side effects are too onerous and the effect is too unreliable.

Once I had that covered and still felt depressed I realized it was something more. It took me from like 9/10 libido to a 6/10 libido

I'd say I went from 9/10 to 7/10 simply naturally with age, when getting laid went from a wild fantasy to something important yet mundane. Normalizing something and knowing it's mostly on tap does a great deal to help with the hopeless cravings.

Eh I guess mileage varries.

It was a sudden drop. The more gradual drop from 10 to 9 happened a year before. And now I'd say I'm at like a 5 or 6. So I've seen gradual change.

delted

So you were a depressed teenager, had a grueling ten years, and were still depressed after achieving the socially approved goal. Then you got older, took a pill, settled down, and it got better. Isn’t the obvious conclusion that the aggressive pursuit of sex with women (as opposed to jerking off) was a waste of your time/actively harming you?

Achieving the socially approved goal may have been necessary but not sufficient for the above poster to overcome his depression.

If you replace ‘achieving frequent sex with various women’ with ‘climbing mount everest’ in the story, I don’t think that points to climbing mount everest being necessary but not sufficient to overcome his depression.

A prediction (‘My depression is the result of my "sexual failure", therefore fixing the latter will fix the the former’) was made, acted upon at great cost, and was falsified.

was a waste of your time/actively harming you?

Yes obviously. But jerking off wasn't an alternative.

And the end result has been nice.

As far as pills...the efficacy is not great and it's probably bad medical advice to use them for this purpose, but you're a physician. Surely you are aware of the side effects of SSRIs for some people?

What are you referring to? I'm pretty sure I was the one saying that talking SSRIs to reduce libido is a bad idea.

I was 21 when I lost my virginity. After that I've had a "normal" sex life, which certainly doesn't mean a Chad sex life; one-night stands, weird little quasi-relationships, and finally now 5 years of marriage (pushing towards six) with its assorted ups and downs, along with 2 children.

What I remembered most of all from the terrible-feeling years before losing my virginity was not just horniness, though of course there was that, but the overwhelming wish to just be normal. I think that really is a major component of inceldom and all the assorted cultural quirks; the overbearing belief that you're not normal, you're not doing the normal thing that the society is focused on telling you that every normal person is doing all the time, and you either keep reaching towards that normality any way you can think of or give up and start stewing in your abnormality and hatred towards normies as the ultimate form of cope.

Of course, the infuriating paradox of it all is that if you just want to use sex as a tool for normality, it immediately becomes subconsciously obvious to women that you are not normal and not someone to have sex with, which makes it all the harder. Of course I also remember reading things to this effect during my sexless years and them just making me angrier due to the zen koan nature of it all.

Another point the book makes, which I mentioned before, is that no strategy really seems to pay clear and great dividends

Surely the dividends of self-improvement are just that, self-improvement? If someone is only improving themselves in shallow ways to get girls then perhaps this would be better categorised as fraud. This point is more than a quibble about definitions, as women find the moral qualities (or lack thereof) which motivate men to be attractive or repulsive in themselves.

Lately I’ve greatly improved both my wealth and general status, and yet success has been sorely lacking

Wealth and social status certainly play a part in attraction but perhaps there are certain personality traits people fail to display which makes this all for naught, wealth and social status alone don't make it pleasant to spend hours with someone after all. Tattoo artists don't have much wealth or (outside of being the best of the best) social status, but they get laid a lot as spending hours distracting someone from physical pain while they talk about their life is great empathy training.

Surely the dividends of self-improvement are just that, self-improvement? If someone is only improving themselves in shallow ways to get girls then perhaps this would be better categorised as fraud. This point is more than a quibble about definitions, as women find the moral qualities (or lack thereof) which motivate men to be attractive or repulsive in themselves.

I really think this is a bad/unproductive framing. How exactly is it fraud if the quality of the good is raised, and not just the marketing of it?

If a man, tired of not getting laid, works out a ton, becomes buff and successfully lands a woman, I struggle to believe that most women would consider this a failing as opposed to a guy who works out for either "himself" or because he enjoys it. Either way, they get a buff boyfriend/husband.

Sure, the former might increase the chances that the guy gives up on the effort when he's getting tail and lets himself go, but empirically that does not appear to matter. I can't say the period where I diligently worked out did much for my actual success with women, even if I do think it increased the odds; and men are still motivated by a desire to keep doing what's bringing in the poon.

Further, if the woman doesn't leave the guy after he stops working out, that signals that she derives some degree of positive satisfaction, from revealed preferences. Sure, people regularly stay in relationships they have ended up hating for many reasons, but at that point it's on them for staying.

I really think this is a bad/unproductive framing. How exactly is it fraud if the quality of the good is raised, and not just the marketing of it?

There's no distinction being made between quality of a person (which has inherent value) and marketing is my point. If we judge things solely by the metric of getting women building bigger muscles is just a more effortful alternative to peacocking or practicing pickup lines, marketing and quality are just different strategies geared towards the same end.

Maybe I'm just being a poor decoupler, but in the same way that a Christian would be offended at someone saying that going to Church paid no dividends in their dating life I want to shout 'you're missing the point!'.

Maybe I'm just being a poor decoupler, but in the same way that a Christian would be offended at someone saying that going to Church paid no dividends in their dating life I want to shout 'you're missing the point!'.

Is that person going to church only for dating? If not, well, I'm sure millions of both men and women go there while sincerely religious and expecting to find a like minded partner.

If someone is only improving themselves in shallow ways to get girls then perhaps this would be better categorised as fraud.

"You're only working out, improving your diet & lifestyle, practising your social skills and progressing in your career so that people (including women) will like you more and find you more attractive!"

yeschad.png?

If you're only doing that because you want people to find you more attractive and not because the progress justifies itself I think there would be a problem. Would this stuff be worthwhile even if it didn't get you attention from women? It should be, and you're not going to surpass any heavy lifters if you're relying on a steady increase in female attention for motivation i.e. onlymenaremiring.png.

And how would the progress justify itself? You'll look more attractive i.e. people will find you more attractive. Sure, you may feel more confident, be generally healthier and have improved mental health, but these are ancillary benefits at best. Everyone knows that the purpose of men going to the gym is to look more attractive, and failing to recognise this leads to "I don't wear makeup for guys, I wear makeup to feel good about myself" levels of cope and rationalisation.

And how would the progress justify itself? You'll look more attractive i.e. people will find you more attractive. Sure, you may feel more confident, be generally healthier and have improved mental health, but these are ancillary benefits at best.

Attention from women is also an ancillary benefit (and not necessarily more important than the others you mentioned imo), and something I think could be gotten with much less effort through other means. The gymcel is a real thing and if you're grounding your motivation for lifting on women you're risking disappointment. Unless you take steroids it's going to take at least a year (more like 2-3) and hundreds of hours to get jacked.

I'll expand this to self-improvement in general and say that if something is worth doing it's worth doing even when the ancillary benefits aren't clear, that's how I'm distinguishing shallow from meaningful pursuits. I could try my hand at listing all the external reasons you should focus on fitness but strength is valuable in a way I can't exhaustively articulate, anecdotally I'm getting way more attention from women now than when I was at my strongest but there's still some feeling of loss from no longer pushing the limits of my body.

and failing to recognise this leads to "I don't wear makeup for guys, I wear makeup to feel good about myself" levels of cope and rationalisation.

I'm no feminist but I think it's both. Women do care about beauty for its own sake, this is evolutionarily ingrained in them for its mating advantage but as an internal state the drive for beauty precedes making the connection to attention from men or learning facts about evolution. It also extends beyond the former in the fact that women care about making things look nice which have no connection to male attraction (and might even annoy the men in their life by insisting on beauty at the cost of utility).

A healthy body drives a healthy mind. There is no separation; its all one organism. Being healthy makes you happier. There is much focus on the gym here, but also vastly important is diet.

Those who make folding impossible make resentment inevitable.

Can you elaborate about how some make folding impossible? Are you speaking only about the difficulty of avoiding taxation, or do you posit other ways that opting out, MGTOW-style, is insufficient/impossible?

(As to taxation: I can see some might the on average unequal contributions/disbursements for men and women a source of resentment, but I hardly think this is universal amongst unsuccessful men—consider that at least some are socialist—while plenty of successful men object to taxation on grounds unrelated to the disparate impact between men and women.)

You cannot be honest about it without being judged as a loser.

Yeah, the idea of honorable, celibate life paths was something we lost when we became less religious. I think that (rough ballpark) five or so percent of people aren't good candidates for marriage, relationships, and children. It's like the Army...fifteen percent of people don't have the cognitive horsepower to be Army cooks or janitors. You've got the intellectually disabled, treatment resistant schizophrenia, different kinds of physical disability. Those are often no one's fault, but even so, they aren't great candidates for relationships and may not be able to form mutually beneficial relationships. Then you've got the traumatized, the unattractive, the asexual...every generation is going to have some of these people, and having them become long-haul truck drivers or travel nurses or neurosurgeons who are "too busy to date" doesn't sound like a bad place to park them.

It seems likely that for every step you take forward in self-improvement you will take another two steps back through aging.

Going to push back on this. While you will be hard-pressed trying to find a straight man who finds a 35-year-old woman more attractive than her 22-year-old sister, age is nowhere near as much of a demerit for straight women. If, as was recently argued here, men tend to go for looks while women go for status, it makes sense that women would tend to find older men more attractive than younger men, as they've had additional years to accrue wealth, experience and knowledge. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, as a 50-year-old man is just as capable of impregnating a woman as a 25-year-old man (albeit the former's child is at greater risk of birth defects).

If looking for a one-night stand, women might well go for the dumb broke 22-year-old barman over the smart, ugly 37-year-old hedge fund manager. If looking for a husband? I think it's a very different story. (Redpill/blackpill essentially acknowledge this with the "alpha fucks/beta bucks" framing.)

Here's an article on the phenomenon:

In the study, men’s desirability peaks at age 50. But women’s desirability starts high at age 18 and falls throughout their lifespan.

A graph which is incredibly encouraging for men and incredibly disheartening for women.

... “But I was also surprised to see how flat men’s desirability was over the age distribution,” [Bruch] said. “For men, it peaks around age 40 or 50. Especially in New York.”

Nevertheless, it’s evident the author himself is skeptical. He spends a lengthy section of the book detailing how JBP himself collapsed into a highly dysfunctional and disorganized existence

Reality is not a morality play, it's perfectly possible for someone to vocally endorse the optimal strategy and yet have it fail them (or him fail it).

The benefits of low hanging fruit like working out, good grooming and fashion are so blatantly obvious that one man's failures do not derail them. I'm sure the author doesn't hold Jordan as the sole argument, but I still can't see it being true.

Improvement is the other strategy which deserves a response; and my response is that I’m far from convinced. The few instances in which I’ve had success with women have had an almost random quality to them, and have been seemingly unrelated to any obvious self-improvement project. Lately I’ve greatly improved both my wealth and general status, and yet success has been sorely lacking.

Scott drew attention to a semi-serious analogue to micromorts, micromarriages, as in an action that has a 1/millionth chance of getting you married. I posit that it's obvious that microfucks are a useful concept too, and that while you any individual act of self improvement cannot be guaranteed to lead to getting laid, they tend to add up over time if you're being diligent.

Handsome people are already born with a lot of (micro)fucks to give, but for the rest of us, we have to work to earn them. Very little guarantees getting laid, short of paying for it in cold hard cash, but it's still worth trying.

In my reply to Cjet, I elaborated on why, despite being significantly above average (at least compared to my peers), I have immense sympathy for incels and incel-adjacent people.

As such, while I wouldn't go as far as to call myself a Chad, I'm certainly further on that end of the spectrum than the other. I still have immense sympathy for incels/average dudes, because I had to deal with raging, all consuming libido for years, and still had dry spells afterwards. I look at the latter, and think "there but for for the grace of God go I". The Chads (and women) simply don't understand what torture that is, how corrosive it can be to your self esteem, even if most of your peers are in similar straits.

Frankly, if you’re having trouble with women as a young man – and I speak as a young man who has had much trouble with women – the problem is likely to get worse with age.

Others have already pointed out that women tend to prefer older men, at least in the age range when men are still desperately horny.

Last but not least, a question to open further discussion: what is the optimal strategy, both in general and in more detail (i.e. should you improve, and what aspect of yourself or your dating approach is most fruitful to improve?).

Firstly, you have to at least try at the "improvement" category. Go to the gym, dress better, get a nice haircut.

If you're extremely unlucky, then yes, this may not suffice, but I feel no qualms about endorsing it in general.

You are far less likely to improve things like height/intelligence/charisma. Some of that isn't outright impossible, since you can always do limb lengthening or keep on hitting the field till you brute force a pickup strategy that works. It's simply not productive.

That being said, it really is a numbers game. If you never try you'll never know, and modern men have a degree of shame and fear that is blatantly counterproductive when you don't have to live in a tribe with the same dozen women your entire life, who gossip about your pitiful failure to court them all. Hit on women goddammit!

Finally, avoid the apps, unless you're in the lucky 10% who get all the goods, in which case my advice isn't for you. For the majority of men, it's a painful, soul sucking process that only dents your self-esteem.

I am unusually good at both in-person flirtation and sliding into DMs, but the advice is still true for the average man. Women are far less picky face to face, and you get far more than a fleeting moment of her attention.

That about sums it up when it comes to general purpose advice, everything else must be tailored to your individual needs.

Addendum:

I'm not being facetious, but my (sweet and loving) girlfriend was looking over my shoulder while I write this post (of all the hundreds I've written lately!).

She would like to make the following statements, written by her own hand on my phone:

Do not listen to anything he said. Doesn't apply to most women. If I slide into her DM, don't expect to get anywhere. My boyfriend vastly overestimates his prowess in the matter of flirtation. He is a very nice man, and that is the 1sf and most important thing g. Women have a radar in detecting fake vs real. I was the one who asked him out, yes that does happen, but it was not because of the flirtatious attitude. Tbh, It was painful. Be yourself. Not everyone is suited to everyone. I can assure you, I like him way before he started flirting. Cause I thought we had a genuine connection and I cud talk to him. That is what we want I the end, someone to talk to, make a life with. Had I not liked him before, his flirting wud have been construed as creepy. So, find out what u like in a woman, and stick to that. Don't slide into peoples dm'z. I assure u, that is a full proof way of getting blocked.

Addendum to the addendum:

Thank you sweetie, of course you're right :*

(Quick, she's looking away!)

Ahem, I would like to add another point to my list of general advice.

Do not take dating advice from women.

I was actually the one who started flirting with her weeks before she even noticed, even if she was the one to ask me out on a date and the one who pulled me in for a kiss. Her mom called me handsome the day the two of them first saw me 😉

That's about it, I don't want to get too saccharine haha.

Finally, avoid the apps, unless you're in the lucky 10% who get all the goods, in which case my advice isn't for you. For the majority of men, it's a painful, soul sucking process that only dents your self-esteem.

This is wrong I think. The apps truly are a painful, soul crushing experience. But if you are not very picky they will give you the chance to very quickly practice pitching to women. And there are few things that motivate sticking to the gym more than hour after hour of hard rejection.

Do not listen to anything he said. Doesn't apply to most women. If I slide into her DM, don't expect to get anywhere. My boyfriend vastly overestimates his prowess in the matter of flirtation. He is a very nice man, and that is the 1sf and most important thing g. Women have a radar in detecting fake vs real. I was the one who asked him out, yes that does happen, but it was not because of the flirtatious attitude. Tbh, It was painful. Be yourself. Not everyone is suited to everyone. I can assure you, I like him way before he started flirting. Cause I thought we had a genuine connection and I cud talk to him. That is what we want I the end, someone to talk to, make a life with. Had I not liked him before, his flirting wud have been construed as creepy. So, find out what u like in a woman, and stick to that. Don't slide into peoples dm'z. I assure u, that is a full proof way of getting blocked.

Genuinely awful advice. Women have no such radar and that they think they do it very bad for them.

This is wrong I think. The apps truly are a painful, soul crushing experience. But if you are not very picky they will give you the chance to very quickly practice pitching to women. And there are few things that motivate sticking to the gym more than hour after hour of hard rejection.

Sure, if you want to use them as training, they work fine, but unless you're already so gifted you don't need any advice, you won't be getting much in the way of dates out of them!

Genuinely awful advice. Women have no such radar and that they think they do it very bad for them.

As much as I love her, she, like most women, has little insight into why she likes the things she likes in the realm of courtship.

It does get mildly aggravating when some of them well-intentionedly give advice that might be accepted by naive men, who think that surely words straight from the horse's mouth are of any help when you're trying to ride it.

Sure, if you want to use them as training, they work fine, but unless you're already so gifted you don't need any advice, you won't be getting much in the way of dates out of them!

If you're willing to spend the untold hours I believe practically anyone can at the very least get a match that will respond occasionally and eventually set up at least one coffee date. We're talking many hours here - thousands and thousands of miserable swipes. It worked for me, and the pretty tangible increase in hit-rate as the gym slowly paid its iron dividend gave me a latter I could feel.

It does get mildly aggravating when some of them well-intentionedly give advice that might be accepted by naive men, who think that surely words straight from the horse's mouth are of any help when you're trying to ride it.

It's very striking how bad the advice tends to be and it has caused me to introspect on the advice I give to women about men. I now try to keep my commentary to simpler things and be extra critical of any opinion that could be subconsciously trying to frame male behavior as pro-social. That said, unlike with women society at large is already pretty suspicious of male behavior.

As far as I've seen, men are far less likely to unsolicitedly give such advice to women, though I have no strong opinion on how good that advice would be if they did give it.

I think people, men included, give advice to women about men. Just probably not of the "how do I even get them interested in me" variety. My Fiance's sister is starting college in the fall and I gave advice to her today about how to be careful at parties.

Well I'd say that I don't think men do a bad job in that regard, from what I've seen.

I was more focused on the advice to women about how women should get the men they like category myself.

Hmm. My close female friend told me to stop being so self loathing. This has been helpful. I might have a date this weekend with a thin middle class American woman. Other than that...I don't remember having gotten any garbage tier advice from women, although it is possible I can't tell good stuff from dogshit.

Do not take dating advice from women.

I can't emphasize this point enough. You wouldn’t learn how to cook from a restaurant critic would you? Women are consumers of romance, they don’t produce it. I’d further extend it taking almost any advice at all from women on any subject. I decline to elaborate further due to this board’s civility norms. Instead a story.

I friend of mine had a dog that really wanted to chase cars. He was fenced in well but managed to jump over, so they got a higher fence. The dog then dug under that one so they started tying him to a lead as well as sinking the fence. The dog strained at the lead when vehicles passed, dug ever deeper holes, and maintained it’s single minded focus. One day it worked. The material stress on the lead compounded and it broke, the escalating digging efforts were adequate; he did it, he was free. A particularly obnoxious or chase-worth vehicle was in his sites, going slow. The dog finally caught one and it crushed his head like a grape.

The libido of a young man is a powerful thing, it’s built civilizations and it’s destroyed them. It’s driven men to the highest levels of achievement as well as suicide. Marlon Brando once described it as being chained to a madman. Short of voluntarily becoming a eunuch, men are in a tough situation in our modern world because of it. I have great sympathy.

However, if you think you have problems with women related to not being able to catch one, wait until, like the dog in the story, you do.

The next time you experience an ebb in your libido, try the following thought experiment. Consider a woman you know well and are attracted to. If through some sorcery they were magically transformed into a man but everything else about them remained, their behaviors, attitudes, they way they treat people, their “personality”, work ethic, etc all remained identical to their pre-transformation self. But instead of their attractive female packaging they now male, would you want to be their friend? Is this a man you would engage in cooperative pursuits with? Even want to be around them at all?

This really helped me when I was young and in the throws of my libido. For me the answer was overwhelmingly NO for the vast majority of the women I was attracted to. At the risk of violating this board’s norms against “booing the outgroup” the vast majority of the attractive women I’ve known in my life have been kinda shitty people. Petty, vain, immoral, motivated by a combination of fear of consequences and avarice. Deathly allergic to taking responsibility for any of their negative behavior. A weak internal locus of control. I’m am absolutely not saying all women are like this, but the American white middle class women I’ve spent most of my life around absolutely are, including all of my immediate family (barring one self-actualized aunt). This also describes a good chunk of the men as well. In times of weakness it also described me.

If you have a strong lifelong desire to start a family you have few options here I’m afraid. If you don’t ever desire children its easier. The main point of this rant is to consider more carefully the objects of your desire as much as you can while blinded by the fog of that same desire.

Finally, self-improvement is worth it for the its own sake. Worry about yourself more. Be more selfish. Be healthy. Pursue your goals, career or otherwise. Be ok with occasionally being an asshole. Perversely (or maybe not?) a fit and driven man who doesn’t give a shit about women is attractive to some of them. Often most of them.

If and when you finally do achieve your goal of forming a relationship, like the dog in the story, then do your real problems start.

I find the average Indian man or woman rather vapid and boring, and even attractiveness doesn't seem to have more than a minimal bearing on that.

Maybe it's different in the West, but the closest I get to seeing the kind of insanity most average Americans suffer from is when I accidentally wander into a default sub on reddit.

I would advise making a top one percent income and being charismatic enough for a career in politics. Failing this, either choose lifelong celibacy or decide where you want the ambulances. If the former it helps to take a job that meshes poorly with marriage and family. A truck driver or a neurosurgeon both don't have time to put down roots.

to whom you’re attracted

"A woman to whom you're attracted" is an odd term to use in in a society-wide analysis. Attraction is fundamentally situational - like everything human, it adjusts to its environment. If you were stuck on a desert island with your grandmother, she'd become appealing after a year or two. If you spent a few years surrounded by only supermodels, you'd find something unappealing about many of them.

Consider - a quarter of America is obese. Of all the very fat, ugly men who date very fat, ugly women - nothing could biologically make you like fat women just because you're fat, if you could go after models you'd find women as viscerally disgusting as I do. But, for the most part, fat people manage to get it up and desire sex with each other. People adapt.

This isn't really a cause of sexlessness or dating woes, though. And I don't think sexlessness is that big of a problem anyway. To whatever extent it does exist, the cause is probably a combination of physical proximity not happening on the internet, pornography, and whatever other right-wing social ideas you want to add to that.

Fraud

How is pickup artistry fraud or manipulation? Everyone, admit it or not, both consciously and instinctively, practice and train their speech and behavior to get the partners they desire. PUA stuff is kinda just an explicit and well-done version of that. Which doesn't mean you have to like the consequences, but it's not any more 'manipulation' than makeup or 'asking a friend what you should text'. Semi-deceptive or semi-adversarial techniques aimed at getting sex or a better wife aren't new features of the 21st century, or even modernity.

How is pickup artistry fraud or manipulation?

Can't speak for all PUAs, but Julien Blanc specifically advised lonely men to falsely claim that their father had recently died in hopes of securing a pity fuck. Numerous women shared screenshots of him trying this exact strategy on them, months apart.

The entire concept of pursuing a "pity fuck" contradicts the fundamentals of PU Artistry.

Maybe so, but that doesn't mean that certain professional pickup artists aren't above suggesting it as a strategy.

I was pretty disgusted when I read about it (and not just it's because cheap, deceitful and manipulative). Surely when men are laying out that much money for a seminar, they expect better advice than "lie to women so they'll feel sorry for you".

I know this forum is more focused on a specific cohort (intelligent, financially successful, often romantically not so much) but I'm approaching this issue from a different angle - a family member who is a classic disabled NEET in his early 30s. Near the bottom of the desirability totem pole, the question of 'fold' vs 'improve' has to contend with the latter having a very significant chance of being very costly in rime & effort and bearing absolutely zero fruit. This is where a lot of 'resent' cases come from, (though not all) but luckily that doesnt seem to be a major factor for now.

The question in these cases is, at what point is it rational to cut one's losses?

How far has your family member dropped their standards when it comes to an acceptable mate?

Where does he want the ambulances? I'm not entirely clear if a relationship with the type of person he can attract as he is would be good for anyone concerned. Maybe it would be.

at what point is it rational to cut one's losses?

The thing about 'improve' is that it's generally the right decision even if your chance of finding a mate is 0. It's just that it's also by far the hardest option, and finding a romantic partner is good motivation to pick the hard road.

I would say instead that 'improve' efforts should be realistic, which means focusing on foundational things like getting a job and maintaining a stable emotional state before trying to start a family.

Yeah. Unless he gets maimed from a weightlifting accident or something he's going to be better off from self improvement.

In another type of society ignoring your sexual desire and doing something else might be workable as a last resort, but in a modern welfare state it is for many reasons a humiliating and degrading proposal. It’s well-known that women (at least in Europe) receive far more money from the state through welfare, maternity care and health care than they pay in tax, and that means all tax-paying men inevitably support women with their hard work.

I'm sure Western societies are already close to the point where women pay more than 50% of all taxes.

EDIT: looking back I think it's easy to interpret this comment as feminist or pro-feminist. It was never intended as such.

No, I’m pretty sure that’s closer to 35% (all else being equal); taxes are progressive and they keep claiming they only make 80-85% as much as men do, so we should expect them to contribute correspondingly less to the public coffers.

The wage gap originating from structural sexism is just a claim, nothing more. As far as I can tell, the statistics do not prove it, and judging by current trends in female participation in the workforce and education, I think the time is near when women won't be net tax consumers anymore. I'm not claiming that they will generally like this, of course, but that's another subject. The general situation we'll be in is a somewhat African-style quasi-matriarchy, where even the last vestiges of Christian patriarchy will be gone.

I increasingly believe that politics, rather most people's political views, is mostly just a function of culture. It's all just a function of the cultural lens. Perspective and values don't make a distinction between the political and cultural realm. Every generation is characterized by a specific dominant cultural lens that is unique in a. what it identifies to be a problem and b. the solutions it prescribes as a response to those problems (generally just meaning the ideal state of existence, which is generally just the inverse of what the state created by the problems is, so ultimately just meaning the norms that are implied and advocated for by the cultural lens). Political views are simply just the attempt at constructing the reality that culture upholds as the ideal; culture is the architect and politics is the builder. That's why when you consume entertainment, comedy in particular, from previous generations it isn't as enjoyable: because culture, which entertainment plays a key role in (in terms of its ability to convey and construct norms), is highly contextual.

But every generation thinks they have arrived at the correct perception of things, and as a corollary they have arrived at the correct view of how things should be. But when this perspective is implemented it always falls short and its shortcomings are evidenced by the fact that the implementation doesn't achieve what its supporters expect for it to achieve. That is what moves thought: the dialectic, the implementation of the counterpoint that reveals the excesses of the counterpoint which eventually necessitates a reversion to a midpoint that seeks to preserve the merit of both the status quo and the counterpoint. It's this constant movement through the dialectic that forces thought and perception to evolve, which is itself powered by shifting perspectives which are rooted in realizing the limited merit of the previously implemented perspective but also that the world which is being perceived is constantly changing (i.e. there are two types of movement: movement within the dialectic and movement of the centerpoint of the dialectic, or what substance the dialectic framework is meant to address). I often wonder if the world had just stopped changing, would we have eventually arrived at a perspective that was objectively supreme, correct, and accepted? Would thousands of years of evolution of thought, with its ability to shape the subject of evolution slowly to be a perfect response to that which it is evolving in response to, eventually have brought us to a cultural lens that is a perfect understanding of how the world is and should be, and, further, would it have eventually brought us to a world that is objectively perfect? But I guess to get back to the point the reason I think we never arrive at that perfect solution is that the focus of this dialectic movement is changing. It's like you're constructing a car optimized to drive on roads, but the roads keep changing.

There is a level lower than culture: material reality. Unlike less intelligent beings, humans can adapt quickly to a new ecosystem by learning traits that are advantageous in that ecosystem. We don't have to wait for multiple generations for small changes in behaviour, we can develop a culture in a company in a matter of weeks. A national culture can evolve in centuries, while the corresponding differences would take at least three orders of magnitude longer if they were genetic.

Culture changes as the ecosystem changes and new cultural adaptations arise. These changes can be due to cultural changes as well as the material reality changing. Much of the cultural change we have seen in the past decades has happened in the parts of the world that consume the most oil. The social upheaval of the past century is less grounded in cultural innovation and more grounded in the ecosystem being fundamentally altered by fossil fuels. Hyperindividualism makes sense when mortality salients are largely gone. When there is enough material excess for people not to have to rely on social networks in order to get by the selection becomes a function of standing out in the crowd.

The Afghan culture is a function of small groups of isolated people trying to survive in a resource constrained environment.

Climates change, resources become more or less scarce, pandemics, wars and other factors will change the ecosystem. I do agree with human cultural change being a major driving factor but the world around us has changed profoundly.

if you re read the second paragraph I think you’ll see we agree that it’s a combo of cultural and external change

The civil rights law imposed the frankly retarded[see image, it's a page from James Burnham's book on his experiences in NYC academia in 1930s] culture of 'some' whites -in this case nominally Christian east coast new yorkers on the entirety of the United States.

Yes, politics is downstream of culture, but political power allows a culture to impose itself on others.

It's incorrect to say 'politics' is purely downstream from culture. The culture of the US was irreversibly made worse by the Civil Rights Act which allowed activists to use the political power of the federal government to change culture throught the country.

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From the 1964 "Suicide of the West" by James Burnham. Which ends with this black pill:

If a decisive change comes, if the contraction of the past fifty years should cease and be reversed, then the ideology of liberalism, deprived of its primary function, will fade away, like those feverish dreams of the ill man who, passing the crisis of his disease, finds he is not dying after all. There are a few small signs, here and there, that liberalism may already have started fading. Perhaps this book is one of them.

How’s that working out for him?

I’d be interested in reading more about how that book held up.

I would argue that both are often preceded by philosophy. Why do we believe that equality is even a social good, or that the common man should ever have a voice? For tens of thousands of years prior to the enlightenment, the very idea was mocked. You were born into a social position and there you stayed. It was simply expected that if you were the child of a king that alone gave you legitimacy as the ruler of your people. If you were the child of a peasant farmer, it was a waste to teach you to read because you were destined to be a farmer on some lord’s land. Nobody ever thought about it or if they did, they came to the conclusion that this simply should be.

Likewise we understand the universe in a rational empirical way. For most of human history, it wasn’t so. The universe was run by some kind of spirits and that’s why things are as they are. That tower fell? God caused it.

And later on politics tries to enact things that philosophy has taught. We believe in equality, so we better do something because it’s not happening on its own.

You were born into a social position and there you stayed.

I believe social mobility by and large hasn't changed much, or at all between the middle ages and now.

I suspect you've been psyopped by 'the Enlightenment', the age responsible for many myths such as 'medieval Europeans thought the Earth was flat', 'people didn't wash in the middle ages' etc.

The universe was run by some kind of spirits

Did Aristotle think so? I don't believe that to be true. So it's unlikely that such was a common belief among educated people in Europe in the past 2000 years.

For tens of thousands of years prior

Hunter gatherers and such were and are very egalitarian.

It was the increase in population density and states that created any inequality in status. So, at most there may have been ~6000 years of people living in agricultural societies, most of which weren't really that unequal being really primitive.

In general I have a very low opinion of any piece of commentary that consists of "look at how much they hate you/us". You see it in a much more mainstream way on the US left re. certain recent SCOTUS decisions too. It's an embarrassing way to act, a facile way of trying to drum up rage and aggression and to radicalize your side. Hatred is not uncommon in politics, but it seems to me that it is often less of a motivation than the opposing faction expects.

I once had an internet argument with someone who argued that Mugabe's land expropriation had been motivated by a hatred of whites. I replied that having done quite a bit of business in Zimbabwe, including with white Zimbabweans who still run many major corporations and are quite prominent in business in Harare, I didn't think that seemed to be the case, and had never noticed much racial animus toward whites by blacks in the country. White farm owners were targeted because they were a small minority that owned a lot of land the government wanted to redistribute to veteran soldiers to try to avoid a civil war; whites were the unfortunate victims of that policy. I don't think most ordinary Germans hated Jews in 1939, even though my grandmother and her parents fled the Holocaust and many members of my extended family died in it; in her mid-90s today, she doesn't have any hatred for Germans and enjoyed speaking German on her many vacations there and to Switzerland.

'They hate us, so I will hate them' is the eternally flawed flipside to the 'mistake theory' fallacy, where everyone in the world is just a temporarily embarrassed western liberal with the same ideals but different views on execution. In truth, they usually don't hate you, they're just different to you. And they'll screw you over to save themselves, which is unfortunately true of almost all people, individually and in groups.

I replied that having done quite a bit of business in Zimbabwe, including with white Zimbabweans who still run many major corporations and are quite prominent in business in Harare, I didn't think that seemed to be the case, and had never noticed much racial animus toward whites by blacks in the country.

...and did they counter-argue the pretty obvious selection bias given your context and who you were working with specifically, i.e. the surviving winners and those who had monetary incentives to put you at ease?

I don't think your argument supports what you think it does. The point of 'the collective hates [X]' isn't that every member of the collective shares the same vibe of the group, an objection which itself would be a form of fallacy, but that the group effects is dominated by those who do. Most ordinary Germans may well not have hated Jews in 1939, but they were also onboard with a regime that absolutely did, hence why so much of German post-war political identity had to confront the 'I wasn't directly involved, and thus not my issue' collective identify in order to rehabilite a collective German political identity.

Likewise, the successful surviving white business men you met who were willing to work amiably with you may not have had significant expeirences with those who shared a regime stance... but the white businessmen were, by definition, the survivors who made accommodations and allies and friendships with/within the regime to protect themselves. The ones who didn't- the ones who would have been dispossesed out of spite- wouldn't still be in business for you to deal with.

The point is that Mugabe was more like Carl Schmitt than he was like Hitler. Many whites, including an extremely racist Australian I know who met him and knew him quite well, think he didn’t hate white people. Mugabe did not act against whites for the entire first 20 years of his presidency. And I think, by the way, that my theory is borne out in practice. The far right, as linked by OP, believe American blacks - by and large - have a deep and unrelenting hatred for American whites. Do you agree? I don’t. I don’t think most black Americans care much at all about American whites. That, and nothing more, was my point.

What in your estimation is the percent of black Americans have white people?

He doesn't need to personally hate white people in order for them to be a convenient whipping boy -- see, uh -- J Edgar Hoover springs to mind?

But if somebody acts as though they hate you for other reasons, is it really worth parsing out the difference between the people who actually hate you and the ones that are only pretending to be retarded racist?

The point is that Mugabe was more like Carl Schmitt than he was like Hitler.

Well, obviously, but the scope of people who have both the animosity and the means to attempt genocide are very narrow. This is a bar so low the only reason it's not a tripping hazard is the straw.

The point you were challenged on was that you weren't in a position to hear the contrary experiences of others who might have differed from your business partners, who had financial incentives to assure you that you could make good money with/for them.

Many whites, including an extremely racist Australian I know who met him and knew him quite well, think he didn’t hate white people.

You're conflating the individual for the group, which was the same error with your Nazi metaphor. Just as members at the bottom of a faction may not share the vehemence of a faction, but it's still fair to characterize the faction in a way, this is also true for the people at the top of a faction. Leaders may not believe a certain narrative, but can also be comfortable co-existing with it / leveraging the people who do / the general complicity of not challenging an unjust system they partake of.

Mugabe did not act against whites for the entire first 20 years of his presidency.

Aside from not really being relevant to changes over time (Mugabe not having static policies over 30 years implies he had changing opinions, not that he never had certain opinions), the first 20 years of Mugabe's presidency were more or less the American unipolar/western hyper-power period, which included multiple American interventions in Africa, while the last 10 years coincided with both the post-American/western low of the financial crisis and pre-ISIS/post-Iraq... both of which offered opportunity and basis for movements to arise blaming nebulous white-west types as scapegoats.

And I think, by the way, that my theory is borne out in practice. The far right, as linked by OP, believe American blacks - by and large - have a deep and unrelenting hatred for American whites. Do you agree? I don’t.

Am I expected to deny the OP before or after I deny beating my spouse?

I don’t think most black Americans care much at all about American whites. That, and nothing more, was my point.

And your supporting argument of personal experiences in Zimbabwe don't support this point, and was not immune to challenge on grounds of you self-selecting the narratives that would deny an issue if there had been one.

People whose jobs it is to convince white people, or people with many white bosses and coworkers, to invest money in a place are typically not going to tell said white people that their money is more likely to be stolen on account of them being white.

they're just different to you

Did you mean to say that they're indifferent?

And they'll screw you over to save themselves, which is unfortunately true of almost all people, individually and in groups.

White people in shambles, bless their hearts 🙏. What negative in-group preference does to a mf. But since they've been nothing but nice to me, I return the favor by doing my best to warn them about the non model minorities, while not biting the hand that feeds.

I don’t have negative in-group preference at all, I just think that outright hatred is less common as political motivation than people think. I also think that ‘mistake theory’ is broadly wrong (and generally vaguely western supremacist, for what it’s worth), but I think a comprehensive understanding of ‘conflict theory’ suggests that conflict is usually a result of expediency rather than hatred.

I did mean difference.

Different peoples have different cultures, identities, interests. They are usually fine with others as long as their own interests are not threatened. This is the best and most full argument against immigration (and one I agree with). But hatred is too strong a conclusion to draw from it. Difference is enough.

Plato would likely argue that an intellectualized interpretation of art should have no influence on whether art is permissible. The purpose of art is to better the mind and soul of the median viewer, the citizen. If the art fails to do this, it ought to be banned. The public viewer is not going to over-intellectualize the art, but come away with an essentially intuitive understanding of what is happening. Peterson’s art is degenerate, and has no good in it whatsoever for a citizen of Plato’s Republic, for these reasons:

  1. The viewer just saw an ugly and violent scene, but with no practical and memorable warning to his own conduct, and with no cathartic release of emotion. In other words, the scene promotes stress but with no prosocial or beneficial emotion or consequent. So, you’ve just made a common person stressed for no reason.

  2. Not only have you wantonly stressed the viewer, but you’ve done this when he has expected something quite the opposite, and you’ve taken the spot of something that could otherwise have been very beneficial to the median citizen.

I find the question of what is beneficial and what is degenerate art easy to answer, it just requiews reasoning about the implications of the exposure. Let’s consider It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s a stressful movie with some tragic elements, but the stresses act as a warning to your practical conduct in world affairs. This will increase the chance of living a wonderful life in the future. Let’s consider the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. A true tragedy with a fate of everlasting torture! What could be the benefit? Well, to induce a beneficial fear. Let’s consider a Clockwork Orange. Does it condone violence? Yes, and perhaps it does this too well — but it asks the viewer the important question of whether we ought to modify behavior using top-down conditioning (apropos!). How about, hmm, a Wes Anderson movie? If there are beautiful shots and scenes that sooth a person and inspire someone to live a more wholesome life, it is good. And so on. What would be banned? A show like Ozark that is a kind of “stress porn” stimulator but with no discernible practical takeaway to your life. A show like Kardashian’s which reduces sum total happiness among women. Fast and Furious movies. And so on.

The Peterson work they picked to go underneath the eifel tower is not one of the violent ones. It's based on some 1400's Italian book where a lovers kiss wakes someone from eternal slumber. If you don't project ideas of racialized dominance on the stylized white and black figures it's a sort of romantic piece with people dancing around the central couple.

The violent ones are shown in galleries to precisely the sort of person likely to develop an overly intellectual view of art.

This author has clearly never considered that this minimalist and highly symbolic artwork (by the commenter’s own admission) might not be depicting the different colors of people literally. The black men and the white men may or may not be blacks and whites; they could very well be the darker halves and lighter halves of a shared human nature ... What this means for the cultural Platonists is that even if we are not libertarians (as I am not), we still ought to act as if we are civic libertarians on most matters that fall outside our realm of expertise, and even some matters that we do know a fair deal about.

A friend of mine is hugely into art, has an MFA and has worked at NYC galleries. We were touring some galleries once, looking at some modern art sculpture that some high concept title and description on it ... but it kind of looked like poop. I asked him, "Do you think the artist knows it looks like poop?" He replied: "Of course, that's part of the game." And then later I pointed out one that looked phallic, and my friend said "of course the artist intended that."

The grug brain / midwit / topwit meme really comes to mind here...

Modern artists seem to be addicted to trolling. Telling people who point out the obvious, intuitive message of some piece of art that they have a dirty mind and they are simply not sophisticated enough is part of the trolling. I don't think the artist is propagandizing in favor of white genocide -- but rather he is probably getting a private chuckle from watching all the sophisticated, effete, white male art critics who will praise the artwork and its "symoblisms of unity" while studiously avoiding saying the blatantly obvious.

There is no reason to reward this trolling with display in public areas. As /u/coffee_enjoyer points out, this "art" does not educate us, does not spiritually uplift us, does not display some amazing abilities of craftsmanship so there is no reason to give it any respect at all. The mural should be replaced by something better.

I lost all faith in the interpretation of 'art' by others due to this sort of trolling. It just ceased to be worth my time beyond my own personal judgment and enjoyment.

For a personal anecdote, the first time I came across this idea of trolling was when an artist friend of mine was trying to get funding for an orchestra to play the Jaws theme at one of the most popular beaches in our city as part of a larger display. Once you've seen behind the curtain, it's impossible to unsee it.

Cleon Peterson is a leftist creep and makes it plainly obvious in his work. If you saw his 'art' on the wall of someone's house, you would immediately assume they're part of some villainous organization, or that they want to look like a villain.

Go look through his Artsy page: https://www.artsy.net/artist/cleon-peterson

It's pretty clear he hates the USA (Destroy America), Donald Trump (Stop the Virus, Useless Idiot and about 1/10th of his portfolio), racists (Practice Intolerance). There's not an apolitical bone in his body. I challenge anyone to tell me that they've looked through 4 or 5 pages of his work and believe he could be altright.

Say I made a painting of a long-nosed, weaselly, greasy, fat, lecherous bastard clutching onto coins being hung from a lamp-post by some stern-faced Teutonic workers - people would quite reasonably assume it was aimed against Jews and that I was a Nazi. I might protest that it was really about destroying the values of greed with hard work - that it was just timeless symbolism. Yet it's pretty obvious that it's not just about that. Images have meaning. Ideas have meaning.

If you make a bunch of paintings about brutish, Uruk-Hai looking blacks slaughtering whites, then people are going to make perfectly reasonable assumptions about the implied meaning, based on context and the clear slant of the artist.

Is this to say that you actually believe the interpretation in OP's first link, that is, that the artist (1) intended the literal racial interpretation and (2) believes that such a future is desirable? The "Uruk-Hai looking" figures are intended as the protagonists? Can you think of any historical example where a political group depicted themselves or their allies in such a fashion, without the slightest connotation of righteousness, beauty or heroism, or do you believe that your outgroup is actually the most morally and aesthetically alien group of humans to have existed on the historical record?

Is this to say that you actually believe the interpretation in OP's first link, that is, that the artist (1) intended the literal racial interpretation and (2) believes that such a future is desirable? The "Uruk-Hai looking" figures are intended as the protagonists?

I don't believe they're intended as the protagonists per se. You were looking for a historical example, so let's look at some ancient Roman art - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Tunisia-3363_-_Amphitheatre_Spectacle.jpg

People making art like this are not identifying with the beast - the protagonist is actually the observer, who is seeing a savage animal painfully kill, torture and degrade their enemies. Cleon himself isn't actually black either, which isn't what you would expect if the black figures were meant to be the protagonists as you describe... but it does match up with the reading that these white figures are his outgroup, and his art is just glorifying the dispossession, dismemberment and raping of his outgroup in the manner that he believes they would find the most distressing.

that the artist (1) intended the literal racial interpretation and (2) believes that such a future is desirable?

Well he couldn't possibly have missed it, it's pretty damn obvious. Contra OP's suggestion that Mr Peterson is apolitical, he's clearly aware of and makes obvious use of political imagery. A quick glance through his portfolio reveals that. A quick glance at the titles of his paintings reveals that.

Motte: Timeless representation of power dynamics and authoritarian violence with caustic debauchery in a revealing display of...

Bailey/What's In Front of Your Lying Eyes: Destroy America, kill Trump, kill racists, the police are oppressive, democracy is a joke, orgies of violence with the strong and obvious implication of whites being killed en masse.

Context is key. If you look at someone's portfolio and just see stuff like this then sure, you could say he might be far right. There is that whole day of the rope meme after all: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/cleon-peterson-absolute-power-7

Or if his portfolio is all stuff like this then sure, he might be a centrist: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/cleon-peterson-what-have-we-lost

But that's not predominantly what Mr Peterson produces, I've looked through his work and it's pretty clear! Didn't you have to go through English in secondary education, where they'd teach you how to find hidden meaning from far less obvious texts. Robert Frost's Fire and Ice for instance, I was taught that it actually had reference to future world wars which might be fought over hot emotions like desire, or stem from a chilling lack of care for the plight of others, that inaction might doom the world. People read in ridiculously far to hidden meaning in poems and art, yet we're not allowed to take what's immediately obvious from Mr Peterson's portfolio? It all but drips malevolence.

Can you think of any historical example where a political group depicted themselves or their allies in such a fashion, without the slightest connotation of righteousness, beauty or heroism

I can think of many actually. It's a very common thing in warfare and other pursuits where it's in your interest to be seen as a savage with no regard for decency.

If you want a recent one consider Russians depicting themselves as Orks. If you want an older one, consider Pirates.

But interestingly in the particular example we're seeing here (modern leftist ideological art), there is an ideological reason for it, which is the explicit deconstruction of those things you list: beauty, righteousness and heroism. Those are all oppressive norms of whiteness that must be abolished. And instead we must "center" "ugly bodies" and "black bodies".

As far as I can tell the original video is no longer online.

An unofficial reupload on youtube exists. I wonder if Europeans were similarly offended when they discovered that people in African and Asian art look more like natives than Europeans.

it's a peculiar sort of chauvinism.

And given the apparent racial overtones of the art, who’s to say that Peterson isn’t a rather extreme member of the Alt-Right, rather than a progressive leftist, and is trying to depict blacks as vicious barbarians that must either be evicted or destroyed?

Contra

I'm not going to dispute that Peterson is a leftist,

From here it looks like you were either purposely trying to deceive people here, or are so stupid and incompetent that you cannot be bothered to spend ten seconds looking at an artist's body of work before trying to write intelligently about the topic. I don't want either of those to be the case so I'd really like to hear a good explanation for why you think this is acceptable behaviour in a conversation (not trying to backseat mod or anything, but if somebody did this to me in a real conversation I'd be seriously offended and want to stop talking to them).

The original comment presents an argument for why the paintings can be perceived through either a far left or far right lens.

This argument exists because you are being deceptive about the artist behind them. You actively called him "apolitical" - again, you were actively lying in order to bolster your argument, in the same way I would be if I took one of those dumb Trump NFTs depicting him as a superhero and said "Oh, we can't really be sure of the original artist's beliefs - you could interpret this from a left wing OR right wing perspective!".

However, in both comments, what I'm saying is that's it's irrelevant what Peterson actually believes

You were the one who claimed that he was apolitical, so you very clearly thought that what he believed was actually relevant, otherwise you would not have brought it up.

(and for the record I don't think his intention is to depict black people slaughtering white people because he hates whites or something

My reading is that this work is as shallow as it appears to be on the surface - a depiction of his outgroup (right wing/flyover white people) being humiliated and tortured in the way that he thinks they would find most distressing (racial violence from THEIR outgroup). When you look at the piece in the context of the rest of his work, the most obvious interpretation seems all the stronger to make.

You might want to look at a broader range of his stuff. See what I wrote here. He is certainly not apolitical, but I do not think that the idea that his work is meant to depict "his outgroup (right wing/flyover white people) being humiliated and tortured in the way that he thinks they would find most distressing (racial violence from THEIR outgroup)" holds up.

From here it looks like you were either purposely trying to deceive people here, or are so stupid and incompetent that you cannot be bothered to spend ten seconds looking at an artist's body of work before trying to write intelligently about the topic.

"I don't want either of those to be the case" is not enough of a disclaimer for throwing a line like this. Please be less antagonistic even if you think someone is being disingenuous.

I don't understand why the great grandparent post of the chain did not already invite a moderator response. Do you consider referring to public figures as "(outgroup) creep[s]" to be within the rules, conducive to maintaining a good tone of debate here or at all inviting (outgroup) to participate, or do you think there are some extenuating circumstances here that justify it in this particular case? As childish as the impulse is, I'm really finding myself wishing I could go around referring to moderately respected figures on the other side as "rightist creeps" until I find out directly, but I presume that the only thing that would happen would be downvotes and outpourings of organic hostility that would make any modhat warnings on top of them superfluous in broadcasting how one is now okay around here but not the other.

Would you be bothered if Ranger had just called him a regular creep and a shitty, hateful artist, rather than specifying the group identification of the creepiness?

I would consider it bad, but not bad in a way that specifically infringes on the goals of this forum like the political group qualification does. Similarly, it surely would make a difference if someone were called a "Jewish creep" (and probably draw much more mod attention, as they still seem to be interested in keeping the forum from pushing away anyone outside of the "JQ right").

Trump

I don't think those are good either, but well. It's already been the case for quite a while that the more intellectual right wingers want to lower Trump's status so as to move on to a better strategy, explaining why organic opposition to anti-Trump posting is lower. Finally, the group identifier really is doing a lot of work. (Compare calling Epstein a "creep" to calling him a "Jewish creep".)

One is just denigrating the person; the other one is suggesting that the imputed negative qualities are related to, characteristic of or even a consequence of being a member of the group in question.

Do you consider referring to public figures as "(outgroup) creep[s]" to be within the rules, conducive to maintaining a good tone of debate here or at all inviting (outgroup) to participate, or do you think there are some extenuating circumstances here that justify it in this particular case?

Generally speaking, we'd prefer people not just throw insults, but public figures are more or less fair game as long as there is some substance to the post and not just ranting about how much you hate Trump or Biden or Cleon Petersen. But yes, if you were complaining about, say, right-wing media and called Matt Walsh a "fascist creep," you'd probably get downvoted, but you would not be modded for that alone.

Ugh. I don't think this is a good interpretation of the rules (and I think I explained in a parallel post why I think that). Allowing this sort of insult adds nothing to the discourse, raises the temperature and very likely turns away people in a way that reinforces any existing ideological slant as it simply allows dominant majorities to assert their dominance. Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part but I think we used to be much stricter about that sort of thing, which, yes, resulted in a constant low rumble of discontent -- but it's not like even CWR, which embodied the "we will not stifle your ability to express your righteous feelings" approach and predictably listed right until it capsized for it, didn't have the same amount of malcontents for whom even the little rules that were still enforced were too much.

On that matter, how would you feel about "Jewish creeps"? (I'm now noticing to my dismay that my phone's predictive keyboard app has already learned to suggest the second after the first thanks to this subthread.)

Ugh. I don't think this is a good interpretation of the rules

If you can persuade Zorba we should crack down on insulting public figures, we'll do that, but generally speaking, we've never modded someone just for being mean to celebrities and politicians. Only if their entire post is a screed about Person I Hate or general booing. Frankly, I am not willing to go through an election season trying to enforce "charity" towards all political candidates. "Trump is a big orange fat-ass!" is a pretty easy comment to mod because it's low effort and inflammatory for no good purpose, but IIRC you (or someone else) wanted me to mod someone for calling Kamala Harris a "weak candidate." Come on.

On that matter, how would you feel about "Jewish creeps"

The rules against making derogatory generalizations about a broad group of people (which includes posters here) covers that.

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I don't think the artist is alt-right, but I do think there is an interesting parallel with Nazi propaganda... take this 1932 propaganda poster titled The Negro-isation of France in 100 years, captioned "the last non-colored French form the main attraction of the Paris Zoo"- there's a similar aesthetic with Peterson with the predatory black figures looming over the white people. This Nazi poster and Peterson's work are both interesting to review in context with the current race riots in France, although I do not for a second believe Peterson has the same interpretation of this as the Nazis.

Yes, it's a pretty funny and thought-provoking image really. Black people in it represent competent, essentially Western population, the neo-French (despite crude physiognomy); the legacy French are reduced to smug monkeys thoughtlessly going through the motions, grooming in their effete manner. Unpleasant as it might be for some, it's very different from your average modern day HBD-informed racist's idea that White people are superior on account of their cognitive capacity and affinity for civilized behavior; that they basically deserve higher status for some contingent merits. Assuming that Blacks surpass whites in those regards, would that image even feel bad for an average believer in the République? Or would he go «eh, why not»?

I wonder how we should understand the author's intent and conception of good and evil.

One could say that the European far-right of the 1930s feared humiliation primarily in front of other Europeans, whereas those of the 2020s fear destitution and powerlessness at the hands of the other. The first is about a kind of racial cuckolding (maybe literally, given Nazi obsession with the 'rhineland bastards' etc), the second is the direct fear of becoming destitute, irrelevant, or a victimized minority. I do think a lot of European ethnat rhetoric is strongly influenced by postcolonial Said type discourse and by the experiences of decolonization.

Interesting when it comes to the history of German racial relations is the Reichstag's interracial marriage debate of 1912. They legalized it (or kept it legal, rather) in part because the social democrats showed the parliament photographs of pretty native Pacific Islander and Southwest African girls and even the centrists agreed they were as attractive as German women, and therefore acceptable.

They legalized it (or kept it legal, rather) in part because the social democrats showed the parliament photographs of pretty native Pacific Islander and Southwest African girls and even the centrists agreed they were as attractive as German women, and therefore acceptable.

These are the real conversations we need to be having.

As an aside I'm currently reading a more recent-ish history of the Bounty mutiny and am being reminded at how devastating Pacific Islander women are to the underpinnings of European civilization.

your average modern day HBD-informed racist's idea that White people are superior on account of their cognitive capacity and affinity for civilized behavior; that they basically deserve higher status for some contingent merits.

I don't think this is what HBD racists are saying. And if they are saying this, it is because they are trying to distract themselves from the underlying issue, which is that smaller weaker people are afraid on a physical material level of bigger stronger people who are more prone to aggression and violence. Whites and Asians don't "deserve" higher status on contingent merits because they're smarter, whites and Asians "deserve" higher status in society because when you get in the woods the strongest man wins. It's better to try to live in a world where we can have nicer things than simply a brute force competition, all the time, because then you don't have society, you just have the horror of nature which is the very thing society is trying to protect us from to begin with.

Whites are about as big and strong as Blacks and bigger and stronger than Arabs (e.g. Algerians in France), pervasive cuckold fantasies about muh barbarian vigor notwithstanding. This is evident from racial composition in the upper rungs of combat sports.

Asians really are worse off though.

(Freedom of speech.jpg)

Asians really are worse off though.

Kung-fucels in tatters right now. Even as a distant observer, it's funny how the harsh objective crucible of MMA has deflated the mystique of traditional Asian martial arts.

Traditional tai-chi masters are indeed in shambles from MMA.

On the other hand, Muay Thai has been proven to be effective fighting style (excuse the dramatic narrator).

This video is of showbox in 1988 between the top American Kickboxer and a Muay Thai fighter using limited rules preventing elbowing, throwing, grabs, and limiting below-waist hits to a low kick. The kickboxer gets kicked in the leg so many times he starts dodging and running around at 5:50, and ends up carried away in a stretcher.

MMA rules allow lowkicks and elbows in some positions. Fighters study techniques derived from Muay Thai, along with other lineages like Greco-roman wrestling and Juijitsu. And "MMA style" is just whatever works in the ring's rules.

Quoting https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/

An analogy: naturopaths like to use the term “western medicine” to refer to the evidence-based medicine of drugs and surgeries you would get at your local hospital. They contrast this with traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine, which it has somewhat replaced, apparently a symptom of the “westernization” of Chinese and Indian societies.

But “western medicine” is just medicine that works. It happens to be western because the West had a technological head start, and so discovered most of the medicine that works first. But there’s nothing culturally western about it; there’s nothing Christian or Greco-Roman about using penicillin to deal with a bacterial infection. Indeed, “western medicine” replaced the traditional medicine of Europe – Hippocrates’ four humors – before it started threatening the traditional medicines of China or India. So-called “western medicine” is an inhuman perfect construct from beyond the void, summoned by Westerners, which ate traditional Western medicine first and is now proceeding to eat the rest of the world.

Would MMA allow all the techniques taught in Kung Fu though? I don't think so.

I don't know enough to comment, but I was under the impression that pretty much anything goes in MMA except for kicking the balls and scratching out eyes and biting. Could very well be wrong!

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The marginal techniques like eye gouging, finger breaking, blows to the back of the head, soccer kicks to the head of a downed opponent, etc. Do nothing to prove hypothetical kung fu superiority.

The better fighter will be in a better position to gouge your eyes and to prevent his from being gouged.

It seems pretty obvious from observation of sport that Whites and Blacks are bad units of analysis.

The average of all whites and all Blacks is meaningless, all the outlier athletes come from small sub populations.

Yeah, this is an interesting one. What was that Scott Alexander concept, a scissor statement?

The artist seems to generally give a huge range of his figures the same kind of face no matter what role they are playing in the paintings.

Both his Mueller and his Trump in this one have the same kind of eyes and mouth as the supposed savage blacks in the other paintings, which makes it less likely that the black figures in the other ones are supposed to be ethnic Africans.

The black figures here and here pretty clearly are meant to be representations of an American police state, not of virtuous ethnic Africans.

Then there's stuff like this where aggressors and victimized look the same.

Ancient Greek vase painting, with its sharp outlines, exaggerated human figures, and black/red/white color fills, has a heavy influence on his stuff. Of course he might be using the colors racially, but as I have pointed out above, this is far from clear.

His attacks on America and his hatred of Trump and cops are not necessarily signs of any sort of extreme leftism. All those are common attitudes among people ranging from boomer liberals to libertarians. In our political climate, they of course code left, but there are ten million fairly moderate boomer Hillary voters who share those opinions yet are not some sort of frothing antifa members.

This appears to be a straight copy-paste of the following article:

https://caffeineandphilosophy.com/2017/05/15/the-violent-artwork-of-cleon-peterson/

Written by "C.B. Robertson" on May 15, 2017.

Will climate change negatively affect crop yields? Has it already?

The wiki article on climate change seems to think so:

Climate change is affecting food security. It has caused reduction in global yields of maize, wheat, and soybeans between 1981 and 2010.

This links to IPCC 2019:

At the global scale, Iizumi et al. (2018) used a counterfactual analysis and found that climate change between 1981 and 2010 has decreased global mean yields of maize, wheat, and soybeans by 4.1, 1.8 and 4.5%, respectively, relative to preindustrial climate, even when CO2 fertilisation and agronomic adjustments are considered.

More on them later. But first, a little detour in the land of reality.

They obviously need all kinds of counterfactuals, because crop yields have greatly increased during that period. Plants generally love heat and CO2, and the earth is greening.

How then did lizumi et al get their results? Basically, they compared the simulations on a model on the yield of various crops under a no climate change (A) and with climate change (B) scenario, taking out the technological improvements. This would be fair enough (if you like models) , but the results show little to no difference (advantage B for rice and wheat, advantage A for maize and soybean).

So they added a third simulation out of nowhere, where they told the model to keep the CO2 to 1850 level (thus artificially lowering the yield the model predicts), but all the rest is like B (simulation C) . Then they averaged the bullshit C value with B and compared that to A, where A finally looked good.

https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms/asset/cb1df87d-a961-4f51-b986-ac0a633f0ffd/joc5818-fig-0004-m.jpg

Red mountain: The model‘s ‚unaided‘ answer B.

Blue mountain: random nonsense C.

Grey mountain: Unholy mixture they can now pass off to the IPCC as „considering CO2 fertilisation“ because hey, it‘s only half-garbage.

Because the amplitude of the observed CO2 fertilization varies with the field conditions and crop cultivars (Ainsworth et al., 2008; Hasegawa et al., 2013), the estimated impacts of the theoretical CO2 fertilization may be more optimistic than the actual outcome.

Or more pessimistic. Where‘s my all-else-equal 600 ppm simulation I can mix with B for a nice yield boost?

If you don‘t like the results of your model, don‘t mess with the „uncertain“ variables until it spits out the answer you’re looking for.

This is why you have to believe the science. Because you wouldn't if you saw how they did it.

I mean, it’s not beyond implausible that a 2 degrees warmer earth would alter rainfall patterns in ways that reduce crop yields or reliability in important agricultural areas, which I always understood was the steel man for ‘climate change is bad for agriculture’. I was never particularly convinced because a warmer earth should lead to more rainfall overall, but some kind of sophisticated argument about greater evapotranspiration in midwestern summers or shifting seasonal wind patterns seemed ipso facto within the realm of possibility.

But you have to assume that if these people had access to any evidence for a scenario like that, they’d argue it instead of doing this.

I can imagine there is an “ideal” temperature range for each type of crop. So while CO2 helps, perhaps certain areas becomes less suitable. But my current understanding is that heating is unequal; the more northern or southern places are getting warmer compared to more steady state closed to the equator. This would suggest more land can be crop bearing.

Correct, it’s really going to get hot for those people who live in the artic circle (Only red zone on the map). Completely ignores adaptation too. If one cereal’s yield explodes, while another shrinks to very little, the net effect will be to greatly increase the availability of food, by swapping one for the other.

deleted

The paper does find different effects in different places: "Yield increases were obtained at the mid and high latitudes, and yield losses were obtained at the low latitudes." And note that even if the amount of temperature change is lower near the equator, areas near the equator might have a greater increase in the incidence of temperatures which retard growth.

After being burned too many times by claims like this my default is to reject them until demonstrated otherwise. A lot of bombastic claims about climate effects have been passed through seven layers of modelling, each causing more dubious results than the last.

Modelling co2's effect on radiative forcing? Go ahead. Modelling radiative forcing's effect on temperature? Fine. Modelling temperature's effect on rainfall. Maybe. Modelling rainfall's effect on crop yields? You're getting too far from hard data now. Modelling crop yield effects on economic migration? Fuck off.

Modelling temperature's effect on rainfall. Maybe.

Last I looked into IPCC details, the error bars on precipitation in most places were huge, to the point that even the sign of the expected change was often unknown.

Good on them for the uncertainty quantification and the honesty (the IPCC has always struck me as light years ahead of the media reporting on climate change...), but this really makes impacts on agriculture unpredictable, and thus makes impacts on humanity annoyingly hard to predict. There's a reason why population density maps correlate so much better with rainfall maps than with any function of temperature alone.

I agree the IPCC’s presentations are honest but they end up participating in a charade.

David Friedman (son of Milton and ACX commenter) has several blog posts (second) on the topic.

He claims that climate change makes yields lower in some areas, and higher in other areas, as there are many areas that are colder than optimal for agriculture, and climate change helps those areas as much as it hurts optimal or warm areas. This would require human adaptation - moving farming to different parts of the world - to respond to - but the modern economy adapts to new situations or technologies rather well. There's also the direct effect of CO2 - increased concentrations increases the efficiency of photosynthesis, increasing crop yields. There's a negative effect on nutrition per gram because the extra carbon bulks up a more fixed amount of minerals, but this is smaller than the yield effect and probably doesn't matter. All of this means the sign of the effect on the food supply isn't obvious.

How does Siberia compare?

ANNECDOTE TIME!

As someone who has actually done it; it certainly effected my crops negatively in zones 9 and 13 (beans, avocados, stone fruit, nightshades, corn, rice, etc etc)

Corn has done fine every year; but everything else has had complete failures a couple times due to the seasons becoming unreliable. I've had killing frosts as late as april; when I look at the journals people had before they never went past late feb/early may.

I've also had complete failures of stone fruit due to temps swinging between 60-90 degrees in a couple days; which again was never reported in any of the journals going back 60-80 years.

Also, I've had failures of some squashes and such because the pollinators either swarmed early or late due to the seasons starting early or late; which is annoying as fuck.

Basically; my growing seasons are still perfect but the timing has became unreliable; which sometimes leads to completely unavoidable unpredictable total failures.

You can't put up frost cloth when you have no warning it's gonna sudenly drop below 40 after a 72 degree day.

You’re not taking any positives into account, like CO2 gains , longer growing season etc. Ask grandpa how many bushels per acre he got with his perfectly reliable swingless seasons. These increased intermittent losses, if they exist (complete failure in the past was hardly unknown, see famines) , are definitely included in the increasing yield recorded, and presumably in the model of the jokers above.

Ask grandpa how many bushels per acre he got with his perfectly reliable swingless seasons.

Careful, he might die laughing.

I have the journals, and productivity is the same on average; ignoring years where it is +-0.

I use solely traditional methods of fertilization and so I can rule out productivity increases from technology (excepting market access to things like cheap fish emulsion, rock phosphate, etc.) and things seem about the same across the board.

That said, productivity increase from non-heirloom crossbreeds (especially in stone fruit where the difference is MASSIVE) make it hard to know for sure in some areas.

If I solely grew for yield and not for pleasure (because it is a hobby for me), I could be seeing much higher yields even staying organic by choosing more hybridized plants and using some GMOs.

EDIT: Complete failures in the past where usually due to conditions that just didn't exist in my growing zones until recently. EG; the zone 13 farm is seeing the first drought in 3600 years at least. Nobody alive or their parents or their parents or their parents or their parents or their parents back to the conquiesta has recorded weather like we are seeing now.

It still isn't catastrophic because modern irrigation tech; but its defo not good. Lotta cows getting slaughtered early.

I've had killing frosts as late as april; when I look at the journals people had before they never went past late feb/early may.

Uh, April is before May, right?

I'm guessing he meant March, not May.

Right after Smarch.

get off my back ok jeez i meant march fuck god damn

We had our peas ruined 3 years in a row. Its not rising or lowering levels of this or that factor, its unreliability and unpredictability. Too much rain to early, cold snaps in April etc. This year a freakish wind storm in May wrecked all kinds of crops on neighboring farms and orchards. The average rainfall will probably be, well, average this year. But having a lot of it fall all at once over 2 days in May still wrecked all the peas.

Yup.

Unpredictability is the actual risk from climate change to mass agg; at least in the USA.

In coastal Socal this year we had a very long cool spring so my eggplant is just now setting flowers; and if it doesn't set fruit before it swings to full summer I'm gonna have to build enclosures for shade cloth and all sorts of other silly bullshit.

I'm confident that if push comes to shove, climate shock resistant crops, produced via genetic engineering will more than suffice to keep yields ok or growing for any likely outcome.

Look at the potential for GMO C4 rice strains as an example.

And that's without looking at geoengineering, which can probably bring down temperatures while maintaining high atmospheric CO2 if needed. The fact that we don't see more clamor for such is a sign that resistance to it is a luxury belief that is being insufficiently tested.

Happy 4th of July to our American friends! I've come to share a little bit of history that struck me, then and now, as one of the more compelling paeans of American greatness: the opinion of Germans of American soldiers in 1917-18.

When the USA fell into WWI mostly-unprepared, it had to rapidly acquaint itself with the realities of modern warfare and gamely struggled with it. Once the fighting ended the Army was very interested in sourcing the enemy's opinions of its performance so as to be better prepared for next time. What actually happened was the USA retreated again into isolationism and it had to relearn all the same lessons in 1941-42 again at great cost. But it did produce this great document: Candid Comment on the American Soldier of 1917-18 (and Kindred Topics) by The Germans.

While much of it is devoted to German opinions of American combat performance (the general conclusion was brave, but foolhardy), the more interesting elements to me are the German impressions of Americans as individuals. Many of the American soldiers were ethnically German themself, and the whole situation lended itself to German introspection on how their American cousins had diverged in between the great German national failures of 1848 and 1918. This was after all a great clash of the ideals of the former versus the structure of the latter (which was drawn into sharper contrast by the further civil conflict within Germany; there are repeated instances of praise for American rule versus that of the "Spartacists").

You can see some selected quotes on various topics here, but what I find particularly interesting are the various comments about American class distinctions, given the shock Germans had in comparing their Prussian norms with American freedoms. Some choice quotes:

He comments on the fact that the Americans were what might be called bad prisoners. A group of 14 were brought in one day and when asked about their units refused to talk. They refused to work and talked back to the [German] officers, much to the annoyance of the officers and the concealed delight of the men.

Braun has served in the German army as an enlisted man and keenly alive to conditions in the army. He makes an interesting comparison in the German and American systems of training officers and states that the German system was the direct downfall of the army. At the beginning of the war Germany was well supplied with experienced officers who were respected and looked up to by the men in spite of the harsh disciplinary measures. The casualties, however, among officers during the first year of the war were enormous and they at once started training new officers... The candidates were selected from among the sons of the most influential families, given a short training and then put in charge of Companies. They tried to impose the same rigid discipline that the regular officers had, but the enlisted men resented this to the extent of open rebellion and fought with their officers until there was no discipline left in the army... He said that the American training schools although modelled after the Germans turned out successful officers because the best fitted men were picked from the ranks.

He spoke of the great difference between the American and German armies and was very much surprised to learn that one could become a noncommissioned officer after spending six or eight months in the service. In peace time in the German army a soldier was given a Sergeantcy only after he had spent 10 or 12 years in service then if he continued faithful he was given a place near his home as a Postman or railroad employee.

The American army seems to me as fine a collection of individual physical specimen as I have ever seen. But from the standpoint of military discipline it is a mob, pure and simple. The men appear slouchy; the officers do not stand out from the men in appearance as they do in any European army. All seem to allow themselves to be victimized in prices by the tradespeople of this, I am most unhappy to admit, vanquished country. They seem to have no conception of the fact that we are their enemies, and deep down in our hearts we hate each and every one of them!

Hahn states that all the people in the town are admiring the clean-cut American soldiers. He states that the impression the American soldier is leaving, with the people of Germany, is the impression that Germany will have of America in years to come. He notices the contrast between the American and German armies in their forms of discipline, stating that if the German army had been as free with their men as the American Army is, they would not have had the success that was theirs at the beginning of the war.

The attitude of the American officer towards enlisted men is very different than in our army in which officers have always treated their men as cattle.

While on duty the relations between men and officers are very strict, but on the other hand, when off duty, they are without constraint. The officers sit in the same cafe rooms with their men. When one sees the supplies, the material, etc., one is obliged to laugh at the imagination of our marine heads who praised the U-boats as a victor over the Entente. Every man has his cloth coat and his waterproof coat, his leather shoes and rubber shoes, etc.

This man has been a proprietor of a cafe for eight years. He speaks very highly of the American soldier and thinks that it was luck for the people that Americans were chosen for this district. He thinks it is strange that the Americans, having spent so short a time in the army, can adapt themselves to any condition that presents itself. He remarked that on the day the soldiers came to this town all were surprised at the orderly way the Americans conducted themselves. He said that he had never known a regiment of German soldiers to come here and behave themselves in such an orderly manner. German soldiers were always brutal to servants and destroyed a great deal of property.

A few American prisoners were brought here in June 1918 and were not mistreated. The Americans were the Chief complainers when the food was bad which was always. The Americans occasionally received packages containing hard tack and other luxuries but their packages were usually rifled. After the entrance of the Americans several Italians desired to return to Italy and France and demanded their pay from the German contractor. This was refused. They appealed to the Americans. Three "doughboys" with fixed bayonets accompanied the Italians and prompt payment was made. He states that miners are now being treated well and receive thirteen marks a day.

In the town of RITTERSDORF the subject of separation of Church and State was very strongly advocated at a meeting of the German Democratic Party: an opportunity to defend the position of the Church in this question was seized by two Catholic priests in the audience, who contended that the ideals of good government and the ideal of the Church were identical. In reply, the speaker of the German Democratic Party stated there could be no better example of the results of a divided Church and State than the American soldiers billeted in the German homes; he asked the audience to compare the conduct, appearance and enlightenment of the American soldiers with the aspect of the German soldiers. The reply met with the approval of the audience and the priests were "hissed" out of the meeting.

This lady says that a good many of the inhabitants of Rengsdorf and the surrounding town have made up their minds to emigrate to America if they will be permitted to do so. She explains that this is due to the good impression made by the American soldiers who are occupying this region and also the fact that most of the middle class and lower class are much afraid of the impending war debt and indemnity.

I have had soldiers in quarter all winter. At first I had Germans. Later Americans came. To become acquainted with these "our enemies" as house companions is among other things so very instructive. I have changed in a good many of my opinions, and would like to go to America for a half year or so because it is certain that these people possess a secret method which raises the most common fellows into an individual who stands up boldly and moves about freely and unconcerned. I think we can learn some things there which later could be used to advantage here. I do not mean this personally, but as a better education nationally.

I have changed in a good many of my opinions, and would like to go to America for a half year or so because it is certain that these people possess a secret method which raises the most common fellows into an individual who stands up boldly and moves about freely and unconcerned.

It is possible that the America of, say, 1870 to 1970 was an extraordinarily unique place in world history in which, for a great many reasons, three things were simultaneously true for ordinary people:

  1. The rewards for ambition, competence, and conscientousness were extraordinarily great

  2. The price for personal failure was still very high

  3. It was possible for many to rise well above their station in life due to very rapid economic growth

I struggle to think of many other societies in which all three were simultaneously true. The few examples I can think of (the four 'Asian Tiger' economies from the 1960s to 1990s, maybe) were also temporary, and true for a much shorter period than the US.

But in such a society, propriety, boldness, ambition and self-respect would likely be more common among those who had great hopes of participating in that ongoing boom.

On 3, it’s surely also a part of the story that a person who got rich became upper class, whereas in many societies a lower class person who gets rich is just a rich lower class person.

I’m thinking about someone I know in particular, who went from (literally)a drug addicted orphan to working as an HVAC tech to owning his own HVAC company. He is not elite today despite his very high income; in 1900 he would have been. It’s still possible he could become elite- spend his free time giving motivational speeches at private high schools, go to charity fundraisers at the opera instead of his church, etc- but in Victorian America he would already be there by virtue of his wealth, and in medieval Japan there’d be no hope of joining the elite no matter how wealthy and well mannered he became.

To take it a step further: I happen to know someone who is either a billionaire or quite close to it (I believe he recently complained that his net worth had fallen just under the billion mark due to some supply chain issue) and is still absolutely not elite in any way. His money is in agriculture, and he is very 'country' in his mannerisms. I do think a world where he'd get to be 'in the room where it happens' would be a better one, but he doesn't act the part of the right sort of person, so he's just wealthy and subject to the whims of the worthless social-gamers.

He is not elite today despite his very high income; in 1900 he would have been.

Perhaps not? He would have been "lower-class rich guy" but his son could get into the elite by going to the right schools and university, and his grandson would certainly have been included and now classed as a gentleman.

Hence all the historical jokes about the sons of guys who had made it responding to their fathers' attempts to discipline them with "You, the son of a farmer/peasant/merchant/whatever cannot speak so to me, the son of a gentleman/nobleman/king".

I struggle to think of many other societies in which all three were simultaneously true.

Don' be so epoch-parochial!

E.g. during the Yamnaya expansions into Europe, rewards for ambition & competence were extremely high, price for failure was absolute and it was certainly possible to rise well above your station by conquering and putting to service enough peasants.

I haven't heard of those people before and looked them up, given that they existed around 3500 BC, what firm evidence is there that they lived the way you claim?

It's a niche subject, and I don't expect to be able to track down much on the topic itself. I did at least bother to ask GPT-4, but it had little to share on the matter.

I haven't heard of those people before and looked them up, given that they existed around 3500 BC, what firm evidence is there that they lived the way you claim?

The wikipedia article ?

This isn't any secret or obscure history, save maybe in India where the local idiots-in-charge like to pretend Brahmins and other higher castes aren't a small remnant of northern conquerors but were actually indigenous to the region. (The genetic data is always a good way of riling up Hindu nationalists on twitter)

If I had to choose to live under any single occupying power, the Americans win hands down.

You lot are kind to a fault to the occupied populace these days, and while I might go far as to say too kind, because some frontloaded brutality might have erased the need for a long, indecisive period of discontent, that doesn't change that. (Compare how the British pacified Afghanistan back in the day versus how the Americans went about it. Some subjects only respect a jackboot to the face)

Just copy-pasting articles from Kevin MacDonald's blog in 2018 (Google said it might originally have been from a site called 'Expel The Parasite' although it was reposted by the 'Occidental Observer'), or anyone really (especially without attribution) isn't acceptable on this board, sorry. I suggest that you take your ban and, instead of making another alt this time, think carefully about how you might actually contribute to this forum in future.

Although I cannot find the link (@2rafa's Google fu is apparently better than mine), this certainly looks like something copypasted from Kevin MacDonald, complete with citations of his own works.

I'll give you an opportunity to convince me otherwise or explain yourself, otherwise you are looking at a ban for bad-faith engagement. (You are allowed to link and quote people, you are not allowed to copy an entire essay from elsewhere and pretend it's yours, just to test for reactions.)

link: https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/10/01/the-war-on-white-australia-a-case-study-in-the-culture-of-critique-part-1-of-5/

quotes around the entire thing for exact matches are good for trying to find a source for a verbatim sentence

Thanks. I tried the quotes thing but for some reason didn't get that hit.

From my experience working in a job where the use of the quotes feature was vital: Google will randomly and without warning place users into experimental variations of their features as a form of A/B testing. If you get placed in the "Google prioritizes words in quotes" user bucket and not the "Google demands exact string match of words in quote" bucket, your search won't turn up the exact results and you're just out of luck.

I managed to escalate this issue quite high into Google support at one point, and the above was more or less everything they told me. Was quite stressful when I needed the exact match for my job.

deleted

Now unlike the above, this is merely "something I read somewhere at some point" and not official, but:

I've read that it's worse than that. They've frequently messed around with search function, and how they evaluate the changes is how many searches a user makes. I.e, if you type in a search, immediately find what you need, and leave Google, that's bad, while you search 4 or 5 times to get Google to finally show what you wanted, that's good.

The A/B testing is specifically trying to make the experience worse for users.

They've frequently messed around with search function, and how they evaluate the changes is how many searches a user makes. I.e, if you type in a search, immediately find what you need, and leave Google, that's bad, while you search 4 or 5 times to get Google to finally show what you wanted, that's good.

I was not in search quality, but that would not match my experience at Google. The idea was to return a useful result, not to keep the user searching.

Good to know, and I'll take your word for it over random-poster-on-other-forum.

More comments

The only thing I've encountered in this vein lately is that their bot-detection algorithm seems to interpret "many searches for slightly different search terms in rapid-ish succession" as bot behaviour, resulting in a captcha -- which kind of adds insult to injury when one is trying to nudge the algo to stop serving an infinite selection of (bot-generated?) obvious clickfarm results as the first page...

Do you not get the option for verbatim mode, or does it not work for you? It's buried in there for me, but if I do a search, I get a little "Tools" button below and to the right of the search bar, and then from there I can switch from "All Results" to "Verbatim", where "Verbatim" actually respects quotes still.

If they're removing even that escape hatch I think it's time for me to find a new search engine.

Admittedly it's been years since my experience with it, but I don't recall that being an option at the time. Could've just missed it though. Thank you for mentioning it, it'll likely help me out in the future.

Imo you should delete first and ask questions later, he’s abusing your charity with his alts. He wants eyeballs for far right blogs, and you’re cooperating with a defectbot. I don’t understand why banning SS and hoff is even on the agenda, when this guy is constantly flooding the forum unprompted, and just far far worse.

We will never satisfy everyone, between those who want us to ban first and ask questions later, and those who think we should never ban anyone without absolute proof of wrongdoing.

I don’t understand why banning SS and hoff is even on the agenda

No one has suggested banning Hoff.

I thought Hlynka was too trigger happy too (still think he was, most of the time). I don't support bans generally, but this is a clear-cut case.

You asked for proof this entire OP was quoting a blog, you got it. You asked him to explain himself, he didn't. And it appears his other post on peterson was also copy-pasted.

He's used up all the benefit of the doubt he's entitled to. Treat him as guilty and let him appeal if it's some insane coincidence.

You asked for proof this entire OP was quoting a blog, you got it. You asked him to explain himself, he didn't. And it appears his other post on peterson was also copy-pasted.

Dude, give us a minute. I am not going to make a snap decision ten minutes after I post the warning.

I think you should delete the comment, it's a bad look, it takes up space in the thread, and it's a clear troll and a sign that people who violate the rules blatantly and repeatedly can have their trolling stay up.

I'd likewise prefer to see this thread deleted and the poster banned. Copy-pasting someone else's essays is low-effort by definition, and they're clearly making a habit of it. Leaving the post up gives them a limited win, and I see no benefit to allowing them to see their strategy rewarded.

As always, though, I defer to the judgement of the mods.

Seems like a lot of words to say very little. You needed 1069 words to say Australians wanted to be white untill 1960?

"This will be the first in a five part series on Jewish influence on Austrlian immigration policy."

You can stop at one part, buddy.

You could have just posted the article and talked about why it’s interesting in the OP

I'm removing this comment. I am writing this reply but I don't actually know if this reply will still be visible after I remove this comment; I apologize in advance for whatever problems that creates!

The comment I am removing was recognized as uncredited copypasta by users. If the mod team had immediately recognized it as such, we may have removed the comment more quickly, as uncredited copypasta is a form of spam. But we had to verify, and there was some inter-moderator discussion going on.

I remind everyone that while our default position is not to remove comments--and certainly not to censor debate or stifle discussion of difficult topics--some users are not interested in discussion, as Zorba talks about in the latest META post. Sometimes it's hard to know who these users are. Sometimes we make bad calls as moderators. I apologize in advance if that's what I'm doing now.

But I admit, for the moment, that I doubt it. I'm also perma-banning the user for spam at least until such time as I am persuaded that they are not, in fact, just a spammer.


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