site banner
PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28329 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Top Bottom New Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

A motte for the term: The deep state

Without endorsing any particular theories here, perhaps the best way to think about the deep state is that it is simply parts of the government that have developed their own distinct political goals and capabilities, and are involved in the political process in ways that may or may not be visible, legal or proper. In some vague sense, a "deep state" may simply be a function of a government. Any government that remains stable for long enough will develop capabilities that do not require a given person at the top, since the leaders change over time. Those abilities will then be put to use in service of whatever political goals unite that part of government.

This becomes more open and more contentious in a democracy when parts of the government revolt against elected leaders.

Or just "the civil service".

Conservatives are trapped in a cycle. The more ‘free market’ a society is, the more money is central to status, the more opportunity the private sector offers smart capitalists over the public sector, the more leftist the civil service will be.

The civil service and academia in WEIRD countries trend inexorably to the left. Even if guaranteed not to be cancelled, few smart and ambitious young rightists would want to join the academy or spend 40 years in the education department. In America this problem is even more significant for cultural reasons.The ‘rugged individualism’, the ‘wild west’ spirit, the settler mentality, homestead aesthetic, whatever you want to call it - conservative US culture is anathema to working for the state except in the police or military, or possibly in some cases as a tough on crime DA or in the judiciary (in the latter case only to stop the left and be tough on crime though).

To be very smart and become a civil servant in the US, you essentially need to be either hereditarily very rich (a small minority of people who mostly do other things), or you need to believe that participating in the ‘capitalist economy’ is somewhat unethical, grubby, dirty, immoral. Not that you need to be some kind of staunch Marxist, but you usually need to be the kind of person who thinks that “billionaires are immoral” or whatever. Almost all these people are progressives, because smart, well educated PMC conservatives and libertarians go into the private sector.

In parts of Europe there once existed a patrician/noble conservative class who considered commerce to be 'common', but these never really existed in great numbers in the US and have mostly died out in Europe anyway.

The best thing the right could do would be to replace the civil service with McKinsey or Bain. Not because those organizations aren’t riddled with DEI and ESG (they obviously are), but because ultimately they are governed by and respond to financial incentives. They have clear hierarchies. People can be fired easily. Partners, above all else, want to make money. And so they’ll respond to instructions, even if they consider them vulgar.

I intended to bring this up the next time someone bemoaned progressive (or really just left-leaning) institutional capture, but I'm lazy so luckily you beat me to the punch. Conservatives have complaining about how left-wing academia has become at least since I was in college 20 years ago, but there's been little introspection about why this is the case; indeed, much of their other rhetoric actually undermined any chance of them having any influence at all. All we heard was that studying English and history and any other humanity or social science was useless for anything except academia, and it was pointless to spend a decade pursuing a PhD just so you could compete in a hyper-competitive lottery where the prize was a low-paying job at small school in the middle of nowhere. Much better to major in business or accounting or a hard science and make real money in the real world. And by hard science I mean major in cell and molecular biology so you can work in the pharmaceutical industry, not, like my ex-girlfriend, get a doctorate in cell and molecular biology from an unprestrgious school and focus your research on hearing in whales.

Government jobs are a little bit different since they're much easier to get. They pay less than comparable private sector jobs, but they usually have good benefits and aren't susceptible to recessions or corporate downsizing. But they aren't the place for over-ambitous young go-getters to make names for themselves. Pay is strictly regimented and promotions are slow to come by. Performance bonuses are all but non-existent. And even if you make it into senior administration you're salary will be capped at about 250k a year, you'll have to live in Washington, and you'll be permanently locked out of executive-level positions that go to political appointees. Unless, of course, you have the necessary connections and don't mind losing your job with the next administration or whenever the current one is looking for a scapegoat.

And then there's the added complication that conservatives have traditionally railed against bureaucracy as emblematic of government bloat and unnecessary spending. You look at the cube next to you at a guy who's been phoning it in for the past 20 years but who makes more than you due to seniority rules and can't be fired, and whose job it is to administer programs you think are a waste of money. Why would any conservative want to be part of this when they can make more money doing essentially the same thing at 3M, or US Steel?

All we heard was that studying English and history and any other humanity or social science was useless for anything except academia, and it was pointless to spend a decade pursuing a PhD just so you could compete in a hyper-competitive lottery where the prize was a low-paying job at small school in the middle of nowhere. Much better to major in business or accounting or a hard science and make real money in the real world.

Yes you can't spend the entire time saying that nobody smart would ever get a humanities degree, and advise any young person you know against it, and then complain that no humanities academics are conservatives.

I think he forgot to write the part where he argues that despite all these good reasons not to go into these fields, and despite them not holding any prestige for that power, they hold real power, being an increasingly self-aware part of the chain that every executive decision has to go through to get actually executed.

There are hundreds of applications per tenure track position - departments do not and will not hire out conservatives. Adjuncts are in no position to demand reform and this wouldn’t be it, anyway. The problem goes back to grad school and allowed research topics/positions…

The problem is worsening. We see increasing adoption of actual litmus tests (mandatory diversity statements) in which conservative positions are considered tantamount to hate speech.

How exactly would you have conservatives engage or reform this system?

My argument isn't that the system is easily capable of reform now, but that it got the way it did due to decades of conservatives ignoring it. Tenure track positions were always competitive, but you can't spend decades telling your kids to avoid academic pursuits and then act surprised when academia is full of you political adversaries, who didn't face the same pressure. One interesting development is that schools have become so reliant on adjuncts that there's actually a shortage of professors right now. Schools are loathe to give tenure when they can get away with it, and there used to be no shortage of PhDs willing to take low-paying positions to keep their resumes up to date. They didn't seem to realize that this was a temporary situation. When I was in college, most adjuncts were people who worked regular jobs in the community who wanted to teach and would take a small fee to teach one night class a semester in some niche topic that wouldn't get covered normally, usually an elective. Then the post-COVID labor shortage came and all the aspiring professors got good jobs in the private sector, and no one is willing to live on scraps anymore.

All we heard was that studying English and history and any other humanity or social science was useless for anything except academia, and it was pointless to spend a decade pursuing a PhD just so you could compete in a hyper-competitive lottery where the prize was a low-paying job at small school in the middle of nowhere. Much better to major in business or accounting or a hard science and make real money in the real world.

Blue tribers(and let’s be real, this is a red/blue division more than a conservative/liberal one) say the same thing, they just don’t expect impressionable youth to listen to them.

Eh, it's more a combo that "blue tribers" are more willing to not have financially successful lives to get what they want. Like, there are a ton of creative people who won't even get all that rich, but will effect far more lives than the median franchise restaurant owner who got an MBA.

As I've said before, for all the blame on teachers or professors, the actual reason why the median 17-year old in rural Nebraska is likely far more liberal than they were in 1995 is they have access to the Internet and can watch videos of non-white people, LGBT people, and even people from other countries have normal lives, and be into normal things.

Like, some trans beauty blogger who has a few million subscribers on YT or whatever probably moves the needle on those kind of issues more than any kind of official lesson plan Red Tribers can try to ban via taking over school boards.

the actual reason why the median 17-year old in rural Nebraska is likely far more liberal than they were in 1995 is they have access to the Internet and can watch videos of non-white people, LGBT people, and even people from other countries have normal lives, and be into normal things.

The internet might play a role, but it's definitely not what you describe here. Before widespread censorship done by Big Tech, all the progressives were terrified of the "Alt-Right pipeline", "alt-right" back then meaning "not agreeing with progressivism". It is only through controlling access to information that this "liberal" ideology can spread.

Yeah, those people were dumb. There was no great movement toward the Right of the youth during this time, as you can see by looking at actual voting results.

Even recently, there is a big story about the rightward movement among teen boys, and if you actually look into the numbers, it's barely outside of the margin of error and more importantly, no evidence of long-term change. Plus, it shows, as you'd expect, that most teens don't have an ideology at all. But even back then, the "alt-right pipeline" was a relatively minor part of Youtube, and yes, people freaked out about it incorrectly. Gamergate didn't cause Trump to win - higher turnout among low-salience middle-aged voters in the Midwest gave Trump the win.

I get it - just like my more left-wing friends think if they can just make the right arguments, everybody will be a socialist, you guys think it'd be a generation of edgy right-wingers if not for Youtube "controlling access to information."

But, most people are normies who don't want to be mean to people they get to know. Whether it's the nice Trump-voting waitress at their local Applebee's or the trans kid across the street.

Yeah, those people were dumb. There was no great movement toward the Right of the youth during this time, as you can see by looking at actual voting results.

Yeah, almost like censorship worked exactly like intended.

I get it - just like my more left-wing friends think if they can just make the right arguments, everybody will be a socialist, you guys think it'd be a generation of edgy right-wingers if not for Youtube "controlling access to information."

I mean, if controlling access to information is irrelevant, why don't you guys just stop? No skin off your nose, right? I'm happy to lose the game if the rules are fair.

But, most people are normies who don't want to be mean to people they get to know. Whether it's the nice Trump-voting waitress at their local Applebee's or the trans kid across the street.

Yeah, but voting for Trump, or not believing that trans women are actually women (to say nothing of opposing the more egregious issues in the trans meme-space) is not "being mean". You have to be actively convinced otherwise.

I think the clear answer is simply to convert every single government position from civil service to political appointee. This gives presidents and victorious politicians at all levels a clear way to reward their supporters, and ensures the alignment of everyone from dog-catcher through park ranger through under-sub-secretary's assistant for automotive regulation are on board with the agenda.

It's also a guaranteed way to make the functioning of government much shittier than the already shitty state it's in. It would also destroy state governments because to ensure people who knew what they were doing (and who were aligned with the president) were in the civil service during a rotation every 4 or 8 years, victorious presidents would have to raid ideologically-aligned statehouses across the country for anyone who knew what they were doing. Every tier of government would get much worse. If political appointees are what's desired, just paying consultants or external lawyers (perhaps ideologically aligned ones) to run government is more efficient.

It's also a guaranteed way to make the functioning of government much shittier than the already shitty state it's in.

That accepts the premise that the civil service is actually meritocratic and competent. It is not.

It would also destroy state governments because to ensure people who knew what they were doing (and who were aligned with the president) were in the civil service during a rotation every 4 or 8 years, victorious presidents would have to raid ideologically-aligned statehouses across the country for anyone who knew what they were doing.

That would be a problem the first time, and not at all the second time.

I don't believe for a second that the quality of governance would get measurably worse... what WOULD happen, though, is that the academic-PMC complex would rapidly start churning out social science "studies" showing that it had gotten measurably worse.

That accepts the premise that the civil service is actually meritocratic and competent.

Not really, just that things could get markedly worse. Which they would. Lots.

And why should they get worse? No one has explained why replacing an incompetent bureaucracy should make things worse.

Because the US had such a thing, once, because many places still do, and it is by both accounts the worse system

Places where it currently exists are generally shitholes for reasons unrelated to that.

The US was not a shithole when we had this system, and there's no reason to expect it to become one if we transition to such a system.

What absolutely WILL happen should we attempt this is the media and administrative employees just turned out working hard to portray it as a worsening.

More comments

Is the bureaucracy uniformly incompetent? How, then, are complex financial crimes prosecuted? Why are the rivers and skies not dark brown with pollution? Why do new things in highly regulated areas like fintech startups or a government cloud exist at all, and succeed?

There are many thresholds of competence, and a government uniformly much less competent than our current one is entirely possible.

So you’re proposing recreating the mid-century Chicago political machine, but on a national level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago-style_politics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_machine

There…are a few issues with that concept.

No, I'm proposing a spoils system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system

Machine politics are fine and dandy as well though. Ethnic voting blocs are sensible.

But the issues we have with the deep state are huge as well. Essentially, they’re almost completely unaccountable to anyone, nothing they do can be effectively controlled by the regime (the official government) and this creates a situation where the regime has little control over anything that the deep state does.

Just for a quick example, Affirmative Action is officially illegal in California. The public university system simply fig-leafs compliance and does Affirmative Action anyway. They just do so by using other things that just so happen to be good markers for race. If you’re a minority, you’ll get a boost (unless you’re Asian) despite the fact that this is illegal. The same thing is going to happen on the federal level where AA is officially over, but since we’re using proxy methods of finding and boosting the scores of minorities. Even somewhat with COVID, it was clear that the health departments were not under the control of any elected official. The elected officials wanted it over, and the deep state said no.

This creates a situation where the government is officially supposed to serve the public, but those who determine what the state does aren’t accountable to that portion of the government that the public has a say in.

A lot of Federal agencies aren't supposed to be accountable to the regime. This is by design. Something like the Clean Air Act isn't supposed to change based on who's in office, and the fact that it requires an independent agency to hammer out details and enforce the law doesn't change that. The president may have certain powers relating to the agency, but these are purely administrative in nature. The constitution isn't set up so that the president gets to dictate domestic policy. And while it may seem like they're unaccountable, this isn't the case at all. They're creatures of legislation, and legislation can take whatever powers they have away, or change the law to undo rulemaking decisions it doesn't like. Not to mention the complicated rulemaking procedures they have to follow. People often argue that since the legislative branch is dysfunctional this isn't really a great check on power, and while I agree, I think the solution is to end the dysfunction, not to concentrate power further. After all, we could take this argument a step further and eliminate congress entirely and let the president make up laws at his leisure. But I don't think anyone wants that.

The irony is a big thing that could end the dysfunction is to end the filibuster, and actually pass legislation.

Now yes, this would lead to some things this forum would not like passed. Also, it wouldn't lead to say the Civil Rights Act getting overturned, because it turns out a Senator who can get elected in say, Georgia or Arizona probably doesn't want to actually do that, or fill in whatever other right-wing promise numerous swing state Senator's have made, but would never actually vote for, because they like their job.

Ironically, the filibuster currently gives the Right an overstated case of their actual political strength, because if you're a Republican Senator in a swing state, you can agree to all sorts of things in a primary, knowing voters don't really care until you actually vote for something/it gets put into law (ie. the Dobbs effect), and they know you need 60 votes to pass anything not directly related to spending.

I say this thing to my left-wing friends as well, as a dirty left-wing social democrat SJW - your issue isn't the system. Your issue is that nobody actually agrees with you because life in America is actually pretty damn good for the vast majority of people, and well yeah, they may complain about [random right-friendly or left-friendly issue], but they're not going to vote for somebody who wants to overturn the whole damn thing. Now, I know, "but a small minority of woke people control society."

Not really true, but also, most people may think going to a DEI training (even though, again, your company having a DEI training is kind of a tell on your educated background) may be a bit over the top, but they also don't think the world is ending as a result of a couple hour training they go too once or twice a year. So, when you act like it is, most normies go, "you're a weirdo, and if the choice is you or the nice lady in charge of DEI training, I'll go with her."

My friends in the military will talk, disparagingly, of we-be's: we be here when you got here, we be here when you gone. They're the civil servants that just loiter in a position or a department for years and know how to slow-roll or be maliciously compliant with any policy change they don't like (or that threatens their own job security). Since firing a civil servant in the federal government requires the same amount of work as a full time job (at least the way the people I know describe it) a we-be is nearly immune to anything beyond a slap on the wrist. The we-be's then shape policy and culture to suit their own ends rather than the ends of the organization / society they're allegedly in service to.

Edit: typos

Is there a rubber room for we-bes? Probably the most elegant solution.

This in itself is a problem, because it saps resources that could be better used elsewhere. Based on what I've been told by friends who worked in various positions in the Trump administration, some departments were never able to operate above about 50% capacity because half their employees were actively sabotaging their efforts and had to be given bullshit makework projects to keep them busy. There are fundamentally fewer resources available to politicians who want to shrink the administrative state because their own employees can't be trusted. And so the one-way ratchet continues unabated.

The solution is to go external for the ressources. Reagan replaced the air traffic controllers, but recent events show that even getting the military to replace civil servants is not likely to be an improvement, as resistance to the Trump administration's goals also came from within the military. Contractors would be the solution, but the reaction from the administrative state would be intense as that would rightly be seen as an existential threat. So whatever administration puts it in motion is likely to be in for an even rougher time than Trump's was.

Sounds like you would need to not only fire everybody, but also move the capitol so you are hiring from a completely different workforce. Somewhere like Wichita Falls, Texas might work.

That seems infeasible. Wikipedia says that it took the FAA 10 years after the PATCO strike for staffing to fully return to normal, and that was only about 10,000 employees. The DoD employees 16,500 employees in D.C. alone, and 738,000 civilians worldwide; also, see how many quality applicants you get wanting to live and work in Wichita Falls.

Which agencies were these and what were the responsibilities of those who weren't doing their jobs?

I don't want to get too specific, but my anecdotes are from Education, Interior, and Transportation. They would do what they could to give those people administrative or otherwise apolitical tasks. It was a lot of people sitting around with 20 hours a week worth of stuff to do, with the ideologically sympathetic employees having to put in extra time to make up for the lack of support on substantive matters.

I'm more interested in what the policy prescriptions were that these people found so odious.

The we-be's then shape policy and culture to suit their own ends rather than the ends of the organization / society they're allegedly in service to.

I think the crux between this and the 'deep state' narrative is whether they do that in a coordinated and goal oriented way that leads to large impacts on the final output of the system, or if they each do it randomly based on their individual whims in a way that mostly adds noise and friction and inertia?

The former is what it feels like people are saying when they talk about 'the deep state did X', the latter is more just 'bureaucratic gridlock' and sounds like what I would expect from the poeple you're describing.

Can't it be both? It's not that there's some Comintern issuing instructions and directing people. But they're also not totally atomized - they share a broad ideology that shapes their motives and judgment

It certainly could be in between, but...

they share a broad ideology that shapes their motives and judgment

Do they?

Surely some of those individual people are democrats, and some are republicans, and some are libertarians, do all of them actually share a broad ideology with each other? Some of them are in the military and some are in the education department and some are in the parks department, do they all share a broad ideology with each other?

That's sort of my point, I'm sure it's true that you could name like 5 or 10 ideologies that large portions of them share and which are specific enough to vaguely predict the actions of the portion under that ideology. But 'the deep state' is used as a unitary term, and I don't think there's any single ideology that unifies their efforts in any way.

The administrative state when it was thought up, had these people be mindless cogs that would pass and process information to the next level until clear orders were drafted and sent for whoever actually ultimately executes them. But consolidation of roles, education and computers now has many of these people aware of the picture they are painting and opinionated with regards to the orders and the people who gave them. Even in cases where they nominally don't have any discretionary power, they can selectively apply rigor, sabotage their own work, know who to inform or not inform of a situation, etc... to give themselves some margin of discretionary power.

And recently they seem to relish how much power leaking to the press gives them.

Even in cases where they nominally don't have any discretionary power

This may be the platonic ideal of what this sort of role should entail, but I don't know that, even if desirable, this sort of job is actually possible. Outside of maybe the most rote service and industrial jobs (and honestly, even then), nobody leaves their personal values and opinions completely at the door.

The civil service jobs we're talking about are often given regulatory authority explicitly by Congress. One could argue that they delegate too much (and courts have agreed occasionally), but the system does allow for much faster pivots than passing bills through Congress would allow. Congress says "The Department of Transportation shall promulgate regulations to improve motor vehicle safety," and after the gears of civil service churn a while get tomes of rules about mirrors, lighting, and crash-safety standards.

But our vehicle regulations aren't written in a vacuum: the YIMBY transit crowd frequently observe that pedestrian safety is basically ignored (this is, slowly, starting to change, it seems) compared to the EU. It seems likely to me that this exists because the bureaucrats charged with writing the standards happily drive their pickup trucks to the office and don't see many pedestrians day-to-day.

Is this the Deep State? By some definitions yes, but this particular example probably isn't hugely political, not do I immediately assume malice. Yes, this sort of thing also exists in politically charged decisions, but I'm not sure it's deliberately by design, or even necessarily avoidable.

It seems likely to me that this exists because the bureaucrats charged with writing the standards happily drive their pickup trucks to the office and don't see many pedestrians day-to-day.

P.J. O'Rourke's account of visiting the DoT head office in DC (in Parliament of Whores) is hilarious for this reason - he goes in to the building expecting to find it full of the kind of car-hating eco-weenies that the average American conservative would expect to find in the Civil Service and is somewhat horrified to discover that it is full of car guys who religiously read his car journalism (which, despite his reputation as a political satirist, was probably his main source of income as a freelance writer in the 1980's). So the chapter turns into a sympathetic account of how people who mostly share PJ's attitude to cars end up feeling forced to order a recall of the Audi 5000 in response to senile drivers pressing the accelerator when they mean to press the brake.

In so far as Parliament of Whores has a story arc, it is PJ shifting from the view you would expect of a 1960's-communist-turned-libertarian (that Big Government is a hostile occupying force that Americans need to defeat) to seeing Big Government of something that Americans do to themselves as a result of the ignorance and apathy of the median voter and the fecklessness of the Congressmen they elect.

The administrative state was always like this, though. It's nothing new and it doesn't seem to be particularly bad in modern America or the West more generally. You had all these problems and worse in Imperial China or Rome. You had these problems in the supposedly absolutist Bourbon dynasty that had to call on the Estates General to try to get around the recalcitrant regional Parlements.

The "deep state" is a motte-and-bailey where the motte is public choice theory and the bailey is that a cabal of civil servants controls the USG.

I'll happily defend what you think is the bailey as my motte. I used to subscribe to "structural" theories providing mundane explanation for dysfunctional behaviors of institutions, and dismiss "conspiracy" theories, but the last few years have utterly discredited the former, and I haven't actually heard a good argument to dismiss the latter.

I think nothing demonstrates this better than the case of Alexander Vindman. Let's assume his whistleblowing was not a premeditated impeachment trap for Trump as I don't think there was any evidence to that. His whistleblowing was based on that public servant's impression that the POTUS was undermining US Foreign Policy, which when you think about it with in mind who is supposed to set US Foreign Policy, is a really odd thing to say.

Ding ding ding.

If you think that the President is, e.g. the Commander in Chief of the armed forces, then literally any action he takes in that capacity when commanding a particular military action should, by definition, be obeyed without question, and refusal should be some form of treason or, bare minimum, dereliction of duty.

So when you have military personnel ignoring orders or claiming he's unfit to command, that's literally upending the actual chain of command as delineated in the basic structure of government.

A General making decisions that contradict those handed down from the Executive is evidence of exactly the sort of 'deep state' conspiracy that suggests that the President and Congress aren't actually the ones with the authority over the government.

Obviously the ur-example of this would be the military couping the President on flimsy grounds, but that's never really been the claim. The claim is that a coup is unneeded because the power isn't actually there in the first place, there's no need to take out the President when you can just ignore him.

The article you linked to doesn't cite any instances of any generals disobeying orders. It lists three names—Mattis, McMaster, and Kelly—none of whom were active military at the time and only one of whom, Mattis, was in any position to carry out orders; McMaster and Kelly's positions were purely advisory. Now, Mattis did ignore Trump's orders on a number of occasions, but as a civilian he isn't subject to military law regarding insubordination. As a political appointee, if he refuses an order Trump's remedy is to fire him, which he declined to do.

As to whether it's treason, luckily, the constitution is pretty clear on this:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

Simply disregarding an order can hardly be described as levying war against the country, and it's not clear which enemies Mattis would have been giving aid or comfort to. Furthermore, the language of the clause implies that an overt act is required, not simply failure to act. Indeed, there are only a few instances in criminal law where one can be liable for failure to act, so the general presumption is that the law requires an overt act unless otherwise specified.

More importantly, I don't see how this really applies to discussion about a so-called Deep State. These were all people Trump picked himself to serve in high-level advisory positions. They weren't military lifers he was stuck with and couldn't fire. This whole situation, if nothing else, is emblematic of Trump's lack of fitness for the office. He said in 2016 that his lack of experience wouldn't be an issue because he would find the "best people" to advise him. Then he didn't like what the best people had to say, so he got rid of them and replaced them with other people whom he didn't want to listen to, either. If your own hand-selected panel of experts tells you something is a bad idea, and this happens multiple times, maybe the problem isn't with the experts.

The point is that if your Country's founding document, deriving it's authority from consent of the governed (or whatever you're going with), vests the portion of that authority regarding military command in a particular person who holds a particular office, you expect that person to have the broadest, highest possible control over the military chain of command. His authority isn't total, but is pretty much total within the world of lawful orders he could theoretically issue.

The grounds for disobeying the President's order, then, will have to come from a justification outside of that authority, since there's literally nobody higher up the chain of command to countermand the order.

So the point would be that undermining the authority of the Commander in Chief is evidence that the authority is not in fact vested where it 'ought' to be.

As I stated very clearly:

The claim is that a coup is unneeded because the power isn't actually there in the first place

If military officers feel safe disobeying presidential orders that would, under most reasonable interpretations, be lawful and authorized, then this simply demonstrates that the "Commander in Chief" role is not in fact resting with the office of the President.

Which is to say that if electing a President doesn't actually vest that person with all the rights, duties, and authority that the office is supposed to have, we should begin to question where all that authority has gone.

And in this case, there were rumblings of needing to simply disregard Trump's orders BEFORE HE WAS EVEN ELECTED:

https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/constitution-check-could-the-military-disobey-orders-issued-by-a-president-

and here is the conclusion regarding Constitutionality of disobedience, which I largely endorse:

Though the general added that he was not talking about a coup by the military, his remarks had the rather scary sound of just such a maneuver. It was chilling precisely for constitutional reasons: it is not the function of the military to make a decision that the policy choices of civilian government leaders are outrageous, or even that they violate norms of international law. That is not a military function. It is simply well outside of any norm of constitutional understanding to pretend either that the military is capable of making legal judgments, or that it has been set up to be a player in checks-and-balances.

So the 'Deep State', in this context, is the parts of our governmental structure that surreptitiously override the civilian control of the military whenever it runs counter to those interests they deem more important.

If you think that the President is, e.g. the Commander in Chief of the armed forces, then literally any action he takes in that capacity when commanding a particular military action should, by definition, be obeyed without question, and refusal should be some form of treason or, bare minimum, dereliction of duty.

This is completely wrong.

"Disobeying the President is treason" implies that the President is the United States. This is the very reason why many believe that Trump (and certain would-be Imperial Presidents before him) broke American norms, because the loyalty is supposed to be to the office of the President, not the man.

Of course military officers (and federal civilians, though the rules aren't quite the same for them - the worst you can do to them for insubordination is fire them) are obligated to obey lawful orders. Key word: lawful. You seem to also be claiming that a Presidential order is by definition lawful, when in fact anyone would be obligated to disobey an unlawful order.

Now of course there's the sticky problem of a subordinate claiming an order from the President was unlawful when the President doesn't think it was. That might only be decidable by the Supreme Court. You'd better be pretty damn sure you want to die on that hill if you disobey a direct order. But a President can't just order his generals to invade anyone or launch missiles anywhere he likes and expect those orders to be obeyed without question.

You know, I used deliberate phrasing to make my point:

and refusal should be some form of treason or, bare minimum, dereliction of duty.

and

the ur-example of this would be the military couping the President on flimsy grounds,

Almost like there's a spectrum for the varying levels of disobedience/insubordination.

"Disobeying the President is treason" implies that the President is the United States. This is the very reason why many believe that Trump (and certain would-be Imperial Presidents before him) broke American norms, because the loyalty is supposed to be to the office of the President, not the man.

Yes, if the President ordered generals to launch a nuke against the U.S. civilian population without some obvious need for it to defend the nation, then you're probably right.

But I assume you'd agree that if the President ordered a General to, e.g. withdraw troops from a foreign country with all haste (i.e. Afghanistan) and that General, rather than obey, decided to send troops to surround the White House in order to prevent any further action...

THAT'D BE A LITTLE TREASONOUS, no?

Just as an example of a clearly lawful order and a clearly unjustifiable resistance.

Now of course there's the sticky problem of a subordinate claiming an order from the President was unlawful when the President doesn't think it was. That might only be decidable by the Supreme Court

Sure. But the military chain of command isn't going to wait on a Supreme Court ruling to take some action.

Add on the fact that the Executive tends to have full authority remove officers and appointed officials at will, and what will likely happen is he can simply fire the ones who are causing him trouble until he finds ones that will meet his standards.

But a President can't just order his generals to invade anyone or launch missiles anywhere he likes and expect those orders to be obeyed without question.

Yes but there's a whole massive world of theoretical orders that are supposed to be followed, and there is nobody higher in the chain of command to run them by. So refusal to follow the order will have to, in this case, be based on something outside of the 'authority' of the authority vested in the office.

https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-ii/clauses/345#commander-in-chief-clause-ramsey-and-vladeck

In sum, the Commander in Chief Clause gives the President the exclusive power to command the military in operations approved by Congress; it probably gives the President substantial independent power to direct military operations so long has the President does not infringe exclusive powers of Congress or other provisions of the Constitution; and it may (but may not) limit Congress’ power to pass statutes directing or prohibiting particular military activities.

You know, I used deliberate phrasing to make my point:

Yes, but treason isn't even on the spectrum.

But I assume you'd agree that if the President ordered a General to, e.g. withdraw troops from a foreign country with all haste (i.e. Afghanistan) and that General, rather than obey, decided to send troops to surround the White House in order to prevent any further action...

Yes, that would be treason, but disobeying or slow-rolling an order would be the smallest part of that.

I don't think it's accurate to call Vindman a whistleblower given that his "whistleblowing" was nothing other than testifying in response to a congressional subpoena. It would be one thing if he leaked the call to the media shortly after it happened, but it isn't reasonable to expect every Federal employee to fall on their sword for whoever is in power.

The good argument against it is that it would be something that would likely produce tons of evidence of it's existence, and we have no such evidence, despite tons and tons of scrutiny on the matter? Which is pretty much the standard argument against most conspiracy theories.

Unless you do have evidence you want to cite, in which case, we'll probably disagree on what 'cabal' and 'controls' means. Obviously people have influence over things, and obviously when there's only two political parties some of those people will be political allies with each other, but I think 'cabal' and 'control' are both big stretches for the things that are already part of the public record.

The good argument against it is that it would be something that would likely produce tons of evidence of it's existence, and we have no such evidence, despite tons and tons of scrutiny on the matter?

That's not a good argument, that's a terrible argument!

First of all, you surely heard of survivorship bias, well there's also it's opposite. Just because you shot down all those airplanes doesn't mean there aren't some that evaded your fire. There might even be stealth airplanes you never saw coming.

Secondly, there are conspiracy theories that did end up getting backed by evidence - see Epstein's Island and his prostitution ponzi scheme.

Unless you do have evidence you want to cite, in which case, we'll probably disagree on what 'cabal' and 'controls' means.

Indeed, that has been my experience. You can drop the craziest idea like "the global elites are deliberately coordinating to spread LGBT ideology around the world", and everybody calls it a conspiracy theory and demands evidence. When you provide evidence, it magically doesn't count, because you have evidence.

Obviously people have influence over things.

This refutes the idea that the Deep State boils down to public choice theory.

but I think 'cabal' and 'control' are both big stretches for the things that are already part of the public record.

Well, you can just not use these words when you're criticizing conspiracy theorists.

When you provide evidence, it magically doesn't count, because you have evidence.

Yes, the "deep" modifier of "the deep state" suggests such layered institutional presence that "the deep state" controls what counts as "evidence," making it therefore impossible to prove its existence within deep state-controlled venues.

Editing this out because I missed the last portion of your sentence somehow, and that means my objection is meaningless. Preserving it as a quote in case someone is working on a reply already.

Uh, no? As someone who uses the term deep state and has a rough idea of what I'm talking about when I do, there are mountains and mountains of evidence that this deep state exists. They have a level of influence over the media and society but their power isn't total. If you want an example of something that I'd view as direct action by the deep state, look at the Hunter Biden laptop letter that was signed by various members of the intelligence community. We now know that the people who signed that letter were actively lying and knew they were lying in order to shift an election, but what matters is that there is direct and primary evidence that the deep state is both real and using their influence to shift public opinion. There's been polls and research done which suggests that if the Hunter Biden laptop story wasn't suppressed it would have changed the outcome of the election.

That's a clear example of the deep state in action - they aren't the Learned Elders of Zion or the Stonecutters meeting in shady rooms, they are another power bloc competing for influence in the government. They have a lot of power in some respects but substantially less in others... but they really don't have the ability to decide what counts as evidence outside incredibly specific circumstances (FISA courts etc).

That's not true. "Deep" suggests a parallel power structure within the official government one, as in: "a state within a state".

Also, I was talking about all conspiracy theories, not just this one.

And you can't say "if it's true there would be evidence" and "if there's evidence, it's not true". The latter is nonsensical on it's own terms, but together it's just a plain contradiction.

The good argument against it is that it would be something that would likely produce tons of evidence of it's existence

Sure.

and we have no such evidence

Now that's weird, because almost every President has constantly been complaining about exactly this problem to degrees that are extremely well documented. Some even had to build parallel organizations just to allow themselves to pursue an agenda the administration didn't like.

It seems zany to say that there is no evidence of the deep state in a world where we know for a fact the CIA almost succeeded to force Kennedy into a war with Cuba he never wanted. Where Trump had generals disobey his direct, legal and specific orders with zero consequence, and where Eisenhower plainly stated that there was the makings of such a thing and we should be careful not to let it happen.

I won't mention every program that congress and the executive only learn about way after the fact, the list is too long, though honorable mention to the current UAP craziness and the Pentagon's creative accounting that has billions of dollars magically pop in and out of existence on the regular. But the evidence that the administrative state lives its own life unburdened by control from democratic institutions is anything but nonexistent.

Yup, as I predicted, I'm happy characterizing all that as 'various people and organizations having lots of influence over various things', I think calling that 'a cabal controlling the government' is misleading.

But w/e, if we agree on empirical reality and disagree on semantics, that's not always an unimportant distinction, but it's almost always a boring one.

I denounce this distinction as without difference.

Cabals are groups of people having influence. If you wish to place the difference at coordination, we also have clear evidence the factions inside the administration are coordinating. Read for instance the twitter files for a recent example.

It seems to me that you have simply decided to define conspiracy as something impossible and that any sufficiently proven coordinated covert action just gets to be outside the definition because it's no longer impossible.

This isn't a useful way of looking at world. Working oneself backwards from dogma such as "conspiracies never happen" is a strictly worse model than discarding axiomatic categories of things that never happen and conceding that conspiracies are a thing that does happen sometimes. If only because it requires less complexity.

There may well be some number of individual cabals, they may well be influencing some number of things. Conspiracies absolutely exist; as you say we have evidence of many of them, and I happily acknowledge those.

But this is again a motte and bailey thing. Or a thing about being so casual with your language that what you communicate is qualitatively different from what you meant.

'Sometimes some cabals exist in the government and influence some things' is pretty much true.

'The Deep State is a secret cabal that controls the government' is not that.

It implies there's one single unified long-term-stable cabal, not lots of disparate and completely unrelated individual ones that spring up and fall apart in response to specific issues and opportunities.

It implies that this singular eternal cabal controls the entire government, that everything the government does is a reflection of their will and nothing else matters ('controls' is a much stronger claim than 'influences', what else could that word choice mean?).

And these claims are not just slightly different from each other, they produce massively different empirical predictions. Like, if there's a single cabal that controls everything about the government, then it should always have consistent goals in everything it does, it shouldn't break down along artisan lines, there should never be different internal factions bickering and working against each other, who you elect as representatives should never have ab effect on what the government is doing, etc. None of these things are actually true.

To me it just sounds like a straw man. Every human organization, including a conspiracy, has factions and internal politics. And all the factions of permanents government are not shy about acting in their common interests and coordinate.

To take a normal feature of any group and say that because this group has it, it's not real means that you are assuming your conclusion.

I repeat myself but to you a conspiracy is not a real object and any real large scale collusion can't be a conspiracy because it must somehow imply unreal features like perfect cooperation between all agents.

If you're not willing to call the bolcheviks a conspiracy against the provisional government, you don't have a serious definition of conspiracy.

More comments

Personally I started believing conspiracy theories when I found out that the US government actually knew that Iraq didn't have any weapons of mass destruction, and then my belief was further reinforced with the William Binney leaks which effectively confirmed that all the conspiracy theories regarding government monitoring were 100% true.

This seems true. Because I didn't recognize the term, here's how GPT-4 defines public choice theory.

"Public choice theory studies how government decisions are made and how they can be influenced by individual or group self-interest. It applies economics to political science to analyze government efficiency and policy outcomes."

In the context of your comment, I think it means that government bureaucrats make decisions based on their own ideology and self-interest, not that of the populace. This seems self-evidently true to me.

The problem, of course, is that the people who are attracted to the bureaucracy tend to exhibit traits that make them far more liberal than the general population. In any large bureaucracy, the deep state would always exist. But rarely before (in the United States) has it been so ideologically divergent from the average person.

My point being that when someone says "the deep state sabotage Donald Trump" or words to that effect, they probably do not simply mean "his executive policies got slow rolled because the civil servants in charge of executing them were liberals who didn't believe in the policies".

Regarding the partisan lean of government employees, I refer other comments in this thread. I don't think there is some intrinsic quality of government employment that makes it skew dramatically liberal (and indeed, certain types skew very conservative for pretty much the same reason in reverse).

What do you suppose is an unreasonable theory of "deep state" that people actually believe in?

I'd think that 'The deep state stole the 2020 election for Biden' is a good place to start the discussion.

Or “the deep state is the reason Trump didn’t accomplish _____.” I was at a gun show this weekend and heard that more or less verbatim from the next aisle over.

Depending on the part removed by the underscore that could actually be totally reasonable and plausible. There were multiple instances where Trump said he wanted to do something and then the machinery of government made sure that could not or did not happen.

Usually, though, this ends up being that he was talked out of it by his own advisors, not that some life-tenure civil servant had anything to do with it.

More comments

I think the accumulation in DC does make government employees skew more liberal, though.

It’s not hard for me to believe that people who think the best government is local do not choose to work for the federal government. Besides, Washington DC votes 95% democrat. Conservatives will self select out of living in a one party town run by their out group. I thought moving the BLM to Grand Junction was excellent policy in this regard. Why in the world should the BLM, which controls 50% of the land out west, be run by Washington bureaucrats as an absentee landlord totally divorced from the land itself?

More generally, what is the meaning of Democracy when some of the people are highly underrepresented in positions of governance? I very much doubt Democrats would be OK with the federal government being located in rural Texas.

Conservatives will self select out of living in a one party town run by their out group.

Capital area Federal employees mostly live in NoVa, and besides which, most Federal employees work elsewhere. The Capital area has a disproportionate share of fed workers, but that's neither particular surprising nor inappropriate (these agencies' leaders are supposed to be available to meet with political leadership and even occasionally each other).

More generally, what is the meaning of Democracy when some of the people are highly underrepresented in positions of governance?

What does 'underrepresented' mean? Conservatives are underrepresented in the civil service; Liberals are underrepresented in law enforcement; Hispanics are underrepresented in the House; Californians are underrepresented in the Senate; Protestants are underrepresented on the Supreme Court.

To make this more explicit: this seems like special pleading for the representation of conservative interests.

A government of, by, and for the people is a good standard by me, no special pleading necessary. Strongly disproportionate representation in the government itself (of unelected officials) runs afoul. The composition of our civil servants isn’t encoded into the constitution, or quite possibly anything, and it can easily be changed. This is in essence the same argument, as you wrote, that Democrats make for the police. They say the police aren’t members of our community, geographically or otherwise, they don’t have our values and therefore don’t serve the community. Those concerns are valid however we address them. I would do so for both the police and our federal bureaucracy.

It took me a second to realize you weren't talking about black lives mattee

they probably do not simply mean "his executive policies got slow rolled because the civil servants in charge of executing them were liberals who didn't believe in the policies".

They probably mean something directionally parallel to this. The more radical ones would claim or at least imply literal conspiracies of this, while more moderates believe in emergent conspiracy ie "The Cathedral", while more moderate still mean literally what you said, with the additional comment that this alone is bad and the ability for unelected civil servants to undermine elected officials is bad and they have too much power.

I'm not entirely sure that the term "The Deep State" alone is a Motte and Bailey just because different people believe different things about how much power it has or should have. It's only when it's used to equivocate between explicit conspiracy and emergent biases that it takes on that role. Maybe it would be more principled for the moderates to use a different term to refer to the biases. But if the actual outcome on politics is identical to the supposed conspiracy the more radicals believe in then I'm not sure the distinction is all that important.

I don't think there is some intrinsic quality of government employment that makes it skew dramatically liberal

I thought they overwhelmingly voted Democrat.

are involved in the political process in ways that may or may not be visible, legal or proper.

I feel like this summary is already overbroad in a way that makes it include both the motte and the bailey again.

Not visible? Of course, there a 3m federal employees and 20m state/local government employees, no one is going to be able to watch everything they all do every day. This seems obvious and value-neutral, definitely the motte of the term.

Not proper? Depends on who's definition of 'proper' you are using, and surely there are some improper things happening by any definition. Here people are going to disagree on how much it's happening and which things count based on their values and intuitions. May be motte or bailey depending on the details of the claim.

Not legal? Now this is definitely in the realm of accusations and condemnation, verging towards the conspiracy theory stuff that is the standard bailey for these discussions.

Basically, I think this definition falls prey to the 'jaywalking, littering, and murder' objection - people can be using this definition while talking about two radically different things (lack of visibility for good and proper actions vs. outright crimes of corruption) that imply radically different courses of action. So it's too broad to accomplish much and leads to people talking past each other.

In some vague sense, a "deep state" may simply be a function of a government.

Not before Garfield's assassination.

Maybe it's time to repeal the Civil Service Act. According to Wikipedia it was racist anyway:

The namesake of the Pendleton Act is George H. Pendleton, an Ohio Democratic U.S. senator who defended slavery in the 1850s and led the anti-war "Copperheads" in the American Civil War opposing President Abraham Lincoln. The passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act with the aid of "Half-Breed" Republicans furthered the aims of white supremacist Democrats to curtail patronage, which had been used by "Stalwart" Republicans to socially and economically benefit blacks.

If there is a point you're making, it is hidden behind enough historical anecdote and glibness that I have no idea what it is. What are you even trying to say?

Prior to the Civil Service Act the Deep State wouldn't have been tenable. Every time the executive branch changed hands nearly everyone lost their jobs. They had probably gotten those jobs through patronage, and their replacements would be patrons of the new guy.

This is why Garfield was killed. His assassin believed he was a big enough Garfield booster that he ought to have landed one of those patronage rewarding jobs. But, he didn't.

I know, and I'm not arguing this. I'm arguing that spoils systems made for worse governance, make for worse governance, and that the people (or person, in this case) arguing for them make a damn good argument for why that's worth the cost. You cannot have your cake and eat it too; likewise, you can't insist on a system that fails continuously and handwave away its flaws with 'eh it's gonna be fine'.

I didn't make any normative statements.

Maybe it's time to repeal the Civil Service Act.

This would be ridiculous in a modern economy. The spoils system had already had its day in an era where swathes of the country had effectively no federal presence except postmasters and other assorted odds and sods like lighthouse- keepers. America already has a relatively high level of political input in the civil service; even if you buy into the whole 'deep state' thing I fail to see how making thousands upon thousands of offices sinecures for party hacks makes things much better.

There's no point in ruminating on the Deep State or what it means because it means whatever the person deploying the term to make a political point wants it to mean. Christopher Wray has been accused of being "deep state" almost since he replaced Comey as FBI director, despite the fact that he's not only a political appointees but one whom Trump appointed himself. Deep state is nothing more than a smear against anyone in government who does something Trump disagrees with.

As for the actual civil service, part of the problem is that they're subject to laws passed by Congress and aren't just subordinates of the current administration. Part of the reason Trump is so often accused of being a wannabe dictator is that he expects the apparatus of government to do his bidding regardless of whether there's any legal basis for it. If Joe Biden told the Social Security Administration to stop sending checks to certain counties for whatever reason, the SSA would be correct to ignore him. Trump's concerns weren't as blatant, but he willfully ignored the normal avenues by which executive action is taking, and ended up confusing and pissing off the people he was relying upon.

he's not only a political appointees but one whom Trump appointed himself

You're saying it like it should prove something. Trump is notorious for bad appointments, he appointed many people who either stabbed him in the back, or made policies that were entirely contrary to what he declared he wanted to do, or completely ignored him and did their own thing. He appointed Fauci, for example. He appointed Sessions. He appointed/selected Pence. He is not great at selecting people who will - not even do what he wants, in any meaning of the expression - but at least not behave like they are his sworn enemies.

Deep state is nothing more than a smear against anyone in government who does something Trump disagrees with.

That is completely false, deep state exists and it is a vast federal bureaucracy which will defend its enormous and largely unchecked powers by any means necessary. Including, for example, impeaching the President. And being appointed by Trump does not contradict being a member of this bureaucracy - Trump can't just appoint a random person to be the head of a department, he'd usually be offered a choice of potential candidates. If every single one of them is the product of the same bureaucracy, or will be obstructed by it to the point they can't do anything at their position - what can he do? Fire the whole federal office to the last chair warmer? Even he is not that bold.

As for the actual civil service, part of the problem is that they're subject to laws passed by Congress

Technically yes. Factually, the opposite - the Congress routinely passes laws which leaves huge rulemaking powers in the hands of the federal bureaucracy and they only limit it in the most vague way. Even when the Congress does say something specifically, they would attempt to ignore it, and must be sued to actually follow the law. And even after an adverse court decision, they would just turn around and try again - because there's no personal responsibility for virtually anything (immunity!) and the most you get if you win a case against the bureaucracy is that they don't succeed this particular time and maybe pay you something from the taxpayer money. The system itself is immune to any damage and can not be hurt - so there's no incentive for them to not to try and violate the law if it serves them.

Part of the reason Trump is so often accused of being a wannabe dictator

Just like literally every single other Republican candidate or President, to note

is that he expects the apparatus of government to do his bidding regardless of whether there's any legal basis for it

That's BS. He expects the apparatus - unreasonably, of course, because the apparatus reasonably considers him the mortal enemy and would sabotage his every move - to work with him, as the representative of the People, because they are supposed to be serving the People, and not instead to obstruct him on each turn. Of course, that could never happen, for the reasons I already stated.

If Joe Biden told the Social Security Administration to stop sending checks to certain counties for whatever reason

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-admin-confirms-withholding-key-funds-schools-hunting-courses-shameful Random latest example. The federal government is using "stopping sending checks" as a tool to enforce compliance and force the dissenters to bend the knee ALL THE TIME. It's not some freak occurrence, it's literally their routine and favorite tool. Tons of regulations rest on it - if you don't comply with X, Y, Z, ..., you don't get federal money.

Trump's concerns weren't as blatant, but he willfully ignored the normal avenues by which executive action is taking

Wait, so you brought something Trump didn't do as an example of something for which he's a wannabe dictator? Of course. But the "normal avenues" is to work with the federal bureaucracy in ways that they built for working with them. Which would allow Trump to do exactly nothing because the federal bureaucracy has zero interest in helping Trump to do anything, and 100% interest in seeing him fail.

ended up confusing and pissing off the people he was relying upon.

As I said, he is pretty lousy at choosing people to rely on. Not that it's an easy task - given that any person associated with Trump would be subjected to eternal hate of the most powerful bureaucracy in the world, and the tribe controlling virtually the whole academy, law, entertainment, high-tech and significant part of the major business - and they don't pull punches. But seeing it objectively - the results weren't that good. It is his personal fault - but it does not change the nature of the enemy he attempted to confront.

given that any person associated with Trump would be subjected to eternal hate of the most powerful bureaucracy in the world

I can't provide a source for this but iirc there was definitely talk behind closed doors of the kind of chilling effect that certain prosecutions had on team Trump. Shortly after someone signed up for the Trump government in a sincere attempt to help him achieve his goals, they would have been the subject of incredibly expensive to defend against prosecutions from a variety of different government sources.

You're saying it like it should prove something. Trump is notorious for bad appointments, he appointed many people who either stabbed him in the back, or made policies that were entirely contrary to what he declared he wanted to do, or completely ignored him and did their own thing.

It is at the very least suggestive of Trump's difficulties stemming from both personal incompetence and poor judgment with respect to selecting subordinates (or alternatively, his appointees were fine but Trump himself was deficient in his conduct - if everyone you meet is an asshole, etc...), not a far-reaching scheme by career civil servants or even passive resistance from federal employees.

Including, for example, impeaching the President.

Congress impeached Trump. Both times.

not a far-reaching scheme by career civil servants or even passive resistance from federal employees.

Except in reality it's both. Moreover, the latter reinforces the former - if you know you'll have to walk through fire once you take the job, the candidate pool will be 10% heroes and 90% short-term grifters who don't mind the noise because they are shameless and their grift would work whether they are hated or not. If whoever doing the selection is bad at separating one from the other and very susceptible to flattery, then the chance the grifter gets the job are very high. These are not opposed, but reinforcing factors.

Congress impeached Trump. Both times.

Yes, but the deep state prepared a basis for it. For the first one, mostly, the second one is such a clown show that it didn't even bother with preparing anything, it's purely "orange man hitler". But the first was the result of the alliance between the Dems in the Congress and the deep state, especially the security services and State Dept wings of it.

Honestly when I think of the "deep state" I just think of Yes, Minister.

I listen to talk radio. Some hosts are concerned about the deep state, but think that name is silly. They decided that something more like "permanent bureaucracy" is better.

There is a real large set of federal bureaucrats that don't care to comply with Republican executives. We should recognize them as a tiny class with outsized undemocratic influence. But maybe a name much less dramatic than "the deep state" would be better.

A question: why do people believe that people - especially men - who are unsuccessful with romantic relationships are unsuccessful because of a lack of moral virtue? A man who's 30 years old and has never gone on a date or kissed anyone is assumed by default to be some kind of fat, basement-dwelling loser. When he is in fact a short but fit engineer, or a corporate lawyer, or a programmer for Google, he's then roundly criticized for being misogynistic or lacking in moral virtue. Occasionally, darker - much darker - suspicions are raised: let's say that there are reasons why these men frequently avoid being around unrelated children. It seems difficult for people to comprehend that an apparently healthy, gainfully-employed individual could fail to meet with romantic success despite a decade of trying...unless there is something seriously morally wrong with them.

Someone who fails at being a salesman, or a business owner, or even at playing basketball worth a damn...doesn't get that. "I'm a nice, decent, hardworking guy...but I can't sell shoes at Nordstrom, I've been working hard to do this and have dreamt of being a salesman since I was 12" is a kind of absurd complaint. He might be a fine human being and maybe he'd make a great heavy equipment operator, but he just doesn't have the talent for sales. We don't think there's something morally wrong with our hero because he can't sell shoes, or because he's a short, clumsy guy that sucks at basketball.

A question: why do people believe that people - especially men - who are unsuccessful with romantic relationships are unsuccessful because of a lack of moral virtue?

In short, the Just World hypothesis. Combined by bias in favor of women.

A question: why do people believe that people - especially men - who are unsuccessful with romantic relationships are unsuccessful because of a lack of moral virtue?

It's ancient wisdom from the before times. I think many languages have a saying to the effect of "there's someone for everyone", so if there's really no one out there for you, you must be really messed up. Of course, when people came up with these sayings, the dynamics between the sexes were a lot different.

I think your entire premise is wrong. People don't generally assume that someone who is unsuccessful with romantic relationships is lacking in moral virtue. That might be the case, but there are many other explanations: he's terrible at dating, he has unrealistic standards, he just doesn't put himself out there enough, he has some baggage that becomes evident once a woman shows interest (not necessarily the same as "lacking in moral virtue"), or he has so convinced himself that he's undateable (because he's short) that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yes, there are men (and women) who try and try and fail and never find love. That's very sad. But it's never because of any one thing (like height).

When he is in fact a short but fit engineer, or a corporate lawyer, or a programmer for Google, he's then roundly criticized for being misogynistic or lacking in moral virtue.

Look dude, ima be honest. You've been banging this "Short men can't land anyone but a morbidly obese hag" drum for a while now, to the point that you've actually been warned about giving it a rest. It's tiresome, and when you refuse every bit of advice that's been given to you, starting a top-level thread to pose it as a "general question" about why short men who can't get dates are treated so unfairly, it's no less tiresome.

This post is... okay, I guess. If it were anyone else posting it, it would be fine. But seeing your name, I immediately knew what the post would be about before reading it. So seriously, give it a rest. Yes, consider this an invocation of the single-issue posting rule.

Is this how the single-issue posting rule is going to be applied? I see multiple comments on non-dating subjects in /u/SkookumTree‘s first two pages of comments.

Without any clear limits this seems like a blanket justification to mod any post for any reason so long as the poster recalls the same themes, which literally everybody here (and everywhere) always does to a degree.

Le Comité better think about what they're doing on this one, because focusing on a handful of issues to a weird degree is almost the sum total of this website's content.

It's not just short guys. I'd argue it's the invisibly disabled and essentially those that look at least decent on paper. The physically disabled and deformed get a different but somewhat adjacent kind of bullshit.

I think in part it would be the Just World hypothesis as @The_Nybbler indicated.

But I would also wager it's because almost all moral intuitions are tied into feelings of disgust or distaste which can be 'prerational.'

Consider the Halo Effect, where pretty people are assumed to be more moral, just, good, whatever. Positive affect towards a person in one area flows into positive affect in other areas. A guy who has successfully gotten married and maintained a relationship for years on end could turn out to have been a remorseless sociopath the entire time, but I wager most people would assume they're a good, well-adjusted person merely by seeing that some woman is choosing to show them affection. "If she likes him, he must be alright."

This can also work in reverse. A guy who is maybe less than perfectly handsome and has been single for a while and who complains about it even a little is likely causing a 'disgust' response in others, just enough to lead the onlooker to the conclusion that this person must be morally deficient and/or hiding some repugnant factor about themselves because obviously if they were a good person they'd have a partner already.

This is at least part of the reason why "incel" as an insult implies that the target is also ugly, because apparently being sexually undesirable is enough to justify the fact that people never show them affection/sexual interest.

Now, to stretch my thinking beyond what I can actually support, I think it is simply how people choose to resolve cognitive dissonance and 'manufacture' a consensus about a person's worthiness for affection and social acceptance.

Seeing someone without a partner, especially over the long term, is the sort of signal that nobody else considers them worthy of receiving romantic affection, which is to say they've been 'socially selected' against for a long time. And thus you, as the person who cannot detect any obvious reason for this, must be missing something. And so there's a tendency to jump towards:

It seems difficult for people to comprehend that an apparently healthy, gainfully-employed individual could fail to meet with romantic success despite a decade of trying...unless there is something seriously morally wrong with them.

And assume that they've got to be at best eccentric and at worst an evil, twisted person who cannot be trusted. So rather than assume that the unseen masses who have previously rejected this guy got it wrong, it's easier to manufacture your own reasons for why they may have done so and resolve your cognitive dissonance in a way that DOESN'T violate the (apparent) group consensus.

Or to put it more bluntly, few people (women especially) want to be the person who 'takes a chance' on the weirdo reject even if there is literally ZERO articulable reason for why he is worthy of scorn, because social reality means this is a risky chance to take, as you could cause the group to turn against you as well.

I've been meaning to write a blog post which touches on this topic for months. Here's the bullet points:

  • Being morally good and being likeable on an interpersonal level are orthogonal traits. Many people are both, many people are neither, but it isn't hard to find examples of people who are likeable but unvirtuous (e.g. charming con artists), or who are morally upstanding but hard to like (e.g. socially awkward and arrogant nerds who join EA and donate vast sums of their own money to charitable causes).
  • The assumption that people who are likeable are also morally upstanding (and vice versa) is so widespread that it might as well be instinctual (for evolutionary reasons). How often do you hear people say "I like him, he's a really nice guy", as if the former by definition implies the latter? It takes immense courage to assert, without a trace of irony, that you like someone even though he's an actively nasty dickhead.
  • We assume that our friends and lovers are decent people who only occasionally behave badly under unusually stressful circumstances (i.e. the fundamental attribution error), whereas people we don't like are assumed to be actively nasty (even if we've forgiven our friends for worse crimes than our enemies have ever committed).
  • Many people are extremely poor judges of why they find someone attractive (either platonically, sexually or romantically). Asking people to enumerate the kind of friend or husband they want is a task extremely susceptible to being confounded by social desirability bias. Most people (especially those lacking in self-awareness) will list off a bunch of socially commendable traits and fail to notice that none of the people they've been involved with historically have ever met that description.
  • If you've internalised the idea that anyone you like is good and that anyone you dislike is bad, if you're approached by a person who's obviously attracted to you or wants to be your friend, but you don't feel the same way, the only way to resolve the cognitive dissonance will be to decide that that person is a bad person.
  • Sometimes the person will, by coincidence, be a genuinely bad person (because interpersonal likeability and personal virtue are orthogonal), but sometimes they'll be a morally upstanding person guilty only of being physically unattractive or somewhat lacking in social graces. For this eventuality, there's the all-encompassing cop-out that "he just gave me creepy vibes". If a woman says that a guy is "creepy" or "gave off creepy vibes" but is unable, when pressed, to provide a single specific example of a creepy thing that guy said or did (e.g. groping her, being pushy, making inappropriately sexual conversation on a first date etc.), you can reasonably assume he did nothing wrong besides not being the kind of guy to whom she's attracted. I don't care if it's been memed to death, this comic is a 100% accurate depiction of the behaviour of modern Western feminists in particular and the human species in general.
  • As I said, sometimes you might find that a person you don't like is a genuinely bad guy, but don't think the cart is before the horse - likeability comes first, then assessment of personal virtue. If a person says "I don't like him because he did XYZ", you may well later find him or her explaining away the XYZ committed by someone they like (platonically, sexually or romantically). XYZ isn't the reason you dislike so-and-so: you dislike him because he's boring or has an irritating laugh, then you tell yourself a story that the real reason you dislike him is because he did XYZ (even if you'd be perfectly happy to excuse XYZ if committed by someone interesting with a normal laugh).
  • This is most pronounced in the case of sexual/romantic relationships, but all of the above applies just as much in platonic relationships too. If someone wants to be our friend and we don't like them or enjoy their company, the human default is to insist that they are morally bad, not just boring or lacking in social graces. Many socially maladroit people end up with the erroneous belief that they are morally bankrupt on the basis of not having many (or any) friends, because they've fully internalised the "likeable = morally good" framework and all it implies.

And before anyone starts urging me to secure a mail-order bride, I'm in a happy relationship with a conventionally attractive woman. You don't have to be an incel to empathise with them.

It takes immense courage to assert, without a trace of irony, that you like someone even though he's an actively nasty dickhead.

Case in point: Peter Thiel. Dude is an absolute asshole, but by god do I like him. Same with MBS.

you can reasonably assume he did nothing wrong besides not being the kind of guy to whom she's attracted.

Yeah, thinking about it more, you do have the issue that the disability theorists call desexualization. Very unattractive people transgress social norms by being openly interested in sex or relationships.

Many socially maladroit people end up with the erroneous belief that they are morally bankrupt on the basis of not having many (or any) friends, because they've fully internalised the "likeable = morally good" framework and all it implies.

That is an interesting one; from what I've seen, they generally come to believe that they are misunderstood and secretly valuable but fundamentally unlikable/repulsive. Sometimes there is bitterness and resentment, sometimes resignation.

from what I've seen, they generally come to believe that they are misunderstood and secretly valuable

Yeah, of the two most common failure modes, "nobody likes me because I'm scum" and "nobody likes me because they're envious of my brilliance", I'm honestly unsure which one is less psychologically healthy for the individual. I've met a few nerdy men who I suspect were bullied as children and to console them their mothers told them "don't mind them dear, they're just envious of how clever you are", and they seemed to have really internalised this. The "former gifted child" phenomenon often referred to on Tumblr and other places like that has a real ring of truth to it.

Couple the two: scum tier outside, serviceable to brilliant inside.

I've seen that - once - with a girl who'd been burned in a house fire. She was a nice enough person but thought (at least in high school) that guys would only want one thing, and then only with a paper bag over her head. Very bitter, very cynical, very blunt.

That poor woman. Hard to blame someone who's been through an experience like that for feeling bitter.

Yeah - although she was too young to remember the fire, about a third of her face looked like Freddy Kreuger. She was fit, liked mountain biking, very nerdy and wrote a lot of fanfiction. She was interested in me; at the time, when we were in high school, I found her sadness to be a turn-off. I didn't mind her face. If she'd been confident and not cared what people thought I would have found that extremely attractive. Now...I'd date her and be happy about it. Time has altered my worldview to be more like hers.

She was not a bad person. She was instead a smart, kind individual who had met an unfortunate fate that was in no way her fault. I suspect that a lot of gifted but awkward people - or just awkward people in general - think that they're OK to good on the inside but that their presentation sucks donkey balls. Hell - that's what my aspie nerd friend thinks: he's awkward as fuck, but thinks he's a decent enough guy. Not god tier by any means but he's a decent guy.

That's a very good and insightful post, thanks!

I've recently been rewatching the mid-2000s TV show "The Good Wife," and it's one of the few creative works I've encountered that grapples with the issues you discuss. I suspect that some people on this forum might dismiss the series out of hand because it features a guest appearance from Donna Brazil and because the sequel, "The Good Fight," is a Trump Derangement fugue and woke fever dream—and would encourage you to reconsider. Especially after a romantic plot is resolved in the second season finale, the show turns almost exclusively to Julianna Margulies' titular good wife confronting exactly the good person/nice person conflict you're talking about — both in others and herself.

It really is well worth your time

I had to watch one episode of it in college and it seemed unusually intelligent and thought-provoking for a legal drama. My parents love it.

They had a great habit of casting against type. In the season four premier, one character says of another "maybe Mao isn't so bad if he works for you."

Mao is played by Nathan Lane.

It is instictive. Women naturally fear men who have low quality genes. Rapists are often portrayed in media as rich men but in reality rape is a measure of last resort. Rape is the worst tactic for reproduction if a man has a choice. Women don't just find unappealing men not interesting, they find them revolting. Most guys don't really feel anything towards an unfortunate looking women. Life isn't meant to be fair, logically consistent or objective. We don't have a supremely rational and detached mind. We often rely on gut reactions based on what is evolutionarily advantageous. Throughout history women who avoided bottom tier men did better than those who befriended them.

Women don't just find unappealing men not interesting, they find them revolting.

I have seen this written online several times before but have seen zero evidence of it. I have, on the other hand, seen men be friends with women who seem to have zero or little sexual interest in them. Why would the women be friends with them if they found them actively revolting?

I'll add some nuance. Women find such men revolting if they make sexual advances i.e. basically expect to be treated as sexual beings.

I think there is a disconnect between the guy who hangs around women hoping that 'friendship' will ripen into romantic attraction, and the women who take on face value that the guy is a friend. Then if he makes an advance, she rejects him, and he drops her. She's hurt and disappointed and angry that 'he was only pretending to be my friend in order to get sex', he's hurt and disappointed and angry that 'she friendzoned me'. She characterises him as the kind of Nice Guy who treats women like penny in the slot machines - put in attention, get sex out - and he characterises her as what the redpill warned about all the time - women have it better in every way and are favoured by society.

Women and men can be friends, but this needs to be clearly understood from the start. If you're hoping "friend" will become "lover", you're likely to be disappointed. This is made worse, of course, by the "friends with benefits" style hookups, where people are vaguely friendly and have casual sex now and again. Observing this from the outside, no wonder some men think that being 'friends' will automatically lead to sexual relationship.

I'll add some nuance. Women find such men revolting if they make sexual advances i.e. basically expect to be treated as sexual beings.

I'll add another layer of that - which is that very unattractive people are just considered, rightly or wrongly, to be straight up transgressive for wanting sex and relationships. That this unattractive MF'er had the gall to point that already gross, already-transgressive desire at YOU is just an extra scoop of shit on top of the steaming hot shit sundae.

This whole "incels/nice guys are actually rapists" thing gets trotted out every time this debate comes up, and I'm still not buying it.

I think it’s just because of the experience gap. Many women have rejected someone for being creepy, very few have rejected someone for not bothering to try, and so at the end of of the day ‘he can’t figure out why he keeps getting rejected’ turns into ‘he must be a creep and not realize it’. Nevermind that most rapists are not suffering from niceguy syndrome, far from it.

So I clicked on the link and took a look. I don't disagree with the findings of that study, but I think there's definitely some nuance warranted here.

If we define 'sexual predation/assault' according to 21st Century feminist terminology, then the cited research is definitely correct. After all, I think it's self evident that it's usually not low-status men who make - and, presumably, get away with - 'inapproriate' sexual advances, do sexual acts without specifically asking for consent etc.

However, if we use the word 'rape' in the original / based / non-normie sense of the word, i.e. rape-rape (h/t to Whoopi Goldberg), a brutal and violent act, then I think we're safe to say that low-status men are more likely to perpetrate it.

Even with this disambiguation, I'm still not buying it. The phrase "low-status men" is kind of ambiguous, so I want to focus on the specific question of "who presents a greater risk of violent rape to a woman - an 'incel' or a sexually active man?" because the debate started with the claim that women think incels are evil specifically because they think they're rapists (or because they think they're more likely to be rapists than non-incels).

The Intersection of Men’s Sexual Violence Perpetration and Sexual Risk Behavior: A Literature Review:

Research with domestic and international samples has consistently demonstrated a positive association between men’s number of lifetime sexual partners and SV perpetration, using both cross-sectional and longitudinal methods. In domestic research comparing perpetrators to nonperpetrators, perpetrators report a significantly higher number of sexual partners

In international research (African and Indian samples), having a greater number of sexual partners is a significant risk factor for intimate and nonintimate partner rape

For example, a history of SV is associated with an increased likelihood of having five or more partners in the past three months

Research finds having concurrent or extramarital sexual partners is associated with SV perpetration... Casey et al. found that men who perpetrate intimate partner physical violence and sexual coercion report a greater number of concurrent partners than men who perpetrate either controlling behaviors or no abuse

A handful of studies have found a positive association between men’s number of one-night stands (i.e., one-time-only sexual intercourse partners) and their SV perpetration

The review is really long but I think I've made my point.

"Women think incels are evil because they think incels are more likely to be rapists" may be a factually true assertion, but several people in this thread seem to think that this belief is well-founded. It isn't. The more sexual partners a man has, the more likely he is to engage in risky sex, the more likely is to have concurrent sexual partners, the more women he's fucked on the first date, the more prostitutes he's had sex with - the greater the risk he is of committing sexual harassment and violence. Based on this evidence, women have far less to fear from the average incel than they do from a guy who has plenty of notches on his bedpost.

"incels/nice guys are actually rapists"

No, they're guilty of something else that might be morally bad or fucked up if you squint hard enough. We as a culture don't have the balls to just straight-up tell awkward nerds that they're gross for wanting sex or relationships; maybe there's something valuable there, too.

Yeah - which is why desexualization is a thing. It is very possible for our unappealing hero to make a Faustian bargain: find a way to signal - loudly - that you know your place and are not interested in sex or relationships, but instead in something that is prosocial and noble. A doctor who is "focused on medicine". An engineer who spends all his time when he's not at work focusing on building water filters for impoverished Africans and says that he is more or less married to his work.

It is very possible for our unappealing hero to make a Faustian bargain: find a way to signal - loudly - that you know your place and are not interested in sex or relationships, but instead in something that is prosocial and noble

Becoming a eunuch or being homosexual are two other increasingly popular options that are also totally-coincidentally considered prosocial and noble by tribes that make more Faustian bargains.

I have seen men get accused of being immoral for complaining about and criticizing women online, but I do not think that I ever have seen a man get accused of being immoral just for not doing well with women.

What makes you think that economically successful but sexually unsuccessful men are being routinely suspected of lacking in moral virtue?

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/

Admittedly our culture has moved on from this specific discourse, but in 2013-4 the "Nice Guy™" debate was all the rage. The essence of the debate was intelligent, gainfully employed but nerdy men complaining about being unsuccessful with women, sometimes for the claimed reason that they are "too nice" or "women don't go for nice guys". In some cases the claim was a bit hard to take seriously ("fuck u u dumb whore ur ugly anyway") but in other cases the lonely men in question gave every indication of being kind-hearted individuals who treated men and women alike with unshakeable respect and decency.

The stock retort from feminists in this era was "of course women go for nice guys. If they went for assholes they'd be all over you", an argument which still occasionally gets trotted out as recently as this year on this very site. Note what this framing implies: that if a man is romantically unsuccessful with women and has the temerity to feel even a little bit upset or frustrated by this, he must be a bad person i.e. exactly what the OP is talking about. This was a key tenet of internet/nerd feminism for years.

Hmm. Around that time I simply concluded that what the disability theorists called desexualization didn't just apply to visibly disabled or deformed people but also to very low-status or unattractive ones as well, and that the RtR crap was just one more kind of desexualization: how dare you even want sex or relationships: know your place. Now. This applies to unattractive women just as well, it just manifests differently.

RtR?

Radicalizing the Romanceless

Oh durr, thanks

The one caveat I add to this discourse is that "nice guys" were being "nice" in specifically the way society had taught them to be. Respect women's boundaries, don't talk over them, don't yell at them, open doors for them, treat them as 'equals,' and never, ever, ever hit them.

That is, they did each and every one of the behaviors that they were explicitly and implicitly told would eventually get them romantic interest from women in their vicinity, even if the guy wasn't particularly handsome, physically fit, wealthy, etc. And for huge swaths of them, this didn't pan out, and they literally watched as guys who transgressed against the behavioral norms were 'rewarded' with attention from sexually attractive women.

So basically, their entire strategy was failing and they could either invest in it further and try harder, or try and figure out why it wasn't working.

In this view, for many of the 'nice guy' men the anger was caused by the complete mismatch between the expectations they'd been sold and their actual experience and was merely being directed at women since... where else would it go?

It wasn't the case that men were putting on these nice-guy masks solely to pick up women. They were earnestly adopting the persona and living it out, only to learn this had given them a distinct handicap in the sexual marketplace. Which was quite the betrayal.

If you haven't already read this short story, I think you will love it: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-35/fiction-drama/the-feminist/

I feel that in my soul, even if my situation wasn't so extreme.

Only missing piece was mentioning how he'd been raised mainly by his mother and his dad was either absent or extremely passive in the relationship.

The running theme always seems to be the lack of a positive model of masculinity and assertiveness to learn from so they become an anxious, uncertain doormat and revert to passive behaviors (which he may have learned from dad!) that are unlikely to succeed, but won't get them scorned or attacked.

I'm glad you enjoyed it. I would also strongly recommend Tulathimutte's first novel, Private Citizens (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Private-Citizens-Tony-Tulathimutte/dp/0062399101). It's consistently laugh-out-loud funny, piercingly perceptive and compulsively readable (I read the whole thing in 2 days).

You're missing a key piece of the puzzle, which is that people who complain about and criticize women online are called incels. This includes well-adjusted, married conservative men on twitter. "Incel" does not really mean something about being alone, it really does mean immoral anti-feminist.

Sure, but OP is implying that men are routinely getting called immoral just for being economically successful while at the same time socially unsuccessful.

I'm not saying that it's good that guys get called immoral just for criticizing women online, I'm saying that I'm not sure OP is actually right that what he claims tends to happen actually happens often.

Because men are assumed to be the ones who have agency in this regard. Men act, women are. And therefore if something goes wrong it’s men’s fault.

Adding to that that many people, especially women, have experience with men whose approach to dating is morally undesirable, but no experience with men who are unsuccessful at dating for some orthogonal reason. Yes, men with morally undesirable approaches to dating are generally doing OK for themselves romantically, but that’s often what women have to go off of.

As for OP, there are many women in the Philippines and Ukraine who would be happy to have you.

As for OP, there are many women in the Philippines and Ukraine who would be happy to have you.

That's kind of a cheap shot.

If he was a first time poster about this particular issue I would agree with you, but after getting warned downthread for single-issue posting about this topic it seems like ‘dude, go to the Philippines if you have that little success in the USA’ is exactly what he needs to hear.

So like, at what point do men in the Philippines start picking up on this? If it really is such a "traditional" culture, shouldn't we expect Western sex tourists to start getting the Bataan treatment from locals?

Rich nerdy white guys who have trouble in the western dating market aren't really engaging in sex tourism. They're actually bringing a lot of legitimate value to the table in the context of more traditional marriage markets. They're not going to get the Bataan style treatment from locals because a lot of the locals actively want to get picked up by a rich nerdy first worlder.

In a traditional culture, getting a wealthy and stable but kind of boring guy for your daughter is a stroke of luck, and young guys who might be interested in her don’t have to like it- they have a lot less say in it than she does.

The men with the most say are probably the most supportive of it: the immediate family of the courted woman. If she marries you, some of that American money will invariably end up in their pockets. Which isn't anything bad or duplicitous: in less individualistic cultures, of course you help out your inlaws with money when necessary.

It doesn't extend everywhere; Filipinos are much more open to foreign marriages than, say, Mongolians (don't even consider trying it).

Speaking as someone married to a Filipino woman, I don't see it as a cheap shot. I think it's excellent advice. Modern Western gender relations are deeply confused and toxic at the moment, and the gap between public rhetoric, professional rules, and private preferences all requires a greater-than-usual degree of reading between the lines to successfully navigate. By contrast, the implicit deal in many non-Western societies remains comparatively clear: the husband will provide some combination of social status and financial security, and the wife will create a pleasant home and family environment. Given this, I think choosing a non-Western wife is an extremely good option for many men, especially non-neurotypical men who struggle with the elaborate courtly cognitive dissonance required over here. That said, just because the rules over there are relatively more clear-cut doesn't mean they're totally transparent, so it's not something to blunder into without appropriate contextual knowledge. Otherwise you'll end up in a situation where you're shocked, shocked to find that your Filipino wife expects you to bail out her brother's failing business back home, or your Ukrainian wife expects to be provided with the means to keep up a glamorous wardrobe.

there are many women in the Philippines and Ukraine who would be happy to have you

Ukrainian women aren't in Ukraine; they're in Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic living their best Tinder lives and sampling the local carousel.

As for OP, there are many women in the Philippines and Ukraine who would be happy to have you.

BTW, OP shouldn't see these women as "lesser" than western women given that they're more likely to say yes to him. I don't know about Ukranians/Pinays specifically but I would venture to say that they are probably going to be more loyal, invest themselves more into seeing you succeed and make a better mother than their equivalent western counterparts (ofc bad apples exist everywhere so choose with care). When you're 50 what will matter is the bond between you and your wife and how secure your relation with your family (children if you want, in-laws), not how hot or desirable she was at 25.

This is another benefit of getting your parents/other elders to at the least shortlist a bunch of people they think would make good partners for you and then you choose from this set rather than choose completely by yourself. In the latter case you'll be more focused on the short term benefits of your potential partner than the lifelong ones they provide and are more likely to end up choosing a suboptimal person when averaged out over your whole life.

This is another benefit of getting your parents/other elders to at the least shortlist a bunch of people they think would make good partners for you and then you choose from this set rather than choose completely by yourself.

I won’t disagree that moving in an east India direction would be an improvement for US courtship norms, but just suggesting it is about as helpful as ‘we should hold singles dances on the moon to help people who have no success on the apps’. It’s just not going to happen often enough to constitute a societal norm.

Eh, once there are enough of us in your country (through either immigration, higher birth rates or shorter generation time) it's going to start happening outside of the subcontinental community purely because of osmosis, and especially so if we make up the upper classes in your country (as people like to ape upper class behaviours). No different to how all Americans started eating Italian food once there was a critical enough mass of them in the US.

Sure it won't help white people in the current generation (and probably not even the next), but eventually they too will benefit (ofc this assumes no AGI, if AGI happens there's no use in predicting anything from that point onwards, it's called the singularity for a reason).

They started eating the American version of Italian food, which is not necessarily the Italian version. And parents etc. setting the standards for marriage used to be the norm in the West, also, until it was overthrown by the ideas of romantic love being the only reason to marry, and more corrosively for marriage, easy divorce.

You yourself have given some indications that you want the best of both worlds: westernised women who will be happy to date and sleep with you so you get to sow your wild oats, then when you're ready to marry, a traditional marriage arranged by your parents. That's not really sustainable. If the USA does move back to the "nice girls don't, wait until marriage, and your families will settle the marriage" model, you and your peers won't have the opportunity to play the field anymore.

You yourself have given some indications that you want the best of both worlds: westernised women who will be happy to date and sleep with you so you get to sow your wild oats

Maybe past me wanted that, current me has seen the error of my ways and thinks playing the field is a net negative for society as a whole and nowadays I have brushed off opportunities because I know there is very little cultural and values compatibility between me and the girl. I will not soil myself or her any further.

Or, more likely, Indians will acclimate to US norms.

I happen to believe in this theory:

Garbage IN, garbage OUT.

Consider the type of person who will willingly endure a relationship with someone they are disgusted by in order to lift their family of origin out of poverty. An admirable sacrifice, to be sure - but wouldn't you feel some resentment? BurdensomeCount: I'm assuming you're a straight dude. Imagine if your whole family got, say, AIDS or cancer or something. But there was some rich gay dude who would save 'em if you married the guy. He's ugly as hell and kind of smells bad, to boot. Would you take one for the team/your family? What kind of resentment would you have for him? How would you ultimately feel about the sacrifice - and it is a sacrifice - that you are making?

The difference is that non-Western women have been socialised differently and will not feel disgusted by a man who isn't the best looker. The things that disgust them are very different from the things that disgust western women and I would say that their "disgust set" is a better fit for long term thriving than the standard western one (no different to how someone who is disgusted by blood and feces is more "fit" for thriving in the world than someone who is disgusted by fresh food and water).

I happen to believe in this theory:

Garbage IN, garbage OUT.

Consider the type of person who will willingly endure a relationship with someone they are disgusted by in order to lift their family of origin out of poverty. An admirable sacrifice, to be sure - but wouldn't you feel some resentment? BurdensomeCount: I'm assuming you're a straight dude. Imagine if your whole family got, say, AIDS or cancer or something. But there was some rich gay dude who would save 'em if you married the guy. He's ugly as hell and kind of smells bad, to boot. Would you take one for the team/your family? What kind of resentment would you have for him? How would you ultimately feel about the sacrifice - and it is a sacrifice - that you are making?

Women are only attracted to the top 20% of men. Any society where the majority of men are getting married is a society where the majority of women are lying back and thinking of England. If you are uncomfortable with that, you can either try to become Chad or you can accept being an incel.

I'm comfortable with it; it worked fine for my ancestors, and if I am performing my duties as a man by providing and protecting then it is perfectly reasonable to expect a woman who will perform her own wifely duties. Whether she enjoys it or not is her own affair.

Also I should add, non-Western women could be just as rich as Western women (and some of them, say from e.g. Saudi Arabia or Qatar, are) and assuming they had a good upbringing that taught them to value what is really important in the long term they would likely still be more attracted to you (assuming no cultural dealbreakers like you not being willing to convert) than their equivalent western counterparts.

It's about values fit, not about lifting people out of poverty.

The problem for women, then, is the men who expect to be able to bang hot chicks when they're 25, then when they're ready to settle down, get a woman who'll put up with a man not on his looks etc. but on other values, while the guy still expects he'll be able to marry an attractive woman.

If it's both parties accepting that "you take what you can get, and kissin' don't last but cookery do", then it works. When it's one partner expecting to eat his cake and have it, while the other partner isn't permitted to do so, then the resentment builds up and feminism is the logical outcome.

Feminism is nothing more than women taking on the role of the partner expecting to eat her cake and have it, while denying men the ability to. That similarly builds up resentment, leading to a never-ending cycle of hate.

But there was some rich gay dude who would save 'em if you married the guy.

Hold up, you're significantly changing the situation by making it a homosexual relationship. I can have children by marrying a very ugly woman, I cannot have children by marrying an unpleasant man.

OK, assume he'll spring for surrogacy; he's rich, after all. Does that change anything?

Mildly, somewhat, eh. There's a pretty substantial step when you cross from someone who is the sex you're orientated towards into an entirely different sex that I think breaks the comparison. It should be plenty to get the point across that it's a particularly repulsive woman. Even just on the child rearing element it matters that the kid(s) would be biologically both of ours and raising them together creates a bond.

I propose a compromise of a trans man who is fully reproductively intact. And I think I wouldn't actually be resentful of this transman if they also took the relationship seriously. Even this version is kind of lacking because I think our perspective savior is likely to be willing to change some things about themselves at the savee's request which kind of interferes with the repulsiveness of a transman to your average man because the transman would at least make an effort to be more feminine to the preference of the savee.

That said I do find the whole mail order bride thing intuitively distasteful in a way I can't articulate well. Something about the transactional nature. Perhaps Disney has just too thoroughly colonized my mind.

Okay, they're a trans man. They're also 450 pounds with atrocious personal hygiene. And they're a trust fund baby.

I take issue with the bad personal hygiene and trust fund status. The usual complaintants are usually well funded through their own personal earnings and frankly the hygiene thing never did at all in my experience, high functioning people who question they're success aren't low hamging fruit like bathing. Seriously, the idea that this is someone earning well enough to sponsor a family coming over while also not having figured out that inoffensive smells factored in is a venn diagram containing only the severely autistic. It's nearly disqualifying that you actually unironically reference it.

I do accept them being 450 lbs and repulsive, but I think there is still room to feel love there. But I think merely very obese would be more fair.

More comments

With respect to Ukraine or any other nation which suffered through the Eastern Front of WW2, it's mostly a simple case of a lopsided sex ratio favoring men (in current Western societies, it's the opposite case), and women there being socialized accordingly.

people are not thinking of marriage and family life in their 20s (and maybe even 30s) because that's redolent of their parents and they don't want to think of themselves as being in that slot of the stage of life yet.

I was thinking about this in college and after; I remember vividly working in a hardware store after graduating college and looking at washing machines, fantasizing about twenty years from now looking at washing machines with a blunt, abrasive, caring, fit wife. Then, I still thought that sort of thing was realistic.

I think you meant to reply to a different comment.

I think part of the problem of discontent is that people are not thinking of marriage and family life in their 20s (and maybe even 30s) because that's redolent of their parents and they don't want to think of themselves as being in that slot of the stage of life yet. They want the fun that our sexualised society tells them is out there - if you're in college, or college-aged, you're going to parties and banging hot chicks/studly guys! You're having all kinds of exotic sex! You're not tied down yet, because society as a whole agrees it's your right to be young and have fun. So if you're not getting that, why not? It's your right. It's owed to you. Someone or something must be to blame.

And that can be the patriarchy or feminism or Women Are Wonderful or Rape Culture or Toxic Masculinity or the Cock Carousel or something. But it must be something to blame, because the old conservative rules were too confining and stuffy and we've agreed to dump them in the name of self-expression and liberty and happier, better lives. So why aren't we getting the happier, better lives? If only women were traditional and submissive to men! If only men were in touch with their emotions and feminist!

To be blunt, a lot of men in the past who were just average guys with average jobs got married mainly because women had little to no choice but to settle for a guy in order to be economically secure. They had decent marriages, nobody expected a grand love affair or swinging from the chandelier sex lives, they got on okay, had families, lived together in old age. It wasn't fantastic, it wasn't awful, it was just how things were. So long as he didn't beat you, didn't drink, didn't run around with other women and brought home the money to run the household, what more did you want? And for the men, so long as she kept the house, was a good mother, and did her marital duty in the bedroom, what more did you expect?

People have much more inflated expectations, and much more choice, nowadays. Women can have jobs and support themselves and generally don't need to marry in order to survive. Men expect the swinging single lifestyle of sexual exploration when they're young, to have plenty of choice and plenty of opportunity, until they're ready to settle down. Women expect to have the same sexual opportunity as men. Somebody's going to be disappointed.

We don't think there's something morally wrong with our hero because he can't sell shoes, or because he's a short, clumsy guy that sucks at basketball.

Competence and self-direction are virtues in men, so we expect men to get attainably competent at things that are important to them.

Our hero might not start as an amazing shoe-salesmen. But, I'd expect him to get good enough to hold down a retail job at a shoe store, especially with a few years of trying.

Applying that to dating: The background belief is that it's not that hard for an otherwise healthy guy to get into a relationship, or at least go on some dates.

So, if a guy isn't dating, then the assumption is that he has a lack-of-ambition issue (he's not asking anyone out), a lack-of-skill issue (every woman rejects him), or a lack-of-interest-in-adult-women issue (... what is he interested in?). None of those are especially flattering.

Our hero might not start as an amazing shoe-salesmen. But, I'd expect him to get good enough to hold down a retail job at a shoe store, especially with a few years of trying.

There are plenty of people here that could not do this: not even if they were as dedicated to their craft as say Paul Ekman was dedicated to the study of facial expressions. It would - I shit you not - be easier for some of the people here to become literal rocket scientists (or at least aerospace engineers). I am not joking.

This seems silly and self-aggrandizing.

I don't believe that otherwise healthy people are putting engineering-degree levels of effort into learning to hold down basic retail job. If someone's telling you that they spent thousands of hours, with engineer-student level focus, and can't hack it at Payless Shoes, then I think they're lying to you.

Maybe he could hack it at Payless Shoes because he's an hourly worker that just has to know a bunch about shoes and show up on time in clean clothes. But selling something like insurance or used cars? There are a fair number of engineers that wouldn't be able to do that.

It’s a pretty straightforward syllogism: moral virtue is that which cultivates “the good”. “The good” is that which is desirable. Therefore, someone who is not desirable is lacking in “the good”, and therefore is lacking in moral virtue.

You can try to poke holes in the argument, but there is a certain logic to it.

I think /u/Quantumfreakonomics has it right. Despite ostensible public morality being deeply Christianised and emphasising our treatment of others as the polestar of morality, our deeper human concept of virtue is deeply bound up with the concept of personal excellence. A straight man who is failing to be attractive to women is failing in the same way that a slow cheetah or weak oak is failing, namely lacking in the distinctive strengths associated with his nature. Yet because of the deep penetration of Christian and (especially) non-conformist Protestant values into modern Western society — exacerbated by wokeness, a Puritan project in all but name — most people either lack the vocabulary or brazenness to say out loud, “you’re a lousy weak male, and you should be ashamed of yourself.”

Instead, that impulse has to be sublimated into the ethical vocabulary of slave morality, with lack of excellence being converted into lack of morality. The only spaces that call out this male weakness explicitly tend to be those that have explicitly embraced modern master moralities (in however confused a fashion). That’s where you’ll find sexually successful men making fun of incels as weakling feminised soyboy beta cucks etc.. Most other people are thinking that, but lack the self-awareness or honesty to say it.

most people either lack the vocabulary or brazenness to say out loud, “you’re a lousy weak male, and you should be ashamed of yourself.”

But this isn't a case of lack of brazenness or vocabulary. A so-called incel will never be called upon by feminists and NPCs to stop being weak, be strong, learn to be a real man etc., because it's not his lack of strength that they find deplorable, it's his open rejection of feminist ideology.

Nominally, yes. But would they care about his open rejection of feminist ideology so much if he were stronger? In my observation the answer is usually either "yes, but not nearly so much" or "possibly, but they'd keep their opinions to themselves, at least around him", which amounts to the same thing from his point of view.

Attractive people (of both sexes) just get cut a lot more slack for their opinions and treatment of others.

An attractive man today has zero incentives to reject feminism as it exists as a sociocultural reality, much less openly question feminist ideology. In fact, if you're an attractive hetero man who doesn't particularly want a family and isn't terribly concerned about the future of his nation, feminism is in fact great. As a result, you're not likely to encounter an attractive man who rejects feminism, so answering your question is actually rather difficult. This largely explains the cultural staying power of feminist dogma. It's high-status men who women notice, not average men, and those men don't question feminism.

People like to believe that the world is fair and just; this is why the gambler's fallacy exists, this is why the concept of karma exists. The idea that someone can do nothing wrong and still fail through sheer luck is abhorrent to most people, so they will grasp for a reason as to why the failure is actually justified, up to and including inventing things as necessary to preserve their belief in fairness. If a perfectly fine young man can't attract a date, there must be SOMETHING wrong with him, it can't be that the world is simply arbitrary and unfair, that would be too painful a world to live in.

Among the people who are most likely to say this also, ostensibly, believe that the world is dominated by a white heternormative patriarchal tyranny, or something like that. They claim to believe the world is deeply unfair and they relish pointing out this unfairness everywhere, even when it makes no sense.

Right, and to acknowledge that the world is deeply unfair even for many straight white males would cause their worldview to crumble.

When women, people of colour etc. don't get what they want out of life, that's because of sexism, racism, bigotry, transphobia and so on. When a straight white male doesn't get what he wants out of life? Well, if even the white cisheteropatriarchy doesn't think much of him, he must not deserve it.

But even this "unjust" world is ultimately just in their belief system. Otherwise the concept of being "on the right side of history" would be incoherent. The good guys are destined to prevail in their eschatology.

I've never heard anyone suggest that it was a moral failing. That sounds like a completely made up strawman to victim oneself against.

Obviously the reverse causality makes sense: bad people should be less datable. But i e never even heard anyone suggest this should is an is as it's plainly not real.

Where are you getting this moral failing narrative from? You need to justify the premise, because it sounds like extrapolated wallowing or self-loathing.

Doing it on the meta level is pretty funny, I have to admit. 10/10

But like others who point it out in this thread I've seen it both online and in real life. Consider how "incel" went from a morally neutral descriptor to a moral condemnation, with the absurd side effect of married men people want to denounce constantly being called involuntary celibates.

Self loathing is certainly bad, but it seems fair to notice that romantically unsuccessful men are about as low on the totem of sympathy as you can get. Even criminals and prostitutes are more sympathetic. You have to get to pedophiles or something to find people with less cachet.

Consider how "incel" went from a morally neutral descriptor to a moral condemnation

I can't consider it because I've never seen it except in these scenarios where i'm assured it's true by its detractors. I especially haven't seen this in real life.

romantically unsuccessful men are about as low on the totem of sympathy as you can get.

Again, Ive never seen this. Get better friends people. Romantically unsuccessful men are to the contrary some of the most sympathetically talked about people I know. Even where it's not sympathetic and just pathetic, that's not the same as immoral.

Doing it on the meta level is pretty funny, I have to admit. 10/10

If you're contorting my comment into moral repudiation of someone for specifically being poorly undatable, I think we've found the disconnect.

This looks like nothing more than a victimhood mentality looking for a bully.

Even if it were somehow morally (I'm not) maligning the OP it's not for being single or unlucky in love.

If a Jewish guy stands up in a movie theater and shouts, 'AntiSemites are trying to silence me!!", His point isn't proven when people shush him.

Similarly, if you come in and say, 'how come I'm morally maligned for being undatable!", I'm not proving your point by repudiating that claim.

I can't consider it because I've never seen it except in these scenarios where i'm assured it's true by its detractors.

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/ben-shapiro-calls-joe-biden-the-kurt-cobain-of-politics/

https://youtube.com/watch?v=nAaZvlYc71w&t=205

https://www.thedailybeast.com/sarah-silverman-savages-pathetic-incel-elon-musk-on-daily-show

https://www.lipstickalley.com/threads/incel-elon-musty-backs-out-of-fight-with-incel-mark-zukerberg.5352488/

https://youtube.com/watch?v=xGGKJ3REusg?si=PnJxvLZlcauYMGxs

https://variety.com/2022/film/news/jordan-peterson-cries-olivia-wilde-incel-hero-dont-worry-darling-1235388024/

https://thespectator.com/topic/delete-facebook-zuckerberg-incel/

A cursory Google (I'm on my phone) to provide examples of public figures being described as "incels". All of these men have been married at least once, all but one of them are still married, all of them have fathered at least one child, at least one is known to have fathered multiple children by multiple women, and at least one is known to have had multiple extramarital affairs.

Elon has ten kids from adult to under 2…. Calling him an incel is literally retarded. Clearly this is not a man who lacks for sex.

I completely agree, but there's no shortage of people flinging that accusation at him anyway.

Occasionally it'll happen that someone will say "omg X is such an incel" and I'll point out "X? You mean the happily married man with two kids? How can he be an incel?" and the person will reply "well he just gives off incel vibes" which is vague enough that it could mean anything.

It seems to be the same kind of definition creep around "racist" or "fascist" where it is now simply a general term of abuse or denigration towards someone who is disliked or does not share the same political views.

Like, if you read Eliot Rodgers quotes online, you can see why he failed so badly with women and friendships, and it had nothing to do with his looks or his ancestry; he was so self-centred and so hung up on his image as the 'perfect handsome gentleman' and yet the way he says things and the things he says, you can see why nobody wanted to spend longer than ten minutes in his company.

There's a complicated problem here with people who are, to be blunt, losers in life not due to their own choices but due to genetic lottery failing them when it comes to looks, intelligence, ability to be not-weird, and so forth. And the problem won't get solved just by "be yourself", but it's too cruel to say "yeah, you need to work hard on making yourself more of a sale, and even then you won't get very high quality in return" even if it's true. Then there are those who put the blame for their own failings (like Rodgers) on "it's women, they're bitches" and that engenders the angry and mean responses in return.

I don't have a solution. Government-mandated girlfriends won't work, because if you want someone to love you for yourself, then someone who is being paid/compelled to spend time with you isn't what you want - they don't care about you really, they are doing their public community service in pretending to like you for the 'girlfriend experience'. Telling people they have to resign themselves to being alone even if they want love and companionship is hard and seems cruel, even if it's true. Telling people if they do X, Y or Z they'll get that girl of their dreams is lying to them. Maybe readjusting expectations? This is not the 60s and the first flush of the Sexual Revolution anymore, historically a lot of people never got to have love and sex, there were always a lot of bachelors and spinsters, the idea of having tons of great casual sex in your teens and twenties and then finding a suitable mate and settling down for marriage and children only worked for a limited time (because you could sleep around, or you could get married, but unless you were rich or very charming, you couldn't do both) and now the sexual market has adjusted to the new conditions.

Really, Elliot Rodger seems like the victim of his own coping mechanisms. His inability to attract women (and same-sex friends, by extension) seems to have been entirely social in nature - as he correctly noted in his video, he's fairly handsome, he was only an inch or two shy of six foot, physically fit, obviously of above average intelligence. Unlike many incels, he couldn't blame his lack of success with women on a physical deformity or a learning disability. There are many incels who, one suspects, would have had just as little success with women had they been born 100, 200 or 500 years ago, but I would not put Rodger in that category: born in another context he could well have ended up content and thriving.

Because socialising didn't come naturally to him, he must have found it awkward and discomforting. In the past, he would have had no choice but to power through this initial discomfort, awkwardness, and platonic & romantic rejection, and had he done so he most likely would have ended up a more or less well-adjusted young man. (This is no mean feat! By "initial", I recognise that it might have taken years of persistent honing of his social skills with very little immediate reward. But it would be quite surprising if he didn't eventually get over it.)

But because he found this awkwardness and discomfort absolutely intolerable and because he was born in the West in 1991, he had the option to, rather than powering through, instead opt out and retreat into online spaces, in which he had absolute control over how he presented himself and with whom he interacted. Spending time in these online spaces made it even more challenging and distressing for him to interact with people in meatspace, creating a vicious feedback loop. Besides depriving him of opportunities to develop his social skills, the other big drawback of spending time in these online spaces (social media, porn, video games) is, unbeknownst to him, how heavily curated and idealised their depiction of the real world is, which resulted in what Rodger wanted out of life becoming concomitantly unrealistic over time. As a teenager, he probably thought to himself "I just want to meet a pretty girl who's nice to me", but by the time of his rampage his goal had curdled into "I want a 10/10 blonde bombshell with DDs, and anything less is a travesty on a galactic scale. 'Everybody' of my social status has that, why can't I?".

Really, the modern "therapeutic" social paradigm criticised at length by Freddie deBoer among others - in which every discomfort or obstacle (no matter how trivial) is an injustice to be remedied by fiat; in which the powers that be must go to great lengths to ensure that every individual feels "valid" and "empowered" at all times; in which adversity is not a potential opportunity for growth, but something always to be ameliorated or avoided under the auspices of "self-care"; in which smartphones and social media to connect with like-minded people are an effective coping mechanism for the "neurodivergent" - seems tailor-made to produce an army of Rodgers. I've spoken to Americans younger than Rodger who've grown up fully immersed in this milieu, and they genuinely seem to see no distinction between "this made me unhappy" and "this is a social wrong". They legitimately talk about the guy they like not texting them back as if their civil rights were being impinged upon. I fear for this generation.

It seems like one of those situations where people go through a superficially logical chain of thought but commit a bunch of fallacies along the way without noticing.

  1. For a woman to be attracted to a man he must be a good person.
  2. Women are not attracted to incels.
  3. Therefore if a man is an incel he must be a bad person (fallacy of denying the antecedent).
  4. Therefore if a man is a bad person he must be an incel (fallacy of affirming the consequent)

You misunderstand, the meta moral condemnation I'm pointing at is precisely the idea that such complaints could only come from victim mentality, which is pretty clearly a moral error. This is different from the question at hand but it is funny because it's the same fallacious mechanism operating.

You're justworlding too: you haven't seen something bad happen so despite multiple people telling you it's happening it must be because of something inherent to the victims.

Just world theory has nothing to do with my skepticism.

I've never heard anyone suggest that it was a moral failing. That sounds like a completely made up strawman to victim oneself against.
Where are you getting this moral failing narrative from?

Literally every feminist on Reddit. It's ubiquitous. Guy asks for advice or sympathy about his dating/sex troubles, immediately gets pounced on by everyone saying "actually it's your lack of confidence and your bad attitude that you're entitled to sex." Every time.

And they claim that things like looks have no effect on dating. "I know one guy who's short and bald and gets lots of dates, therefore your lack of dates mean you must be an evil misogynist". Or they'll tell guys to "take a shower" as if every unsuccessful guy is an insane hobo who never bathes.

Ok link me an example of that.

In addition to what Astranagant and doglatine have said, it may be viewed it as part of the common phenomenon of some people wanting to act like the victims of stigma and abuse deserve it. You'll see this in any bullying. The victim will be portrayed as a somehow bad or loathsome person by the bullies. This serves a few purposes. They can justify the abuse to themselves and to others (often, an aggressor's view and feelings towards another person comes more like a justification of their own previous acts, rather than as a pre-existing reason), and recruit others to the effort. Bystanders' thinking goes from "jfc, it could easily be me next, they should be stopped" or "the world is unjust and terrifying" to "oh, there was a reason, let's go with it or look the other way".

And I'm not saying that incels are necessarily innocent nice people all the time, and I'm not saying that anyone who derogates them is a cruel bully necessarily, but you do observe women who seem like they want any below average sexually attractive man to be sent into the frozen wastes, and thus it is useful to make the incels look worse than they really are.

you do observe women who seem like they want any below average sexually attractive man to be sent into the frozen wastes

Are you telling me that a subset of weird angry jackass feminists invented the goddamn Hock many years before I did? Independent invention, eh? I suppose if you chucked a bunch of unattractive dudes into the Alaskan wilderness, those that survived would on average be more attractive than those that did not, and they'd all at least be fit and determined.

Relevant recent comment:

it’s fairly well-accepted that men, for the most part, are thirsty coomers who will take what they can get. A lot of men will readily admit that they’re weak for female youth and beauty, and it’s morally agnostic just like how apples fall from trees. They don’t pretend their preferences have some sort of moral underpinning.

In contrast is the mainstream view that women are Wonderful, and that women’s attraction for men are but moral litmus tests for men who have the “correct” attitudes and behaviors, a view that in mainstream and online discourse many men will whiteknight and women will fight tooth and nail to protect and insist. It’s evergreen Just World insistence.

It's no surprise that sayings such as "you don't ask a fish how to fish, you ask fishermen" have been gaining ground. A few more thoughts:

  • The Women are Wonderful effect, Just World fallacy, with a touch of tautology. Only men with the “correct” values and behaviors are attractive to women, as women are only attracted to men with the “correct” values and behavior.

  • Control. It reinforces the status of women as social and moral arbiters. Coincidentally, the “correct” values and behaviors of men are also those that just so happen to benefit women (often at great personal cost to the men themselves) and abide by mainstream progressive norms: Being just as eager to wife-up women who’ve “had their fun” just as they would virgins, women who are single or divorced mothers (Real Men don’t care about biology) just as childless women, tattooed women just as tattoo-less women, “plus-sized” women just as slim women, old women just as young women. In “mistaken” paternity events (which totally don’t happen by the way, but when they do it’s because you stupid men deserve it), men shouldn’t punish the children and should continue to raise the children (because the biology of it doesn’t matter, as mentioned).

  • Virtue signaling. If I’m a mid-male who gets tepid once-in-a-month sex with my mid, aging wife who’s already had her fun and is weirdly protective of her phone, at least I can lord my greater morality over you in that I have the “correct” values and behavior and you don’t. If I’m a woman, let me deign to descend from my pedestal to educate you on reasons why you and your icky incel morals suck.

God Almighty, Sloot, reading your view of what women are like and why won't the bitches just open their legs for any guy without strings attached except and until the guy wants to marry a virgin after he's had his fun, it makes me want to introduce mandatory castration for all men, and I generally like men. I want them to be romantically and sexually successful! I want those who want romantic relationships to be able to have them!

What the fuck is it about sex that makes humans crazy?

  • -13

why won't the bitches just open their legs for any guy without strings attached

I don't see how you read this into his comment

What the fuck is it about sex that makes humans crazy?

Is this a rhetorical question? I feel like you could answer this

What the fuck is it about sex that makes humans crazy?

People who weren't "crazy" about sex did not reproduce; we are not descended from them.

I'm always down for a "total scrote death, when?" circle-jerk, however:

reading your view of what women are like and why won't the bitches just open their legs for any guy without strings attached

As an authority on myself, I must disagree to this highly uncharitable well-poisoning and strongly so. And you're extrapolating far too much.

I consistently bang the drum that men are not entitled to sex and that attraction is not a choice (the latter notion that I recently expressed to... you, apparently). I'm hardly under some illusion that: if I were somewhat shorter, less jacked, with less online social media proof, the outcomes I've had with women would be the same. Nor do I feel entitled to get laid if I don't approach, whether virtually or in-person, just as I don't feel entitled to get fed if I don't buy food and/or cook for myself. A sentiment I regularly express, indirectly or directly, mostly descriptively but sometimes prescriptively: For the most part (pretty much the whole part), men won't get laid unless they make it happen, with or without strings attached.

FWIW, I agree with you. @Sloot's intense and sometimes deranged takes on the Gender War get very tiresome for me as well. He does toe the line between "offensive, annoying but directionally correct" and "crazy hates-all-women redpiller" quite well though.

I think Sloot represents the cleaned up, highly rationalized anti-women maximize your 'game' rhetoric that we saw get developed by people like Heartiste and Rollo Tomassi. Unfortunately this entire worldview towards dating and relationships grew up as essentially a counterpoint in a mimetic arms race as feminism grew into an ouroboros that began to eat it's own tail when it started trying to feminize men far too much during the early 2000s.

While some men, like myself, were lucky enough to stumble upon less blackpilled, non women-hating writers like Mark Manson and eventually and pull ourselves out of a toxic, anti-social and antagonistic mindset towards women, many other young men who grew up with the internet and /r/redpill telling them how to date instead of a well-adjusted father figure have continued to go down the dark left hand path. The prevalence of single mothers raising young boys can't be understated in terms of causing this phenomenon as well. I know we talk a lot about inceldom and the future of sex here, and unfortunately I think men like Sloot, who from a homo economicus standpoint do have a rational set of values and goals, are going to dramatically worsen the problem of sexual relationships as the gender war heats up.

At it's core the dating market is suffering from a sort of tragedy of the commons issue, or perhaps a prisoner's dilemma. The societally healthy, pro-social approach that Christianity and most religions have endorsed for essentially the last ~10,000 years give or take of marrying young, being loyal to your partner, reproducing and teaching your sons to do the same is at risk. More and more young men are deciding to defect from a combination of pure lust mixed with either anger at the world, rejection of God and/or other religions, rejection from women they can't emotionally process, or all three at the same time.

It doesn't spell a good future for either sex, as far as I can see. I hope that our modern rationalistic worldview can produce an answer as compelling as the old religious framework, or we're in some serious trouble.

At it's core the dating market is suffering from a sort of tragedy of the commons issue, or perhaps a prisoner's dilemma. The societally healthy, pro-social approach that Christianity and most religions have endorsed for essentially the last ~10,000 years give or take of marrying young, being loyal to your partner, reproducing and teaching your sons to do the same is at risk. More and more young men are deciding to defect from a combination of pure lust mixed with either anger at the world, rejection of God and/or other religions, rejection from women they can't emotionally process, or all three at the same time.

Correct. And, as any libertarian knows, the way to solve the tragedy of the commons is to privatize the commons.

Likewise, the way to solve the Woman Question is to make women property again.

The pro-social approach Christianity endorses is only viable when women's sexual choices are controlled by their fathers, then their husbands.

More and more young men are deciding to defect from a combination of pure lust mixed with either anger at the world, rejection of God and/or other religions, rejection from women they can't emotionally process, or all three at the same time.

To be fair, it wasn't men who defected first, men are finally playing catchup after women have been defecting for the last 60 years and men have finally realised that women aren't going to stop defecting. Unfortunately everyone is worse for it.

FWIW, I agree with you. @Sloot's intense and sometimes deranged takes on the Gender War get very tiresome for me as well. He does toe the line between "offensive, annoying but directionally correct" and "crazy hates-all-women redpiller" quite well though.

In contrast, I find it exceptionally hard to sympathise with this sentiment, given the state of the overall culture. It's been quite surreal to watch various women taking offence at the fact that in a few places online, some of which have been sequestered, men are saying mean, denigrating and in their opinion untrue things about women.

I've seen it put like this: "[This] upsets you. You find it unjust and unfair and unjustifiable. What if that was what you saw when you watched CNN or MSNBC? Read Slate or Salon or the Guardian or the Washington Post? What if it was constantly trending on Twitter? What if your HR department instantiated it in company policy? What if your union promoted it as a true fact that needed rectifying? What if the American Psychological Association, in their guidance for treating women and girls in crisis, was promoting the ideas espoused by /r/TheRedPill and recommending treatment practices based on them? What if this narrative had convinced your country or state to reverse hundreds of years of jurisprudential advances, and return to an era where due process is an inconvenience that should be abandoned? That's what men see when they turn on the TV or open the newspaper. It's what they're confronted with when they come into contact with the criminal justice system, or the mental health profession."

The high-status, influential, thought leaders of our time do in fact promote such negative narratives about men, and it's ubiquitous in our institutions to the point that it's overtly endorsed by governments and many prominent organisations. Such viewpoints have actively influenced law and public policy. And yet a commentator on some nowhere forum online can make @FarNearEverywhere "want to introduce mandatory castration for all men". Well, I suppose in some way you kind of understand how the "extremist" redpillers feel, then.

I understand how this would be frustrating to some women who find themselves attacked when they personally did nothing to contribute to that state of affairs, and I do wish gender relations weren't the way that they currently are. But quite frankly, I don't think many women understand that this kind of thing is just daily background noise for men. And if the red pill is a response to anything at all, it's a response to the fact that said anti-male cultural trends have been allowed to go on for so long without any significant correction. Even if their defection is anti-social, it's a reaction to incredibly dysfunctional social conditions that they did not create. You can't make situations that resemble a boot stamping on a human head forever and expect people to never chafe under it and never create their own compensatory rhetoric - this is just a classic example of "You reap what you sow".

Would I like to see better sexual relations? Yes. Do I think things are headed somewhere bad? Absolutely. But the redpillers did not start this, they don't have institutional power, and in accordance with this they are not the ones upon whom I place the obligation to change first.

EDIT: clarity

And if the red pill is a response to anything at all, it's a response to the fact that said anti-male cultural trends have been allowed to go on for so long without any significant correction. Even if their defection is anti-social, it's a reaction to incredibly dysfunctional social conditions that they did not create. You can't make situations that resemble a boot stamping on a human head forever and expect people to never chafe under it and never create their own compensatory rhetoric - this is just a classic example of "You reap what you sow".

Would I like to see better sexual relations? Yes. Do I think things are headed somewhere bad? Absolutely. But the redpillers did not start this, they don't have institutional power, and in accordance with this they are not the ones upon whom I place the obligation to change first.

Well hey man, I actually agree with many of your points here. I feel a lot of sympathy and pity for the anti-social men who turned into red-pillers.

But I think the mature response is to accept the truth, buck up, and work to change it. Change people's minds, especially women, not by hating them but by walking through the issues and appealing to their emotions like their boys brothers fathers etc.

Now is this path much more difficult than just posting angry screeds about sexism online? Absolutely. But it's more effective overall, and much less likely to lead to actual bloodshed or societal upheaval.

But I think the mature response is to accept the truth, buck up, and work to change it. Change people's minds, especially women, not by hating them but by walking through the issues and appealing to their emotions like their boys brothers fathers etc.

This runs into the problem that the people who are upholding the current state of affairs have a much larger megaphone than we do, and are using their disproportionate authority/power to deplatform those who would ever possibly challenge their position effectively.

So how can you 'appeal to their emotions' when it's your still, small voice vs. a massive screaming egregore of social media/pop culture that is pumped into womens' brains during all waking hours?

How exactly do you change someone's mind when every single social force is pulling them the opposite direction? (without directly attacking the source of the pull, see below)

We have guys like Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson I guess, and a plethora of manosphere types that are trying to 'walk through the issues' in a semi-rational matter.

They take on the institutions, and they get literally imprisoned, fined, fire, deplatformed, hacked, and otherwise shouted down by every single mainstream outlet at once.

That is the message that is coming across. "Rock the boat in any way that might actually change minds and we bring the full weight of our combined power down to crush you."

So you say "accept the truth, buck up, and work to change it."

Please, if you think there's a version of "changing it" that doesn't involve directly 'attacking' the institutional power wielded against those aforementioned men, and men in general, and dismantling, possibly via violence, the mechanisms they use to suppress alternate opinions, I'd love to hear it.

Its the whole problem of "why are conservatives/libertarians/populists complaining about censorship online when they should be trying to change hearts and minds and building parallel stuctures?"

Because this response ultimately becomes "Build your own internet/payment system/social media platform" and thus the work required to actually get any change done is a couple orders of magnitudes more than it would be if they were allowed to speak their piece unmolested.

It sounds like a kafkatrap when read uncharitably:

"If you're just complaining about it online and not doing something to change it, you clearly don't care about the issue enough to take action."

Then on the other hand, if you DO take action:

"Whoah buddy, you can't just directly go after the people and institutions that you think are responsible for suppressing male concerns and preventing any response to issues facing men, that makes you look like an overzealous psycho! Work to change people's minds first!"

Yes yes, work to change things.

But can we be, perhaps, REALISTIC about the amount of effort and strife that 'changing things' will entail, given how TPTB are quite happy to keep things the way they are?

But it's more effective overall, and much less likely to lead to actual bloodshed or societal upheaval.

Societal upheaval seems like an unavoidable outcome if things continue on their current trajectory (never a guarantee!) though.

Some MRAs are conflict theorists. They believe that relations between the sexes are fundamentally a negotiation, and that women have more bargaining power which makes the negotiations leonine. These MRAs believe that feminism is in fact good for women in at least the short term, and as such they don't see a point in what you advocate - they think everyone already knows the facts, and their difference with female feminists is simply that they happen to be self-interested men instead of self-interested women.

"Angry screeds about sexism" are an attempt by these people to increase men's bargaining power by unionising men, much as they perceive feminism as unionising women (and male feminists as scab workers begging for scraps).

Even within the conflict-theory frame, there are other ways to increase men's relative bargaining power. Unfortunately, most of them are "run away screaming" levels of horrible. Banning smartphones is the most prosocial one I can think of, by a very long way, and I'm not even sure it'd work (certainly, their introduction brought women onto the Internet in huge numbers and thus enabled instant feminist shame mobs, but it's not super-clear whether removing smartphones now would cause those women to log off or merely to buy PCs).

(There are definitely mistake-theory MRAs as well, though, and some who are a bit of both.)

I would not disagree that some MRAs have a view of gender relations that resembles conflict theory (but as you already noted, many MRAs are also mistake theorists or are a blend of both). However, in contextualising this viewpoint it's necessary to note that the predominant feminist view of gender relations is itself an antagonistic one (patriarchy theory), it arose much earlier than MRAs, and much of feminist political activism is informed by this idea. And when you stand in opposition to conflict theorists, you need to understand that they believe they are at war and will treat it as such. Perhaps their belief is mistaken, but through their actions they have created a dynamic that's fundamentally indistinguishable from what you'd see if conflict theory was true.

In other words, the funny thing about conflict theory is that it’s self-fulfilling, to some degree. Once it is believed by enough people and acted upon, conflict theory frameworks then actually become a somewhat correct framework to view the world through, regardless of the prior validity of the theory. So when the primary lobbying group that purportedly works on behalf of women is essentially treating gender relations in this way and actually getting what they want, I do believe that does indeed introduce a strong aspect of conflict to the relationship, and I think the "conflict theorist MRAs" are simply perceiving this fact. Gender relations might not inherently be one of conflict, but in the current environment, they have gained a distinct shade of antagonism wherein one side seeks to incessantly improve the position of "team woman" in some shockingly zero-sum ways, and while they do feed into the gender hostility as well it's clear that the conflict-theorist MRAs were not the primary progenitors of this antagonism. The way I see it, a large part of the purpose of their rhetoric and activism is to create some kind of necessary counterbalance to trends they didn't start, and they're doing this without benefits such as the backing of institutions.

Once again, I don't like how things are going and find the entire thing to be almost excruciatingly tiring at this point, but once someone starts a memetic arms race (and I do indeed place the blame primarily on feminists for instigating that arms race) it's almost impossible to stop.

I think I mostly agree with your position on the fundamentals. I left my post as conditional as it was for a few reasons, including but not limited to:

  1. it wasn't necessary to argue the truth of the premises to get TheDag to understand the logic

  2. I'm too close to the feminism/MRA issue, as both a victim of misandrist child abuse and a 30-year-old virgin, to be confident in my objectivity

  3. I'm trying to follow something like that Doctor Who quote "I help where I can; I will not fight", and arguing the fundamentals would be wading into the Culture War for real (if you go through my posts you'll see that while they're not always taken as such, most of my CW posts at least technically stick to clarifications).

I think nuclear war's fairly likely inside the next few years, and I think there's a significant (if small) chance of AI X-catastrophe by the end of the decade. So a) CW issues feel trivial by comparison, b) raising the temperature of the CW worsens both of those risks because it weakens the West, c) if we do have a nuclear war, a substantial chunk of the Blue Tribe is going to literally die in a fire and the SJ movement is probably going to collapse in on itself, so opposing them now feels at least somewhat moot. Luke 12:20 and the Warcraft 3 introduction convey my attitude pretty well.

And to come full circle, this means I kinda do agree with TheDag on high-temperature actions being a bad idea right now even if I mostly agree with you on who's at fault (and even if I'm too much of a deontologist to actively oppose people fighting for ideals I sympathise with).

Briefly responding to the two comments here from @TheDag, although my reply to @FarNearEverywhere somewhat covered them both:

FWIW, I agree with you. @Sloot's intense and sometimes deranged takes on the Gender War get very tiresome for me as well. He does toe the line between "offensive, annoying but directionally correct" and "crazy hates-all-women redpiller" quite well though.

Uh huh. Let the fatigue flow through you. When sorting by “new” comments, you’re one of the most active commenters here, so it appears you have quite a bit of energy to spare.

“Deranged”, “annoying,” “crazy,” “angry,” “hate[ful],” etc. are all too typical labels lobbied onto wrong-thinkers, as a shaming tactic and an attempt to poison the well, where the targets range from Brexiters, American Trump-voters, white and Asian men against affirmative action, parents questioning the LGBT propaganda in their children’s schools. Nothing novel here.

While some men, like myself, were lucky enough to stumble upon less blackpilled, non women-hating writers like Mark Manson and eventually and pull ourselves out of a toxic, anti-social and antagonistic mindset towards women

Not familiar with Manson’s body of work, but I’m glad that some men, like yourself, were lucky enough to latch yourself onto One of the Good Ones, and to eventually transcend such “toxic, anti-social and antagonistic” mindsets in reaching such a state of nirvana and enlightenment.

I think men like Sloot, who from a homo economicus standpoint do have a rational set of values and goals, are going to dramatically worsen the problem of sexual relationships as the gender war heats up

I suppose I am, to a similar degree to which I worsen the problem of relationships between job seekers and employers, investors and financial advisors, tax-payers and government, by providing advice—or recounting a summary of my personal experiences—on job-seeking, investing, and tax-minimization here, elsewhere on the interwebs, or in person. I've not promoted the Wonderfulness of employers, financial advisors, and governments.

But I think the mature response is to accept the truth, buck up, and work to change it. Change people's minds, especially women, not by hating them but by walking through the issues and appealing to their emotions like their boys brothers fathers etc.

Yes, the mature response is to just be a Decent Person and a Real Man, continue to cooperate in the face of defection, and win hearts and minds by kindly walking women and their allies through issues as if you’re their “boys”, brothers, fathers, etc.

Obviously, I’m not going to treat individual women, or women as whole, like they’re a younger (or older, for that matter) female family member, just as I don’t treat individual men, or men as a whole, like they’re a younger (or older) male family member.

It's indeed all so tiresome.

Thanks for replying! Didn't realize I was one of the most frequent commenters here, I should probably scale that back a bit.

Deranged”, “annoying,” “crazy,” “angry,” “hate[ful],” etc. are all too typical labels lobbied onto wrong-thinkers, as a shaming tactic and an attempt to poison the well

Totally fair point. I get personally annoyed by the argument you put forward because I fell fully into it for many years, and it ruined many of my closest relationships with people which I will never get back. It also turned me bitter and angry at the world for a long time.

At the same time, there was a lot of truth in it. I learned to be more confident and the importance of actually contributing to the world instead of complaining.

I suppose I am, to a similar degree to which I worsen the problem of relationships between job seekers and employers, investors and financial advisors, tax-payers and government, by providing advice—or recounting a summary of my personal experiences—on job-seeking, investing, and tax-minimization here, elsewhere on the interwebs, or in person. I've not promoted the Wonderfulness of employers, financial advisors, and governments.

I would (with some caveats) generally say the employers, financial advisors, and governments are made up of people who have good intentions. I think the tendency to act as if they've all defected and there isn't a single good employer our there is indeed 'toxic,' in that it's an unhealthy mindset which will only lead to more suffering. Same goes for women.

Yes, the mature response is to just be a Decent Person and a Real Man, continue to cooperate in the face of defection, and win hearts and minds by kindly walking women and their allies through issues as if you’re their “boys”, brothers, fathers, etc.

This is a caricature of my position, and I'm pretty damn far from any sort of actual 'enlightenment,' but you're not necessarily wrong. I'm generally a fan of more civil strategies. In terms of actually doing this it doesn't look like being what you would call a 'nice guy,' it instead looks more like being a stern father. The ability to be truly kind and help others requires a relationship with anger, which I find to be the central issue with redpill esque arguments.

I know I came across as a bit of a dick in my post, but I am genuinely sympathetic to your position. I believed in the same things you believed, once.

Thanks for replying! Didn't realize I was one of the most frequent commenters here, I should probably scale that back a bit.

Don't do that if you're thinking you're bothering others, imo commenting frequently is fine if your posts are often good and yours are (and often get upvotes). And you're not the most frequent, netstack has 500 more than you, I'm about the same in total.

Surely the obvious answer is that many people's reference class for men "who are unsuccessful with romantic relationships" is dense with men who are also lacking moral virtue. If your reference is Elliot Rodger, or incels.is, or whatever that seems like a pretty natural inference to make.

Sure, but this is a bit like saying it's perfectly natural and reasonable for people to assume that every Muslim they meet is a potential terrorist, or every black man a potential mugger.

Sure, but this is a bit like saying it's perfectly natural and reasonable for people to assume that every Muslim they meet is a potential terrorist, or every black man a potential mugger.

Isn't it? When moms tell their daughters to to share elevator rides with strange men, they assume every man is a potential rapist, and everyone accepts this as a reasonable precaution.

Sure, but there's a world of difference between "assume every man is a potential rapist" and "assume every man is a potential rapist, unless he's conventionally attractive and charming", which is what the OP is complaining about. And given that high-status men are more likely to commit sexual assault than low-status men, the latter heuristic is actively worse than the former.

I do not accept this is a reasonable precaution.

I didn't say it was good. I think the ecological fallacy is bad all the time. But it is a thing people commonly do.

General complaints about sexually successful men lacking moral virtue are also completely commonplace though.

I think it is possible for people's model of both unusually sexually successful men and unusually sexually unsuccessful men to be dense with men who are lacking moral virtue without contradiction.

Someone who fails at being a salesman, or a business owner, or even at playing basketball worth a damn...doesn't get that.

Meh, that's mere technical knowledge. People expect them to require specialization or for some people to be more talented.

Meanwhile, social skills are seen to go together. If you seem utterly incompetent at an important life project like that people will wonder where else in the social world that also applies.

Hmm. That is interesting. Hell: someone who hasn't learned to drive and appears healthy...maybe he's just a lazy bum, but he might well have some kind of invisible disability. So too: if I had to guess, if you put a gun to my head? People with poor social skills AND who are also pieces of shit tend not to last that long in a given environment. Successful predatory shitbaggery requires the ability to conceal it at least some of the time and as such not suck donkey balls socially. Yes, you have the shit tier self-identified incels...but they're also lonely people. The Harvey Weinsteins of the world are competent at being predatory pieces of shit. It's basically Berkson's paradox.

Hell: someone who hasn't learned to drive and appears healthy...maybe he's just a lazy bum

Well, that's true for me. I let 2 learners lapse because I was too busy/lazy to give the exam.

My first guess would be 'psychologically wrong' given the setup. Perhaps they have mother issues and secretly hate women (though it's not always a blocker for success)

Someone who fails at being a salesman, or a business owner, or even at playing basketball worth a damn...doesn't get that. "I'm a nice, decent, hardworking guy...but I can't sell shoes at Nordstrom, I've been working hard to do this and have dreamt of being a salesman since I was 12" is a kind of absurd complaint. He might be a fine human being and maybe he'd make a great heavy equipment operator, but he just doesn't have the talent for sales.

Because your metaphor is severely retarded. Failing to get laid isn't like failing at basketball, or failing at selling shoes, or failing at running a restaurant; it's like being unemployed. Failing at being a lawyer is like failing at sleeping with some particular girl, or some particular genre of girl perhaps. One criticizes a guy who fails at starting his business the same way one criticizes a guy who strikes out with the sorority girls at a party: for lack of skill and ability. One criticizes a guy who sucks at golf the same way one criticizes a guy who can't score with Asian chicks, for lacking some particular talent.

But we ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY criticize men who fail at every single job they try for being lazy, useless, morally worthless, losers, wastes, effeminate, overgrown boys, the cause of the downfall of Western Civ. Men who are unemployed at 30, who don't have or have never had a real job, come in for exactly the same kind of moral criticism we level at incels. When they whine that no one would hire them, we gesture at the want ads. When they whine that the jobs they can get suck, we tell them beggars can't be choosers. When they whine about the Capitalist System, maaaan, that forces them to work to live...we tell them everyone else has to work too. When they really piss us off, we bring up Second Thessalonians.

Being unemployed is seen as a moral failing because someone has to provide for you. Either a relative or your countrymen through benefits paid via taxes. Doesn't really apply to inceldom. Even then we recognize there are people who are unemployable through no fault of their own (the mentally disabled/mentally ill).

Being unemployed is seen as a moral failing because someone has to provide for you

Partly. But not completely. A trust fund kid might have enough money to provide for him for the rest of his life. But, I'd still judge him if he decided to spend that life playing video games on a couch.

Is it his legal right? Sure. But I'd be applying a moral judgement, not a legal one.

Ultimately, we're judging people for not living up to (anything close to) their potential. That's why we'd judge the lazy-rich-kid, but not the mentally disabled kid, even if both of them lived superficially similar lives.

Failure stings when the person is failing at something they should be able to accomplish.

Fair enough. It seems like... just like some guys are destined to be college educated guys waiting outside home Depot with Mexicans looking for day labor or at best working as temps, maybe homeless while doing so...some guys are supposed to be living with and supporting fucked up women.

With the gender ratio being 50/50, and some women being fucked up, mathematically that’s how it is, yes.

Thanks. That makes sense. It's probably better to have a terrible relationship with a girl that puts you in the fucking hospital with stab wounds than none at all. It's only now that I have realized this. You gain valuable wisdom if you survive and if you don't...who cares? At least she's probably going to pay for it.

This is unnecessarily antagonistic, and also oddly specific, which I suppose tracks.

If you would like to talk about the specifics of your personal difficulties, we do have a weekly Wellness thread. Though even there, you'd need to be seeking advice (and be open to gracefully receiving it!) rather than just venting. I don't think I could draw a bright line between "expressing frustration over CW-adjacent issues" and "aimless heated venting," but your posts seem to lean more toward the latter than the former, and if you can't rein that in, you're going to eat a ban.

I am sorry if I came across as antagonistic.

I genuinely, sincerely believe that it is better to have a partner that might be considered abusive than to never have a partner at all. It's better for a 30-year-old man to have been working shitty, dangerous jobs for $5/hour cash under the table than to have never had a job. This doesn't change if he's killed or maimed on the job. The only real thing that changes it is basically it being highly illegal...nobody's going to think badly of our basement-dwelling hero if his weed guy invites him to run drugs for the cartel and he says that they never had that conversation. It's better - no shit - for a guy to get stabbed in the goddamn lung with a samurai sword than never have a partner. At least this way, the guy's having a relationship. Arguably, it's better that he get stabbed than his better-looking, more socially-graceful (come on. Samurai sword? Neckbeard might've gotten got with his own damn weapon), taller peers. Also, she's going to wind up in the system and as such face consequences for her actions. No different than if our neckbeard hero was working a dangerous as fuck job that paid dogshit and wiped its ass with OSHA regs and got shanked in the lung by a flying chunk of metal or something.

I hope that this clears some things up, and again - I don't mean to come off as antagonistic.

It's better for a 30-year-old man to have been working shitty, dangerous jobs for $5/hour cash under the table than to have never had a job.

If he can live on the land without ever participating in the exchange of goods and services, no it's not.

I might agree with the job analogy but you're missing a major piece about abusive relationships. They tend to emotionally damage both people and their inner reasoning to a degree that leads to future dysfunction. As opposed to the other examples, it leaves a lasting decreased ability to succeed in relationships in the future. If you start a business, but fail, you usually learn a lot and are less likely to make those same mistakes again for your second business. If you take a bad job, it might motivate you to get better ones. If you approach a girl poorly, you learn what doesn't work. If you suck at golf, you will probably get better when trying again.

But if the girl you are dating literally stabs you, not only do you have some medical recovery going on, but studies as well as practical psychological research and experience show that the patterns of harmful mental thought that have resulted from the relationship are very damaging to future relationships. It's easy to get stuck in bad modes of thought. Research suggests that victims of abuse frequently find themselves in abusive situations again in the future at dramatically higher raters than can be attributed just to environment alone. They literally become worse at picking good, emotionally healthy partners and relationships (especially without therapy).

I might agree with the job analogy but you're missing a major piece about abusive relationships. They tend to emotionally damage both people and their inner reasoning to a degree that leads to future dysfunction. As opposed to the other examples, it leaves a lasting decreased ability to succeed in relationships in the future.

Being injured on the job may leave you with a lasting decreased ability to succeed in jobs in the future. That is more or less certain if the injury is permanent. Our hero, after having had his arm shattered after working for Unsafe Ulm's Garage Door Company and tensioning a torsion spring with a goddamn screwdriver and piece of rebar, might be dealing with some mental trauma from that as well as potentially limited use of his arm for life. Same if he gets his lung run through with a piece of flying metal on the job instead of a samurai sword from his girlfriend - there may be lasting physical and mental trauma there.

So too, our shanked hero also has a responsibility to report what's going on, so that Unsafe Ulm or Crazy Carrie don't fuck up any more dudes. They are cannon fodder: it's an honorable niche. They'll fill the emergency rooms and operating tables and yes, the graves as well as better men.

It's probably better to have a terrible relationship with a girl that puts you in the fucking hospital with stab wounds than none at all.

Er no, why would you ever even think this? There are plenty of successful life paths that don't require any sexual interaction with women ever.

Not if you consider "successfull," to be "having genetic children that will themselves have genetic children." Not everyone agrees with that, but we're all descended from those who did.

I mean, /u/FiveHourMarathon is fairly explicitly analogizing 'failing to get laid' to unemployment, and via analogy describes them as losers, useless, morally worthless, wastes etc.

Seventy-three men sailed up From the San Francisco Bay Rolled off of their ship, and here's what they had to say "We're callin' everyone to ride along to another shore We can laugh our lives away and be free once more" But no one heard them callin' No one came at all 'Cause they were too busy watchin' those old raindrops fall As a storm was blowin' out on the peaceful sea Seventy-three men sailing off to history Ride, captain ride upon your mystery ship Be amazed at the friends you have here on your trip Ride captain ride upon your mystery ship On your way to a world that others might have missed

We (“we” as in mainstream blue-pilled society) do indeed shame and criticize men for being unemployed (in contrast to how we treat unemployed women), or their insufficient ambition and/or provision abilities in being underemployed or even retired early. Cue Chris_rock_unconditional_love.mp4: “I once heard my grandmother say: ‘A broke man is like a broke hand: Can’t do nothing with it’… even right now, Michelle Obama is looking at Barack, going, ‘What’s your plans, nigga?’”

However, we don’t gaslight such men or tell them pretty lies to protect employers’ wonderfulness. Employers don’t care about intelligence or credentials, they can just tell that you have toxic attitudes toward employers and employment, that your employment search is being conducted in bad faith. You clearly can’t fit a whole employer in your head and need to seek therapy. Just be yourself, work on your toxicity, and employment will happen naturally when you meet the right employer.

We tell unemployed men to get off their ass, start spamming resumes, work on their application/interview tactics. We don’t tell sexually unsuccessful men to start approach-grinding and working on their courtship tactics, as that sounds too gross and red-pilly. After all, advising to approach-grind is unromantic and misogynistic, as it implies courtship can be construed as a numbers-game and that women are NPCs that can be unlocked like boxes for loot-drops.

Employment tactics like exploiting ATS automated keyword searches and LinkedIn search algorithms, having pre-canned responses to behavioral questions, using offers as leverage to receive and negotiate other offers, can be freely and openly discussed in mainstream online spaces in ways that courtship tactics like go-to openers, having pre-canned stories, setting up date logistics to make sex occur more likely and quickly, and exploiting female mate-choice copying cannot. Not that women would fall for such tactics, of course, because women are strong and independent thinkers and because courtship and dating are dynamic processes that can’t be reduced to cheap tricks.

Not that women would fall for such tactics, of course, because women are strong and independent thinkers and because courtship and dating are dynamic processes that can’t be reduced to cheap tricks.

Amazing how it's possible for the largest employers who spend millions optimizing their processes to get the best candidates each year fall to for the standard tactics, but individual women would never fall for anything so cheap and base.

Modern western courtship norms are absolutely pathetic. Their whole society needs to be shamed for them. At least I'm doing my part.

However, we don’t gaslight such men or tell them pretty lies to protect employers’ wonderfulness. Employers don’t care about intelligence or credentials, they can just tell that you have toxic attitudes toward employers and employment, that your employment search is being conducted in bad faith.

Once again, your antiwork crowd would argue that we absolutely do that. The lies are a little different: "If you just work hard at anything you'll get ahead!" "There are plenty of jobs out there in your field, just apply-apply-apply!" "Back in my day..." "Something Something Networking" "Show up early and stay late and be willing to do anything and your boss will notice."

This whole "Compare jobs to dates" schtick suffers from taking what is said in one's own circle and universalizing it. There are still plenty of schmucks running around who think they How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying themselves from the mail room up to the C Suite.

Personally? I have highly limited patience for able-bodied above-average-IQ young American men complaining about lack of either dates or jobs as such in 2023 America. Complain about the quality, or the spiritual fulfillment, or whatever you like, but the opportunities are out there, literally all you have to do is show up at this point. The want-ads are everywhere! Employers tell me they can't find decent workers, women can't find a decent lay, all you have to do is be decent and the world is your oyster.

Funny how these complaining employers and women are totally insulated from criticism under this perspective. Did you tell the women to lose weight, smile more? Did you tell these employers to raise their wages and stop calling their employees cunts?

all you have to do is be decent and the world is your oyster.

All you have to do is offer a decent wage. There are of course, plenty of opportunities out there - opportunities to do shit work for shit pay. I don't mind myself - I like work and don't really have much drive or ambition to be rich. But I don't really pass judgment on anyone who thinks the whole thing stinks and certainly, there's nothing to be gained by scorning others or looking down on them.

We tell unemployed men to get off their ass, start spamming resumes, work on their application/interview tactics. We don’t tell sexually unsuccessful men to start approach-grinding and working on their courtship tactics, as that sounds too gross and red-pilly.

Who's "we"? There's plenty of people and instances telling unsuccessful men just that, and not just your stereotypical PUA types, either. Heck, I'd say that "just keep grinding" (not in those words, probably) would count as the most common advice for such men in our society.

If we want to keep the unemployment metaphor, what we don't have is a subculture that keeps telling the unemployed to just stop trying since they'll never get a job of any sort, to just blackpill and LDAR and what have you. (We do have antiwork types but their message is different - not one of despair but one of conscious rejection - and they're marginal.) However, we do have subcultural incels telling young men just that vis-a-vis dating, every day, on image boards and other sorts of forums.

2 points:

1, I'm not so sure that this is a universal implication that people make about all men who have trouble dating. Rather, I think it's levied at specific communities of (mostly-online) men who complain about having trouble dating, or against men making specific types of complaints that pattern-match to rhetoric from those communities. And then there's a whole rabbit-hole of why people feel those communities are morally suspect, whether that's a fair judgement, whether that judgement is being applied overbroadly, etc.

2, As you point out, the first guess isn't a moral failing, it's a physical/social/economic failing ('fat basement-dwelling loser'). When it turns out that none of those explanations apply, it's natural that people would try to think of some other explanation for what is, after all, a surprising outcome statistically... and if none of physical, social, or economic failings are available as possible explanations, then yeah, some moral failing probably is one of the more likely remaining explanations.

Like, it's not surprising if someone can't succeed in basketball if they're not good at basketball and don't have the physical or mental attributes needed to succeed at it. If you then say 'no actually they're a 6'8" hugely gifted natural athlete with tons of self-discipline and determination and they were born with the resources and opportunities and support structures needed to focus on this and also they still can't make any headway' then at that point yeah you would start looking at less likely explanations for what is going on.

Ironically, the people who say guys who can't get laid must be evil, are typically the same ones who spout Nice Guy rhetoric that "being nice doesn't entitle you to sex", and they somehow don't see the contradiction.

Of course they would never have sex with said guy no matter what he did, said, or believed, but some hypothetical other woman (who conveniently can never be specified) might.

This is usually because they conflate promiscuity with low standards, they're not equivalent

Considering who posted this it's difficult not to read it as a thinly-veiled rant. I think the responses cover most of the best answers but I'll add that the phenomenon you describe is very exaggerated online where a subset of users (especially on Reddit) have a rabid hatred of incels, Redpillers, and any group of men who have anything less than perfectly normie, bluepilled opinions on gender relations.

I'm reminded of this thread where a young man sexually propositioned a classmate he was friendly with. It did not go well for him. I think his approach was misguided and someone should nicely tell him that, he's still very young and has plenty of time to learn from the mistake. But many of the commenters jumped straight to "he's doomed to be an Andrew Tate fan or an incel". I think this is a bizarre, almost autistic response. Like telling someone posting about struggling with their faith in Christ that they're doomed to be Dawkins fan. There's definitely some people just looking for an excuse to rag on sexually unsuccessful men. Either women who just use them as an outlet for their rage or men virtue signaling their superior moral status.

/r/Tinder is similar. Every now and then a woman will post a man starting a convo with an overly forward pickup line and the comments will be filled with people saying "ha! next thing you know he'll be complaining about how women on Tinder don't wanna fuck him!". Which is especially bizarre considering that the most popular genre of post on the sub is men trying similar lines successfully. Almost like a low-effort, sexualized pickup line will sometimes get you laid on an app designed to get you laid with as little effort as possible. Shocking.

In general I wouldn't put too much stock into the opinions of people who comment things like this. Worth remembering that a lot of the content you read online is produced by insane people. In real life, women are mostly just baffled when they hear an otherwise normal guy is romantically unsuccessful. I remember an ex being shocked my college roommate was still a virgin and she said something along the lines of "why doesn't he just talk to some girls at a frat party and get it over with?". Which is sort of adorably naive. Though tbf that was in 2017, slightly before that incel discourse had reached its peak online.

Worth remembering that a lot of the content you read online is produced by insane people.

In this context this isn't relevant. What is relevant is that the incitement by these particular insane people of hatred, ostracism and violence against "incels" is completely normalized. That should be a huge warning sign.

Warning sign about what, exactly?

A warning sign that the ongoing cultural revolution will be waged with heightened intensity in the future, because the generation that is currently in its teens and preteens is growing up in an environment where this sort of culture war fodder brainrot is, again, completely normalized throughout social media, which is all-pervasive. I think this is self-evident.

Every now and then a woman will post a man starting a convo with an overly forward pickup line and the comments will be filled with people saying "ha! next thing you know he'll be complaining about how women on Tinder don't wanna fuck him!". Which is especially bizarre considering that the most popular genre of post on the sub is men trying similar lines successfully.

Yeah, for the men it's like a group of Spidermen pointing at each other. And it's always easy for women to judge as armchair quarterbacks, since they never have to make the first move themselves. Ugh, stupid men, why can't they just get it?

Just read her mind, bro.

I remember an ex being shocked my college roommate was still a virgin and she said something along the lines of "why doesn't he just talk to some girls at a frat party and get it over with?". Which is sort of adorably naive.

I know, right? It's almost cute in a childlike way. "Why doesn't he just ask Santa Clause to bring him a girlfriend for Christmas? Is your roommate stupid?"

As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, "courtship and romance are just magical things that happen to [women] serendipitously like Acts of God" while they exist passively, so it's sometimes amusing to hear their (lack of) insights on how the sausage is made.

It's funny you linked indirectly to that reddit thread as apparently as of two days ago the OOP is back! asking what to do since that girl is apparently in his same major and is in one of his classes again and will probably be in even more in the future. So basically everyone in his major will know. But I'd argue that pulling aside a classmate in the library you're in an informal study group with and saying directly "hey let's have sex, but also I don't want to date you" out of the blue is something that merits inclusion in the informal network of women-to-women conversations that, out of safety, exists to warn others women of potential creeps. The fact he did it as maybe sophomore/junior (21 in college?) within a cohort of frequent acquaintances and in a school setting (the library!) is a major self-inflicted L, not merely an innocent misunderstanding in my view.

I do agree though that online responses to especially dating type questions don't line up super well with real life relationships. Something about the online experience doesn't allow the same degree of nuance and sense that the person you're talking to is a complicated and occasionally self-contradictory person in their own right.

Man, that was a great Motte thread. What’s great about that scenario is that when you read it, you get an instinctive “oh no what is he doing?” response. But when you actually think about it, what exactly did this guy do wrong? No-strings-attached hookups between classmates are definitely a thing that happens. He asked for affirmative consent. He did not hurt her in any way.

I'd argue that pulling aside a classmate in the library you're in an informal study group with and saying directly "hey let's have sex, but also I don't want to date you" out of the blue is something that merits inclusion in the informal network of women-to-women conversations that, out of safety, exists to warn others women of potential creeps.

Okay, go ahead. Make the argument. Bonus points if you can coherently define the word “creep”. This is not a rhetorical question. I really want to see someone do it.

I will confess I just looked at the primary reddit threads and not the motte side, though they might be interesting and perhaps then I should, so I haven't examined it super in depth yet. But I'm actually more than happy to provide a definition, and I don't think it's actually all that difficult.

My own definition of a creep is someone who deliberately places themselves in situations to get, or verbally fishes for, excessive amounts or types of personal information from women, often largely unsolicited or abruptly sexual in nature. I think that captures pretty well what women mean by a creep. Some women might add an addendum that excessive leering might also qualify. Now, I'll concede that physical attractiveness of the male in question of course warps these standards a bit. We all know that happens (e.g. the HR meme). But it doesn't influence the definition itself, just the cutoff point of what constitutes "excessive" or maybe less often, "unsolicited". The definition I think is fine.

While no harm was demonstrated, he (at least to her view, obviously she didn't receive nor seek out the full story) did affirmatively demonstrate an a) unsolicited b) excessive and c) abruptly sexual interaction. The implication is that he views many otherwise innocent/normal interactions with women in a "I want to score", sex-seeking way. Someone interested primarily in not the personalities of women, but their sexual willingness to the exclusion of other things. That's a predator kind of mindset. Now, it's not actually his mindset (due to a wildly off base understanding of FWBs and a general unfamiliarity with female friendship generally) but you can forgive her for jumping to that conclusion, I think. And there actually are elements there that support the conclusion a bit! She makes a correlation-causation kind of judgement error in shunning him and spreading it around. More pessimistically (and more speculatively), it probably hurt her ego the implication that she's either really easy or she's only good for sex but not good enough for a relationship, so putting him in a "creep" bucket allows the problem to be him, not her.

Dictionary.com uses a bit more broad and uncharitable definition: "an obnoxious, disturbingly eccentric, deviant, or painfully introverted person". I don't like this definition at all because it combines and conflates a lot of behaviors and personalities together without much actual meaning. Maybe similar to what you're criticizing. I think it's grossly unfair to call someone a creep just for being a "painful introvert". What women are actually interested in, for sharing purposes, is to try to count "red flags" and due the absence of good data, often resort to less good measures including stereotypes in an attempt to keep themselves and those around them safe. It's understandable, but often imperfect and of course a bit vulnerable to gossips with bad intentions. The other element in being a "creep" is the "obnoxious" angle, which is the only thing I couldn't find a good way to include but should be, and perhaps also the part that leads to a more slippery slope and overbroad definition and use of the word.

I appreciate the detailed and sincere response.

My core problem with the whole “dating” milieu is that it is fundamentally dishonest. It is dishonest both in that the most common advice given to individuals is lies, and in that any imperfect man must be dishonest about his intentions in order to get laid. Comment 171 syndrome is real, and it’s chewing young men up. Your average introvert doesn’t want to chat up the girl in his class for her personality. That’s what being an introvert means. Our young hero has to either:

  1. Suck it up and live the rest of his life alone.

  2. Say how he feels and get labeled the local creep. Or:

  3. Come up with some elaborate scheme with a false motive for getting together so that he can have plausible deniability when he invites her back to his room — at which point, presumably, sexual advances will no longer be excessive or abrupt (I honestly don’t know if that’s true. I’ve never gotten that far before. There might be even more steps after).

I think your definition of “creep” is bad because it perpetuates this insanity.

I mean, yes, and if that girl is charmed by you at all, she'll have to pretend to care about whatever niche interest you're into. Welcome to normal human relationships.

If you want to be an introvert, the price is, yes, it'll be harder for you to build those initial relationships.

Honestly, a lot of complaints from people in general, but mostly men, when it comes to the dating scene seem to basically be a lot of the time, "I can't act exactly the way I want too, and get exactly what I want." No, but 90% of people in general can't, at least for the person they want.

I mean, yes, and if that girl is charmed by you at all, she'll have to pretend to care about whatever niche interest you're into. Welcome to normal human relationships.

Wow, normal human relationships suck! I always just looked for things we both liked, so no one had to pretend.

not merely an innocent misunderstanding in my view.

What distinguishes an "innocent misunderstanding" from, well, whatever you think it is? I lean toward "it is an innocent misunderstanding" because that sort of behavior can easily result from uncritically taking terrible mainstream dating/hookup advice at face value, such as:

  1. always ask for consent (as @Quantumfreakonomics mentioned)
  2. casual sex is fine (we don't slut shame around here!)
  3. be upfront about your intentions (lest he gaslight her or make assumptions)

#1 and #3 taken literally are retarded but they're suggested all the time online, mostly by women. In reality hooking up almost always involves a situation that starts with some plausible deniability and maybe a little alcohol. And women hardly ever complain about the setup after the fact. He might have gotten away with this had he invited her over to his place to study, rushed through a problem set and then handed her a beer and put on a movie. But were he to post about this idea there would be people, some of whom presumably understand signaling and subtext irl, who would accuse him of getting her drunk to take advantage of her or being a creep who tried to sexualize what the poor girl thought was an innocent study session. To a naive young man who doesn't have the experience or intuition to understand that advice on Reddit and from women generally is effectively designed to preserve your virginity as long as possible, the approach he actually took seems much less manipulative and therefore ethical.

The actual reality is the Sex Recession was either something made up out of bad data, a temporary drop mostly due to women being more worried about COVID than men, especially among single people under 30, or was left-leaning women being more wary of "non-political men" and those men learning how to better sell themselves.

Why do I say this? Because according to the same data people used to write one zillion Hot Takes about how online dating has destroyed young men's ability to get laid, everything is fine - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FyOlWt9aUAAYZsd?format=png&name=small

We're back to the only guys not getting laid actually being probably the guys who were never getting laid. Or maybe the incels aged out, and Gen Z, born into dating apps, know how to deal with them better as they enter adulthood.

I suspect it's end is bad data/ change in definitions.

People are fatter than ever. Then there's porn.

My view is the data was always kind of meh, COVID really messed with it, and maybe this new data is OK, but maybe it's just as bad, but it shouldn't have been used or be used as proof there's an incel crisis or Tinder had destroyed gender relations or whatever.

Tinder enables winner takes all mechanic in dating, which doesn't help anyone but guys great at getting matches on tinder.

Is that even in dispute?

As to why there's a crisis, tinder / sex Revolution is not solely to blame. Few could have forecasted accurately that while porn use was no big deal, having access to a great variety of porn will cause sexual dysfunction in a lot of men. (5-10% is my estimate hard to find any or good data on that).

This is a bit of a ramble, but bare with me.

I honestly think what Tinder mostly did was give men definitive no's when they could've maybe dreamed in a perfect world, they could convince a woman they're the right match.

I'll put it this way - back in 1995, your random guy working a decent mid-level job at Microsoft in Seattle wasn't hooking up with the cute rock chicks hanging out in still super cheap 'n' grungy Capitol Hill, but the fantasy could still exist. Now, that same guy knows for sure it's a 'no.' Now, I do think one thing that maybe should be pushed slightly more is unless the other person has a photographic memory, you have a really terrible profile they'd remember, or you have terrible luck, it's probably fine to try to hit on somebody that swiped left on you six months ago if you come across them. Now, the issue there is you shouldn't probably remember the person you didn't match with six months ago, and that's a sign of deeper issues.

There's no actual good evidence of greater hypergamy among women of this actual hoovering up of all the women by Chad's that people on Twitter and the Internet claim is happening. The reality is, despite what some people on this very site claim is happening, you random average-looking office worker in suburban Des Moines is not swiping no on everybody who doesn't make six figures, isn't six feet, or at least "six inches." Now, maybe this is happening in very specific situations that people online are overrepresented in - ie. San Francisco - but most things people complain about Tinder, have been complained about dating since it became something more than what your parents decided you were going to do.

Now, you can maybe make some arguments about the drop of in-person meeting and such, but I do honestly think the results of Tinder have been overstated because two groups of people that Tinder causes issues in totally separate ways - women who get tons of matches on Tinder and dudes who get zero matches on Tinder, both have outsized voices in their own bubbles. I also firmly believe that there are a lot of dead profiles on Tinder or profiles that (mostly) women leave active to be another form of social media that gives them positive feedback in the form of likes. Now, that might be bad, but that's not a fault of women, since men would largely do the same thing if they could.

Tinder, porn, and general changes in dating are thing people are an '8' on a 1-10 scale and will lead to massive scales of societal destruction, but in reality, they're probably a '3' or '4' and nobody actually talks up the positives. Like, knowing say, whether your partner would be OK w/ an abortion or has drastically different views on their future is actually something that's probably stopped bad marriages, divorces, and terrible custody cases. That's not even getting into the fact the actual big society wide changes aren't so-much US going from people getting married at 24 and having 2.3 kids to getting married at 34 and having 1.8 kids, it's that even places like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and most of Africa are having plummeting birthrate drops.

I honestly think what Tinder mostly did was give men definitive no's when they could've maybe dreamed in a perfect world, they could convince a woman they're the right match.

This is a real and significant psychological effect. In the old days all these “redpills” would sound like rumors or conspiracy theories. You don’t really “get it” until you see a, “you have 121 matches,” notification pop up on your female classmate’s phone.

Is it really a definitive no, though? I'm not sure that just because a woman rejects a man based on his Tinder profile, it 100% means that she would reject him in real life. Maybe it's like 90% or something, but that still means it's not a definitive no.

The data has always been bad. Sample size is like 150 people (both men and women) in that age group for each year. That leads to so much noise in each observation it's really hard to deduce anything.

It'd be helpful to look at hard data on venereal diseases / STDs, to the extent it is even publicly available. If the sex recession is real, and I'm convinced it is, the data should show the following:

  1. A small minority of single men carry a large number of STDs simultaneously.

  2. A large majority of single men do not, and have never carried any STD.

  3. Regarding STD rates, the variance among single women is much lower than among single men.

  4. On average, single women are more likely to be infected than single men, and if infected, are more likely to carry multiple infections than single men.

PiV sex is nowhere near as risky as anal sex.

I believe condom use is quite frequent among this demographic.

What exactly does anal have anything to do with this?

That someone who has a lot of sex doesn't necessarily imply a high rate of STDs.

Not necessarily indeed, but the causation is undoubtedly there. If you're a hetero man, you'll only be infected if you have sex with multiple women, or if your sole sexual partner is having sex with other men.

Wow, this is the first bit of good news I've seen on this site in months. Would be interesting to see a breakdown by generation.

left-leaning women being more wary of "non-political men"

What exactly is that supposed to mean please?

a temporary drop mostly due to women being more worried about COVID than men

I happen to have remembered a short discussion in the /r/CultureWarRoundup subreddit about the new GSS data released in November 2021, and it actually showed the opposite if this.

The relevant parts of the commentary there regarding this are these:

Before generating the graph I was expecting the trends from 2018 to have continued and exacerbated, so I was pretty surprised when the final graph for the proportion of people aged 18-29 with no opposite sex sex partner since 18 did not show this. Instead the female "virgin" percentage seemed constant while the male "virgin" percentage actually had a noticeable drop, nowhere near enough to get us back to 2014 levels (when Online Dating was really starting to take off) but still something.

And (from a different user):

Spitballing: More women experienced loneliness and isolation during the pandemic, which potentially changed their partner selection, offering more opportunities for sexless men already in their close proximity (friend zone). Trust and familiarity became a slightly higher priority, even for casual hookups.

Having said that, I do believe a) the sex recession is real b) it started long before the COVID lockdowns c) eventually the long-term consequences of said lockdowns will exacerbate it. It's rather obvious that anyone who was in adolescence during the lockdown has significantly eroded social skills as a result, and perhaps the most common complain levelled at young single men is that they lack the necessary social skills to correctly read the nuanced and carefully calculated signals from young women, and to generally navigate the social world and follow its unwritten rules.

It's very simple - people hate what is bad, weak, unpopular, and ugly, and they love what is good, strong, popular and beautiful.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats