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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28379 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Russell Brand Accusations

Russell Brand has been accused of sexual misconduct and/or rape by four women in a large exposé by the Sunday Times [2]. The mainstream consensus online is that the testimony of these women is absolutely correct. I wonder, though, how many false accusers we should expect given the context of Russell Brand.

Russell Brand is not just some guy, he was at one point a party icon in the UK. As such, he has slept with 1000 women. And these are not just some women, just like Brand is not just some guy. This is not a sample size of the median woman in the UK. The women he slept with would differ psychologically from the average woman: more likely to make poor choices, more likely to be partying, more likely to be doing things for clout (like Russell Brand), more likely to be involved with drugs and mental illness. A study on the lives of “groupies” in the heavy metal scene found that groupies were more likely to use sex for leverage, to come from broken homes, and to have issues with drugs and alcohol. (This is not a one-to-one comparison; heavy metal is different than the rock n roll persona of Brand).

Scott has written that up to 20% of all rape allegations are false. But with Brand, we have a more complicated metric to consider: how many false accusers will you have sex with if you’ve had sex with one thousand women who make poor choices? Scott goes on in the above article to note that 3% of men will likely be falsely accused (including outside of court) in their life. If this is true, we might try multiplying that by 125 to arrive at how many accusers Brand should have. That would bring us to four, rounding up — but again, this would totally ignore the unique psychological profile of the women he screwed.

There’s yet more to consider. Brand is wealthy, famous, and controversial. His wealth and stature would lead a mentally unwell woman to feel spite, and his controversy would lead a clout-chasing woman to seek attention through accusation. What’s more, (most of) these allegations only came about because of an expensive and time-consuming journalistic investigation, which would have lead to pointed questioning.

All in all, it seems unfair to target a famous person and set out your journalists to hound down every woman he had sex with. It’s a man’s right to have consensual sex with mentally unwell and “damaged” women, which would be a large chunk of the women Brand bedded. Of course, this cohort appears more apt to make false accusations. Quoting Scott,

in a psychiatric hospital I used to work in (not the one I currently work in) during my brief time there there were two different accusations of rape by staff members against patients […] Now I know someone is going to say that blah blah psychiatric patients blah blah doesn’t generalize to the general population, but the fact is that even if you accept that sorta-ableist dismissal, those patients were in hospital for three to seven days and then they went back out into regular society

Bit of an update on some things I saw this week on this.

Looks like Youtube has already demonetized his account. Guilty until proven innocent.

https://apnews.com/article/russell-brand-youtube-sex-assault-ecf7aeecb3b66a02a4f3eb74282dc1c8

YouTube said Tuesday that Russell Brand will no longer make money from the video streaming site after several women made allegations of sexual assault against the comedian-turned-influencer.

The BBC removed some of Brand’s material from its streaming archive, joining a growing list of organizations distancing themselves from the performer, who denies sexual assault and has not been charged with any criminal offenses.

YouTube said monetization of Brand’s account, which has 6.6 million subscribers, has been suspended “following serious allegations against the creator.”

“This decision applies to all channels that may be owned or operated by Russell Brand,” the Google-owned video service said.

Something that popped up in my feeds today that seems even more concerning is this from alt-media site Rumble though.

https://twitter.com/rumblevideo/status/1704584927834960196

They received an email from British parliament inquiring as to whether Russel Brand was still monetized on their website.

Dear Chris,

I am writing concerning the serious allegations regarding Russel Brand, in the context of his being a content provider on Rumble with more than 1.4 million followers.

The Culture, Media and Sport Committee is raising questions with the broadcasters and production companies who previously employed Mr. Brand to examine both the culture of the industry in the past and whether that culture still prevails today.

However, we are also looking at his use of social media, including on Rumble where he issued his pre-emptive response to the accusations made against him by The Sunday Times and Channel 4's Dispatches. While we recognize that Rumble is not the creator of the content published by Mr. Brand, we are concerned that he may be able to profit from his content on the platform.

We would be grateful if you could confirm whether Mr. Brand is able to monetize his content, including his videos relating to the serious accusations against him. If so, we would like to know whether Rumble intends to join YouTube in suspending Mr Brand's ability to earn money on the platform.

We would also like to know what Rumble is doing to ensure that creators are not able to use the platform to undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behavior.

It's twitter and rumble along with a few other alternative media sites like post-millennial reporting on it so far, so it could be a hoax. It would be interesting if true. It looks like they are using this not just as a way to silence Brand entirely by cutting off his income, but also as a pretext to "examine the culture of the industry," i.e. pressure media both old and new in a more general sense beyond Brand.

He certainly has a high base-rate of false accusations. But, absent anything else, I'd think sleeping with a lot of women in those circumstances, especially those who have issues with alcohol and drugs and alcohol would lead to a high base-rate of true accusations as well. Both directly because of drug/alcohol use, and because personality traits and individual tactics that lead to success in casual sex include being aggressive and pushy, and in that frame of mind one can easily cross the line to violations of consent with miscommunications, with drugs, or if you just pushed a bit too far this time.

Just for an example of media incompetence, I saw a (presumably serious?) online celebrity rag publicising a FistedbyFoucault tweet mocking the witness.

Russell Brand then proceeded to sexually assault her on broken glass in his living room, while forcing her to listen to Goebbels' "Total War" speech recorded live at the Berlin Sportspalast on February 18, 1943

https://wegotthiscovered.com/celebrities/why-did-russell-brand-and-katy-perrys-marriage-end/

This is so surreal. The rest of the article doesn't look like a joke. Some kind of next-level joke? (Admittedly effective) clickbait to get more views? Total credulity on the part of the journalist (perhaps they don't know FbF's general slant on things)? Epic fuck-up by the intern in charge of linking tweets? Editor was high on crack and thought it was fine? OK, the editor probably doesn't even exist in this kind of 'journalism'.

Makes you wonder how many people will read and believe this nonsense. I had a lecturer credulously reveal to the class some so-fake-even-Snopes-condemned-it nonsense about how Trump called the Italian President 'Mozzarella'. Ironically she taught history...

Yeah. Hell, even if he is being unusually careful to stay out of situations where consent is dubious...and does that successfully 99.9 percent of the time...that still leaves him pretty likely to get into a sketchy situation. I'm thinking things like this guy has sex with a woman that's experiencing a first break of mania or psychosis, genuinely seems fairly lucid and coherent if maybe a little bit hyped, and then three days later is completely out of touch with reality and a week after that has a genuinely poor recollection of things and was told that she had sex with this Brand guy, something she would never have considered when not manic. Things like that might well fool even a cautious, prudent person assessing the situation into thinking that she's just a normal person.

On the other hand, you have the Jimmy Saviles and Bill Cosbys of the world.

But that isn’t rape. It isn’t sexual assault. Consent for criminal law purposes must be the reasonable 3P standard. Otherwise you really run into a mens rea problem

The 3P standard?

What would a reasonable objective person believe.

Thanks.

I think the MSU football case is even more interesting. He fooled around with literally a victim surviving counselor. Those are the type of people who dream about getting to go after a high ranking person. I don’t know if he went too far but I do know I would never mess around with someone with that type of job and that goes 10x if your a powerful person.

A friend of mine recalled how she was worried about sexual harassment from this creep in the workplace, only to be appointed as departmental sex harassment officer by her quick-thinking boss. She didn't have any problems from then!

I don't understand what the relevance of the number of false accusations in expectation is. Surely accusations are true or false because of facts in the world, not dubious statistical expectation. If we want to determine if the accusations are true or false we should examine the facts of the accusations themselves. At least one of them appears to have a great deal of contemporaneous corroborating evidence. Or did a woman go to a Rape Crisis Center and spend 5 months in therapy so that, a decade later, her false accusation would appear more credible?

I don't understand what the relevance of the number of false accusations in expectation is.

If I claimed that got shot at with a man-portable particle cannon yesterday, you would dismiss the claim out of hand without some compelling corroborating evidence, because the base rate of getting attacked with sci fi weapons is very low for all segments of the population.

If I claimed that I was shot at with a RPK machine-gun yesterday, and you know me to be an office worker in Paris, you would place a very low level of credence in my claim because the base rate of getting shot at with military weapons is very low for the French middle class.

If I made that same claim but you know me to be an infantry soldier in Ukraine, you'd probably just take me at my word because the base rate for being in combat is quite high for infantry in a warzone.

The base rate determines the level of evidence necessary to evaluate a claim as likely to be true.

Well yes, the base rate is important but you don't just look at the base rate and then stop your analysis. what /u/gillitrut is saying is that in order to properly judge this case we need to look at the actual facts on the ground too.

I don't understand what the relevance of the number of false accusations in expectation is.

I don't understand what the relevance of the number of false accusations in expectation is.

The argument goes: someone to a first approximation either is a rapist or not, but both rapists and non-rapists can expect roughly the same chance of false accusations per sex act. So by Bayes' rule, someone who has sex once and is accused of rape once is probably a rapist, but someone who has sex 10,000 times and is accused of rape once should be expected to be a rapist roughly at the base rate of being a rapist, because non-rapists in that situation would get (falsely) accused almost as often as rapists getting (falsely or truly) accused.

This Outside View argument is relatively-weak evidence (something like a factor of 10-20 in likelihood?), and can be overcome by sufficient Inside View evidence, but it's relevant for informing priors.

The sexual revolution involved worsening the lives of a substantial proportion of the population (both men and women) to benefit a tiny minority of men. This was probably always an untenable state of affairs, given that even the men in question often had daughters (by contrast, billionaires and kings do not typically have family who are paupers or peasants). Society - even liberal society - is governed by countless rules, minor and major, designed to prevent some parties taking advantage of others even if it is "consensual". You can't pay someone $2 an hour even if they consent, you can't sign up to 30 years of indentured servitude even if you consent, you can't practice as a self-taught surgeon even if all your patients consent. You can't engage in duels or cannibalism even if both parties consent. So we agree that clearly 'consent' isn't everything; we're not (for the most part) ancaps. Some things are social negatives, and it is understood that tolerating them is bad for society, period.

Part of reversing the sexual revolution is making sure that promiscuity has consequences. Yes, that includes for women (although as Red Pillers seem to delight in reminding them, 'hitting the wall' is the consequence for women anyway, and most slut shaming has always been by other women, which continues comfortably well into the 21st century even in progressive circles). But it also means consequences for men. The '60s rocker lifestyle of fucking a thousand 14-16 year old girls while on tour across the country is a net negative for society. It benefits a small number of men at the expense, in many ways, of everyone else (who is impacted directly or indirectly by mountains of damaged women created as a consequence). Sexual libertarianism is as degenerate as any other form of liberalism, and therefore I really do support measures to give it more consequences. If cases like these act as a deterrent for the next generation of Russell Brands, they will have served their purpose, whatever the truth.

And in Brand's case, he really is an infamous asshole, a pseud, and has a proven record of being a huge piece of shit. So it's hard to feel bad for him.

The sexual revolution involved worsening the lives of a substantial proportion of the population (both men and women) to benefit a tiny minority of men.

The benefit to the women is that they get to have kids with a higher quality man than they'd otherwise be able to get commitment from. It's a solid sexual/evolutionary strategy, which is why the drive exists.

Single motherhood from the start (as in mothers who were never in a committed relationship with the father of the child) is still relatively rare among whites, and there’s mo evidence that baby daddies are on average higher quality than the hypothetical ‘alternative man’ who would commit. It’s more that in some communities, there are very few men who would commit nowadays.

Society - even liberal society - is governed by countless rules, minor and major, designed to prevent some parties taking advantage of others even if it is "consensual".

Sure but these rules need to be clearly laid out. You seem to be saying that since you can't use consent in all situations, consent is useless.

And in Brand's case, he really is an infamous asshole, a pseud, and has a proven record of being a huge piece of shit. So it's hard to feel bad for him.

This was a lot of words to basically say; you don't like him, so fuck him. So do you get to decide who the rules applies to? Do you really think you're so morally correct?

Well said. Completely agree

Are you saying powerful men created the sexual revolution for their own benefit?

Cui bono?

If we're to believe the stats, nobody.

It was also good for women too. Women were second class citizens until the 1960s. This isn't even a debatable. And it was worse the further back you went.

That post is ridiculous cherry picking to attack a strawman. I never claimed women had no agency ever and nothing they said would disprove they were second class citizens compared to men.

It was also good for women too. Women were second class citizens until the 1960s. This isn't even a debatable.

It's entirely debatable to anyone with the slightest knowledge of historical fact. The anti-suffragettes were likewise women, and they argued vociferously against having the franchise extended to women as a class. One of their tactics to try to prevent it from happening was to demand that any plebiscite on the matter be voted on only by women, since if the question was limited to women only, both the suffragettes and anti-suffragettes expected the plebiscite to fail. And in fact, it was passed by having both men and women vote on it together, as the Suffragettes had demanded.

Feminists demanded that men have an equal say on whether women should get the vote, because it was unpopular enough among women that it couldn't win without the men's help.

This history, of course, has been buried down a mineshaft ever since, because of course the March of Progress has been an unquestioned benefit for all involved and its aims always succeed. If one is willing to tell unlimited lies about the past, the present is always the best of times, and the future is always sunny.

And it was worse the further back you went.

That too is quite debatable. Sure, marital rape was only recently criminalized, from which we infer that prior eras were a horror show of unrestrained sexual violence against women. In a similar fashion, we've only recently begun systematically searching schoolchildren for weapons when they enter school grounds, which has at last addressed the rampant and unrestrained schoolchild murder spree that stretches back to the endemic child-murderers of ancient Rome.

But at least in our own era, we've solved intimate-partner violence, right? ...Right?

What evidence specifically has led you to the above conclusion? Primary sources? Court records? Diaries of women in the 17th century? Historical writings conveying attitudes toward women? Is there something solid your view is based on, or is it just a story you were told?

My understanding was that what we now call "intimate partner violence" was simply called cruelty or brutality, and suffered significant social sanctions.

In the just West? From Roman's views on women, to the Bible, to what Enlightenment philosophers wrote about women, to laws in the US and Europe, etc. Or just go back and read what women wrote about their life in the past, how they were portrayed in films and television, whatever. It all paints a pretty obvious picture. What evidence specifically has led you to the your conclusion that the opposite is true?

From Roman's views on women, to the Bible,

Women are at least half of Christianity, and considerably more in America. I assure you that they too have read Romans in particular, and the Bible generally. The large majority of the women who take Christianity seriously, who are in fact likewise half of their respective population, do not seem to find anything objectionable in either. You thinking they ought to find these passages objectionable observably does not compel them to object, probably because of a number of other verses which you appear to be ignoring, which speak at length of husbands and wives, men and women treating each other with love and respect.

My wife's sister attends a church that's gone quite Progressive. My wife and her mother don't like attending that church because they are moving to include women in leadership roles, something my sister-in-law is leary of, and my wife and mother-in-law consider flatly unacceptable. You are of course free to assemble a stepford-wife caricature of all three women in your mind, but the reality is that they have views on the proper interaction of men and women very different from the liberal consensus, and that they arrived at these views quite consciously, value them deeply, and intend firmly to keep them. It seems to me that the standard Progressive response of smearing such women as brainwashed is itself straight-up misogynistic. Despite endless propaganda to the contrary, Womanhood is not a wholly-owned subsidiary of Progressivism Inc.

to what Enlightenment philosophers wrote about women

I certainly am not in the business of defending Enlightenment philosophers, but perhaps you could be specific?

Or just go back and read what women wrote about their life in the past

I have, a bit. Generally I find descriptions of a life of joys and sorrows, hopes and worries, different in some ways than my own, but similar in many others.

how they were portrayed in films and television

At this point, you're up to the beginning of the last century, well into the progressive era and something like a generation past the point that feminism has started shaping the culture on a grand scale. And yet, how were they portrayed specifically? My wife watches a lot of TV, and being generally conservative, she watches a fair amount of old TV. Women are generally portrayed as kind, thoughtful, empathetic and generally decent. One of my favorite movies is from 1950, and features a prominent female lead; I see no reasonable objection to her portrayal. One of my wife's all-time favorite movies is The Taming of the Shrew, a movie so dangerously based that it made me more than a little uncomfortable the first time we watched it together while dating. She sees nothing objectionable in that movie's portrayal of its female cast, and on reflection neither do I.

Early TV and movies were not shy about marketing themselves to women. Which do you think is likelier: that they pursued at least half their audience by insulting them, or that you don't have the best understanding of people who lived in a world very different from yours?

What evidence specifically has led you to the your conclusion that the opposite is true?

Reading historical letters of husbands to wives, of women to other women an men to other men on the occasions I've come across them. Historical accounts of how men and women have lived together, what their concerns were, and how they addressed them. Observing the lives of old people I know, some of whom have been very old indeed. Observing my parents' own marriage first-hand. A number of historical anecdotes about the oppression of women that I've confirmed to my satisfaction to be false. Watching old movies, listening to old music, reading old fiction, and noting the themes therein. The observation that humans don't change that much, and the observation that our current society lies about this fact with wild abandon to cover its own failures. Complaints of contemporary women unsatisfied with the "progress" our current society has gifted them. Reading some small amount about the anti-suffragettes, who they were and what they argued for. A lifetime of observing the intellectual bankruptcy of popular feminist arguments, and the general forms that bankruptcy take, especially the way they argue by assertion and then use their purported moral authority to shout down any counter-argument. A lifetime of conversations with my mother, sister, female friends, and six years of conversations with my wife, her sister and her mother.

That, and the observation that people making arguments like yours don't actually make an argument and provide evidence to back it, but simply act like your correctness should be self-evident. We're a couple comments down in the chain, and the most specific evidence you've cited is "the book of Romans".

I ask again. What specific evidence leads you to the conclusion that women in the past lived as second-class citizens, or otherwise suffered unusual oppression relative to men?

Are people who can't own property and vote second class citizens to those that can or are they equal? To me, if you don't have the same rights as other citizens, then you are a second class citizen. There weren't many powerful institutions in the West going back to the Roman Senate, to the Anglican Church (until very recently), all the way up to the Catholic Church now where women had equal rights to men. This isn't even debatable to me and I don't how anyone could say otherwise. Whether or not that is a good thing and whether or not some women preferred that is irrelevant.. If you have less rights than others, you are a second class citizen (in my opinion). Obviously women weren't the only people this happened to.

More comments

Yes! Although it’s better to say that they took advantage of a series of unique cultural and economic circumstances that had developed in the two decades after the war to accelerate it for their benefit.

The start of the sexual revolution is hard to pinpoint. It involved male students protesting at the University of Paris to be allowed into girls’ dormitories at night (the true trigger of the ‘68 riots btw); it involved a slow decline in religiosity from the early 60s; it involved the abolition of a lot of lewdness censorship laws in Western countries; it involved the invention of the teenager by advertisers because of a newly prosperous society. It involved a lot of things. But yes, ultimately it was steered and accelerated by powerful men who wanted access to a conveyor belt of cheap pussy.

They already had access to that if they were powerful and they couldn't have stopped it if they tried (many did).

They had access to a much smaller sampling of whores, actresses and loose women, after the sexual revolution they had access to a much larger group, that’s a big difference.

Society - even liberal society - is governed by countless rules, minor and major, designed to prevent some parties taking advantage of others even if it is "consensual". You can't pay someone $2 an hour even if they consent, you can't sign up to 30 years of indentured servitude even if you consent, you can't practice as a self-taught surgeon even if all your patients consent. You can't engage in duels or cannibalism even if both parties consent. So we agree that clearly 'consent' isn't everything; we're not (for the most part) ancaps. Some things are social negatives, and it is understood that tolerating them is bad for society, period.

One man's modus ponens and so on. While I'm not a full on libertarian, it seems clear to me that society has no business interfering in any of those situations.

I dispute that most of those are even societal negatives. Being unable to pay less than minimum wage prices out subpar but better than nothing labor, leading to marginally nonproductive people on welfare, and why kids these days in the West struggle to get a summer job when it would cost the same to get a grown adult to stand behind the counter at McDonald's.

Indentured servitude is just one extreme of the practise of selling one's labor for money, and I see no reason any sane individual shouldn't be allowed to do so, even if it's a stupid idea unless the payoff is crazy.

Cannibalism? It's no skin off my back, pun intended. Duels? Duel culture is bad, but not so bad I would legislate it away, especially when you can just say no without losing all social status.

Kids are subsidized by their parents. Letting them get jobs where they can underbid people who need the jobs to put food on the table and pay rent is basically legalized dumping. And parents subsidizing their kids isn't subject to market forces.

I never considered it from this angle before. I'm usually in favour of letting kids work for the character benefits but you do raise a good point.

Indentured servitude is just one extreme of the practise of selling one's labor for money, and I see no reason any sane individual shouldn't be allowed to do so, even if it's a stupid idea unless the payoff is crazy.

In most cases, contracted indentured servitude is nothing but a way to take advantage of people - or, put another way, a way to burn shared surplus to take rent for yourself. The average case of (bad) indentured servitude will end up looking like someone who's desperately poor, stupid, or in a temporary state of bad judgement agreeing to a contract that pays them much less than they would in a similar position, and one a reasonable person in their situation wouldn't agree to.

Nevertheless, there are cases where something resembling a contracted transfer of personal authority is probably good. Consider rehab, mental institutions, halfway houses. Maybe a drug addict is net/net better off if they can enter a program that'll force them to act in a certain way for a few months or years. Maybe habitual criminals too. And maybe private slavery indentured servitude is the best way to achieve that. It probably isn't though, and such institutions should probably be regulated or otherwise exist in sufficiently different social systems that 'contracted indentured servitude' is a poor description of them.

Duels? Duel culture is bad, but not so bad I would legislate it away, especially when you can just say no without losing all social status.

I don't have a strong position on this, although duels are very bad.

Indentured servitude is just one extreme of the practise of selling one's labor for money, and I see no reason any sane individual shouldn't be allowed to do so, even if it's a stupid idea unless the payoff is crazy.

I suspect the word "sane" is doing a lot of work there, and that this is relevant to its worth to society. Most people who will consent to long-term indentured servitude in modern society are, by selection, going to be people with a serious case for non est factum, and that's going to gum up the court system.

Don't get me wrong; in a colonial era (past or future) the institution makes a lot of sense; in that societal circumstance a lot of sane people will agree, and the societal benefit is also greater because of the Parfit's hitchhiker problem. But we're not in one of those now, so it's less work to just ban it outright.

(I think I agree on duels.)

The first argument that I find convincing against the standard libertarian positions is that most people are actually really stupid and a paternalistic government that treats them like children generally creates better outcomes(this is the real secret to Singapore). Take a normal Algebra or English class at a middle of the pack state school, most of the people in the room are still just guessing passwords. I am skeptical that anyone under 110 IQ can actually understand Algebra or get anything from text beyond the explicit meaning of the words without heavy priming. I would put the bottom 60% of Americans in approximately the same bucket as thirteen year-olds and think a kind government should make more choices for them, not less.

The second argument is zero sum positional status games, we would all be better off if society could collectively agree that all jobs get two months paid leave(or whatever) and don't allow any 'sane individuals' to trade that away for higher pay, because they all will, even though the marginal value of an extra dollar is trash, because humans.

Let’s say they are dumb. It doesn’t follow from that government is the rigger decider. First, government is also staffed with a lot of stupid people. Second, government suffers from Acton’s problem coupled with little skin in the game. Third, dumb people with local knowledge will outperform smart people lacking said knowledge (Hayek’s key insight and proven with the Soviet experience). That is, even a government of angels often will underperform.

Singapore is interesting but my perhaps faulty understanding is that Singapore depending on the issue is either super authoritarian or super liberal. It doesn’t get stuck in the middle.

I think things like clean air and water, cfc ban, lead, seat belts, and social security are all examples of governments being able to do exactly what I think they can do/want them to do, so I don't feel much need to argue about the platonic ideals of various organizational structures which imply that my preferences are impossible. They are possible, we live in a world where they are being satisfied to an extent, and I just want more.

I am skeptical that anyone under 110 IQ can actually understand Algebra or get anything from text beyond the explicit meaning of the words without heavy priming

I think I disagree. I have limited experience teaching dumb-seeming people algebra and they were able to solve simple linear systems of equations eventually.

My experience teaching dumb-seeming people is just tons and tons of password guessing with no fundamental understanding of what they were doing or why. I was constantly confronted with what I started to call 'magical-thinking' where I would notice that students had no underlying grasp on or seeming belief in a consistent reality governed by legible rules. They were just memorizing strings of characters that they were told produce certain other characters. The learning plateau is so short for these people I doubt education beyond basic reading and arithmetic has much real value. Anything they don't use for a month will be lost.

I suspect that there are IQ thresholds for 'cognitive milestones' in the same way that a new born is incapable of object permanence, the two big ones that have stood out to me are reading comprehension and algebra. Again, in a school environment these people can pass a class that is ostensibly testing this skill, but my single biggest frustration as an educator was noticing how good students are at guessing passwords. I also saw this as a student, I am not as highly educated as the average motte users, I took classes at a community college and three different middle-tier state schools all of which are full of students who can pass these classes(and plenty who can't), but try digging into what they read even a little bit outside of the script that they memorized for class and they have no idea what is going on. I suspect that smart people in general overestimate the cognitive toolkit that average and below average people are working with and underestimate the ability of such people to fake it.

I presume they weren’t referring to “2x + y = 10, y = 4, what’s x?”.

While I use the content of HS algebra daily, I remember nothing about how it was taught in high school, lol. That said, looking up 'algebra 2 exam pdf' on google, and I think an average IQ person could, with high-quality instruction, get a B or A. Things like the quadratic formula, factoring, reduced form, solving equations equations with polynomials, multiple variables, and ratios, drawing graphs, word problems, etc. My memory of tutoring is the slower students (still not below-average iq I think) were able to grasp that eventually, but maybe there was still some selection bias. This is the sort of thing one's default intuition might be bad for.

Looking for data on algebra knowledge for current students, the closest measurement I can find is that "Only 26% of 12th grade students scored at or above the proficient level on the NAEP math assessment". 38% were basic, the remaining were below basic. But apparently NAEP proficiency measures a significantly higher level of skill than grade-level, algebra is grade 8-11. Some of this is just guessing passwords I suppose. But when tutoring, students who were blatantly guessing passwords on specific kinds of problems, even things as basic as 'x + 1 = 2 ... durr .. x = = 3 ????' were perfectly capable of learning the real thing if you taught them well, so I think that with good tutoring most median IQ people could grasp most of algebra. I'm not entirely confident in that though, and I can't find any very strong evidence on this.

I'm not sure about calculus, and anything above that is probably beyond the limits of most, although I'm uncertain where the lines are.

I note you didn’t reply to the idea of letting anyone declare themselves a doctor, though.

More from laziness, in that I expected most people to have a ready argument, than anything else!

I'll bite the bullet, medical practise itself should not be regulated, but terms such as doctor, general practitioner etc should be protected.

Let anyone give medical advice, or perform procedures, as long as the patient is clearly aware of the credentials involved. The government should be enforcing truth in advertising.

After all, I'm honest in admitting that modern ML systems are competent enough that you should be willing to trust their judgement, or at least only check up details on anything serious, rather than treat them as a magic 8-ball.Would it thus surprise you that I'm not fond of medical regulations in general, even if they sometimes benefit me in terms of salary and job security?

Even Scott agrees that FDA delenda est.

That’s not an especially hard one for the ancap to resolve; you can just let private medical licensing authorities award medical-qualification ratings based on their preferred criteria and create an accreditation marketplace. If I choose to go to an amateur surgeon despite him having low ratings, that’s up to me.

Of course, I wasn’t implying that professional licensing is an issue ancaps haven’t discussed. But the person I was replying to isn’t an ancap!

Society - even liberal society - is governed by countless rules, minor and major, designed to prevent some parties taking advantage of others even if it is "consensual". You can't pay someone $2 an hour even if they consent, you can't sign up to 30 years of indentured servitude even if you consent, you can't practice as a self-taught surgeon even if all your patients consent. You can't engage in duels or cannibalism even if both parties consent. So we agree that clearly 'consent' isn't everything; we're not (for the most part) ancaps. Some things are social negatives, and it is understood that tolerating them is bad for society, period.

Do you believe there's any liberal society anywhere that will ever have the moral confidence and courage to declare certain sexual acts to be criminal even if everyone involved is a consenting adult? (The examples you mentioned are technically against the law.) After all, surely any hope of "reversing" the sexual revolution, if that is even possible, is moot if you don't actually believe that.

Incest is already illegal in many Western countries, not too long ago so was homosexuality.

I think possibilities for radical cultural change are always underestimated.

Homosexuality was illegal in the US for ages, as was miscegenation. You can be a liberal society with doublethink characteristics, just like how the People's Republic of China has ruthless working conditions for a workers state, just like how the US espouses anti-racism but there are few consequences for anti-white rhetoric. Bernie Sanders "If you're white you don't know how it feels to be poor" for instance.

I can get behind this. Sexual promiscuity has been heavily discouraged for the vast majority of human civilization for a reason. With the creation of birth control, we naively assumed that the only reason that state of affairs existed was so that you wouldn't have unwanted children. And so the floodgates opened.

really is an infamous asshole, a pseud,

Also what is a "pseud"?

Also what is a "pseud"?

Pseudointellectual

For those who want direct evidence of Brand being one: here

Yes, that includes for women [...]. But it also means consequences for men.

And yet the consequences for men keep coming, and the consequences for women don't. There isn't any reversing of the sexual revolution going on here. Just the perpetration of a new double standard where men get responsibility for both their own choices and those of women.

Undo rape shield laws. Actually punish single mothers who commit child neglect or abuse. (As of now this is pretty much not happening.) Just two ideas off the top of my head.

If you send single mothers to jail the kids become wards of the state (at what, $100,000 per year minimum?) while they’re there.

Foster care doesn’t cost anywhere near that.

Unfortunately foster care has such high rates of abuse that it’s probably better to just let the kids be abused by their parents most of the time.

What about stripping them of custody and putting the children up for adoption? I'm pretty sure that'd objectively be warranted in many cases, even if it's currently not done.

Unironically, bring back slutshaming.

Promiscuity looks to be, by every measure, a very bad thing that hurts women(and men, but especially women). Women are extremely influenced by societal pressure and the best way to influence them is to tell them that it’ll change their social status.

If it wasn’t about sex I would agree with you, but I just don’t think humans are capable of being nonjudgmental about it.

Slut shaming never disappeared. A favorite Gen Z TikTok topic is slut shaming women based on their ‘body count’. Women still slut shame each other the same way they always have, this is a fundamental way of in-group policing / mate guarding for women. Hoe, thot, ‘for the streets’, all common terms, the problem is more mixed messages from media and conflicting messages from young people which are confusing for teenagers.

Slut-shaming happened in the social context of monogamous patriarchy, where women had neither economic independence nor reliable means of contraception, where early marriage was the norm, and which no longer exists. You know that perfectly well.

I see parts of it repackaged into FDS-like content where women encourage each other to not put out for any random fuckboy. They don't use the word slut and put an emphasis on "they don't deserve you" rather than "you're a worse person for fucking them", but the message remains.

Fair point. It doesn't surprise me. I remember people in the Manosphere making this prediction more than a decade ago, namely that women who feel duped by the message of sex-positive feminism will start advising their daughters or younger female relatives to avoid casual sex in general. But this message is not anchored to any moral code, conviction or worldview, and has no structural basis in current society. Rejecting the sexual revolution out of nothing but spite, regret and resentment will not change anything.

Average age of marriage in some conservative Muslim countries (eg. parts of North Africa) is well over 25, in Algeria it’s 28 for women and 32 for men; it’s unclear that sexual conservatism requires early marriage.

Seriously?

When delayed marriage is normalized, it creates more incentives and also opportunities for promiscuity. Isn't that self-evident?

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This isn't convincing at all - The trendlines for men and women largely track each other and women commit suicide less than a quarter as often.

Wait a second.

Race to the bottom to get male attention at all? I think you are being hyperbolic here.

Everywhere I see innumerable women complaining about.. too much male attention not a lack of it! All those pesky guys sliding into their dms, bothering them at the gym, bothering them at the coffee shop, on the train, on the library, etc. Certainly of all the things women are suffering from a lack of male attention isnt one of them.

What you meant to say was. Attention from the top decile of men, who can dictate the terms. Yes attention from them will require you to race towards the bottom. But as the apex fallacy goes, CEOs and billionaires are not the only men in the world.

Ill actually make an effort post about this soon, with a radical solution that will never happen.

Attractive women wanting to sleep with attractive men is the natural order. Unattractive women also wanting it is natural (who doesn't want better?), but them wanting that and nothing else is what is causing the rip.

Its not as simple as that but correction.

It's not that we need more of these kinds of posts, but you have to admit the phrasing was unfortunate. It's hard to square it with all the "don't even look in my general direction" complaints you see all over the internets.

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great post

Absolutely loved Eighth Grade, and agree that it's a great opportunity to see the perspective of a modern young woman.

I see a lot of assertions that this state of affairs was all young women's idea, and that they need to be punished in order for it to change.

I think both genders collaborated on this group project. I don't want anyone to be punished, but we have the rock of consequences and the hard place of changing tastes. Brand was able to sleep with 1,000 women not despite his reputation but because of it.

How do we make his sexual personality repugnant to women instead of attractive? That seems insanely difficult. Very intelligent people - male or female - tend to pick potato chip partners over celery on a consistent basis.

In return, they don't get the sexual pleasure or status that a rake enjoys.

My hope would be that at least some fraction of his partners derived some pleasure from this, but given the description of what he considered fun sex I'm not sure that's the case. I also struggle to find where a starfucker would cash in on their status beyond maybe getting lucky and being invited to various parties and stuff afterward. It's difficult to steelman.

Honestly I think like a lot of things socially shaming and thus lowering the status of bad actors would do a lot to fix things. If he was socially shamed as a cad, a bore, and so on, women wouldn’t want to be around him because that behavior would make him low status. And he wouldn’t be openly sleeping with thousands or even hundreds of women because he’d lose status not only with women but with other men.

I mean the counterpoint is ‘yes, the sexual Revolution and porn culture is largely men’s fault, but it rests on convincing women to act against their own best interests. The only way anyone can see to fix it which has ever worked involves restricting the range of socially acceptable decisions for women to make, and that might not be fair, but life isn’t fair’.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that’s an oversimplification. Actually undoing the sexual Revolution entails things like making it harder for promiscuous men to find non-prostitute female companionship. But that, again, is the sort of thing that’s usually affected by restrictions on women’s freedom(her father has to approve before you can date or w/e). But the rat race can only be stopped by stigmatizing running it, and that means that yes, the restrictions are going to fall disproportionately on young women- just like they did historically.

and women commit suicide less than a quarter as often.

That’s because women try to take pills(which has a high failure rate) and men shoot themselves(which does not). For mental health suicide attempts(which are higher in women), not completed suicide, is the better metric to look at.

Suicide attempts that fail because of incompetence (a good metric for mental health) and suicide attempts that fail because they're not honest attempts (which are not) are impossible to disentangle.

Women realising that a failed suicide attempt is a great way to get a bunch of sympathy points/attention/clout would be upstream of the choice of method in this model.

Usual QALY given for depression is something like 0.7 IIRC; suicide is generally considered a much worse outcome than "being depressed for a while".

This assumes that all attempts are equally serious and reflect similar levels of mental anguish. It is also possible that some attempts are less serious and driven by different emotional states. For example, maybe some people are desperate for attention/support/accommodations from the people around them, and understand that an attempted suicide will give them those things. Obviously there are other reasons women might prefer softer options, while still being 'equally depressed', but its not a given that that is what is happening when looking at attempt numbers.

That’s because women try to take pills(which has a high failure rate) and men shoot themselves(which does not).

Sure, but why is that? You imply it's something inherent to men that they happen to choose more dangerous suicide methods, but they could easily choose those methods simply because they're more serious about actually going through with it.

For mental health suicide attempts(which are higher in women), not completed suicide, is the better metric to look at.

This is a very bold claim and seems intuitively wrong. Those who go through with suicide must on average be less mentally healthy than those who are less serious about it.

Young women are depressed and suicidal in record numbers.

The issue is consequences imposed by others, not the essentially mechanical consequences of one's actions.

What consequences do you want for them?

Penalties for false rape/sexual assault accusations, for starters. Serious ones, on the same level as the accused would have gotten if the lie had not been discovered.

Penalties for false accusation wouldn't discourage Russell Brand. But they would be a demonstration that something is going on that has (externally imposed) consequences for men and women. 2rafa is, as I read it, trying to justify the consequences to Brand as part of some sort of reversal of the sexual revolution, which would have consequences for women as well. This is something many of those opposed to consequences to Brand would be in favor of, so it's a way of telling them they're actually getting what they wanted. But they're not; the consequences to Brand are NOT part of any reversal of the sexual revolution and in fact no consequences to women are forthcoming.

other parents

It seems like other parents mostly have your back on this. Your child’s peers, on the other hand…

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Can you believe that I, at least, am sincere in this?

Sure. But it doesn't matter; I do not believe those attempting to punish Russell Brand are doing it for that reason.

But if we want to discourage this extremely familiar pattern of a high status man very publicly using and discarding (often extremely young) women for decades, to zero social censure, with all the abusive behavior that very predictably ensues? We probably don't want to scare off women who come forward and say, "Actually, it wasn't all in good fun."

If it was, indeed, in good fun, we (or at least I) DO want to scare them off. And this logic has been used to justify non-questioning and non-punishing of all sorts of false accusers, from Aziz Ansari's accusor's (where the accusations weren't even of wrongdoing, just ridiculously cringey behavior that she went right along with) to Sabrina Erdely's (she, as you may recall, fabricated an entirely unbelievable story and ended up getting a number of men's organizations punished for it). But in this case that's not my point. In this case, my point is that punishing women for wrongdoing would be evidence that all this is done in furtherance of fixing a problem, not making it worse. Russell Brand would be punished by anti-promiscuity people, feminist activists who just want to stick it to men, and those who want to punish Brand for opposing COVID vaccines. The lack of any attempt at consequences for women rules out the first; that's not the motive here.

How are penalties for false rape accusations going to roll back the sexual revolution and prevent more Russell Brand type lotharios? That’s a complete non sequitur for discouraging male promiscuity.

The non sequitur is claiming that the consequences to Brand are somehow part of rolling back the sexual revolution and therefore OK. You're starting from a consequence, claiming a cause, and then claiming that cause justifies the consequence, when that cause does not exist as can be determined by the lack of the other consequences. That is, you're using "rolling back the sexual revolution" as a pretext to justify the consequences to men of something entirely different.

What would the consequences for women be that they aren’t already? Women are already a main group of losers in the sexual revolution and (as I note) Redpillers already argue that women face great, dire consequences of promiscuity - eg. low social status for having a reputation as a slut, spinsterhood, hitting ‘the wall’, being an ‘alpha widow’, unhappiness, loneliness and becoming a cat lady. By contrast, Brand faced no consequences until now.

Do some napkin math to explain how women are the losers of the sexual revolution. Without any of the variables being plus or minus infinity.

Because this isnt computing.

I could tell you, but I’d rather just copy @raggedy_anthem’s excellent comment:

I'm saying that women are more depressed and suicidal than they have ever been. They are more depressed and suicidal than they were in the Bad Old Days of supposed patriarchy. Like men, they are struggling to find fulfilling relationships or lasting contentment, because the current regime isn't good for them either.

Women are suffering the direct consequences of letting men like Brand loose to enjoy themselves. They are getting raped, taken advantage of, or just used in that sad, grubby way that doesn't amount to a crime. They are getting the resulting STIs and raising the resulting babies by themselves. In return, they don't get the sexual pleasure or status that a rake enjoys. All they get is the fleeting satisfaction of being desired. This is a terrible deal for women, and to be honest it's not one that most women ever even wanted. It's a race to the bottom, where you have to do things you aren't comfortable with in order to get male attention at all. If you want to know what it's like to grow up female post-Sexual Revolution and post-Internet porn, this is a great place to start. Little girls didn't choose this.

I see a lot of assertions that this state of affairs was all young women's idea, and that they need to be punished in order for it to change. That perspective... really lacks empathy or insight into who's actually driving the bus. It's blaming some of the least powerful people involved.

Okay here's my line of thought;

  • "Sexual Revolution" happens.
  • Some winners, a lot of losers.
  • We can do arithmetic all day about as to whether the average, median, modal man/woman is worse off on net on average, etc.

But I do think barring any and all aggregate statistics. The women are still the winners.

Why? Simple. Women are the choosers. They can choose a man of equal status to them and mostly avoid the pitfalls of the sexual revolution. Most women have this option. Most men don't they either get chosen or not. Not doing something is a lot easier than doing something.

Now is it realistic to expect women to do this? Well, no. But on the individual level, this is a non-issue for women.

I think when people talk about these widescale societal issues there is too much meta-talk happening, but a majority of women can avoid the pitfalls, men can't. Focussing on the individual makes this patently obvious.

The elephant in the room remains. Women would rather have this than choose a man of equal status. Revealed preference makes it clear.

Women being choosers, are the only ones who can fix this.

Women in the fifties mostly became married stay at home moms. This is statistically what most women figure out they actually want, eventually. It is also an option that most women do not have access to anymore.

Ergo women have lost something important with the sexual revolution. That’s even leaving out that while yes, it’s easier than ever for women to have casual sex with chads, almost none of them actually want to do so.

So what's stopping an individual woman from marrying a Brad?

I know women as a group don't do this because they are subject to.. a lack of agency, social pressure, retarded messaging, etc.

THem not being able to be SAHMs is more of an economic problem than a sexual one.

My point is yes women as a group have indeed lost something, but that's because they act as a group! Any individual woman can still "defect" and avoid the pitfalls. If anything I will wager it's easier than ever for a woman to get "what they really want a la 1950's" because competition among men is so much more that many will provide it at considerable cost, just to have some coochy.

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having a reputation as a slut, spinsterhood, hitting ‘the wall’, being an ‘alpha widow’, unhappiness, loneliness and becoming a cat lady

We've already been at a point for pretty much decades where any public discussion of these phenomena and their negative social and personal consequences is practically exiled by the controllers of public life to obscure online message boards universally reviled by polite society. In any other place, they're a completely taboo subject. You know that. Let's not fool ourselves.

My impression was you can complain about it all you want, if you blame men.

That's a fair and difficult question. I think this can be achieved if a blanket condemnation/rejection of mainstream feminism and a simplified scapegoating of men in general are both avoided.

Oh, touché. Productive and in the mainstream is indeed a tall order.

Discussion of the consequences is exiled by many corners of public life. But the consequences themselves, as manosphere types will say, occur nonetheless, and they do so whether they are written about or not.

If society denies the existence of something, then it's no longer real, and is not considered to exist.

It is real, society didn’t talk about the opioid epidemic for a long time and clearly the deaths still mounted. I’m not opposed to Deleuzian theories of reality and I suppose your view is ultimately very French, but in a very real sense the consequences do still exist, yes.

Women are already a main group of losers in the sexual revolution

Sure, and the primary victims of war, too, right? The 'consequences' they received have been getting what they want, but not liking it.

That is how Gods punish people that they really hate.

I am not sure that applying the same severe logic one might use for homeless drug addicts to the child-bearing half of humanity is tenable long-term.

The whole ‘women as legally children’ thing was the norm for most of human history and it’s the norm for a minority of societies today. ‘Undesirable’ is possibly a fair criticism, but ‘just can’t happen’ or ‘unsustainable’ are easily disproven objections.

No they are not. Many things which were sustainable in the past are unsustainable today to any noteworthy extent. Example: hunter-gatherer lifestyle (unless you are also willing to cut down the global population by orders of magnitude).

It is trivial that the society can in principle be radically restructured to cope with disenfranchisement of women, but the way from here to there should be more clearly imagined, as well as the costs of the journey – all facets of our world that will not be sustained, as it were.

And specifically, Nybbler's logic of "they reap what they sow" might be unsustainable even in the previous era. Contrary to the feminist narrative, contempt for femaels wasn't an overwhelming consensus among Hajnalis of a few centuries ago.

When the world was harsher to women, TFR was higher. I'm not claiming that's cause and effect, but I am claiming that there's no evidence against such long-term tenability.

Again, why do you think 16 year old girls in 1965 had more power than rock musicians, Hugh Hefner, Hollywood and the ad industry? Blaming women for the sexual revolution just doesn’t stack up.

This is a non sequitur.

  1. I agree we should view it as terrible awful behavior. Not sure it should be criminal.

  2. Question is whether there is the possibility of forgiveness. Brand seems to have gotten his life together and decries what he did previously.

I don't think Brand should face criminal charges unless there's good evidence for the criminal allegations; presumably, as in eg. Weinstein's case, that's something that the police and prosecutors will determine. Social sanction? Well, if people want to judge him for fucking a 16 year old girl when he was 35, that's their right.

I'm curious - how do you actually coordinate on enforcing social sanction besides something like a religion? Aka "wokeism" or the ol' faithful of Christianity.

I think this question is confused.

The non-woke and non-christian parts of our society have large and well-used mechanisms of enforcing sanctions. The courts, being fired by your employer or kicked out of an institution, distributed social rejection. I don't see how this is different in kind from the Church proscribing a behavior or exiling someone. And the Church's moral commandments were developed in ways not dissimilar to our own - some were debated by powerful men and legislated, all were evolved and spread among individuals of varying intellect and interests. Fraud and theft are immoral actions too, and we enforce social sanction against it all the time, both via courts and social media.

You don't. It's emergent based on what catches on and what doesn't. It's a social sanction so society is the arbiter as a whole.

That's the point really. It's the distributed judgment of your fellow citizens. And when enough agree, a new convention coalesces and through social shaming and gossip it spreads to a critical mass.

Even with Christianity it only works when enough people agree with the tenets. But if Christianity fails to convince enough people, its reach falls. It still spreads through the same mechanism as every other social judgement.

I’d say social sanction is exactly what he’s facing now, it’s essentially cancellation.

I’m not sure Weinstein got a fair trial. He was basically convicted first in public opinion.

Didn't stop Spacey from somehow dancing through an endless bunch of raindrops.

Or Depp for that matter, where Heard clearly had a 3-0 lead for years.

IMAO if you have sex with ~1000 women selected for drug use and poor emotional regulation, this is an inherently hazardous activity and the inherent hazard(or at least one of them) is that they will spread damaging rumors and make accusations about you. Obviously he deserves a fair trial, but it's hard to feel bad for him.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. If you're talking strict liability...

What I am about to say is NOT to defend this sort of conduct, or to offer an excuse.

Hell. He might wind up having sex with a girl who is actually 15 but has a very high quality fake ID saying she is 21. And she genuinely looks 21 as well, has older friends, and her story superficially checks out. Is this terrible? Yes. Should he have done more due diligence? Yes as well. I've known guys that have had full beards at 14 and could pass for - and were frequently confused for - college students. I knew a 19yo guy that was frequently confused for a teacher, when I went to high school. Long story but he came to the US from Slovakia when he was 12 and needed to be held back to learn English.

No test or person is perfect, and if you wind up succeeding 99.9 or even 99.99 percent of the time at not fucking up and having sex with someone that can't really consent legally because of age or altered mental status, that works great at keeping you out of trouble if you have about ten partners during your lifetime. Not so much for quadruple digits. As such it is arguably morally risky to do this as well...

I'm surprised no one has commented on the far more ominous and frightening thing happening here. The very obvious political motivation behind the hit pieces.

Brand has been a, "rock star" sex pest and drug addict for pretty much ever. More recently however he's become increasingly disillusioned with the establishment and used his platform to criticize everything from vaccines and the covid response to russiagate. I don't follow him much, but it seemed to be around the 2020and covid when he fully divorced from his controlled opposition, Bernie Sanders with a bit of anarchy, type politics and started interacting with the Assange, Greenwald, Tucker style deplorables. It appears that in response to this the same media that gave him a platform for years and cheered on his lifestyle started calling up every one of his "1000 women" in order to get dirt on him.

This to me is far more frightening than the rapes, assuming they happened. It's more evidence that we live in a fully captured regime. Even if Brand were an out of control rapist existing in a world that had no modern safeguards against crime, at most he could harm, what? a few hundred or so? Before a ticked off relative is going to smash his skull in. The increasing merger between the political class, media and intelligence agencies in the west has, based off historic examples, the potential to get millions abused or killed. The sense of entitlement journalists seem to believe they have to "the narrative", history, truth, culture, etc. is rape on an industrial scale.

Come on, there have been political motivations for rumors, true and false, since the first city and the invention of large-scale politics. And even before that, hunter-gatherers in bands of twenty levied rumors against each other. Romans accused political enemies of sexual misconduct. It's absurd, lacking even historical context of the past ten years, to consider this evidence of 'a fully captured regime'. It isn't even particularly partisan, Republicans will jump on anyone in democratic media accused of sexual assault or pedophilia, too. Just googling, what about this CNN talking head, a dem?

The increasing merger between the political class, media and intelligence agencies in the west has, based off historic examples, the potential to get millions abused or killed

"Increasing". Do you have any evidence that 'accusing guy on the other team of sexual assault' happens more than it did 10, 20, 40, 80, 160, or 320 years ago? I'm confident if you look into any of those timeframes, it'll happen just as often (when you adjust for the volume of reporting available, there just wasn't as much news in 1700 as there is today)

Bingo -- the similarities with the Assange story are right there in our collective face.