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Notes -
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,
The inverse, how many women can you hookup with without raping one?
By rape I don't me beat up, drag into an alley and wrestle to the ground while she screams and fights, I mean women who really wasn't into it or ended up getting something different than she expected. These loose sexual encounters are difficult to read and people aren't communicating clearly. If a women can change her mind half way through, have blood alcohol content above a certain rate or be ok with x but not y without giving a manual before hand it isn't strange that women have had miserable experiences.
False rape is a common trope on line. The reality is more like a middle ground. A lot of these cases aren't a man consciously trying to rape a women, they aren't a women enthusiastically participating in sex and then changing her mind the day after. They two drunk people steared by horniness having an akward encounter that went wrong. The women in these college rape cases have a point. A lot of women are having deeply uncomfortable experiences that they really didn't want. The men also have a point, they didn't put on a mask and bring a gun in order to execute a planned crime.
The fundamental issue is that all forms of training for how people should behave, what is expected and norms for sex has been replaced with do what you feel like. This is going to lead to a greater than 0.1% instance of someone clearly not getting what they bargained for. By replacing norms with do what you feel like we have entered a behavioural sink. The feminists wanting consent laws probably aren't evil man haters, they are probably women who have been legitimately hurt and are deeply unhappy about the state of things. However, their solution of throwing men in jail for years based on hearsay worsens the situation and furthers the rift between men and women instead of healing it. Having removed romance, deep bonds and love from sex as well as the stability of marriage we have created the grounds for bitter encounters.
TLDR; Don't expect to be happy the day after you sleep with a drunk/high guy who doesn't know or care about you.
About as many as people you can say meet without murdering them (and my murder I don't mean deprive of life, I mean slightly inconvenience).
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This particular kind of bitter encounter may have increased in frequency, but this isn't the only effect of the sexual revolution, it's worth considering things in total. The 'stability of marriage' could refer to no-fault divorce - many people, both anecdotally and in survey data, were trapped in unhappy, abusive, or sexless marriages before that. Also, marital rape was legal in the US prior to 1970. (not that my position is modern sexual norms are good)
Also, two events described seems more like central cases of sexual assault than miscommunication or awkwardness or 'bad sex' -
with text messages evidence
And
It'd take a lot of creative misinterpretation on the part of this accuser to take an 'awkward encounter that went wrong' to this. It's possible, though, some people are very creative when they recount things.
I think another component of the phenomenon you describe, which is more common than actual rape, is that being aggressive and ignoring some signals to stop is a good strategy for success in casual sex. Part of the 'game' is women giving mixed or negative signals that the man needs to be a bit aggressive in pushing through to get what he wants, and if you do it well you'll often get a positive response. And when a guy is trained by repeated experience to do that, it encourages the kind of personality that, with a little random variation caused by miscommunication or bad judgement in the moment, can cross over into violating consent. The man's and woman' actions here are in large part instinctive, and (imo, I have little legible evidence though) those instincts are related to an evolutionary history where a lot of sex wasn't entirely consensual. So the whole thing's a mess.
I don't think just 'bad sex and rape-adjacent things happen' is a good reason to roll back the sexual revolution, tbh. There's just a lot more great or fine casual sex or fun serial monogamy than there are actively traumatic experiences, and the rate is comparable to other fun but dangerous activities that should be legal. You need to believe that the average case of 'fine' fling or longterm relationship that doesn't lead to children is bad, despite both parties enjoying it.
This isn't my hobby horse, so I don't keep links on hand, but didn't people have more sex, and report greater satisfaction on average back then? Loosening the norms was supposed to increase happiness, but now that it failed, the fact that things weren't perfect is used as an argument for bringing back a system that worked better than what we have today.
If I had to guess, 'reported having more sex' is true, and a product of both a younger population, and probably that, when you're in a relationship with someone, you'll have more frequent sex than if you aren't, in large part due to ease of access. It's definitely true today that between ages 20 and 80, frequency of sex declines, and I'm pretty sure that should contribute to an overall trend. This figure seems to support the second claim. That's not really incompatible with a large number of unhappy or abusive marriages. I think reports of happiness or general satisfaction are pretty uninformative for anything more fine-grained than 'starving africans say they're less happy than westerners', because the way people conceive of happiness and a good life varies. You could totally imagine a liberal centrist position that it's good that people have sexual freedom, and it's also good for more people to partner up than are today, and that the combination of those two is both achievable after norms randomly drift a bit more and is better than either the 1950s or today.
(note that arjin's comment was posted before I edited in 8 paragraphs into grandparent comment)
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Great post overall, and I have to especially double down on this section.
Uncertainty, in any context, is hard for humans to deal with. Cultural rituals and norms exist in some part to reduce uncertainty so people can be more confident in the situations they find themselves in and be prepared to make decisions.
An interest counter-intuitive reality in the sex-culture-wars; the BDSM community is full of pretty elaborate and almost legalistic consent procedures with very little room for interpretation. Nothing gets you exiled faster than even a rumor of coercion. In many ways, it is pretty close to literally exchanging grocery lists of sexual acts with one another (or more!) and then going line by line through them with "yes", "no", "maybe - and here's my stop word." For more extreme acts, written documents aren't at all unheard of. This is all in the context of a community that is unrelentingly sex positive. Suffice it to say, even the real freaks understand the importance of rituals and norms.
The sexual revolution of the 1960s drafted on its own acceleration through the 1970s into the present and is now something more like sexual nihilism. Nothing matters (besides consent, of course), a monstrous appetite isn't something to be worried about, and partners can be as temporary as tee-shirts. When you allow that kind of madness to flow over a fundamental human activity that is also core to societal functioning, you're going to get alarming results.
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I absolutely think this counts for women as well as men. Don't decide it was rape because you both got drunk, or he didn't call the next day, or years later you wish you hadn't done it.
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Hearsay is when a witness testifies about what he heard someone else say he witnessed, not when a witness testifies about something he experienced first-hand.
Hearsay is the wrong term, but there are hard-coded exceptions to evidence rules which only apply to sexual assault and not to other crimes.
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In otherwords when their friends give a statement about what the "victim" said the mornng after
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I don't think that's having a point at all. Those women were entirely free to not do that to themselves. Just don't go home with the guy. If he then crosses the line into actual rape, then and only then, she has a point. Her having unrealistic expectations and a random man failing to meet them is not and will never be a serious problem in need of solving.
People's choices aren't products of some wholly independent life philosophy consciously derived from first principles. We're products of society and we act like it. If you had been raised from birth in an Afghan village the sum of your philosophy, identity and belief system would be radically different to what it is, even mediated for genetics. Expecting young women to wholesale reject 60 years of the sexual revolution as teenagers (when all almost everyone wants to do is fit in) is ridiculous. It's up to the adults in the room to change norms.
Hugh Hefner and the ad men of Madison Ave weren’t teenage girls. Teenage girls wanted male attention as much in 1865 as they did in 1965, the difference was the adults who surrounded them and the culture they were raised in.
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It feels good in the moment, and consequences come decades down the line. Even then, it needed a few generations to take hold.
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Sorry but the fact that something is not a crime doesn't mean it is not a serious problem. The problem is that half of the solution - use your judgement, don't put yourself in peril, listen to your mother and so in is anathema to the modern safetism feminists. The other half is to actually have men abide to some semi formal dating rules (if you didn't get to second base outside of the house, don't be pushy inside for example) and dating language. This will minimize the communication errors and unpleasant experiences.
Feminists don't seem to want the other half in practice either. Obviously getting rid of those kinds of situations entails good behavior but feminists don't want that, they want institutional control.
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I largely agree. However, the sexual market place is bigger than the individual. The sexual revolution has limited the bargaining power of women and the extent to which men will wait for sex. In a hook up culture competing by showing more skin and sleeping faster has become widespread. Trying to make the demands a women could make decades ago such as waiting for sex, demanding that the man provide for the family etc isn't really feasible.
It has only limited their bargaining power with Chad, who now has four other girls on his booty call list just waiting for a text from him. But women have more bargaining power than ever over the ever-increasing percentage of men who are incels.
If a woman actually wanted to marry a provider and remain chaste until marriage while she was still young and hot and virginal, she would have her pick of the litter.
But women only want Chad, and would rather fuck a dog than an average-looking beta provider. They only hold their noses and marry such men when they hit the wall and stop getting attention from Chad, or when they end up as single mothers looking for a bailout.
Women debase themselves by having sex after a few dates and performing degrading sexual acts because that is the only way to compete for Chad, and the alternative to competing for Chad is accepting a man that is not Chad, which is a fate too terrible to countenance.
I have a hard time seeing this as women having a point.
Post about specific groups, rather than general groups, whenever possible. Write like everyone is reading, and you want to include them in the conversation.
As a rule, if you can't differentiate between "women" and "some women," you're going to have a hard time.
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This is not my third-hand anecdotal experience. Even conservative-leaning men want premarital sex even more than the women of similar cultural leaning do.
And even in past societies, among the masses, (note: vague guess on my part based on reading a few historical sources, could be wrong but I doubt it, there's definitely better scholarship on the topic I haven't read yet) sex before marriage was very common, and the strictly enforced rule was more 'marry the women you have sex with and raise the children'.
It seems like redpill/PUA/manosphere adjacent people have these theories about the whole of modern sexual behavior that are exclusively based on the way < 20% of the population behaves, and then exaggerate even their behavior. Ugly men and ugly women have casual sex AND date, even in college! On dating apps specifically, and i guess on social media, women have a massive advantage - but that's in large part because connection there is mediated by looks and very short-term interactions, which men are more interested in than women. And as a result dating apps have 5x more men than women. But if you're dating friends, or people you know from shared activities, non-Chads do quite well.
This just seems false, if I interpret it literally, compared to the experiences anyone I know has had?
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Really? The average guy (not Chad) is happy to date a woman who wants marriage first, sex after? When he's young and horny and wants to have sex with as many women as he can realistically manage to get, because he wants fun and experiences and not to be tied down aged 18+?
It takes two to tango, and for every guy who says he wants a nice girl fiancée, there's one who means "when I've sown my wild oats and am ready to settle down".
The average non-Chad guy doesn't get a chance to sow his wild oats while he is still young and horny. That is precisely what would make such a marriage a good deal for him; he could trade commitment and financial support in exchange for guaranteed, exclusive sex.
Sure, he would like it even better if he could have sex with a bunch of women, but, not being Chad, he doesn't have that option. Having the opportunity of an early marriage would be a strict improvement over his current situation of masturbating to porn and maybe getting laid once or twice a year if he tries really hard every weekend (there is a reason they call it "getting lucky").
As fortaleza84 put it:
But the average man doesn't get that option anymore, because women are not actually interested in getting commitment from a beta provider. The only reason they ever got married to such men was because their fathers, who had legal, social, economic, and religious control over their sexual choices, forced them to. The sexual revolution ended that.
Now, a beta provider is expected to wife up a woman in her 30s after she has finished spending her youth, beauty, fertility, and purity getting pumped-and-dumped by Chad:
From "The Archetypal Modern Woman":
But, increasingly, men are saying "thanks, but no thanks" and leaving those women to become bitter cat ladies and single mothers. In the immortal words of Michael:
Not to worry, though; the government is perfectly happy to steal the fruit of men's labor to help pay for Chad's bastards.
In the welfare state, every working man is a cuck.
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In secular urban circles in the modern West (and no, suddenly deciding to leave your family, friend and community and become a Mormon or an Orthodox Jew at 17 isn't a realistic option for most women), what percentage of eligible young men do you think expect or consider it reasonable to wait until marriage?
People are products of society, even as they participate in shaping it. Young women who grow up in the shadow of the sexual revolution had no choice about which society they were born into and what its norms were and are. Yes, everyone has free will, expecting every teenage girl to rebel against the entirety of modernity is absurd.
Isn't this kind of like saying "in vegetarian urban circles in the modern West, what percentage of eligible ladies want to have steak every Friday"?
If you want steak, you shouldn't be hanging out with vegetarians -- even urban churches should have no shortage of men who are OK with waiting until marriage for sex -- so long as the wait is not too long ofc.
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The answer depends on your definition of the word "eligible".
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I read a fair bit into the link you provided, and found nothing that could be reasonably read to support your claim. The link claims that a small minority of women have bestiality fantasies (hardly surprising), that a very small minority of female participants in surveys report having engaged in bestiality, and that bestiality-themed dildos are popular (yes, furries are a thing.) None of that adds up to women, as a class, preferring sex with dogs to sex with non-chads, or even preferring it to sex with outright incels; there is no evidence provided that "women's" preference for sex with dogs is a significant factor in the sexual marketplace at all.
Your statement appears both highly inflammatory and entirely unsupported. The sexual marketplace is woeful enough without resorting to absurd caricature, and in fact your comment would be greatly improved by its absence. Don't say things because they sound good, say them because you've thought about them seriously and concluded that they're true.
Not him, and don't necessarily support his claim, but I think the logic goes something like
I think it's less about the idea that it has a major impact on the marketplace (though the complete non-existence of dogs would probably have some infitessimally small impact) and more just one of those realizations where people are hit with the fact that they are literally less fuckable than a literal dog.
Of course, this all falls apart if the focus is on "average looking" rather than "beta," as it only works if talking about incels specifically.
My own view is that what I laid out above is roughly true, but mostly just the fault of the bottom-tier men for sucking that badly. It's not even really a bad or shocking thing. As you said, furries exist, and they're a much larger group than loser-philes.
Zoophilia is not that common a paraphilia, practicing zoophilia even less, removed from contexts like degradation or zoosadism yet rarer still, and female non-degradation-focused zoophiles even more uncommon.
((I don't recommend using Bad Dragon as a metric, since regardless of Varka's issues the median Bad Dragon sale or advertisement revolves around the fantasy of a sapient and often bipedal partner, but a) the median customer has or had a dick, and b) an overwhelmingly male ratio applies to self-reports among actual-bestialists, too.))
It's just more visible, in the sense that someone getting arrested and/or publicly shamed for animal abuse (whether in any remotely less-violent way, or as the degradation or animal-sadism sense that very few incels would want) shows up in the news for incels to talk about, where "woman with kink for ugly/submissive/pathetic men" doesn't in any visible or identifiable way. But the later is more common than you'd think; if more generally spaced among written fiction than visual pornography.
And, of course, the broader "average-looking beta provider" is far better off, even before considering all of the ethical and pragmatic problems with actual animal abuse.
((Peter Singer's impact on the Wider EA Community isn't the worst thing that hit the tumblr ratsphere, but that I know this stuff is definitely not a benefit.))
But the article linked in the post you linked mentions that 4% of the female population had a sexual experience with an animal, with much higher rates among certain sub-populations (particularly farmers). I mean that's not exactly the 5% I mentioned off the cuff but cut me some slack. That just becomes more significant when taking into account that actual practicing zoophilia isn't even required for the overall point.
As to that data, my understanding is that the data is pretty all over the place, women fantasize about animals more often, men actually engage in the actions more frequently (but typically don't fantasize about it even if they do normally fuck animals,) and the actual rates of interest in it are pretty close.
The points about the pathetic-man-fetish are all valid though, and I'm not too attached to the overall point anyway, though I expect for anyone who does care about it, any nitpicks are unlikely to remove the emotional damage of "there are attractive women who have fucked dogs but wouldn't touch you with a 10-foot-pole."
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It is not ~0% of all women who don't want to sleep with the incel, it is tilde 0% (Zorba fix markdown escape pls) of all women he ever met (more plausibly, approached).
He probably haven't met any dogfuckers, either.
To demonstrate the problem a different way: Go to an incel forum, select a thousand incels. Go to a dog competition, select a thousand charming, beautiful, intelligent, expensive male dogs with female owners. Which group do you think will have more sex with female humans in the next five years?
The "incels are less fuckable than dogs" doesn't hold up unless you redefine "incel" much more narrowly than anyone actually does. Your average unemployed 5'6" recessed chin guy on those forums is still more sexable than a chocolate lab.
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Yeah we have a word for that…boorish. Something can be socially condemned without calling someone (socially and criminally) as a rapist. Being a boorish man is bad; being a rapist is evil.
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The testimony from one of his accusers is interesting. She was 16 at the time (the UK age of consent) and her parents felt they couldn't do anything to stop her seeing Brand. It's as if they considered the limits of their own parental authority as extending to the letter of the law and not a jot further. I personally would have expected a good mother to stop her daughter 'dating' a celebrity sex addict, age of consent be damned. The girl herself comes to the conclusion that the law needs to be changed to protect 16-18 year olds.
Although to answer your rhetorical question, it's pretty easy to have lots of consensual sex without doing the stuff Brand is accused of. Holding a girl's mouth open so you can spit into it isn't a case of blurred lines and miscommunication.
The problem is, if she's legally the age of consent, what can they do? Lock her in her room? That's abuse and the second she calls the child abuse hotline, social services and maybe the cops will be at the door. Stupid young 16 year olds are going to threaten to run away or kill themselves or other stupid stunts if their parents interfere with "True Love".
Tell her she's too young to have sex? The entirety of society is going to condemn such shaming and controlling and repression.
Mutually assured destruction, motherfuckers. See you after the cops brought you back from running away. Or in the hospital after your suicide attempt. Or the morgue.
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And in America preventing 16-year olds from dating older men is a thing that parents probably do more often than they allow it. 16 is a common age of consent in the USA. Britain's legal and cultural environment is probably not that different unless you can point to relevant differences.
Yes, there's parents that are unable or unwilling to put their foot down and stop their teenaged daughter from being a toy for an adult man. While parents who are able and willing to do so have somewhat less support from society at large than they would have had in 1200 AD, lots of them still manage it. Thus we can conclude that the former subset of parents generally have some hangup in themselves rather than being stopped by broader society from controlling their daughters.
True. Which makes it so hilariously sad two years later when those same parents send their daughters off to college in another city/state without a second thought, where they will completely lose the ability to prevent their daughters from making such mistakes.
How many fathers who proudly subscribe to the "Rules for Dating my Daughter" would react with shock and outrage if you suggested that maybe paying for their little princess to spend four years away from parental supervision in an environment full of sex, drugs, and alcohol is not the best idea? Probably most of them.
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I think there's some major cultural differences based on filter bubble about what is acceptable parenting as far as intervening in your 16-18(/21) year old's personal life. Obviously these parents lived in a bubble where they considered it unacceptable intervention to stop their sixteen year old daughter from dating an adult male celebrity with a bad reputation for treatment of women; lots of parents would think that a pretty reasonable intervention based on just one of those factors, let alone all of them.
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There isn't a middle ground when you're talking about "guilty" vs "not guilty". In this case talking about a middle ground is usually finding an excuse to punish the man. You can bite one bullet and say that "when a man and a woman have an awkward encounter that went wrong, no rape occurred". Or you can bite another and say "when a man and a woman have an awkward encounter that went wrong, he raped her". If you talk about a middle ground and put out a lot of words but ultimately conclude the man should be punished, you've decided it's rape, and if you put out all those words but ultimately conclude he should not, you've decided it's not rape.
I see it as the revolution entering its authoritarian phase. In the early Soviet union the farmers were going to be free and run themselves without any oppression. The result was mass starvation. When cannibalism becomes a major concern in cities, getting farmers to produce becomes a legitimate concern. Shooting lazy farmers for being tsarist spies and having soldiers patrol farms while enforcing strict counting and documentation of production was awful for the people who lived through it. Yet millions of people weren't starving to death in the 1950s. We are experiencing something similar on the dating market. Free love became freedom to act selfishly. This has caused wide spread and genuine hurt among women. Some of them are now demanding the state clear up the sea of bad behaviour using the legal system. Total sexual freedom didn't work, instead tradition will be replaced by commissars.
We can't have a society in which men more or less use 16-year-old girls to get off. Having large numbers of women have deeply uncomfortable experiences and having genuinely psychopathic men take advantage of the freedom of the sexual revolution is a travesty.
With that said it obviously won't work. The NKVD can't be everywhere, and people cheat all the time. Show trials designed to maximize convictions don't create functioning societies.
Commissars rather famously didn't work; the USSR was supported by US grain exports in the 1970s and 1980s, and was dissolved in late 1991.
Of course it didn't work, but it worked better than it did at the most zealous, most extreme, most euphoric and most radical phase of the revolution. The Cultural Revolution was shitty even by the standards of Chinese communism. The sexual revolution was a catastrophic disaster for a huge number of people (I'd argue both men and women) to the benefit of a small minority of men. Reining it in is going to involve punishing those men disproportionately, it is what it is.
Agree, but the punishment is only the first half of the re-calibration. You can point to something and say "That's bad, don't do that," but people will naturally respond, "Well, fine, what's good?"
And then society, culture, and all of the relevant institutions are going to have to start really getting behind the idea of stable nuclear families, courtship rituals that are defined (heavily) by gender roles, and explicit pro-natalism. Personally, I think of these are stellar ideas. But there are some absolutely bananas divergences in opinios on that. This is why, I think, the trashfire that is contemporary dating endures - there isn't a well articulated alternative and even vague attempts to develop one are only at the margins and oriented around fine-tuning and optimization. The recent article-and-comments on "Date Me" docs over at Scott's Blog is case in point.
Then again, what's old is new. People really like to fuck. Like, a lot a lot. Society has been dealing with this with great difficulty forever. At the societal, pro-social level,packing away women in burlap bags probably isn't a good move, but neither is broadcasting luxury strip clubs as empowering art. I'm not going to weasel out and say "it's a balancing act." No, the assertion that ought to be made is "sex is one of the most basic social contracts you engage in. Yes, it's personal and fun, but it isn't something to be taken lightly." Then, taking the next step up in the responsibility chain, "you should have sex in an already stable pair bonded relationship with an eye towards longevity." No, don't criminalize one-night stands and don't jail the town harlot or village lothario - but hold them up as examples of what not to do.
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What are you talking about? The Soviet Union was exporting grain to support the growth of it's heavy industry in the early 1920s which led the USA to withdraw it's massive famine relief efforts. In the early 1930s famine was caused by collectivization and wasn't required to feed the cities. It isn't like collectivization helped productivity in the long run. That they eventually stopped being so insanely oppressive that starving their citizens was a step to far is more due to politics than anything.
Are you deliberately choosing bad examples to make a point?
Soviet Union had reintroduced free market economy in early 20s, because of a total carnage of the actual communism as practiced in the early years during of the Russian Civil War and after it. Before that, the commies would seize the food from peasants, who as a result stopped bothering to grow much. The shortage of food in early 20s was extremely severe.
By the end of NEP in 1928, the agricultural production has recovered to pre WWI levels, though the Soviet Union food exports throughout its history have never been even close to the Imperial Russia exports in 1913.
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