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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28036 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

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?

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.

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.

More comments

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.

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.

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