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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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I'm feeling rather insane right now so I'll post a screed.

Do you ever feel like there are just... too many men on this planet? Not humans. Just men, in particular.

Humans are like 1.05 males: females at birth, so there's a natural imbalance. I can only assume this was balanced in the past because males died more: from war, or hunting animals, or just generally taking more risks.

None of that happens now, in our ultra-safe modern feminized society. So we just have a bunch of surplus males sitting around.. doing nothing... simping for women. Taking up body building, or feminism, or prostitution, or onlyfans, or whatever else will give them a drop of female attention.

Everybody knows "Ender's Game," but did you ever read the sequels? It has one (Speaker for the Dead) where they find an alien race that can only reproduce through a chemical change caused by war. That's... how I feel. Like, our species basically requires war in order to sort out our psychology. Otherwise there will be this latent male aggression caused by intra-sexual competition, and it won't end until we have some stupid fucking war over nothing, just to reduce the surplus male population.

There's too many dicks on the dance floor

There's clearly something wrong with the standard for toplevel posts. Either posts like this should be promptly deleted, or higher-quality regulars should be making a lot more lower-effort toplevels. Or both!

And look: a few perfectly interesting discussions were spawned in the comments, despite this being an "insane" "screed".

I don’t understand this. You seem to be saying that A) we have too few top-level posts; B) this one led to several “perfectly interesting discussions;” and C) this post should nevertheless have been deleted before those interesting discussions were allowed to happen.

If the OP led to an interesting discussion, who cares how insane it was? You’re letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I wasn't intending that comment to push a specific view, just highlight a tension.

If the OP led to an interesting discussion, who cares how insane it was

(iirc) The mod team disagreed with that line of thought the last time it was brought up.

I sort of agree. On the other hand, I think we could have more posts that aren't huge effortposts but aren't 'insane', and since we don't we reply to the insane ones. IMO (maybe) there should be a general space (like the BLR) where it's within norms for people to post thoughts, links, etc about generic topics (as opposed to the weekly threads, which are scoped to questions / fun / etc) that can start discussions. I'm guessing there's a lot more supply of posts that are shorter and lighter, but still decent quality, than 20 paragraph effortposts, posts similar to the good replies to this post. But currently only people who for whatever reason ("I'm feeling rather insane right now so I'll post a screed") are willing to break the norms a bit end up making the toplevel posts.