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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29079 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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The last top-level comment (if that's the correct description) in last week's thread was a self-declared screed by @BahRamYou, which coincidentally reminded me of a short observation about the Ukraine made by @qqqq almost a year ago, which unfortunately generated no further discussion at all:

From a demographic point of view, it is much more interesting how a country with one of the lowest fertility in the world and a population of less than 40 million people will exist after at least 10 million people left it. (Most of which are women and most of them will not return). This will probably be the biggest gender imbalance in history. Will Ukraine declare itself the first incel state? Will it provoke insanely high levels of crime and suicide? It will be interesting to watch.

I thought about this a bit, and it occurs to me that the Ukrainian War is unlike other wars seen around the world since the beginning of this century because it indeed represents a sort of unfortunate perfect demographic storm, namely that 1) it affects a population that is relatively well acculturated into general Western norms of modernity 2) it is relatively close enough to Western welfare states to trigger a massive refugee wave 3) pretty much no control authority anywhere is trying to curb the flight of women, as opposed to the flight of men 4) the region affected is characterized by low fertility, even by European standards.

Based on what I know about the reality of sex differences, I'm sure the presence of large numbers of Ukrainian refugee women, I imagine a large portion of them young and single, in the EU has already generated high levels of resentment among local women, even if this is not visible in media reports. On the other hand, if the Ukraine, or at least large regions of it, has indeed become de facto incel land, which I imagine is indeed the case, I find it hilarious that, objectively speaking, this probably represents the first social realization of the scenario that average Western online feminists love to loudly complain about as a nightmarish dystopia to be avoided, namely a society plagued by enormous numbers of single, sexless and, one can imagine, bitter and traumatized, violent young men - and yet I'm sure you'll not see much or any discussion of this in feminist circles.

Mate, they're in the middle of a war right now, and all you can think about is "Does this affect my chances of getting laid?"

Would you prefer the women stay there to get killed? That's not going to help the fertility rates post-war, either.

Content like this is why I can't take incels seriously: it's like the crazy guys going on about being circumcised as babies which means that now they are being denied mind-blowing orgasms like men who were not circumcised get. Bringing everything, even a war that is killing people daily, around to "I am not getting the fantastic sex I should be getting because I'm owed that!" makes you sound like a toddler demanding to get those cookies instead of the veggies for dinner.

Call me nuts, but I kinda think a single young man in Ukraine is more occupied with the bombs, bullets and missiles flying around him than chances of getting his end away. You have to be alive to have sex, after all.

That seems like rather a crude reduction. Yes, I would think that young people fighting in war do think about their future... Including the possibility of marriage and family.

I don't know if uncircumcised men have significantly better orgasms than circumcised, but I think that there is nothing silly about a man being angry that his parents were big enough retards to cut part of his dick off for no good reason.

Generally it seems to be considered as medically sound reasons, but most of the commentary I read about it (and unhappily I had to dip my toe into this, as it were, due to a guy who came on a fansite I was hanging around years back and turned out to be a crazy "women are all evil, I want my foreskin" type) seems to be resentful about sex. Uncut men are more sensitive, more sensitive means more sensation means better sex and better orgasms, why Mommy denied me better orgasms?

And it really is all "Mommy's fault", nobody ever questions Dad's part in all this.

My parents are medical professionals, and they got me circumcised for reasons that were, in hindsight, unnecessary.

I think the effect on my QOL is just about zero, and I was old enough to remember what my dick used to be like. I doubt it's worth getting angry about in the least, my orgasms from PIV sex are just fine.

Everything we know about the topic points to circumcision being a pretty minor deal, though. It’s not as if circumcised men don’t like sex plenty; most of them do.

I will not be circumcising my sons unless they develop some kind of medical condition requiring it, and if there was an easy circumcision reversal procedure I would probably do it. But getting mad about having been circumcised reeks of mommy issues.

But getting mad about having been circumcised reeks of mommy issues

I find this willingness to apply 'deranged' label to resentment over getting mutilated unsettling. Can't help but see it as a defense mechanism first.

Mutilation is a technically accurate but very strong word, and I do think that being mildly frustrated over it is reasonable, but uh, most people who get conspicuously upset about it are not bodily autonomy advocates getting conspicuously upset about other example of medically unnecessary procedures(eg doctors pressuring women into unnecessary c-sections), they’re MRA’s going on screeds who are also getting much more upset about it than seems reasonable.

most people who get conspicuously upset about it are [...] MRA’s going on screeds

Maybe, either way, I think being very upset over it is permissible.

I find this willingness to apply 'deranged' label to resentment over getting mutilated unsettling. Can't help but see it as a defense mechanism first.

We've experienced it, and do not consider it worthy of the term "mutilation". No perceptible loss of function has been observed; while I'm sure there is a quantifiable difference, that difference appears to be entirely swamped by other factors.

It is, in fact, possible for a person to fixate on something minor and blow it up out of all proportion. One of the best ways to tell whether this is happening is to look at whether their experience generalizes. The experience of circumcision-objectors observably does not generalize very well. You can tell people that they've been mutilated, but many of us do not in fact perceive ourselves to be mutilated. You can claim that sexual pleasure would be greater; okay, so instead of it being the most intense physical pleasure we ever experience, it is instead the most intense physical pleasure we ever experience. Like, you get that sex is primarily a trigger, right? Do you think if you shave a few millimeters off a gun's trigger, it makes the gun less powerful?

We've experienced it, and do not consider it worthy of the term "mutilation"

It's vanishingly rare here, I think experiencing the alternative gives you just as much standing to judge it. I'm not sure if I quite understand what you have in mind when you say "the experience of circumcision-objectors observably does not generalize very well". Here, practically any adult man would consider it an unambiguous mutilation if proposed without absolute necessity.

The exact extent of the loss of function is of little interest to me, it's a technicality dwarfed by the default of no wanton destruction of body parts that I know to be perfectly good as they are. I could probably live with the tip of each finger, say 0.5cm, removed. You could prove it's only 8% loss in general performance, I don't care - it has to be a significant, unambiguous improvement before it deserves even a conversation.

I especially dislike how meaningless the practice is in the US, and as such, a reminder that men are disposable. If it were a genuine ritual you go through when coming of age or whatever, I'd be far less disgusted, even though it would hardly be any more of a choice.

I'm not demanding each 'victim' to be mad about it, of course, perspective @self_made_human describes is reasonable.

It's vanishingly rare here, I think experiencing the alternative gives you just as much standing to judge it.

If you haven't experienced the loss, I think it's easy to overestimate the degree of loss involved. If you have experienced it, and if the argument is that the loss is significant in specific ways, knowing that the loss does not seem significant to you in those specific ways seems like strong evidence in a way that "I enjoy this and do not want to lose it" is not. You can imagine what that loss would be like, but I have actually had the experience.

I'm not demanding each 'victim' to be mad about it, of course, perspective @self_made_human describes is reasonable.

I think his perspective is similar to mine. I will not be circumcising my male children. But people who choose otherwise are not "mutilators", any more than people who send their children to a public school have "sold their children into child slavery". The label is too non-central to be useful, and it seems to me that it's primarily useful to try to spin up a victimhood narrative that just doesn't seem appropriate to me. Male disposability is a real thing, but the object-level facts can't support the weight "mutilation" is trying to load here.

If you haven't experienced the loss

Only men cut well out of childhood do. But I would not cede the exclusive right to judge the matter to them anyhow. I only meant I consider being and not being all natural as far back as you can remember equal standing here.

but the object-level facts can't support the weight "mutilation" is trying to load here.

I don't agree. Yes, it's a strong word, it is sufficiently central here. I would say such parents are perpetuating mutilation, just not the worst imaginable exact kind.

"Mutilated" is a loaded term. Are dentures being put in and your objections overruled mutilation? Getting your ears pierced as a child?

The obvious counterpart, female genital mutilation, has much more grounding as such, since it is explicitly designed to deny women sexual pleasure, and the clitoris contributes a great deal more to it than the prepuce does for the penis.

I'm circumcised, and I'm apathetic about it. I don't see myself as being deprived of anything in particular, and it wasn't done when I was too young to remember the difference. Now, I'm also against people having their bodies modified against their consent for most reasons, and the benefits of circumcision are minimal if they exist at all. I just happen to think that the men who consider it a cut-down hill worth dying on are overstating its impact. It likely contributed nothing to what ails them, unless the circumcision was really botched, and I don't think that's accusation in play. It's a trivial procedure, or less African witchdoctors and Rabbis with incisors couldn't pull it off reliably.

The reason it is silly is because it is not, in fact, worth getting upset about. The quality of one's life is not reduced in any meaningful way.

Getting raped usually doesn't reduce a person's quality of life after the rape either in any way other than by giving them the trauma of feeling violated, yet that trauma is a pretty big deal!

If the great majority of people who had been raped did not find that the experience resulted in trauma, I do not think we would have a consensus that rape caused trauma.

It seems obvious to me that the "trauma" experienced by a small percentage of circumcised males is the result of a self-inflicted and highly irrational neurosis. I'm circumcised. I would prefer that I were not. I understand what I've lost, and will not be circumcising my children. Despite these facts, my circumcision is not a great trauma, or even a small one; it does not impact my life in any significant way.

Mate, they're in the middle of a war right now, and all you can think about is "Does this affect my chances of getting laid?"

What do you think soldiers think about when they're not actually getting shot at?

Drink and sex, but when they are getting shot at or blown up, I doubt they're thinking in the thick of it "Damn, if only the girls in the neighbourhood had stuck around, I'd have a good chance of scoring with one of them!"

Only between barrages, I'm sure.

to that add the "suspension bridge" effect and I would assume they are very, very horny.

enormous numbers of single, sexless and, one can imagine, bitter and traumatized, violent young men

Vast numbers of these men will be dead or mutilated, however, and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the intact parts of the country has in the past demonstrated the ability to build stable communities marked by higher than regionally average fertility rates. Ukraine will be a third world rump state with a dysfunctional economy, sure, but ‘land of incels’ doesn’t seem like the greatest long term prediction.

5houldn't the sex ratio of Ukraine stay basically the same? More women than men are emigrating, yes, but plenty of men are also emigrating. Plus they're dying in the war.

It might turn out like you said, too depopulated to continue as the same state. Or they might get the same sort of baby boom that most countries traditionally have after the war.

Men, unlike women, pretty much cannot legally emigrate/flee since the war began.

As in the past, I still not believe that it will exist any anti-refugee movement started and staffed by women, also on the basis of intrasexual competition. There was none when the rape indexes went up in European countries that received immigrants, and as a consequence I believe that, if there will be any sort of "sexual tension" in the future, there will be no reaction from women at all.

If there are not women in Ukraine for Ukrainian men to date why won't they date women from other countries? It's not like dating has to stop at national borders. Ukraine is also not some geographically isolated country. It has neighbors on every side. Especially if Ukraine joins the EU, giving all these men the right to travel and work anywhere in any other EU country.

Ukrainian men, practically speaking, are mostly not permitted to leave the country, and it's not like foreign women are likely to immigrate.

While the war is currently on, sure, but it will end eventually.

If the Ukrainians do end up verging toward cultural and ethnic extinction, I wonder how this will affect the decision-making of other low fertility nations that neighbor great powers. Will Taiwan quickly decide that standing up against China isn’t in their actual interest? Could a joint Chinese / NK force influence South Korea’s sovereignty? Etc. It seems that anyone who has survival in mind (let alone thriving) will recalculate how much they actually value sovereignty over capitulation. But then again, maybe the leaders of these countries simply don’t value “peoplehood” and have already made plans to send their families to America if things go sour.

But China is in a demographic slump. Actually quite a bad one.

Sure, maybe Taiwan would never recover long-term from a war to prevent Chinese invasion. But it's not like China has young men to spare by sending them to to killed by the boatload as they surely would be. They have way too few young men compared to the number of older people. With no war at all they will suffer from the demographic time bomb they've built.

China has a huge male surplus among the military age population, though. I feel like that changes the calculus somewhat.

Besides, low fertility rates didn’t stop Russia from starting a war of attrition with its neighbor.

But they really don't have a surplus male military aged population. Those young men are on the hook for caring for their parents and grandparents. Each boatload of these "surplus" men sunk to the bottom of the Taiwan Straight is a lot of Chinese families that just got wiped out and have no one to support them in old age.

Based on what I know about the reality of sex differences, I'm sure the presence of large numbers of Ukrainian refugee women, I imagine a large portion of them young and single, in the EU has already generated high levels of resentment among local women, even if this is not visible in media reports.

Living in a country with a large Ukrainian refugee population, I have literally not seen a single indication of this. By all accounts solidarity with Ukrainian refugees remains high among men and women.

In Poland opinion polls about refugees are notably split on male/female axis. With noticeably lower rating among woman, attributed to competition with Ukrainian woman.

Well, yes, I'm sure you'll not see any resentment expressed verbally and publicly, because it's hardly an issue normies are likely to complain about in such a social climate as the Finnish, or the German, for that matter. But logically speaking I just can't imagine that tension and resentment not being there at all.

Again, if it was there, I would see something. Anonymously on the Internet, at least. In private conversations. There are pro-Russian types, after all - both men and women - commenting online, a limited number as they form, both anonymously and publicly. However, I can't recall any instances of female sexual-competition frustration against Ukrainian women.

I'm reminded of this dumb tweet I've seen a few times, and how the entry of Ukranian women to Europe basically proved it almost instantly incorrect.

Yeah, same here, I'm a man but I've not heard of any resentment against Ukrainian women, if anything everyone still has sympathy, and the women probably have more sympathy than men (due to general gender differences in sympathy).

Same here. That scenario seems entirely imaginary.

Western online feminists love to loudly complain about as a nightmarish dystopia to be avoided, namely a society plagued by enormous numbers of single, sexless and, one can imagine, bitter and traumatized, violent young men

Bitter, traumatised and violent, yes they treat that as a huge problem, but single and sexless? I’m not sure feminism explicitly worries about this, single and sexless men are to be dealt with on an individual level as inconvenient complainers who are to be ignored or shamed - feminism only deals with these men insofar as their situation (whether self-inflicted or not) causes them to step out of line. I don’t think women in general have this attitude but it’s the sense I’ve gotten from any explicitly feminist space I’ve seen.

feminism only deals with these men insofar as their situation (whether self-inflicted or not) causes them to step out of line.

Yes, that's what I meant, mostly. The issue of there being young men that are sexless and single is generally not discussed publicly as a social problem unless they step out of line one way or another, and violence of any sort committed by young single men is politically correct to discuss as long as it's possible to do so in the context of white men being radicalized by anti-feminists and generally being toxically masculine.

Or in the context of their being the agreed-on good guys, committing it against the agreed-on bad guys in what's agreed to he a "just war"?

True.

To discuss a broader point that mere modern sexlessness or the demographic travails of a particular nation, I don't think demographics are worth worrying about particularly.

There's two different considerations at play here:

  1. Whether global birth rates/total human population will decline.

  2. Whether that decline will be a "bad" thing.

In the case of the former:

I think that a "business as usual" or naive extrapolation of demographic trends is a bad idea, when AGI is imminent. In the case of population, it's less bad than usual, at least compared to things like GDP. As far as I'm concerned, the majority of the probability mass can be divvied up between "baseline human population booms" and "all humans die".

Why might it boom? (The bust case doesn't need to be restated, insert the usual AI x-risk arguments).

To the extent that humans consider reproduction to be a terminal value, AI will make it significantly cheaper and easier. AI assisted creches or reliable rob-nannies that don't let their wards succumb to what are posited as the ills of too much screen time or improper socialization will mean that much of the unpleasantness of raising a child can be delegated, in much the same manner that a billionaire faces no real constraints in their QOL from having a nigh arbitrary number of kids when they can afford as many nannies as they please. You hardly need to be a billionaire to achieve that, it's in the reach of UMC Third Worlders because of income inequality, and while more expensive in the West, hardly insurmountable for successful DINKs. The wealth versus fertility curve is currently highest for the poor, dropping precipitously with income, but then increases again when you consider the realms of the super-wealthy.

What this does retain will be what most people consider to be universally cherished aspects of raising a child, be it the warm fuzzy glow of interacting with them, watching them grow and develop, or the more general sense of satisfaction it entails.

If, for some reason, more resource rich entities like governments desire more humans around, advances like artifical wombs and said creches would allow large population cohorts to be raised without much in the way of the usual drawbacks today, as seen in the dysfunction of orphanages. This counts as a fallback measure in case the average human simply can't be bothered to reproduce themselves.

The kind of abundance/bounded post-scarcity we can expect will mean no significant downsides from the idle desire to have kids.

Not all people succumb to hyper-stimuli replacements, and the ones who don't will have far more resources to indulge their natal instincts.

As for the latter:

Today, and for most of human history, population growth has robustly correlated with progress and invention, be it technological or cultural, especially technological. That will almost certainly cease to be so when we have non-human intelligences or even superintelligences about, that can replace the cognitive or physical labour that currently requires humans.

It costs far less to spool up a new instance of GPT-4 than it does to conceive and then raise a child to be a productive worker.

You won't need human scientists, or artists, or anything else really, AI can and will fill those roles better than we can.

I'm also bullish on the potential for anti-aging therapy, even if our current progress on AGI was to suddenly halt indefinitely. Mere baseline human intelligence seems sufficient to the task within the nominal life expectancy of most people reading this, as it does for interplanetary colonization or constructing Dyson Swarms. AI would just happen to make it all faster, but even we could make post-scarcity happen over the scale of a century, let alone a form of recursive self-improvement through genetic engineering or cybernetics.

From the perspective of a healthy baseliner living in a world with AGI, you won't notice any of the current issues plaguing demographically senile or contracting populations, such as failure of infrastructure, unsustainable healthcare costs, a loss of impetus when it comes to advancing technology, less people around to make music/art/culture/ideas. Whether there are a billion, ten billion or a trillion other biological humans around will be utterly irrelevant, at least for the deep seated biological desires we developed in an ancestral environment where we lived and died in the company of about 150 others.

You won't be lonely. You won't be living in a world struggling to maintain the pace of progress you once took for granted, or worse, watching everything slowly decay around you.

This will be offset in Ukraine's case by the attrition rate. Many of those violent young men are or will be dead. The average age of Ukrainian soldiers is already north of 40, I believe, so the young must not be so numerous.

That's a valid point, but we can't say to what an extent will it be offset. We'd need to have the exact numbers about the refugee wave and the military losses, and to the extent these are even calculated, I doubt they'll ever be public.

Ukraine, like its neighbors, has a population pyramid that looks like a novelty buttplug. 1991 was the last year of relatively sustainable birth rates, and these dudes are 32 already. Then there's a long neck of atrocious birthrates, with twenty-somethings being as rare as 75 year-old men.

What a coincidence, I linked the Chinese population pyramid in a sub-thread just a minute ago. Looking again it is way too jagged to work.

Ukraine on the other hand. It has a flared base and everything. The tiniest bit of smoothing and we're in business on this population pyramid butt plug. It's a little too on the nose (or up the butt?).

Looking forward to further analysis of various regions' population pyramids' suitability as sex toys and what that implies for their demographic future.

The picture for ukraine says '2023' but it can't be 2023, probably it's a version projected from 2021? After millions of women and children left Ukraine, there's huge male surpluses above 17-18 y.o.

I believe population pyramids are largely interpolations or projections from few and far between official censuses or best guesses. Had the war not occurred presumably this one would be a reasonable approximation.

But whoops, it's lacking some recent demographic changes in Ukraine.

What's the salient difference between the shape of any buttplug and any pyramid? Don't they both have a wide base tapering to a point (appropriately rounded in the plug's case)?

Ukraine, like its neighbors, has a population pyramid that looks like a novelty buttplug.

Well, thanks. I'll never be able to unsee this.

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