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Well, alright then:
A large study from all of Sweden has found that increasing people's incomes randomly (actually, increasing their wealth, but you can convert wealth to income via an interest rate very easily) does not reduce their criminality. The authors find that via a cross sectional model, people with higher incomes are less likely to commit crimes (this just compares rich people to poors and sees rich people are less criminal), while when they switch to a "shock" model where people who won what is effectively a lottery don't see reduced criminality in either themselves or their children. This is a pretty big blow for the "poor people are more criminal because they don't have money for their basic needs" theory.
Original study here: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31962/w31962.pdf
Marginal Revolution post discussing this here (also reproduced below, post has an additional graph at the end on the link): https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/12/why-do-wealthier-people-commit-less-crime.html
New but not surprising. People involved in retail theft prevention have known this forever. There is no reliable profile for a potential shoplifter. It can be anyone.
Surely you are not suggesting that it’s not possible to reason probabilistically about who is more or less likely to shoplift? I don’t think anyone believes that it is possible to definitively rule anybody out, but I would be shocked if it’s not possible to draw useful and reliable conclusions about whom to devote more resources to focusing on.
Demographically no, behaviorally on the other hand...
I half suspect that the prog preoccupation with idpol and demographics stems from an underdeveloped sense of social awareness. IE that in lacking the normal predator/danger sense and background theory-of-mind they find themselves defaulting to coarser easier to read signals.
Related: we have deliberately and accidentally managed to make almost every way to read social class in strangers more difficult and unreliable. Imagine this scene from My Fair Lady, or its equivalent lines in the inferior Pygmalion original, today. The entire concepts behind the play almost don't make sense in today's world.
The modern upper class, such as it is, uses constant negro and lower class slang. The pattern of speech can be distinguished over time, but not cleanly and easily. It will take a minute or more of conversation, in a lot of cases, to reliably place someone as rich or poor, and hours to place them in a decile unreliably. Accents are muddled, or affected for gravitas. Where the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers specifically took classes to eliminate their accents, the modern upper class affects accents to seem plebeian.
Where fashion conscious they dress in fashions drawn largely from hip-hop, which in turn derive from street gangs and prison culture; where slovenly they dress in ways so pointlessly indistinct as to be unreadable. Unless one is very adept at reading branding, one cannot at a glance tell who is rich and who is poor. Where in Victorian England the clothing items chosen, the cleanliness and state of repair, the quality and thickness of the fabric, the cut, would all tell you instantly someone's social class. White collar and blue collar mean nothing with the abolition of dress codes in offices and the tendency for office workers to dress like Lumberjacks for fashion purposes. Tattoos are basically as common on young ivy leaguers as they are on bikers these days.
As a result, where in olden days one could rely on reading individuals by class, many now fall back on race, because skin color is one of the few things that can't be altered.
Sir, this insult to the great work of Bernard Shaw unsullied by the "musicalification" needed to make it palatable to the common mind shall not go unchallenged. I demand satisfaction!
(Though you have to admit, Hepburn was resplendent in the film, but she was resplendent in all of them, so that doesn't get it any points)
God forbid anyone jazz up a dry-as-dust social farce with several of the best songs in the entire Western musical tradition. No, we can only deliver messages by having everyone stand quietly in a drawing room and exchange their views. Shavian "humor" indeed.
Seriously, Pygmalion is a fine work, but the musical is superior. The songs have at least three absolute bangers, the kind of stuff that gets played without reference to the musical and has become part of the American Songbook tradition: Wouldn't it be Loverly, The Street Where You Live, and Get Me To The Church On Time ((Which I also force everyone to listen to before planning any Bachelor/ette party: if your party doesn't meet this basic theme it is a complete failure, a Groom Shower for mincing pussies not a proper Stag)). Then the next tier of plot specific songs all make for great reaction youtube links, Why Can't the English, A Little Bit of Luck, Just You Wait, You Did It. The music is fantastic, a classic in its own right.
Then, the plot changes. The Frasier-Crane-Ass naysayers have always argued that the musical's happy ending is a betrayal, ruins the oh-so-serious dark complexity of Shaw. Codswalllop. Shaw's original was, dare I say it?, too woke. It's a feminist fantasy, where once educated Eliza must become self-actualized, free from her prior restraints, independent and determined to live her own life. Women universally prefer the musical. Because that is the way that a woman would really act if she were carved from marble by a man she'd be under his spell and never really escape. Rex Harrison is the sexiest man in the universe to most women watching the play, why would Eliza leave! The play has a too optimistic bluepill view of female and human nature, the musical corrects it.
Lol this must sound crazy to anyone who hasn't seen My Fair Lady:
"Alright fellas, we've got a dozen bottles of tequila and bourbon, an eightball of speed and a bus load of hookers is on their way up. Pop on the My Fair Lady soundtrack and let's get fucking nuts!"
In the planning stage lah.
I HATE getting dragged to a Bachelor party that has been so totally neutered to avoid pissing off the fiancee that it's just a hangout. The whole concept is that it's one last night out with the boys before getting married, if it is entirely things that you're allowed to do after you get married then why are you fucking dragging me out to Nashville or Asheville or whatever. I kid you not: somebody tried to get me to go on a fucking GHOST TOUR as part of a bachelor party.
Then you have the guys who are so petrified of speaking to another woman that we have to go out into the woods miles from anywhere at all and drink so much expensive bourbon that someone almost dies. Which I don't ENTIRELY object to, but don't entirely like either.
Bachelor parties should feature a mix of bars, nightclubs and strip clubs. The groom-to-be should engage in some minor activity that he would not engage in once married. If no one is seeing, or at minimum brushing against, some breasts then it is a waste of everyone's time. We should be in various places where everyone points at the groom-to-be and says he's about to get married, and women in the place at least play at trying to seduce him away from marriage, attention which he enjoys but resists.
Hence the song! It's the perfect outline of everything a Bachelor party should consist of rightfully. Drinking, song, dance, loose women, a controllable modicum of risk. If you lack one or more of those elements, don't drag me on some cockamamie Groom Shower for your fat fiancee's instagram.
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WARNING: Spoilers for Pygmalion/My Fair Lady below, I highly recommend watching the whole thing, it's worth your time (99%+ confidence); Pygmalion is freely available here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tmdPj_XbF30 , My Fair Lady can be found without much difficuly on the high seas.
Really? Bearnard Shaw quite convincingly argued the opposite, at least to me, in the afterward he wrote to his play: https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/pygmalion/sequel-what-happened-afterwards/ , the whole thing is very worth reading, but it's the ending which clinches it for me (bolding mine):
Eliza is deeply interested in Higgins, but this is not a romantic interest, it is the sort of interest one has towards one's heroes or even one's Gods. Making her come back grovelling to Higgins just demeans the person she is now, and by extension demeans Higgins crafting ability since he created what Eliza is at the end of the story.
Even ignoring all that making Eliza and Higgins get together just ruins My Fair Lady completely for me. It's not believable; not just from Eliza's end but also Higgin's end. Higgins isn't sexually interested in Eliza, he is interested in Eliza in the same way that any elevated man is interested in true friendship, which as a thing is far rarer and more worthy than true love, indeed as La Rochefoucauld said hundreds of year before Shaw: "However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship".
Even then, why would Higgins want to marry Eliza and have her dedicate her time to domestic duties, he has Mrs. Pearce for that and his station in life (and the time) is such that even if he wanted himself a wife he could easily get himself a far more docile and beautiful woman gladly willing to wed him who he could boss around much easier. In Eliza Higgins created an equal, someone worthy of going toe to toe with himself; you would not cage your fellow man would you, why should Higgins want to cage Eliza?
Higgins doesn't want Eliza to leave him for the same reason that Michaelangelo would be very sad and unhappy if his David suddenly disappeared, throwing in a latent romantic (and by extension sexual) motive to his actions demeans the man himself.
Much like how the chapters on Scouring of the Shire are an integral part to what LoTR is, the ending to Pygmalion is a fundamental part of the whole that you can't just straight up and replace while keeping the work the same thing (and not depicting the scouring was my principal complaint with the Peter Jackson films).
Pygmailion had to be made sacharrine to be palatable to the common man and that didn't just involve the songs thrown in (which I admit are good, Bernard Shaw would probably be rolling around in his grave if he found out though) but it is the change to the end which completely ruins it all, turining it from incisive social commentary and haute drama into a mere romcom, something you take a girl to see on your second date with her.
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The play isn’t “blue pill” or woke, it’s just telling a different story with completely different motivations for the protagonist.
The film genericizes the plot into the generic Pretty Woman romcom where the charming and suave man saves the humble and overlooked girl from a miserable life and elevates her. It’s the classic ‘I can fix her’ narrative which appeals - as all the best romantic comedies do - to both sexes. It’s not even necessarily gendered, since it’s a fantasy for both sexes to get a “great deal” on the dating/marriage/sex marketplace by taking someone of lower status and elevating them above what they could get in their own class / status / looks range to start with. See jokes about dating a fat girl and taking her to the gym etc.
The original story is darker and involves actual satire, the rest of the cast are much more fleshed out, and the ending retains a glorious ambiguity. My Fair Lady is merely the default romcom with some limited aesthetic influence from Pygmalion, if even that. In addition, Higgins has a lot of Shaw in him, and Shaw seems to have had a strange disinterest in sex that would make elevating a pretty peasant girl to society for himself to fuck incongruent with the narrative as presented.
Part of the humor of the story is that he really is doing it as a bet, not to sleep with Eliza.
I don’t know that the film portrays Higgins as suave or charming; maybe as a straight guy I’m just not picking up on what women would see in him, but to me Higgins comes off as a turbo-autistic and self-absorbed Confirmed Old Bachelor. The song “A Hymn To Him” implies that he’s at best an ardent misogynist (and not in the “believes in restrictions on female sexuality” feminist sense, but rather the purer “can’t stand to be around women, prefers the exclusive company of men” sense), at worst a self-closeted homosexual narcissist who is only capable of interacting respectfully with people who share his precise personality. However, I do agree that the ending of the film lets him off the hook.
That being said, maybe @FiveHourMarathon’s redpilled reading of the film is correct and that in real life Eliza would return to Higgins, whether because his domineering attitude and aloofness toward her are genuinely attractive, or because a woman from her background would recognize the obvious practical/financial downsides to a long-term relationship with Freddy and would decide instead on the pragmatic hard-headed choice to hitch her wagon to Higgins, as flawed and difficult as he may be.
Probably the best synthesis is simply to accept that straight plays and musicals have inherently different purposes. While there are examples of musicals with unambiguously tragic/unhappy endings, generally speaking (and this is especially true of Golden Age musicals like My Fair Lady) audiences are just never going to accept a bleak and emotionally-unsatisfying ending to a musical. Plays can get away with that because the genre conventions are far less hard-coded. My tastes lean toward preferring the bleak and unsparing ending - I’ve joked in the past that I never want to see another movie with a happy ending ever again - but I accept the realities of what it took to get the film made.
(Such as casting a lead actress who couldn’t sing and dubbing virtually every line of her singing in the film, and then not crediting the splendid Marni Nixon for her overdubbing. I love Audrey Hepburn as much as any straight man with eyes does, but the part should have gone to Julie Andrews, and thank god someone took a chance on her soon after and her full career was launched by The Sound Of Music.)
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There's whole sequences in both plays devoted to showing this, I'd argue it was much more effectively achieved in the musical where the disinterest is easier to show in blocking and attitude, along with two whole ass songs about it, where the play shows it by character walks into room and gives dissertation on the topic. The romance isn't remotely similar to Pretty Woman, as you say Higgins isn't seeking to "make a good deal" which is where the humorous character of the father comes into view. The humor and romance is precisely finding love at a time when you aren't looking for it, about closeness and intimacy melting neuroticism and narcissism.
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