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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25669 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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The War on Kiwi Farms: The Kiwis Fight Back

I'm sure everyone here knows of the controversial site Kiwi Farms, which has been endlessly accused of facilitating online harassment, and endlessly deplatformed. The site's defense has always been that it doesn't do that, the content is completely legal in the United States, and it's just a neutral observer, and with very limited exceptions (namely protecting Chris Chan until 2021, and interfering with zoosadists), I've found that to largely be the case. But I always wondered if this attitude left them vulnerable to just being attacked endlessly like this. Like, if bad actors know that this site won't actually fight back in any way, wouldn't you expect that they would just relentlessly attack it, since they're more-or-less free to do it?

Well, recently, they've actually started doing it. They're using the tactics that have been most effective in deplatforming them, and turning it on others. Namely, filing abuse complaints with upstreams and accusing sites of violating their AUP (which stands for Acceptable Use Policy). Their first target, thematically enough for an anti-trans site, is DIY HRT, as in HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) that isn't dispensed directly from a licensed pharmacy, often homemade and imported in to the country from shady international sources.

DIY HRT sites exist in a very legal gray area, because they more-or-less undeniably facilitate the sale of unlicensed pharmaceuticals. There have been credible reports of the drugs being manufactured in really unsafe and unclean conditions, leading to issues like clearly visible human hair in a vial that's meant to be injected into your bloodstream. Furthermore, the demographic they serve raises child welfare concerns - children are the demographic most likely to be unable to access legal HRT and/or want to keep their HRT on the down low from others - and some of the marketing/labeling on the items is quite blatant (in one case, text reads "Keep away from parents" and the image is of a childlike figure). Naturally, these are the reasons Kiwi Farms uses to file abuse complaints with upstreams. And they're doing it quite openly - there's a public thread on the site where they coordinate and give information on filing abuse complaints. So has it worked?

Looking at the DIY HRT wiki, they list several DIY HRT sites that have been taken down by complaints, so certainly looks like it has. It's gotten to the point that I had to look through an archive of the DIY HRT wiki, because I couldn't connect to the live site. The irony is that, just like Kiwi Farms themselves, the sites haven't actually been taken down for good - they just hop to another web host, domain registrar, email provider, and they're back in business. And the biggest irony of all is that the DIY HRT camp don't have any recourse for this. On their subreddit, one person asks "What is stopping doing the same to KF?" and the answer is "It has been done to KF already." What are they going to do exactly, attempt to take down a site that has spent years hardening itself against being taken down? One is reminded of the Chinese parable where the penalty for being late is death. They can't be more mean to Kiwi Farms, because trans activists have already spent years being as maximally mean as possible to Kiwi Farms, kicking them out of almost every single web host and domain registrar in the world, and all that has resulted in is a horde of people pissed off that their site is being taken down by trans activism, now radicalized against the trans movement. They've been put in a situation where they can either lose, or lose but also take down others with them, and in that respect I don't blame them for finally, finally, starting to fight back.

trans activists have already spent years being as maximally mean as possible to Kiwi Farms

My favorite part of the KF saga is how poorly it is going for the deplatformers. They can't even get rid of one guy who doesn't have a lot of money and has been banned from virtually everything that matters. And that's despite fawning mainstream coverage and years of unprecedented behind-the-scenes efforts, all the way up to getting Tier 1 ISPs involved.

Almost could make one a bit more optimistic about the future of the Internet.

To be fair, the guy in question seems to have a superhuman level of obsession with keeping his project alive, I don't think an average person could reproduce that.

Though speaking of optimism, he did mention plans to share his hard-won knowledge with the common folk.

That's true, but I see this as a form of evolution, the same way that 99.99% antibacterial soap ends up producing superbugs through natural selection. It's just a matter of consequence that trans activists' deplatforming efforts would end up hitting on one guy who just happened to have the smarts, wits, etc. to figure out how to effectively resist censorship and would want to dedicate enough time and effort to doing so.

Surely he is writing down his methods?

He's apparently toying with the idea of setting up a charity / nonprofit for censorship resistant hosting infrastructure.

He's written a post on the forum of a tier list of internet services that he recommends.

To be fair, the guy in question seems to have a superhuman level of obsession with keeping his project alive, I don't think an average person could reproduce that.

He is also trapped - the anti KF crowd made sure that everyone in the entire world knew who Joshua Connor Moon was. He has no possibility of getting gainful employment in the west, because there's zero chance that the crowd currently trying to make sure KF goes down would be ok with him just having a regular job. They've made sure that he has no other choice - if he stops maintaining KF, which is how he supports himself, he doesn't have any other options.

My favorite part of the KF saga is how poorly it is going for the deplatformers.

My favourite part is that every few days, a tranny on twitter will say something about how "we got rid of Kiwi Farms" only to be corrected that no, they didn't, it's still there, still documenting insanity, and more hardened than ever.

Sigh. It seems it was inevitable that I'd have to get around to doing the unpleasant part of being a mod at some point, namely enforcing the rules and using my discretion in ambiguous situations. But I did sign up for it.

Please consider this a request, and a mild warning, not to speak this way.

So far, your comment has received 3 reports for being antagonistic, which it clearly seems to be to me. To an extent, antagonism is a forgivable sin, and I certainly plead guilty to being less than maximally polite on occasion.

However, what does draw my attention is that this, to me, represents an example of "waging the Culture War". There's no strict line in the sand here, the people discussing CW in the CW thread are almost always at least modest opinionated on the matter, and advocacy for one's beliefs is in no way disbarred.

I don't even particularly care that you call them trannies, I'm not one to police vocabulary where the word is entirely synonymous with more polite equivalents, even if it's pejorative. If someone insisted on calling Jews "Blood-drinking vampires", then I'd consider that to be an obvious infraction. Some of the other mods may well disagree, but I'm only me, and I have a degree of leeway here.

It might surprise you to learn that I happen to largely agree with you. I consider transgenderism, if not an outright mental illness in the strictest sense, to be highly comorbid with it. I wouldn't balk at calling many of them insane like you did. I have a soft spot for Kiwi Farms, Rdrama and the other untamed corners of the internet, and I'm glad they live to fight another day in an increasingly homogenous internet where the edges are sanded down and a relatively small but vocal minority tyrannizes the rest of us and slides the French Overton Window as fast as the rails allow.

That being said, I would prefer you be less antagonistic. You are allowed to be happy that attempts to deplatform a site that makes fun of transgender people backfire. You may enjoy schadenfreude. You may, assuming the rest of your comment doesn't continue to not contribute to the atmosphere/culture we seek to cultivate here, also call people trannies (or at least I won't mod you for that reason alone).

But the gestalt impression conveyed by your comment? Bad. Not conducive to the (ideal) spirit of even-tempered discussion of contentious topics. The problem with culture war fervor, schadenfreude, and pithy pejorative labels for the outgroup is that they tend to crowd out everything else, or at least foster a negative spiral if left unaddressed that leads to everyone else doing the same, and those looking for more polite and high quality debate crinkling their nose and leaving. We aren't rdrama, this is what we are trying to avoid here, and by including all three and not much else, this comment is not helping.

I'll leave it at that, it would take a trivial restatement of your comment to make it slip under the high threshold I hold for formal mod action, if not a reprimand. If you wish to consider this an attempt at censorship (and how can mod action not be?), then it's of tone and not content.

Wow.... I had no idea reading a massive longpost of a moderator going on and on in tortured detail about why he's handing out a warning would be so enjoyable. I can't believe I didn't vote for you. More of this please!

The moderator cries out in pain as he strikes you

(I find modding comments I personally agree with but consider against the rules or not conducive to the health of the forum painful, but I wouldn't have accepted the nomination if I didn't think I could put duty first)

Paradoxically, it's that this is a mild violation (I wouldn't call it simply borderline) that I felt compelled to justify my statement. If it was glaringly ban-worthy, I'd swing the hammer with only mild regret.

In fact, I am more annoyed by the fact that he's compelled me to act against a comment I endorse, much like a 50's Sheriff shaking his head as he drags a KKK member he's had drinks with off to a cell. But The Motte is, as far as I'm aware, one of a kind, and if that's necessary to keep it the kind of place that drew me here 5 years ago, then I will put my disquiet aside and do as I must.

I am proud that my tenure here earned the endorsement of the people who voted for me, and then the approval of the previous mods, and I don't want to tarnish their faith in me. As for those who didn't vote for me, I can only hope to gain their retroactive endorsement through my actions. This forum isn't a democracy, but if the mods don't act in a manner that the users approve of, well, we'll eventually end up as the sole suzerains of a drinking club and an entirely unjustified AWS bill.

I find modding comments I personally agree with but consider against the rules or not conducive to the health of the forum painful

I think that's where the entertainment value comes from. "I do not want to do this.... but I must!" Who knew there could be so much drama in a single mod action? The only thing that could make it better is if you broke out to do a Bollywood dance number to express the true depths of you pain (can AI do that yet?).

Ok, I'm probably enjoying it way a bit too much. Keep up the good work, man.

The only thing that could make it better is if you broke out to do a Bollywood dance number to express the true depths of you pain (can AI do that yet?)

Yes.

It's certainly a better dancer than I am, I can only be coaxed into a shuffle with a few drinks on me.

And thank you, we've certainly had our differences in the past, so I'm glad that when I put on the badge and try to be an idealized version of myself, I haven't obviously fucked it up on the first go!

You guys got to vote?

Yes; a group of motte regulars elected a council to select a new batch of moderators, that's how he, netstack, and raggedy anthem got in. He was the last of the new mods to earn my vote, but after seeing the lengthy justification I am glad I voted for him.

I think you're looking a little too hard into something that was only really supposed to be a light-hearted and conversational addition about how even the instigators' allies have no idea how badly it's actually going, personally.

But okay.

Wow, I hope that when I finally snap and refer to some right-wing posters as nazis or w/e, I get such a measured and restrained response from the mods.

It's funny you should say that, Darwin (did I guess right?). A comment made by you ended up in the mod queue, and I elected to ignore it, and when I checked again, it was gone, indicating another mod has dismissed it. As I've elaborated upon above, I did find it antagonistic and uncharitable to your opponents, but within the limit of what I'm willing to tolerate without comment, at least once in a while.

You happen to have the dubious distinction of being so frequently downvoted that I and the other mods usually need to manually approve your comments, as I did for this one.

I am also aware, from reputation, if not personal interaction with you, that you have a tendency to toe the line and make comments that just barely avoid the point where we need to take mod action. That was the case from well before we move offsite. As our moderation guidelines make clear, we have the discretion of taking action even if no individual aspect of a comment is obviously bad, if the total is, especially when it's representative of a wider pattern.

Thus, you can interpret our/my seeming inaction as a form of action in itself. Try not to flame out or resort to name-calling, if you can avoid it, but until then I am more of a cautious observer. As usual, it is far superior to report antagonistic comments than to join the fun, though we definitely make allowances for provocation.

It's funny you should say that, Darwin (did I guess right?).

Yeah, confirmed that a few weeks back.

I'm more aware than anyone how frequently downvoted my comments are, and perhaps uniquely have the perspective to see that the number of downvotes is not very correlated with quality, effort, antagonism, or etc. I'm not surprised if there are correspondingly many reports.

I'm also aware of the 'reputation' (I find it intensely weird that strangers have strong opinions about me and try to stalk me across a decade of posts, I have no interest in being a 'personality' and just want to talk about ideas exclusively, but c'est la vie)

Whatever people believe, I don't try to toe any lines as any kind of game, that sounds incredibly boring. And I don't try to be any more antagonistic than the average poster here talking about wokies or BLM or trans or whatever; it always seems to me like this forum accepts pretty antagonistic stances as long as the targets are correct, and applies a lot more scrutiny if the table gets flipped. Which, again, I'm not even trying to make a game out of 'turnabout is fair play' or w/e, I'm a bad-at-reading-socialcues person trying to tone-match the attitude of the room and constantly surprised when people get mad about it.

Anyway, if you do see reported posts form me that you find ' antagonistic and uncharitable to your opponents, but within the limit of what I'm willing to tolerate', I would love to get a similar 'request and mild warning' and detailed explanation like you did for Astra here. That would help me a lot to understand what people are reacting to and expecting, before it blows up into something more serious.

I disagree that quality doesn't correspond with upvotes. Both from personal experience, and looking around at what gets upvoted in general.

it always seems to me like this forum accepts pretty antagonistic stances as long as the targets are correct, and applies a lot more scrutiny if the table gets flipped

The mods don't control the users, anyone can upvote and downvote as they please, and we're not like Reddit where you can get into trouble for upvoting Crimethink. But in terms of our own behavior, I do not see any significant or notable bias in what gets through or is condoned by the mods, and my existence as a humble user has been far longer than my odd week as a mod. We also make allowances for a good regular user who has an off-day, things that might get a new user banned for good might get merely a warning. Or at least a shorter ban.

If your opinions are unpopular, well, that sucks, but it's not a problem to be fixed, at least until the people reacting negatively also violate the rules in their responses.

Anyway, if you do see reported posts form me that you find ' antagonistic and uncharitable to your opponents, but within the limit of what I'm willing to tolerate', I would love to get a similar 'request and mild warning' and detailed explanation like you did for Astra here. That would help me a lot to understand what people are reacting to and expecting, before it blows up into something more serious.

I'll keep that in mind for minor violations, but as you must be well aware, the specific example of snapping and calling Right-leaning people Nazis (unless they are obviously and outspoken right-wing Wignats who advocate for discrimination against the usual targets of the original Nazis), is not acceptable behavior. For anything else, where you don't seem to be obviously trying to push buttons or stick to just the right side of the tracks, I'll try and point out what you can do better.

But of course, just because something is being reported doesn't mean the mods take action, and you are better off asking the people who disagree with you, I can't really speak for everyone who downvotes. And if the mods do take action, we usually make it a point in the first place to explain our reasoning. If Astragant had been reported but I considered his comment and pattern of behavior acceptable, I wouldn't have warned him in the first place, or explained anything outside my usual remit as a user.

Darwin. You're back! Good to have you!

Thanks!

Can you post some examples of this? I'm not saying that this doesn't happen, but it just sounds exactly like baseless triumphalism.

A casual twitter search:

https://twitter.com/bashfulfrogs/status/1720859992218050949

https://twitter.com/YTSirBlack1/status/1695378056372752826

https://twitter.com/ProfPButton/status/1657548089371049987

I mostly see these claims and corrections on KF threads themselves so this is just whatever twitter's search dug up.

I must confess, I have never learned how to read Twitter. Is there a guide somewhere? Where do you start, at the top or the bottom? Which message refers to which? I even find it hard to tell actual posts from advertisements, at a glance - which I guess is by design.

Posts are ordered top to bottom, as in replies appear beneath prior posts, and context appears above when a single post is being highlighted, as here. If there's a vertical line on the left between two posts, the bottom one is a reply to the top; if not, both are a reply to the highlighted post (the focal one in the larger font).

Thanks!

The same as any forum thread… start the top with the OP and go down…

Their first target, thematically enough for an anti-trans site, is DIY HRT,

Are they anti-trans, or just interested in a few laughs by stalking insane people making fools of themselves on the internet, a disproportionate number of whom are trans because of selection effects?

"Anti-trans" in the same way that most people are "anti-trans"; which is to say they don't want to instantly and unquestioningly cede all ground to and meet all demands of the trans activists. They have a distaste for narcissism, entitlement and child transitioning, again, in the way that most people do.

KF users, like 4chan users before them, are not mutants that exist only on the internet. They are all around you. They are your delivery drivers, bar staff and doctors. Cashiers and postmen. They are just normal people who want to talk about things you're not allowed to talk about in public. That's it.

KF has had an influx of TERF refugees some years ago. The tone of many trans threads has shifted from "Haha, look at this weirdo!" to wall-of-text rants about how this man in a bad wig is an insult to womanhood and a threat to bathrooms everywhere.

The trend has abated slightly after the site has been harder to reach for a while and Twitter has become more permissive, but calling KF "anti-trans" is somewhat justified.

I agree, a lot of the cattier TERFs (for whom the main pleasure was bitching about certain transwomen lolcows rather than gender-critical advocacy) migrated to KF after Reddit (and, for a time pre-Musk, Twitter) cracked down on TERF content.

In general, they were always going to lean a certain way just because of the relatively lax moderation around slurs, throwaway insults etc (this is probably the only hard-right-leaning community I've ever found online where fully polite discourse is enforced). In addition to famous transwomen, a lot of other big targets are 'breadtube' (ie socialist youtuber) content creators, some of whom are trans like contrapoints and philosophytube, but others they hate for other reasons (hbomberguy). So naturally there's a general loathing for that kind of socialist ideology.

In general, making fun of reactionary youtubers (which still happens on the farms, but is mostly less popular) is more a pastime of rationalwiki users and a few other leftist online communities.

In general, making fun of reactionary youtubers (which still happens on the farms, but is mostly less popular) is more a pastime of rationalwiki users and a few other leftist online communities.

This isn't actually true. A huge portion of the site is devoted to going after Ethan Ralph and his ostensibly right wing crowd, and there's another devoted to Nicholas Fuentes and his bizarre cult. They make fun of a lot of the online/internet right, it's just that nobody cares about the internet right getting bullied.

Just in general, you’d expect right wingers to be a little bit less frequently the kind of in-your-face weird and crazy than lefties because of greater conformism. But the trans thing is probably a bigger part of leaning right/mostly targeting left wingers, you’re right.

I'm not a fan of the TERFs on the farms, they seem to have an actual political axe to grind rather than just laugh at the absurdity of the trans people who are posted there. Almost all of these people would still be scorn worthy even if they weren't trans, that's just icing on the cake, but TERFs treat the transness as the main issue with such people when in reality it's little more than an afterthought.

Mixture of both? But internet weirdoes who are also lolcows are more disproportionately "trans" lately. It's the mind virus du jour.

If your goal is to milk lolcows, then very online transpeople would be a great target.

Well duh, if you’re picking insane people on the internet to stalk, you’d have to deliberately exclude Trans people not to get a very disproportionately trans sample. That’s basically what I said, but it doesn’t make kiwifarms ideologically anti-trans(although I doubt they’re politically correct).

Kiwi Farms isn't a monolith; there are some people on there who are sympathetic to transgender concerns. That said, the overwhelming majority are definitely anti-trans. I'm not implying that this means that the site is deliberately anti-trans or anything; it's a combination of their thread subjects being disproportionately transgender (as previously mentioned), but also the fact that many other gender-critical spaces elsewhere on the internet have been shut down thus funneling many would-be GC Reddit/Tumblr users onto the site, as well as the fact that many don't even care about trans issues and just want to laugh at weird people but have essentially been forced into caring due to the many attacks on the site (no doubt by the same activists shutting down anti-trans thought on the rest of the internet). If they were left alone, half of the anti-trans sentiment would disappear overnight.

I suspect that a trans movement capable of producing activists that leave kiwifarms alone also would not produce so many lolcows.

Associating the farms with the dissident right was always a bad tactic, it’s not that politically reactionary, some regulars are but it’s more in the vein of other classic internet institutions like the RPGCodex forums or 4chan (or, more recently, /r/drama) that attract dissident rightists but aren’t really for them exclusively. Most KF regulars are just apolitical bullies, and I mean that with the greatest praise.

90%+ of the farms is just a slightly more vulgar version of /r/internetdrama or a snallygaster-type effortpost on some obscure YouTube figure.

Somehow in this battle I find myself on the side supporting the autistic bullies versus the forces of globohomo, which just goes to show you how terrible I think the other side is. Imagine how bad you have to be that people who take a critical look at the conflict decide to side with literal manchildren who have nothing better to do with their life than bully people they will never know personally.

Btw, snallygaster is amazing, more people should sing her praises.

One is reminded of the Chinese parable where the penalty for being late is death.

This is absolutely irrelevant to anything you are saying, but man, I had forgotten how biting some of the earlier SSC posts are.

Age really does make congenial, erudite but uninteresting milksops of us all.

Oh I think Scott can still push out bangers when he wants to, his fiction is still just as good, it's more he doesn't want to agitate the powers that be much more, which makes sense once your public name is out there.

I wager it's more because he prizes staying in the good graces of his immediate social circle, if memory serves, the dude who happened to date (marry?) his non-binary ex Ozzy leaked private emails from Scott where he acknowledges his surreptitious belief in HBD, which is an unpopular stance to hold in the EA community (and partially taboo in Rat circles like LW). This would be obvious to anyone who read his OG blog, before SSC, covering his trip to provide medical aid to Haiti.

This isn't to deny that he probably didn't like the controversy from the NYT exposé, but from a more detached perspective, it didn't really do him any harm and a lot of good. He garnered a great deal of sympathy, even from his opponents, and his Substack made >250k annually shortly after he opened it. That is already median wage for a US doctor, and at this point I expect it's long eclipsed his regular income.

And he wasn't really susceptible to cancelation in the sense of being sacked and left unemployed, it takes quite a bit to do that to a doctor, and short of being struck off the register for gross malpractice, they have the option of doing private consultation or heading to places with good salaries but more flexible standards in who they hire.

Another reason I hold that opinion is because he still criticizes what might well be called essential elements of the PTB, such as calling for the FDA to be, if not delenda est, significantly reformed.

This isn't to deny that he probably didn't like the controversy from the NYT exposé, but from a more detached perspective, it didn't really do him any harm and a lot of good.

The things he posted after the expose were a lot more milquetoast. I'd say it did a lot of harm.

Harm to the diversity of his writing? Sure. Material harm to him, be it financially or through social ostracism? Quite the opposite.

Nice to see them start fighting back. Even though it's mostly a tangential target.

I think there's a trans analogy here. People are superficially asking you to not say bad things about their situation, but they actually want you to think their own perception of that situation is correct, not just mouth the words. And every so often they make a demand that doesn't really fit the former and implies the latter.

I largely agree with you but, uh, doctors telling their patients to lose weight is, well, not covered under traditional etiquette(it is almost tautologically solicited advice), nor is it some sort of fat shaming- it’s doctors doing their jobs, which are to improve patient health and provide important advice to do so. I’m not discounting that doctors could generally improve their ability to do so, but health problems being downstream of weight issues is a real and very common thing that doctors have to recommend a course of treatment for all the time, and ‘resolve the underlying weight issue’ is in fact the most thorough treatment.

I think it's fair to acknowledge fat activists aren't just fantasizing about the shortcomings of the medical system. Doctors can sometimes focus on obesity at the expense of other issues. I've personally seen an obese family member's tumor go undiagnosed for a troubling amount of time, because the doctors all assumed her symptoms were weight-related. But I'm skeptical of the activist framing that this is all due to fat oppression and discrimination. Rather, doctors begin with the simpler or more common explanation, and obesity is a) very common and b) affects almost all body systems.

This is the standard "chasing zebras" narrative in medicine, and I've honestly never given it much serious consideration. We might hear about the odd obese person whose health problems were caused by something unrelated to their weight and carelessly overlooked by a GP, but for every one I'm sure there are at least 100 cases where the GP's snap diagnosis was right on the money. It seems the height of narcissism to demand that healthcare professionals disregard their training and ignore statistical fact (in fact, to demand that healthcare professionals administer substandard care to their patients) just because it makes some of them feel sad. (See also trans activists, who demand that healthcare professionals waste hundreds of man-hours asking 6-foot tall, bearded, broad-shouldered people if they are or have been pregnant recently.)

It's also demeaning to feel like you're in for a scolding every time you interact with the medical system, and this can discourage people from getting checked out.

Sure, but the same is true of smokers, drinkers, drug addicts etc. and no one expects me to take the Alcoholic Acceptance movement seriously or check my Drinks-In-Moderation Privilege.

Sure, but the same is true of smokers, drinkers, drug addicts etc. and no one expects to take the Alcoholic Acceptance movement seriously or check my Drinks-In-Moderation Privilege.

Oddly, if anything, as fat acceptance has grown, acceptance of smoking and drinking has shrunk.

Medical guidelines for what constitutes "acceptable" levels of drinking have been reduced to very low levels. A single glass of wine is now the limit of what is allowed under new British guidelines. Pointedly, the new guidelines also eliminate any difference between males and females.

The science on this is less than clear. For one, we don't really know if moderate drinking (2 glasses wine/day) is good for you, bad for you, or neutral. And certainly, men can safely drink more than women for many reasons, including higher body mass and the fact that they don't get pregnant.

Perhaps this a noble lie, that by advising people to drink 1 glass a day, they will reduce consumption from 4 to 3. If so, this is immoral and unlikely to work.

I think more likely it is politically motivated.

I recall reading a wine morbidity metastudy 15ish years ago. The results were astounding. Controlling for all relevant variables (age, income, race, sex, etc), the people who drank the most wine were the least likely to die. Really excessive wine drinkers beat regular wine enjoyers beat tea-totalers.

The study had a warning that they are not advocating drinking two bottles of wine a day. Sure, all evidence they could analyze shows that is peak human performance, but please don't.

And now more recently we have the ice cream study. Either the truths of human nutrition and health are rather counterintuitive, or health and nutrition science are largely shit. Replication crisis as academic disciplines.

or health and nutrition science is largely shit.

This is definitely it. Nutrition science since 1970 has been a disaster for the human race. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-as-obese?tab=chart&country=~USA

Smoking is bad for you. It's completely obvious in the data. Moderate drinking is not bad for you in the same way. Some studies say it is. Some say it isn't. Whatever the result, the effect size is SMALL.

Why does the British medical establishment even care about moderate drinking at all while their citizens are eating themselves to death? My conclusion: they're losers.

wine morbidity metastudy

I went searching and found this other one right off the bat.

Results: This systematic review included 25 studies, of which the meta-analysis included 22 studies. The pooled RR for the association of wine consumption and the risk of CHD using the DerSimonian and Laird approach was 0.76 (95% CIs: 0.69, 0.84), for the risk of CVD was 0.83 (95% CIs: 0.70, 0.98), and for the risk of cardiovascular mortality was 0.73 (95% CIs: 0.59, 0.90)

And yes, a risk ratio below one does mean an inverse relationship -- that is, more wine less risk.

But WHO has spoken.

I recall reading a wine morbidity metastudy 15ish years ago. The results were astounding. Controlling for all relevant variables (age, income, race, sex, etc), the people who drank the most wine were the least likely to die. Really excessive wine drinkers beat regular wine enjoyers beat tea-totalers.

Any chance you could find it again? I'd love to read it.

Oddly, if anything, as fat acceptance has grown, acceptance of smoking and drinking has shrunk.

Acceptance of smoking tobacco has shrunk. Acceptance of smoking marijuana has grown.

I doubt that we will eventually find marijuana to be significantly better for you than tobacco(although there is enough crap in cigarettes that it would shock me if they weren't worse than pure cannabis leaves).

Generally don't smoke leaves, mate. The good stuff concentrates in the flowering portion, the female sex organs specifically.

Low effort post really wants to be incoming. Instead I'm going to wax nostalgic and write another scrollpast.

Many years ago I got high for the first time with my good friend, R. Let's just call him R. It happens to be his real first initial, but whatever. I loved him dearly. Past tense not because my love has ended, but because he is dead now; I'll get to that.

R was the son of a very interesting father who probably once worked for the CIA in some capacity in the 70s. R's family, due to his father's interesting career, in R's childhood at least, traveled all over the world, in particular the middle east, and he had the tchotchkes and prints and flotsam of such trips all over his high school downstairs room (he was from a wealthy family and his "room" consisted of the entire downstairs.) R's dad--who treated him shamefully post-divorce until he decided he wanted to bond with his only son--had similar decor in his own home: Original folk-type paintings of sheiks, large brass platters on the wall, various brass tea urns and pitchers, حُقَّة, etc.

R told many evocative stories about his childhood travels, mingling these with reflection on the pain of his parents' divorce ("like getting shot with a shotgun in the gut"), his sadness at the inevitable loss of the childhood idyll, and his suspicion that he would, if he ever became a father, fuck up his own children (He never did. Either.) One memory of his that sticks, oddly, with me, I who may be the only one who has any memory of it now: He, his father, his mother, his sister, on some beach in Greece, happened upon an American woman sunbathing topless. They--his family, the woman--happened to be once-removed through some friend back in Alabama, and ended up cooking an octopus in the sand.

My own childhood memories were of sitting in a screened-in deck at a rented cabin in Gulf Shores staring at jigsaw puzzles and giving myself third degree burns upturning an electric pitcher of hot coffee. Less romantic.

Anyway the first time I enjoyed the intimate ministrations of Mary Jane I was probably 17 or so years old. This would have been circa 1985. Rocky had reached IV. Brazil had just come out. It was the year of The Breakfast Club. Don't you. Forget about me. The first time I got high, possibly smoking whatever parts, possibly the female sex organs but I doubt it seriously: I felt nothing. I sat there over our board game of trivial pursuit ("Who killed Jabba the Hutt?" So easy as to be laughable, but these were the days before you could look anything up in five seconds) and, after smoking at least one shared joint and taking several hits off a water bong, asked: "What am I supposed to be feeling?"

I have since learned that this is not unusual the first time. One expects the drunk, the alcohol buzz. It's different. I would get high many times after this, though always only with R. This was as much about naïveté as trust: I didn't know anyone else well enough to know whether they got high, or when, or how often. I knew R well enough to know all of the above, and also to be invited along. I remember he would sometimes share a joint with me and then have to be somewhere else--his social life was always very active. He eventually became some sort of crystal meth dealer, which, contrary to my own understanding of how the world should work, altered his social circle such that he did not have to hang around with the likes of me, but was often surrounded by extremely confident and well-dressed people: leggy women, beautiful female French exchange students, sardonic boys with what seemed like an inexhaustible supply of witty comments and, ever ready, subtle putdowns. In other words, The Rich.

I remember sitting on a rock in a creekbed, midnight. My parents were long asleep, not knowing where the hell I was but trusting that I wasn't doing what it was I was, in fact, doing: Getting high with my feet dangling in the water. Everything was funny, or extremely important, or beautiful. R had a cassette deck with batteries and he took it out and made a recording of us talking on that creekbed, sitting on that rock, and I still have this recording--it is, alas, on the same cassette that he made it, in a pile of cassettes my wife periodically urges me to toss: For we have no cassette player. When I read reddit comments or any ripostes of the young, I sometimes remind myself of this: Someday they, too, will have memories they cannot access simply because they don't have whatever the future equivalent is of a fucking cassette player.

R and I stayed friends for many years. Have I mentioned he was fat? He was. I remember walking through supermarkets with him and his picking out the Snackwells and counting the grams of fat (not, in those tender years, concerned with the sugar). He lost the weight, then gained it back, then lost it again, then gained much of it back. It kept going like that. Fast forward through time, through his great lake parties, his girlfriends, both true and not, his studying to be a chef in Italy, his eventual marriage to the woman I think, in my worst moments, may have been the instrument of his death. His last email to me of his health problems--liver failure. Or maybe it was kidney failure. Or both.

When I flew home to see him in his hospital bed the doctor assured me his brain was already so full of ammonia that he would have no idea of what was going on. And yet when I had entered the room no more than twenty minutes earlier, R had grasped my hand, sat up, and looked at me with what I can only describe as anger. That he was being kept alive. That he had been reduced to this bloated mass surviving only because of machines. Or maybe he was still pissed at me for something I had done 20 years ago.

He died, had a funeral, I delivered the eulogy, the mic didn't work, then probably three years later his dad was reduced to a bedridden shadow of his former robust self. I remember holding his hand at his makeshift bed in his house while his home nurse gave us a moment. "I commune daily with R," he said, speaking of his son, my friend, the guy I had many times gotten high with. "He speaks to me," he said. I had my doubts. I, who in the years since R had died had tried all manner of ways to get in touch with him--astral projection, lucid dreaming, everything but paying a village shaman to do us a seance. Because I loved him, and he was gone too soon, and to this day getting high I remember him--though of course to get high in Japan will land you in all sorts of hot water. And so I don't. And this isn't some opsec bullshit. I truly don't. Not that it matters to any of you.

But if I did, and when I someday surely again will, I'll ask whoever it is I get it from for the female sex organ of the cannabis. So thanks for the tip, is what I'm saying.

Edit: Leia. Princess Leia killed Jabba the Hutt. Of course she did.

Wow. That's a heck of a story, bud. Thank you for sharing.

Bravo, honestly. I just wanted to say I really enjoyed that, and I hope you have a good night. Thanks so much for sharing it.

My understanding was that no one really thought smoking marijuana was better for you than smoking tobacco, possibly even worse, if you smoked the same amount. But tobacco smokers smoke way, way more than marijuana smokers, so in practice marijuana is a lot less dangerous. And edibles exist.

Cigarette smokers smoke way more than potheads. Pipe and cigar smokers probably smoke about the same. It makes sense to regulate cigarettes as a highly addictive substance with ruinous health consequences(because that's what they are for the majority of users) while treating marijuana more leniently on the basis of less-addictive. But pipe tobacco and cigars don't fall in the same category.

My understanding was that no one really thought smoking marijuana was better for you than smoking tobacco, possibly even worse, if you smoked the same amount.

I have encountered this exact view a couple of times "in the wild," as it were. Specifically, based in the earnest belief that, while tobacco causes cancer, marijuana cures cancer — and that the reason it's been kept illegal for so long is because "they" don't want you to know that, so that Big Pharma can keep people endlessly paying for their overpriced "treatments" rather than the true cures Nature provides us.

oi M8, u got a license for that second glass of cab sav??

Britain puts the rest of the world to shame when it comes to nanny state nonsense.

For one, we don't really know if moderate drinking (2 glasses wine/day) is good for you, bad for you, or neutral.

They've gone and put out a few meta-studies which swear that any amount of alcohol is bad for you, and now they're just following their own science.

Other meta-studies are murkier but the WHO has spoken.

A single glass of wine is now the limit of what is allowed under new British guidelines.

The guidelines always included "Don't drink every day" and the guideline was expressed as a weekly total. So it isn't one glass of wine a day, it is two glasses every day you drink (or three if you are a man and using the pre-feminist version of the guidlines).

"Glasses" should also be in inverted commas, because for typical strength wine 2 units is a 175ml glass - that is now standard for wine by the glass in pubs and restaurants, but it is bigger that a glass you would pour for yourself after buying the bottle. Two "glasses" of wine per wet day is closer to half a bottle, which is what the French always held out as a reasonable day's drinking even before modern booze-scolding.

Pointedly, the new guidelines also eliminate any difference between males and females.

That, I agree, is silly. OTOH, my parents will spend more effort ensuring that a decent bottle of wine is divided exactly evenly between them on any other marital conflict.

Two "glasses" of wine per wet day is closer to half a bottle, which is what the French always held out as a reasonable day's drinking even before modern booze-scolding.

We don't have to go very far back before 1/2 bottle a day (375 mL) would be considered a very modest amount indeed.

In the 1950s in France, there was a campaign to try to limit people to 1 liter of wine per day! That's 1 and 1/3rd full size bottles and nearly 6 times the current British recommendation.

https://vinepair.com/articles/french-anti-alcohol-art/

politically motivated.

By whom? Is the temperance movement still active and significant?

I can certainly see safetyism in general as a strong trend in politics, but it seems to pop up in all but the most libertarian political camps.

By whom? Is the temperance movement still active and significant?

There's actually a strong streak of it in feminism, or at least feminism-in-tech. Not surprising considering how temperance has always been connected to feminism, ask Carrie Nation.

Nanny state health departments are blue coded since Covid.

I doubt it. The movement isn't really about big chairs and if it succeeded in big chairs, people that fail romantically and professionally because of their appearance aren't going to be satisfied that they at least have bariatric toilets everywhere. Even maximal reworking of the physical environment to protect people from the consequences of being fat will fail to change the general perception that fat people are unattractive and exhibit a character flaw in their appearance.

I agreed with the general thrust of your original post.

We might hear about the odd obese person whose health problems were caused by something unrelated to their weight and carelessly overlooked by a GP, but for every one I'm sure there are at least 100 cases where the GP's snap diagnosis was right on the money.

And from the fat person's perspective, they go to the GP saying "I have this new issue; I've had this body type my whole life, so that part is not new." and the GP is ignoring their history.

(See also trans activists, who demand that healthcare professionals waste hundreds of man-hours asking 6-foot tall, bearded, broad-shouldered people if they are or have been pregnant recently.)

Well, that question has been on every medical history form I've ever gotten because they don't print different ones for men and women.

And from the fat person's perspective, they go to the GP saying "I have this new issue; I've had this body type my whole life, so that part is not new." and the GP is ignoring their history.

  1. The obese person may have gained weight since their last GP visit and may not have realised it (or may be in denial about it).
  2. Many of the health problems faced by obese people are cumulative and progressive, and don't just show up the second your BMI tips over from 29.95 to 30. This is the same self-serving reasoning as "I've been smoking a pack a day since I turned fifteen and I never had so much as a cough, so my current chest pains can't possibly be caused by my smoking."

Well, that question has been on every medical history form I've ever gotten because they don't print different ones for men and women.

My father was getting a Covid vaccine in 2021 and the nurse was completing an intake form in which she verbally asked him the questions on the form and filled in his answers for him. She asked him if he'd been pregnant recently. In his 60+ years, he'd never been asked this question by a medical professional before. See also this article about a blood donor clinic which used to ask "for female donors only have you been pregnant recently?", but changed the form to ask all donors that, even donors who'd already explicitly stated that they were male and hence incapable of getting pregnant. (They changed the form back to its non-pseudoscientific version in response to public outcry.)

And from the fat person's perspective, they go to the GP saying "I have this new issue; I've had this body type my whole life, so that part is not new." and the GP is ignoring their history.

And from the smoker's perspective, they go to the GP saying "I have this new issue; I've been smoking since I was in high school and I've never been coughing up blood before" and the GP is ignoring their history.

But the overall framework of fat oppression presupposes that the core of the problem is the way society treats obese people, and the movement’s primary goal is to reduce messages that inflict shame. This shame, activists argue, is the main source of suffering for fat people.

A particularly extreme version of this may be Carleton University's Fady Shanouda:

A Canadian professor who specializes in "fat studies" claimed that aiming for an obesity-free future was "fatphobic" and blasted the "biopolitics" agenda as an attack against fat people.

Fady Shanouda is an associate professor at the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation at Carleton University in Canada. Shanouda "draws on feminist new materialism" to examine the intersections between "fat studies, "colonialism, racism…, and queer- and transphobia."

The Critical Disability Studies scholar wrote that it was "fatphobic" to have a public health conversation and to tamp down on obesity, according to a Monday article in The Conversation.

…

In particular, Shanouda believes the marketing of the drug Ozempic – as a method to combat obesity – was the latest example of fatphobia in the culture.

"The latest wonder drug… [was] invented to help diabetics regulate blood glucose levels, but has the notable side-effect of severe weight loss. It has been heralded by many to culminate in the elimination of fat bodies. The fatphobia that undergirds such a proclamation isn’t new," Shanouda said.

…

The professor lamented how the effectiveness of obesity treatments could eliminate "fat activism" and "the fat liberation movement."

He added that treatments for "the so-called obesity epidemic" were "steeped in fat-hatred."

"Elimination of fat bodies." Shanouda talks about a drug that helps people lose weight — one they voluntarily take — with the sort of language I usually see used to talk about things like ethnic cleansing. I'm not sure how much Grandma's rules of politeness address that.

A Canadian professor who specializes in "fat studies" claimed that aiming for an obesity-free future was "fatphobic" and blasted the "biopolitics" agenda as an attack against fat people.

In this edition of "The Woke Are More Correct Than the Mainstream", I find myself agreeing that I am "fatphobic" and that I hold positions that could reasonably be described as biopolitics of opposition to fat people. I do believe standard platitudes about how it would be better for fat people if they lost the weight, that they'll be happier and healthier, but if I'm being as bluntly honest as possible, I just have contempt for people like Shanouda. Shanouda eats himself into disability, then claims that disability as an oppressed status and makes a professorial career out of it. Yes, my biopolitics are against everything he stands for, people should strive to be fit and healthy, and governments should generally not subsidize disordered lifestyles.

My grandmother grew up in southern Texas, and also followed these rules. She also hosted holiday get togethers, and always enforced the "no politics or religion" rule, aside from niceties like singing traditional Christmas carols, or presenting a theologically neutral Thanksgiving prayer.

I haven't followed fat acceptance very carefully, and mostly hear about the sillier examples online.

As far as I can tell, the vast majority of people are still reasonably polite, and never ask something weird and rude like "where are you really from?" or complain about strangers weight in front of them, even as they're being crushed on a 6 hour flight between two much heavier people.

I've met some people who seem nice enough in person, but come across as very rude online. The Grandmother's Etiquette Guide seems like it needs to have some things worked out about things like (generally non-conversational) email lists and social media, because of the whole dynamic around some people soapboxing in those spaces, a few people responding positively, and a bunch of other people quietly thinking worse of them, but not really knowing them well enough to say anything. I would like to be able to wield something that's the internet equivalent of a mildly disapproving stare or awkward silence.

Think of all the other subpopulations for which progressives write highly specific codes of etiquette. 10 Things Not to Say to Pregnant Women. 15 Common Microaggressions Against AAPI. Now imagine that these codes are replaced by Grandma's simpler, more scalable etiquette that recognizes where respectful behavior truly originates: not in feelings, but in habit and training.

If I were to be a touch ungenerous, I would say that these things emerge because many of their writers and audience are incredibly socially awkward and lack the sensitivity or experience to intuit appropriate behavior. And not just for what they might do/say, but for what other might do/say to them. If I were to be less generous, I would say that these things emerge because some people are looking for an excuse to get offended. If I were to be more generous, I would say that these things emerge because many people were not socialized into a culture of dignity and courtesy. Or the socialization didn't take, or carried with it an unspoken assumption that these standards of behavior only applied to the right sort of people. It is certainly not difficult to find people who openly delight in meanness (especially online, where a lot of our instinctive filters aren't functioning).

(If I were to be honest, I think all three of these things are true simultaneously).

None of the ideas you describe as "Miss Manners" etiquette are alien to my or most of my midwestern middle-class millennial peers (though I would hazard to guess we all picked it up from our parents rather than writing). However, I think you are right in saying that there is an effort to promote sentiments rather than behaviors. The goal is to get past polite toleration (which very much has its limits, as you note) and into actual acceptance. We might not call someone a fat fuck to their face, but as you also note there are a thousand little social indicators that being fat Not OK. And now apply the same concerns to, e.g. LBGT acceptance. (Though ironically, that may be more attainable, given that even notional allies of Fat Acceptance tend to not-so-secretly think that being fat is bad).

Whats missing from the story about your grandmother is the key component that everyone knows what she is doing. They know that they are being shamed for being fat, even if she is not voicing shame. And they feel the shame. She doesn't talk about her diet, she simply demonstrates superior behaviors, and the granddaughter knows they are superior and feels shame for not living up to said standards.

Yes, the shame is known ant a societal level and so it doesn’t need to be emphasized by any one person, as that would be unnecessary and rude. Certainly, people can and do say only polite words while their tone and demeanor implies the disdain, but those people would only be worse if they considered it appropriate to simply say their actual thoughts.

The problem with so many activists is they are not simply trying to encourage kinder behavior toward some group, they anre attempting to change what is considered acceptable/desirable/healthy regarding stuff that is straightforwardly bad, like obesity.

The “ableism” stuff regarding say banning any reference to sight/blindness or the fact that there is now the “R slur” are other examples. Obesity is just far more of a problem because it’s an increasing epidemic where choice/behavior is involved.

I've lived most of my life in the state of Virginia, and I feel like this kind of courtesy never went away. The public fights I heard about and sometimes experienced were often in other states. The North East was particularly bad during COVID. The puritan ethics that exist up there say that public shaming is not only ok, but necessary and good.

I often find reasons to like my own culture and dislike the culture of others. Its definitely motivated reasoning some of the time.

Those rules were either honored in the breach or didn't bear much weight. People got the message that being fat was bad, even if it was communicated by what pointedly wasn't said rather than by what was. And these rules (at least among peers) didn't have the asymmetry that current fat acceptance does. Complaining about the discomfort one's fatness resulted in would be as unacceptable as pointing out the reason for it.

Aren't most etiquette rules easily broken and frequently honored in the breach?

I think most frequently, breaches are used to contest and/or enforce a social hierarchy; it is acceptable to breach etiquette to an inferior's disadvantage, and unacceptable for the inferior to call the superior on the breach. Which has some bearing on the fat issue, as someone gaining weight would lose status in the hierarchy and thus open themselves up to unpunished rude behavior.

But in addition to that, the etiquette rules always left a way (at least for someone with enough social status) to get one's point across, whether that be plausibly-deniable catty remarks or perhaps even exaggerated efforts to "help", e.g. "Oh, honey, that chair just isn't very sturdy, and I wouldn't want you to hurt yourself, why don't you sit in that one" (when the chair in question is fine). The fat acceptance people don't want that. They don't want weight gain to lose them social status, they don't want to be told (even implicitly) that being fat is bad, and they want to be able to demand accommodation for their fatness.

But if their goals are not realistic or achievable, as I don't believe they are, then I think I'm offering a better deal than they'll get from the oppressor/oppressed framework.

The oppressor/oppressed framework offers them everything, if they can get the right position in it. Nobody gets to say anything about their weight, or treat them in any way badly due to it, and they have to be accommodated in every way.

Medicine will continue to show that obesity is unhealthy, which will give everyone psychological permission to maintain their aversion.

I want to believe this, but I feel that time has shown that the oppressor/oppressed framework is more than capable of overruling the science. There's a lot of research on IQ, heritability, innate gender differences etc - and people just continue to spout verifiable, known lies that accord with the framework in question.

I suspect the fat acceptance movement won’t have the same success, partly because it isn’t innate and partly because medical advances will make being thin easier for most fat people to attain. Didn’t @self_made_human talk a few months ago about some new diet pill that seems to work wonders? Once almost anyone can become effortlessly thin, fat acceptance advocates will probably be seen the same way we now view anorexia advocates.

Ozempic? It works great, both for weight loss and more surprising applications like treating addictions and impulsive behaviors. They haven't even discovered any real adverse effects, barring loss of muscle mass with the fat (as is the case for most rapid weight loss techniques, including dieting or fasting), and believe me there are plenty of attempts to find a reason it can't just be taken at face value, or must be "too good to be true".

The only knock against it I can muster is that it's still expensive, but it'll get cheaper, there are other drugs in the same category that work even better, and eventually it'll become a generic or commodity alternatives will show up.

I don't think the Fat Acceptance movement ever gained widespread momentum, ahem, but it's going to die out from its adherents ending up sheepishly not fat, or the worst of them will literally die.

partly because medical advances will make being thin easier for most fat people to attain.

As I noted in a reply upthread, at least one "fat acceptance" activist professor has attacked Ozempic as an example of "fatphobia" — "the elimination of fat bodies" even:

"What makes this moment different from the others, however, is the dangerous rhetoric in which it is lodged. This rhetoric elevates the banal and commonplace fat-shaming that fat people must endure and resist to an unprecedented level," the professor added.

…

The professor lamented how the effectiveness of obesity treatments could eliminate "fat activism" and "the fat liberation movement."

He added that treatments for "the so-called obesity epidemic" were "steeped in fat-hatred."

I also don't think the fat acceptance movement will have any success - but mostly because fat people are actually viscerally uncool and status-damaging to hang out with. I just don't think their disrespect for science and material reality is going to be what does them in, because observably false beliefs can survive just fine in society without any serious pushback.

I think of etiquette as a subset of a much larger principle that’s best exemplified in Confucian thought. The idea of seeing yourself in relationships and that those relationships are reciprocal is really to my mind the secret sauce of civilization. Depending on the specifics of the relationship, certain things might well be considered rude in one place and perfectly okay in another. It’s perfectly okay for an elder to give advice to a junior member of the group. Telling a kid to eat reasonable amounts of food is perfectly acceptable because your role as an older adult to not eat the entire pizza. From a relative stranger, the same advice becomes an insult. A kid telling an older adult not to eat like a pig is off putting because of the relationship. Strangers obviously have no relationship to the fat person at all and are free to say anything they want, although they shouldn’t necessarily say such a thing to the person or within obvious earshot. Doctors are supposed to talk to patients about health, and in fact if they’re not, they’re neglecting their duties because that's the relationship you hired him to protect your health.

All fine and good but what if you think some large institution is systemically violating grandma's rules by building airplanes with too narrow of seats? The rub is when demands are made of others and individuals are crushed by society's immense gears.

This is an indictment of having gears that large. Not of the finite power of courtesy.

Large institutions may be necessary for modern life, but is modern life really instrumental to human flourishing? And insofar as parts of it are, do those parts really require large institutions?

I've long been convinced universities are not just superfluous but actively hampering g the pursuit of knowledge for instance, and those exist precisely at that size that becomes too large to remain personal.

A properly ordered society doesn't have humans as replaceable cogs of a machine that could ultimately run without humans. Either remove humans or remove the machine.

Perhaps true but from the perspective of the progressive it's intolerable that any are oppressed and large gears are the mechanism by which they're able to crush oppressors. You can say they shouldn't but that's a values disagreement.

I am indeed not opposed to nature because I know one opposes it at their peril. Which is of course not something I share with progressives.

That said, the vision of most progressives for the future is rarely that cynical. Most just think that if we turn the knobs of the great machine correctly we'll get Star Trek. There is an unstated faith behind the idea of systemic injustice that a just system can be made.

Unfortunately it is not the case. Every single attempt for now more than 200 years has been frustrated and billions have died on that altar. And yet we now live in a world more unjust and unequal than ever.

To any who still want to try I ask: what makes you think you are any different to all your predecessors who made a worse world in the name of a better one?

I think framing morality/ethics and its many subsets such as etiquette as top down is compelling and effective (religion). But the modal mottizen is better served by viewing it bottom up, selfishly.

In that morality is that which allows groups to flourish as some form of optimized equilibrium for the longest of times. Etiquette is the aesthetics of that which facilitates the above.

If you apply "I should act such that this person is going to be more likely to invite me to the next party or that this person is more likely to make me a job offer", you might just arrive at grandas ethics.

Well, except if you're with a group of people bonding by bullying someone, you perspective implies I should start bullying them too...

ETA: though, I do admit, definitionally that taking the selfish perspective does "better serve" you

Well, except if you're with a group of people bonding by bullying someone, you perspective implies I should start bullying them too...

This is a strategy followed by countless schoolchildren worldwide for centuries, so you wouldn't be alone.

Sure, I'm just pushing back against what @f3zinker said:

you might just arrive at grandas ethics.

This is false. [ETA: unless you think grandma condones bullying, I guess...]

She does, generally. She is, in fact, doing it her whole time while maintaining the air of politeness. Who gets complimented and who does not. Who she asks if they want another serving of pasta and who she does not. Etc. Schoolchildren are often more blunt, but they must be, they are 8 years old and they don't have the subtle touch of a 65 year old grandma intimating to her daughter that her granddaughter is fat.

No law is perfect to the letter. The spirit of the rules would certainly prohibit backhanded insinuations via second helpings just as it prevents backhanded compliments--in fact I'd argue that clause does cover such a situation in letter, but that is debatable. Nonetheless, calling someone fat isn't okay just because you don't use the word fat.

The spirit of the rules would certainly prohibit backhanded insinuations via second helpings just as it prevents backhanded compliments

No, it doesn't. The spirit of the rules is to maintain Grandma's standards while not being outwardly aggressive about it.

Indeed. The world doesn't work without rules enforcement. It can either be through social condemnation, or police force.

Interesting take. Nonetheless, we should acknowledge that the letter of the law prohibits implied insults, does it not? One such insult is illustrated, but it seems obvious there are innumerable forms such an insult could take. So we are left with two propositions: either the clause applies to all such implications, or it applies specifically and only to compliments given directly to an individual directly and exempts other forms of breach not specifically mentioned. The latter would support your premise of "secretly evil", I suppose, but it makes me wonder why outlaw backhanded compliments in one specific use case, and not outlaw, for example, complimenting the horse fatty rides riding for its perseverance? Is it that complimenting the mount is less obvious somehow? I think not. Thus I'm forced to believe implied insults, of whatever form, are prohibited by the letter of the law.

Although the question of the spirit of the law seems moot, given the explicit callouts in the text, I'm curious if there are other laws which you believe have a spirit diametrically opposed to their text? If we want people to stop at a given intersection, should we install Yield signs, or no signs? I don't quite understand how this works.

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I think the script component is also immensely valuable. I’m increasingly convinced there is no “authentic” interaction except perhaps among those closest to us.

In general we can either have a script or we can track everyone’s status to know how to act as you allude to above. Interestingly I think that’s one lens to use for the identity fixation phenomenon. It seems to me something like that is unavoidable if we decide to throw out scripts and be “authentic.”

I remember my first time abroad alone in college for the summer. I was groggy from the flight and found myself eating a home cooked meal at my host’s house with his wife and I realized I had no idea what to do or how to behave!

Fortunately I had a script I could use. What I thought was irrelevant—say thank you for the meal, eat a sizable amount to show appreciation, offer to help clean up, etc.

What a relief to not have to re-derive from our relative statuses what to do so as to not give offense.

I think it’s a combination of our worst tendencies but also a fallback plan.

If we’ve systematically criticized and torn down anything that could be worth making even the smallest sacrifice for, if nothing is worth putting ahead of yourself, where else would you wind up?

You may not offer unsolicited advice. Presume that other people are competently managing their own lives as they see fit. If they want your thoughts on their relationships, finances, or dietary habits, they will ask.

Interesting. My upbringing was basically the opposite. I was told by my parents (and culture more generally), that if I saw someone doing X to achieve goal Y and I really truly believed that instead of X it would be better to do Y it was my duty to let them know this and the fact that this was unsolicited means nothing.

Imagine you see someone trying to open one of those child lock medicine bottles where you have to push them in first, wrangle the cap around a bit and then twist to open them. However they don't seem to know this and you've noticed them for a while trying to twist the cap and open it and it keeps on failing, and they don't know why. They haven't asked you for help but anyone can see they are clearly frustrated. Pretty much nobody would say it's a bad thing to go and tell them how to open the cap, even though technically it is unsolicited advice. We just take this concept and scale it up to apply to many more things.

Now whether they choose to follow my advice or not is completely up to them, and I shouldn't try to change what they do, but my duty is to let them know and what they do with this knowledge later is purely for themselves to decide. On the Day of Judgement I will be able to say before God that I did what was required of me at that point in my life to help my fellow man and thus I was indemnified from whatever happened to that person afterwards, e.g. if they were swimming in waters I knew to be shark infested I have a duty to tell them they should get out ASAP, if they don't and then get eaten I am not morally responsible for what happened in a way I would be if I saw them swimming there and just went on with my day giving them no warning.

I guess this is yet another example of the cultural differences between the west and my homeland. It's pretty small on its own but when you have many dozens of such things they add up very quickly.

You say: Don't give unsolicited advice.

We say: It's your duty to give unsolicited advice.

See, in the twist cap situation, I would always lead with, "may I offer a suggestion?" When they inevitably agree, you're now offering solicited advice. You've engaged them in asking for your help, which makes them inherently more open to accepting it. "Don't offer unsolicited advice" doesn't mean "speak only when spoken to." And of course etiquette always takes a back seat to actual danger.

Sure, but I expect in the West if you are in a situation where e.g. a fat woman is complaining about her dating life and you go "may I offer a suggestion to help?" and when she says yes you respond with "I think it would help to lose weight to improve your odds" it is still seen as unsolicited advice. Sure you can say it's rude, but lots of things are rude while not being unsolicited advice, however this response will still get seen as unsolicited advice even though you did the whole "may I offer a suggestion to help?".

And of course when I say we give unsolicited advice in our culture it's usually crouched in such language too, it's very rarely "you should do XYZ" straight out, it's almost always "may I offer a suggestion?" and if the other person says no then your duty is still discharged, they rejected your offer of help, you are no longer liable and can go on with your day.

I think it would help to lose weight to improve your odds

The obvious difference here is that almost everyone already knows this, probably including the person you're talking to, which is not the case in the bottle-cap or shark-infested waters examples. Indeed, the latter two aren't actually unsolicited advice, they are unsolicited unknown information which is very different.

There is almost no-one for whom 'lose weight' will be novel and actioned advice.

Overstepping definitely exists and there are lots of ways in which it happens, one way I mentioned above was e.g. trying to get people to actually follow the advice you gave them, thiis is looked down upon quite hard.

There's no offense taken when you presume to understand someone's most personal circumstances better than they themselves do?

Using an example from your own culture (Machiavelli's The Prince):

Nor, I hope, will you think it presumptuous that a man of low, really the lowest, station should set out to discuss the way princes ought to govern their peoples. Just as artists who draw landscapes get down in the valley to study the mountains and go up to the mountains to look down on the valley, so one has to be a prince to get to know the character of a people and a man of the people to know the character of a prince.

It's more that the advisors aren't seen by the advisee as knowing their personal situation better than they do, the advisor is just saying what they feel is best for you (the fact that they give up their own time to even give you the advice in the first place is a small act showing they care, it's cheaper for them to save their own time and say nothing) from what they are able to see. Like the artist in the valley looking at the mountain, they may be able to see something about you that you have overlooked, even though you have a far better idea of the exact details of the situation.

There is minimal expectation for the person being given the advice to follow it, and people often freely ignore the advice they have been given by randoms (because of course, the random doesn't know much about you, you might be doing X because X' is unfeasible for some other reason they don't know but you do, so when they tell you to try X' you thank them for their advice and continue doing X),

Equally this isn't seen as insulting towards the random person who's advice you just decided to ignore because everyone knows and acknowledges that you have more information about the situation at hand than the person giving you advice. Note that this is often even true in the case of solicited advice, that too is often freely ignored by the person who asked for the advice in the first place because it doesn't work for them and isn't seen as something particularly bad by the culture beyond a slightly higher expectation that you will follow the advice because you were the one asking for it in the first place.

Going to 50 different people, asking for and getting their advice and then ignoring everyone's suggestions is definitely looked down upon, it's perfectly possible for the first 3 people that they gave you bad advice, but it's far far more statistically likely that if you don't take the advice of 50 different people the problem is with you rather than them. On the other hand ignoring 50 people who gave you unsolicited advice is seen as far less bad, because all 50 of them might not have seen the reason why X' is unfeasible for you.

I personally try to at least give a small justification for why the advice they gave me wouldn't work when I'm put in such a situation, and then other person, their duty discharged, goes on with his day. Repeatedly pestering the same person multiple times with advice on the same thing they don't take is most definitely seen as overstepping though, and looked down on, generally it's fine to give 1 piece of advice, maybe 2 if you really know the person well and like them, before moving on with your life, more is seen as excessive but of course the closer you are to the person you are giving advice to the more you can do here.

Interestingly financial advice is the one type of advice I do not give to anyone, not even those close to me. This is because if the advice doesn't work out they will blame you, while if the advice does work out they won't thank you in anywhere near a proportion to how much they would have blamed you in the counterfactual. "Buy index funds and don't touch them" is where I leave it at (incidentially this is also how I invest my own money).

And of course, certain things really are beyond the pale, telling people "you should have at least 4 kids" is not gonna fly unless you're their parent or grandparent or your argument is so high level that it would apply to basically everyone (in which case it isn't personal advice any more). Interestingly though far more people can get away with "you should have at least 2.2 kids", probably because the argument behind giving the latter advice does not rely on much specific factors about the person you are giving the advice to, so it really doesn't matter you don't know them well at all. I have been told multiple times I should donate my sperm to a sperm bank though, completely out of the blue...

It's not just Western media. There's a lot of complaints about MILs in some Asian societies as well. I've heard many examples of MILs ordering their DILs around and some DILs fighting back and correcting expectations.

It's interesting to hear stories of how things have changed over the past few generations in some countries. A funny story; i knew a couple with a young kid who lived in the US. His parents lived in China and had nanny cam access to some of the rooms. They couldn't stop offering unsolicited advice about what to do so much that the US couple threatened to shut off the nanny cam if they didn't stop.

See here for examples: https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/culture/2023/12/135_130229.html

https://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2016/07/11/korean-mother-in-laws-mantra-please-cook-for-my-son.html

I've heard stories of MILs ordering their DILs around and some DILs fighting back and correcting expectations.

Oh we have this problem as well, very very massively. another issue is that the husband still sides with the mother over his wife in marriage, which leads to strife between him and his wife. I wouldn't say it's merely an unsolicited advice problem where the wife can ignore the advice and everything is fine, it's the MILs literally ordering the wife around and treating her like a servant, which shouldn't be seen as OK. I suppose it's more fine when you have actual servants she can order around so the wife doesn't have to do everything herself but if you don't it makes the wife's life hell.

I like to think when I get married my mom won't be like that to my wife, but every man probably thinks that way...

"My mother or mother-in-law keeps telling me how to parent!"

This to me is crazy, maybe complaining about the mother-in-law is somewhat justifiable but if you believe you yourself turned out alright and had a decent childhood then your mother has a certified track record in raising children which means you should probably listen to what she has to say (same with mother in law, your chose your partner so you probably think they turned out alright, hence your mother in law has a certified track record as well). What makes you think that you, on your own, can do better than them? They are your elders, they have earned the right to give advice on raising children by successfully doing the same themselves. Lack of filial piety is another major issue I have with the western way of life.

And then these very same women who don't trust their elders will happily leave their offspring with daycares and nurseries for hours each day to be raised by randoms for whom you have minimal idea of their suitability to raise children beyond passing some government mandated training courses that teach god knows what.

I can understand this sentiment when you're raising your 5th child and have the fresh memory of dealing with 4 children while the knowledge from your elders is more dated, but doing this for your first child is madness (I assume most of these letters come from first time mothers or the like, mostly because there are a lot more of them than 5th time mothers and also because by child 5 your mother/in-laws probably won't still be offering advice as you've documented to them already that you can handle things).

When I end up having children my plans are to leave them for a while with either my or my wife's parents precisely for these reasons over throwing them into daycare, it's cheaper and very likely better, plus having a young child around the house again will light up the lives of its grandparents.

It is kind of backwards, but medical and safety recommendations have changed in the last thirty years. My parents were told to put me on my front to sleep and they were at a loss to help me with getting my first baby to sleep. Today there is a huge campaign where "Back is best" and babies are laid in their bassinets on their back.

It has also been 20 years since they last held a baby and I don't think they remember most of it. They also thought things like spanking a six month old for crying was ok, and that babies cried to get sympathy and attention.

I guess I turned out ok and I survived to adulthood (despite my mother at one point handing me off to a complete stranger because the stranger said she looked tired and offered to help.) But is it complete hubris to hope I can do better?

I agree with some of what you say, but that's very charitable to your in-group and very uncharitable to your out-group. I could just as easily cite "The Nurture Assumption", reference things like people having fucked up parents, and that people turned out all right in spite of their parents. Or maybe they turned out poorly even though their parents were decent people.

And then these very same women who don't trust their elders will happily leave their offspring with daycares and nurseries for hours each day to be raised by randoms for whom you have minimal idea of their suitability to raise children beyond passing some government mandated training courses that teach god knows what.

What's wrong with this? You frame it in a very negative way, but millions of kids in the US go to daycare. Is it really that bad? For the most part, I think people should figure out what's best for them and pursue it.

I worked at pretty mid-tier daycare in Canada. It was bad.

The studies that show daycare is good for child development use highly curated daycares, with like 1:4 adult-to-child ratios. These studies actually simulate a mom staying home with her kids. MY daycare was a charity daycare run by a church, so to help single mothers, they took everyone. I worked with the 3-year-olds, and the worst ratio was 1:21 (illegal). A normal day was 1:12. In either case, the kids were supervised, I guess, but the priorities were no fingers in power outlets, no vomit, no urine, etc. Learning to count or something was a complete impossibility.

-The kids could talk, but it was garbled and they couldn't tell you what they had done the night before. Conversation was difficult, so their language development was definitely stunted. A child psychologist once told me that language abilities develop most in early childhood- if that's true, daycare damaged these kids' brains. I would meet kids who stayed home with their moms and those kids would tell me what WOULD HAVE happened if something the night before had turned out differently.

-One kid in the one-year-old room cried LITERALLY all day, 8-5, for about her first month. The metabolic stress alone must have affected her, and the noise and tension affected the other kids.

-One kid didn't talk for the 5 months I worked with her. Not word to me or anyone else.

-The one-year-old room was a pen. The kids sat on the ground with toys pretty much all day. The ratio was better, but the workers were occupied with diapers and feeding most of the time, so interaction was limited.

-About 8 kids (out of around 50) were at the daycare from 7 am to 5 pm. A little kid sleeps about 12 hours, so that leaves either 2 hours with their parents or sleep deprivation. Both of those are bad for kids.

-Since the kid spends the majority of his waking life at the daycare, the workers are raising him. I thought I needed resume padding for teachers' college (incorrect), but the other workers were low-IQ, 5th-generation underclass hillbillies under the stress of just being in a room with so many feral kids, let alone trying to manage them. Since middle-aged women generally don't like the cold, and Canada is cold, the kids spent very little time outside.

I am now a highschool teacher, and while I am certain that intelligence is fixed and genetic, I am confident that IQ depends on nurture. Exposure to puzzles and vocabulary and general knowledge and grammar are extremely important. It takes years and years to acquire that stuff and you can't speedrun it when you realize that it's missing. My kid is 9 and just finished Algebra 1 on Khan Academy. I don't know how that compares to actual school algebra in the US, but in Canada that's pretty good (she can't rotate shapes to save her life though, so that's 1 point for the nature crowd). At this rate she's going to have math powers. She has extreme reading powers. It is possible, and some even say probable, that she will not be able/interested enough to spin that into some high-paying job, and she might turn out a bored housewife or HR-lady-that-none-of-the-other-HR-ladies-like-because-they-think-that-she-thinks-she's-better-than-they-are, and the Nurture Assumption crowd will say "See, Gog? Similar outcomes to other women with parents like you."

But quite apart from money, or propensity to addiction and crime, how do you think her model/experience of the world differs from that of one of the kids who went to that daycare, and which model/experience would you prefer your child to have? What sorts of questions will she wonder about, compared to the daycare kids? How will she experience movies and music and advertising? How many more topics of conversation will she be able to discuss? How much more will she bring to the romance table? None of that just develops because of genetics. Daycare is bad.

Two things

  • The de facto early childhood narrative around COVID is that we've ruined the educational and social development of 2 - 5 year olds (roughly) because of the lockdowns and lack of return to school. Genuinely curious (I have no horse in the race): does your daycare experience lead you to doubt that or not?

  • I have an overwhelming fascination with teachers' (at any level before university) perspectives on intelligence, personality, and social development. Please write your own top level post!

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This is interesting, and might be worth its own thread.

My understanding of the research is that people were surprised by the results, because they're not intuitive, based on things like observing kids in daycare vs home and extrapolating, though I've mostly forgotten the details.

I am now a highschool teacher, and while I am certain that intelligence is fixed and genetic, I am confident that IQ depends on nurture.

Wait, what? Isn't IQ just the indicator of intelligence that we're able to measure?

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I think it's important to make a distinction between "supplying information (especially when clearly lacking)" and "opining on a course of action". The difficulty is often in evaluating what information others do and don't have, as repeating already-known information borders on emphasizing it and thus suggesting a course of action.

I think I prefer the way your homeland does it. Every time I see someone in the west complaining about or shaming others for offering well-intentioned advice, it just looks like shooting the messenger and poisoning the well. I would happily accept 100 wrong or offensive advices in exchange for 1 that helped me.

Some of their agenda is practical and material. They want to see wider availability of plus size clothing, larger seats on public accommodations, and design choices in general made with larger bodies in mind. Given the percentage of the American population that is now overweight or obese, this seems eminently reasonable. Some of the fat activist agenda is medical, such as getting doctors to stop saying, “Lose weight” as a first-line response to every fat person who shows up in their office. My focus here is not the etiology, health risks, or recommended treatment for obesity, so I’ll leave this here.

Short of drugs and or surgery, and even those do not work for all and weight regain is common years after surgery, nothing works well long term for obese people. Thus, acceptance is the only option, like baldness-acceptance or short-people-acceptance. for many reasons , lot of ppl become fat and making them un-fat is close to impossible long term despite best efforts. Doctors seem indifferent because treatments options are limited to begin with, short of various drugs, and a failure to put the fork down is not really a disease either.

It is a sort of grey area in which obesity is not immutable in the same way losing leg is and thus needing wheelchair ramps, or immutable like blindness and need dog access , but like limb replacement, obesity is still damn hard to fix

I personally think that a lot of what people call “fat acceptance” does fall under the umbrella of what your grandmother would do naturally, and what many of us are raised to do naturally.

I’d like to add that the Internet contributes to this, as many of us, from the boomers to the zoomers, due to the way the Internet came about, have somehow come to view speech on the Internet, anonymous or not, as existing outside of the purview of the traditional rules of politeness, despite the fact that in terms of raw numbers, it’s more public than almost any situation your great-great-grandparents (and imagine their politeness norms!) could ever have dreamed of.

I think this is substantially correct; people such a fat acceptance activists are often on much stronger ground than they realise, and part of the reason they don't see it is a preoccupation with a radical aesthetic, so what is really bourgeois courtesy is repackaged as 'liberation' etc.

The peculiar converse of this is the downright rudeness of much of the online right, which in just the opposite fashion of many on the left is at odds with the bourgeois aesthetic many of them idealise.

A couple weeks ago I had an argument with people on here about the Sexual Revolution, and its terrible effects on society, or lack thereof. Just about everyone except me was in agreement that the SR was a bad thing.

My thoughts and responses to objections were scattered throughout the thread, so I decided to collect them and make a brief and incomplete case as to why the SR, and the social revolution of the 60s in general was not a bad thing, and most of its purported deleterious impacts are overstated, wrongly attributed, or nonexistent.

Did the social revolution of the 60s make everybody unhappy and miserable?

Straightforwardly, yes. American self-reported happiness rates have been on a fairly steady decline since the 70s. With regards to women in particular, there is a phenomenon referred to as the ‘paradox of declining female happiness’, the observation that even as women have attained greater legal rights and generally been raised in status relative to men, their self-reported happiness has declined. This is often used by social conservatives to argue that women were happier as wives and mothers and that forcing them out of their ‘natural’ roles and into competition with men was a mistake.

I am generally skeptical about self-reported happiness, because it’s not clear if measurement invariance holds over time. Does the question “are you happy?” mean the same thing to someone in 2020 as it does in 1970, let alone 1900?

But suicide rates have also been rising in the US for a long time, so it’s fair to say people becoming unhappier is a real phenomenon. The trend is actually worst among young-ish adults. Here’s a tweet from middling right-wing e-celeb Indian Bronson blaming this trend on the usual right-wing bogeymen.

The problem with the “everyone is depressed and killing themselves because we aren’t based and trad anymore” story is that it doesn’t hold internationally.

It’s pretty undeniable that Western Europe underwent the same social revolution as the US. On many metrics like irreligion, illegitimacy, and rates of people identifying as LGBT, what a social conservative would probably call ‘the decay’ is actually significantly more advanced than it is in the US.

Yet over the past several decades in Europe, self-reported happiness has tended to either hold steady, or increase.

Suicide rates back this up. Over the same time period that suicide rates have spiked among Americans, especially American youth, they’ve declined in western Europe

It seems that everybody being atomized gay atheists hasn’t made Europeans more depressed or suicidal.

What about the dreaded epidemic of single motherhood? Well, as noted above, multiple European countries have single-parenthood rates (and as in the US, the vast majority being single mothers) equivalent or greater than those of the US, without the associated social dysfunction.

There’s not as much research as one would like, but from what I have found, the children of widowed mothers do not tend to differ much on outcomes from the children of biological, two-parent households, so “growing up without a father” doesn’t seem to be that important net of other factors.

What about the supposedly meteor-tier impact on the ‘sexual marketplace’? This is honestly worthy of its own post, but the short answer. Is, no, the idea that the upper 20% (or 10% or 5% or 1% depending on how blackpilled your interlocutor is) of Chads hoarding all the woman while ordinary guys starve is very thinly supported on the ground.

Last year a headline proclaiming “most young men are single. Most young women are not.” went viral. Specifically, GSS data showed that 63% of young men reported themselves as single while only 34% of young women did. This was of course immediately seized upon as proof that a huge proportion of girls are in “chad harems.” Since nobody bothers to read beyond a sensationalist headline, not many dug deep enough to discover that this proportion has been roughly the same for over thirty years, so if the chadopoly is real, it’s been going on for a long time.

As for the “divorce rape” the manosphere has spent the last fifteen years insisting is endemic under our gynocracy, only 10% of divorces actually result in any actual alimony paid.

I add this cautiously, because it’s the only study I could find to treat the question, and it’s about the UK, and it’s about twenty years old, but there is at least some evidence that men actually end up richer long term post-divorce. Which makes intuitive sense to me. Most men are breadwinners, so naturally when you don’t have to support a whole other human being, you’re going to have more disposable income on hand.

If you’re a conservative, then you think single motherhood, divorce, people being gay, and promiscuity, are bad in and of themselves, so from a conservative perspective, the social revolution of the 60s was tautologically a bad thing since that revolution was explicitly an anti-conservative one. But that is not likely to convince anyone who is not already a conservative.

When I have this argument elsewhere someone always hits me with “oh so you think everything is great, huh? You think this degenerate feminist deracinated hellscape we inhabit is a paradise, don’t you?” People on here are not generally that abrasive but anyway, no, I don’t, I think there are plenty of problems in the world. but I also don’t think there’s much evidence for “everything would be better if we RETVRNED” thesis.

This is all besides the fact that I don't think it's POSSIBLE to retvrn because I think the massive social changes of the past two centuries are down less to the Frankfurt School indoctrinating everyone with Cultural Marxism and more to the seismic shifts in the actual underlying material basis of society, which could not be undone short of some kind of totalitarian anti-technological world dictatorship (which of course would have to make significant use of modern technology to impose itself) enforcing the law of Ted Kaczynski upon the earth, but that is another story and I am tired of writing.

I think it’s very damning when critics-of-critics of the sexual revolution rely on the same flawed arguments.

  1. “The alternative is women not working or very young marriage (as in 1950s America)”. Countries in Islamic North Africa and - as @self_made_human says below - India have both high numbers of young women working and comparatively much more conservative sexual morality than the West. Women worked in substantial numbers outside the home in Western countries since the middle of the Industrial Revolution, a hundred years before the sexual revolution. The idea that female labor force participation automatically generates liberal sexual mores simply isn’t as obvious as some people seem to think. Similarly, the Saudi birth rate collapse of the 1980s and 1990s happened while native female labor force participation was extremely low (suggesting, again, that women working was not the primary cause of falling birthrates).

  2. “It’s not that bad”. Yeah, but it’s not that good, either. As I’ve argued before, and as more ‘feminist’ critiques of the sexual revolution by people like Louise Perry discuss, women don’t really get anything out of casual sex. They get neither status nor (in almost all cases) pleasure, so why do they do it? For the same currency (male attention) that women have always received, except previously they didn’t have to put out for it. That, not “women in the workplace”, is the sexual revolution. What benefit did 13 year old girls passed around between adult rockstars as groupies in the 1970s get from this glorious state of affairs? Again, seemingly very little.

  3. There is something to @BurdensomeCount’s occasional suggestion that some people (typically smarter and higher status than usual, although they are not close to a majority even among that group) are able to successfully decouple sex and relationships. It would be unfair of me not to say that I’ve met women (and of course men) like this. But it’s also clear to me that they’re far from the majority, and policy around vices must take into account how most or many people respond to a thing. There are long term functional heroin users able to maintain some semblance of a ‘normal’ life, but they are in the minority. I won’t speak for men, but most women I know who’ve had lots of casual sex with strangers don’t seem to have benefited from or enjoyed the experience, and many regret it and say they would advise their own daughters against it.

  4. These don’t seem to be imaginary problems. Data on things like how promiscuity affects relationship success and satisfaction lead detractors of the sexual revolution to often note the fact that many young people today probably would be happier getting married in their mid twenties to an exclusive partner. I think this is what most women want. Men’s desires are more debatable, since a large part of the incel phenomenon is (as you correctly suggest) anguish that they’re not ‘chads’ rather than actual discontent with the dynamics of the wider system. But even many men suffer from the emptiness of single life, and men seem to, as @Questionmark says below, struggle on their own too.

More generally, a lot of modernity serves the interests of a small minority of happily atomized PMC ‘decouplers’ who want to maximize their individual freedom at the expense of the institutions that allow for a more broad-based happiness. “I can gamble without getting addicted, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to? I can smoke mountains of 20%+ thc weed without losing all motivation and sitting on my couch watching SpongeBob all day, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to? I can find meaning and happiness in hedonism, consumption and career success, so why shouldn’t we abandon traditional forms of spirituality? I can have casual sex with many people without any physical harm or psychological damage coming to me, so why shouldn’t I be able to without condemnation?” The problem comes if freeing these people from the chains of tradition and obligation actively damages the lives of many others, and I think it does.

Most people (and yes, I include myself in this) don’t particularly desire a great deal of individual liberty. They want a clear, well-trodden path, a route that works, a comfortable life, ‘traditional’ happiness in the form of a stable community and family. They don’t want to have to set out in the world on their own without a map and to figure out everything for themselves.

Look at the interminable number of TikTok and Instagram gurus. The Tates and the Female Dating Strategists. The Hustle Bros and the Girlbosses. What are their (often very young) audiences looking for? Someone to tell them exactly what to do and how to do it. They represent an organic rejection of personal freedom, of individualism, which is aberrant and dysfunctional.

Have you watched the show Fleabag? One of the reasons it resonated with so many young women is that it’s about this. Of course its creator is a liberal feminist, she doesn’t even really understand the implications and the true theme of her own work (this is not unusual of course). But there’s a scene in the second season where the protagonist, who has wasted her twenties and early thirties doing nothing and having endless casual sex with strangers, is sitting in a confession box at a church begging the priest, begging God, to tell her what to do, to give her a path, to free her from the atomized and empty and depressing nature of her existence. Here’s the monologue.

Of course, the scene is subverted (she later sleeps with the priest); I consider it unlikely the writer even consciously understood the impulse she was describing. But I also think that in the moment it’s so, so real, more than the creator knew while writing it.

More generally, a lot of modernity serves the interests of a small minority of happily atomized PMC ‘decouplers’ who want to maximize their individual freedom at the expense of the institutions that allow for a more broad-based happiness. “I can gamble without getting addicted, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to? I can smoke mountains of 20%+ thc weed without losing all motivation and sitting on my couch watching SpongeBob all day, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to? I can find meaning and happiness in hedonism, consumption and career success, so why shouldn’t we abandon traditional forms of spirituality? I can have casual sex with many people without any physical harm or psychological damage coming to me, so why shouldn’t I be able to without condemnation?” The problem comes if freeing these people from the chains of tradition and obligation actively damages the lives of many others, and I think it does.

Incredibly well said, AAQC'ed. This line of thinking is something I've believed for a long time without being able to put into words exactly. As much as I love @BurdensomeCount and his excellent trolling, he is definitely the exact type of person our modern, atomistic society is set up to serve.

And while individual liberty is overall a good compared to the previous system of tyrannical monarchies, I absolutely agree we've taken it too far. Perhaps if we could find a situation where individual liberty was allowed but sort of looked down upon or difficult to achieve, that would be far better. That way only those extremely motivated to pursue liberty will achieve it, while the majority will be "stuck" with traditional modes of life that likely fit them better, and help balance out their negative inclinations.

As much as I love @BurdensomeCount

I aim to please!

he is definitely the exact type of person our modern, atomistic society is set up to serve

My tax slips disagree...

Ahh yes well I forgot you were in the UK - they seem to have issues with the whole liberty thing...

What benefit did 13 year old girls passed around between adult rockstars as groupies in the 1970s get from this glorious state of affairs?

I swear this is like the 50th time you’ve brought this up on this site since it started, because you’re eager to bring it up whenever the repercussions of the Sexual Revolution are discussed. Ok, I get it, or at least I think I do – you’re a feminist woman after all, and that entire cultural hellscape in question just disgusts you to the core. But let’s look at this objectively.

Based on what accounts are available on the ‘baby groupie’ phenomenon, it appears it was pretty much confined to the Sunset Strip area, and 99% of all the attention it ever got was due to two of these groupies being willing to give interviews about their activities in order to get their 15 minutes of fame. And according to the Wikipedia articles on them, even these accounts are contradictory, which raises the obvious question of how far these girls were actually willing to go sexually, and just how much they lied and embellished. Either way, I’d be very surprised if the number of these baby groupies ever exceeded 100 in the entire US, in other words, it was completely negligible. (‘baby’ is an important qualifier here obviously)

On the other hand, if I want to play sociologist and give a reasonable explanation as to why all this even happened, I’d say this: there were numerous veterans returning from World War Two and the Korean and Vietnam Wars suffering from PTSD, which, combined with the overall decrease in parental supervision in general due to social upheaval, drove many teenagers to run away from dysfunctional and traumatizing households, permanently or intermittently. Also, pop music turned into a huge and commercialized cultural phenomenon, plus rebellious behavior and drug use was socially normalized in the ‘60s. It was also much easier to have a transient lifestyle before the digital age. But again, none of this is directly related to the Sexual Revolution.

I think the teenage groupie phenomenon is overstated for sure, but it's an interesting slice of history.

There was an incredibly brief period of history (basically the 1970s) when premarital sex was destigmatized but upper-middle class children still had freedom from helicopter parents.

I agree, but I doubt these baby groupies came from upper-middle class families.

I swear this is like the 50th time you’ve brought this up on this site since it started, because you’re eager to bring it up whenever the repercussions of the Sexual Revolution are discussed. Ok, I get it, or at least I think I do – you’re a feminist woman after all, and that entire cultural hellscape in question just disgusts you to the core. But let’s look at this objectively.

I’m so non-feminist I believe that women shouldn’t have the franchise and their college attendance should be capped at some low percentage of the total, and ‘13 year old groupies getting passed around as communal toys’ is disgusting and enraging to me. So throw out the accusation if you’d like.

I agree that one definitely not need be a feminist or a woman in order to reject such forms of degeneracy. However, feminists and non-feminists in my view tend to have, as demonstrated by your comment here as well, rather different ideas as to what the degradation, exploitation and ruin of women entail as a phenomenon in a sexually permissive society. It occurred to me that 2rafa's arguments about this issue are distinctly feminist in character.

More generally, a lot of modernity serves the interests of a small minority of happily atomized PMC ‘decouplers’ who want to maximize their individual freedom at the expense of the institutions that allow for a more broad-based happiness. “I can gamble without getting addicted, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to? I can smoke mountains of 20%+ thc weed without losing all motivation and sitting on my couch watching SpongeBob all day, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to? I can find meaning and happiness in hedonism, consumption and career success, so why shouldn’t we abandon traditional forms of spirituality? I can have casual sex with many people without any physical harm or psychological damage coming to me, so why shouldn’t I be able to without condemnation?” The problem comes if freeing these people from the chains of tradition and obligation actively damages the lives of many others, and I think it does.

Agree with this analysis, although I'm not sure what to do about it. Virtually all progress comes from this group, and I find their arguments coherent and compelling. Yet at the same time, I cannot deny that for many, this does not work and is not what they want. This is most apparent in free speech advocacy. Back when tech was not just created by but run by nerds, there was no censorship or moderation. You could say whatever you wanted - getting banned wasn't even a thing. But once the plebe hordes arrived, they demanded that the internet not be that way, and now you have some longhouse marm listening in on your teamspeak when playing Overwatch, making sure you don't say any mean words or you get a banslap. And the plebes like this! They think it's progress and celebrate it! To the extent that there's any disagreement among them, it's not over the censor button itself, but slapfighting over who is the one in charge of the censorship.

While my disdain is not exactly concealed, I do acknowledge that for many, freedom doesn't work that well. You let them eat whatever they want and they just stuff themselves until they're like a fn balloon. You let them buy opiates and they turn themselves into a zombie infestation on the streets. It's completely ridiculous, but I cannot deny that this is objectively what happens for a good chunk of the population. Whatever I may think of their epistemics and philosophy, the results speak for themselves: being denied the freedom to fuck up objectively improves the lives of many. Further, whatever elegant philosophical foundation high-decoupling freedom advocates have, de facto their policies are Darwinian accelerationism: "If the plebes want to eat until they bust, well then so be it, let them bust." But judging by the fertility stats, we've already accelerated to a degree that may well crash the entire species. However beautiful I may find the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism, I am at least clearheaded enough to concede that the collapse of the species is a bad thing, and whatever caused that should probably be reconsidered.

Where this leaves me, I don't know, other than to say annoyed and unsettled. I don't want to be subjected to their petty nonsense, but I also don't want humanity to collapse, so... I don't know, maybe stuff them back in their matrix pods while I walk free? But of course there's little room for that in my philosophy, and advocating so is a stain on my soul.

Maybe if we could set it up in such a way that they're technically putting themselves in the matrix pods while I walk free... ponders

But judging by the fertility stats, we've already accelerated to a degree that may well crash the entire species. However beautiful I may find the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism, I am at least clearheaded enough to concede that the collapse of the species is a bad thing, and whatever caused that should probably be reconsidered.

This leads me to something I've noticed. Plenty of people, when confronted with this sort of conflict between political system and population, rather than rethink the former, instead set out to "fix" the latter. Once, there were the Communists attempting to create the New Soviet Man. Now, I see plenty of people looking at what you've pointed out above, and arguing that we need only keep papering over the cracks and spinning the plates just a little while longer, until Inevitable Technological Progress allows us to "fix" humanity to be long-term compatible with our political system — whether that's by replacing human governance with a godlike AI singleton, Aubrey de Grey making us nigh-immortal, or using CRISPR and exowombs to engineer the New Soviet Liberal Man Person of Self-Determined Gender (as a Tumblr mutual keeps insisting is just a few years away). No matter which way, it seems that for them, Man is made for The System rather than The System being made for Man (a view which, as I've previously noted, goes back to Plato at least).

Does your ideology support the notion that it's better for billions to have lived free than -illions to have spent their lives in chains?

Countries in Islamic North Africa and - as @self_made_human says below - India have both high numbers of young women working and comparatively much more conservative sexual morality than the West.

I was actually less precise/nuanced than could be desirable in the response you're pointing at. That is, to an extent, unavoidable when discussing such an enormous country.

In a sense, the Sexual Revolution is here/ongoing in India. If you average over the entire place, then of course it's going to be very conservative compared to the West.

If you average over major cities, it's going to be significantly more liberal. Dating and casual sex is hardly unheard of, and in more liberal places like college or uni, entirely unremarkable. I speak VERY broadly, there are colleges, down in the south, where you can get expelled for holding hands with the opposite sex, even off campus.

It might be slightly frowned upon, but for the average middle/UMC Indian, be it a boy or girl, your parents won't disown you for bringing a new partner home, and as an independent young professional living in a city, you're largely immune from any negative consequences of sleeping around.

Quite recently, my ex of many years unblocked me, and I discovered she's going through what could be described as a belated hoe-phase, and I had to treat her for STDs (no judgment, I broke her heart, I'm more miffed at her terrible taste in new partners and what that might say about her dating me), and she's experienced some of the downsides of the SR as might be entirely unremarkable from examples in the CWR thread. Such as a fling with a 35 yo dude who asked her if she was amenable to poly/an open relationship.

Another point of pushback is that India has liberalized, especially since women began entering higher education, and were enabled to work independently in most of the same jobs as men. We simply began from a nadir in terms of gender equality, but going from Victorian norms to 1950s America in the same period America went from the 50s to uh, whatever the date is now, is still an enormous change, and smaller exclaves have achieved total parity.

The directional trend is robustly liberal, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. So if you ask whether the empowerment/employment of women lead to loosening of sexual norms, then India should not be taken as a counter-example, we started from a more conservative position and we still moved left.

*Illustrative observations:

Tiny village in bumfuck nowhere? If you get caught dating, you're getting yelled at, or punished, or potentially beaten up (or very rarely honor-killed).

Middle class or UMC in a major city? Dating is frowned upon before college, because it distracts from your studies, once you're there it's no big deal, at most you are discouraged from sleeping around too much as a girl, for reputational concerns. Not even that big a deal, my slag of an ex from med school won't face any real issues when she's looking to settle down. Her mom didn't, and she was infamous as the class pony if the muttered complaints from my parents are factual, and she ended up marrying a judge. (Different exes)

Rich? Do whatever the fuck you want, and unless your family is hidebound, it doesn't matter.

The idea that female labor force participation automatically generates liberal sexual mores simply isn’t as obvious as some people seem to think

It's less that female labor force participation automatically generates liberal sexual mores than that technological advancement undermines the property relations upon which traditional marriage and patriarchy in general was built, which in turn creates an environment conducive to liberalization of sexual mores and to increasing participation of women in the labor force.

Yeah, but it’s not that good, either.

Is it worse than what came before? I don't think so.

women don’t really get anything out of casual sex.

Women don't have to have casual sex, and in fact most women don't have casual sex. Average number of life sex partners is something like 6, and those tend to be long-term partners in a relationship, not bar or tinder hook-ups. Casual sex is more common than it was in the 50s, but it's not really that common.

Data on things like how promiscuity affects relationship success and satisfaction lead detractors of the sexual revolution to often note the fact that many young people today probably would be happier getting married in their mid twenties to an exclusive partner.

This data is naturally very confounded. I can't find the stats at the moment so I guess you should have lower confidence in what I say next, but promiscuity sex only leads to lower satisfaction among those who believe promiscuity is wrong. So if you think promiscuity is wrong, don't be promiscuous. It's true that married people generally report being happier than unmarried people, but that is also extremely confounded, the evidence that it's a long-term effect is shaky, and the effects are small anyway.

But there’s a scene in the second season where the protagonist, who has wasted her twenties and early thirties doing nothing and having endless casual sex with strangers, is sitting in a confession box at a church begging the priest, begging God, to tell her what to do, to give her a path, to free her from the atomized and empty and depressing nature of her existence.

What does it mean for married life with kids to be more meaningful or less empty than the contrary? I'm not religious, so I don't think Jehovah or Allah or anyone else has prescribed that as the "correct path." What do I have to believe in order to believe that there is some kind of real 'meaning' or 'fulfillment' in traditional life that is not found elsewhere? When e-trads talk about the meaning, happiness, fulfillment etc. of getting married and having kids I just have to wonder what they're talking about. I don't live in a cave. I have seen married couples with kids, many of them close up. Some of them are happy, sure. Some of them are hilariously miserable. 50% of marriages end in divorce, and I highly doubt 100% of the other 50% are happy. It seems like most people who get married aren't actually satisfied with the way their life turns out.

I say all of this as someone who does not live a particularly hedonistic life by most standards. I don't drink or smoke weed or use any harder drugs. I like reading books, hanging out with my friends and family, exercising, and arguing with people online, most of which would be unobjectionable to even the most conservative conservative. But I still think I have benefited from the revolution, because if it hadn't been for that, there's a real chance I'd be married with kids on the way by now, and if not now, then almost certainly within the next decade, which is something I don't want in the slightest.

Data on things like how promiscuity affects relationship success and satisfaction lead detractors of the sexual revolution to often note the fact that many young people today probably would be happier getting married in their mid twenties to an exclusive partner. I think this is what most women want.

Too bad they've been priced out of it by factors mostly beyond their control (yet they're quite obviously still fans of it, as indicated by their politics). If we took a hatchet to the educational-managerial complex and levelled it hard enough that it resembles what it was in 1950 [so that you were considered an adult by your society far closer to when it biologically occurs, with all the financial opportunities thereof, without needing to even graduate high school and university was only for the actually smart people] , you'd see men and women getting good jobs then married in their late-teens-early-twenties again as was normal in those days ("high school sweetheart" isn't a meme from that time for no reason).

But we don't have that, and said education system currently forms a massive form of "corporate" welfare for women-as-population, so apart from being able to offshore those lower-skill jobs to China- like we did to men in the '80s- good luck clawing that back from an electorate wholly dependent on it. (Same thing for HR positions- it would take a significant amount of legal reform to pop that bubble.) It'd probably take a war that explodes most of China for that to happen in the US again, but half of the male Chinese population dying overnight would probably end up causing 500 years of Chinese world domination 50 years later so maybe that's not great for American interests.

The problem comes if freeing these people from the chains of tradition and obligation actively damages the lives of many others, and I think it does.

Thus the obvious conclusion: the need to impose taxes on the excess amounts of virtue those people have. Anyone who wants to freely exercise that intrinsic power deserves to get shot up just as surely as those who make more than an average amount of money do should they get any idea to keep it. The liberal argument is the same as it's always been- lower taxes on virtue has had massive economic benefits and given us basically everything in the modern world- and the traditionalist-progressive argument that we should not have that if it gets Society further away from the moral fashions (usually one's parents' conception of God, but in the last 400 years it's been capital-P Progress carrying the day) is convincing to some people who... have also been on the back foot in terms of dictating socioeconomic policies for 360 of the past 400 years (that said, almost all of those 40 years have been within the last 100- 1920-1940, 2014 to today, and the other one was 1800-1810 confined mostly to Europe).

Considering society at large has been effectively continually inflating punishments for Outer Party members (the section of society most likely to need this as a release valve), this is another "it could work, but prices are too high now". Fines were good enough proxies for taxes (though it's worth noting people don't see fines as such), not sufficiently ruinous, and inconsistently-enforced enough that this way of levying them was probably OK, but fines have far outpaced inflation and State capacity has grown to such an extent that being able to make a case is a few clicks away (extended to the average citizen by means of Twitter mob), and the temptation to do this is pretty obviously there (considering all Western states spent the last 2 of 3 years overusing exactly that ability).

As always, the problem is that society itself (and its governments, charged with executing its preferences) has shown itself to be an incredibly untrustworthy judge of what should and shouldn't be taxed- it is probably not an accident that, for those 360 years, the states with the lowest such taxes were the most prosperous compared to the rest of the world; the worst one could say is that it's coincidence.

Men’s desires are more debatable, since a large part of the incel phenomenon is (as you correctly suggest) anguish that they’re not ‘chads’ rather than actual discontent with the dynamics of the wider system.

I'll reply in a separate comment because it's a subject that deserves more scrutiny.

Can you please explain why you keep repeating this ludicrous claim with no basis in reality? Have you ever even seen an incel in your life, either online or offline?

I just want to say that I really enjoy your writing and your perspective.

Most times on the Motte people only respond when they are in disagreement (often about one detail of a long post). On rare occassions I think it could help to simply say "good post". So... good post!

Maximum individual liberty is alienation from others.

To your second point, I see this argument get bandied about endlessly, and it almost always fails to take seriously the way I see critics of the SR conceptualize the matter. This is the same error feminists always make against those who advocate a return to the 1950's, when they castigate men by saying that it was never a utopia. A claim I never saw any man ever make. The choice isn't necessarily between good and bad. It's between bad and 'worse'. The common error is to assume to there's some kind of 'solution' out there that we simply have to get to, that appeases all parties involved, and there isn't. You simply have to 'tolerate' certain things. Women aren't exactly the happiest they've ever been either, living in the richest and most emancipated society that's ever existed in the history of the human species. That either goes to show that:

  1. Their happiness isn't very stable and shouldn't be shown too much regard.

  2. If they're going to be unhappy no matter how you have it, there are better ways to structure society and better uses to put them to.

More generally, a lot of modernity serves the interests of a small minority of happily atomized PMC ‘decouplers’ who want to maximize their individual freedom at the expense of the institutions that allow for a more broad-based happiness.

This is why I've always looked at liberal/progressive ideology (and indeed Leftism broadly construed) as a snake that eats its own tail. A lot of these kind of freedomhead's espouse values such as "unity!" and "solidarity!" in their philosophical lexicons, but it rings hollow on the inside.

"Solidarity!," doesn't carry with it the same intimacy with others as the spirit of "nationalism!" and love of one's country does. Saying "let's all go to the community center!" doesn't have the same ring to it as saying, "let's all go to Church on Sunday!," and be told about our place in the cosmos.

so “growing up without a father” doesn’t seem to be that important net of other factors.

I'd suggest there is a modest difference between "My mother is a single mother because my father died" and "My mother is a single mother because her boyfriend/partner broke up with her", and a much greater difference when it's "My mother is a single mother because she has a string of boyfriends and is not sure who my biological father might be/the baby daddy also has a string of girlfriends and multiple kids he is not helping to raise".

Widowed household may be more similar to stably-married household for that comparison, as the marriage was not ended by choice or conflict leading to divorce/separated because never married.

There’s not as much research as one would like, but from what I have found, the children of widowed mothers do not tend to differ much on outcomes from the children of biological, two-parent households, so “growing up without a father” doesn’t seem to be that important net of other factors.

The whole point is to estimate the causal effect of single motherhood, not correlational.

Looking at widows makes more sense than looking mothers who are single because of a break up, since the relationship of the latter with life outcomes is presumably more confounded by more variables.

But there is at least some evidence that men actually end up richer long term post-divorce.

I can see this long-term. Not having to support the spending habits of a female partner (high-end travel, dining, clothing) is a massive financial advantage. Especially when the male has reaped the rewards of being partnered early in their career where the females has helped managed your household and establish social credibility.

It doesn't detract from the un-fucking-believable, hilariously unfair lopsidedness of the average divorce settlement. I have yet to see one without a shitty, late-game money grab as part of the female playbook. In a golden age of feminist empowerment and advanced degrees, the legal system is configured exclusively to assume 50's housewife scenarios.

OP claimed

only 10% of divorces actually result in any actual alimony paid.

Is this wrong?

I didn't read the study, but I can assume it's true, and it changes nothing. As pointed out in another comment:

When the Manosphere discussed the phenomenon of ‘divorce rape’, they didn’t just mean the issue of alimony payments, they also meant the ways child support payments are calculated, the way those are enforced, and the way child visitation rights are decided.

This is just the tip of the divorce-industrial complex iceberg.

  • The allocation of assets like houses, in which even if both parties contributed evenly to, is held hostage during divorce negotiations, or provided entirely to the female
  • The responsibility to maintain or pay taxes for those assets, which is assigned entirely to the male
  • The division of retirement accounts, including individually named ones when both parties are high-earning white collar professionals but one person didn't contribute
  • The delaying of remarriage (despite long-term cohabitation) to extend alimony payments when they're applied
  • The delaying of high school graduation to extend child support payments
  • The total disregard of value provided from one spouse to another prior to the divorce when determining alimony (my favorite anecdote - a friend paid for 4 years of his wife's post-grad degree as a full-time student to the tune of $150,000. She sucked her professor's dick at her graduation party, then ground out the extraction of his credit card points before the end of the divorce! Also received massive alimony payments since she delayed actually starting a job with her nice degree)

@Unsaying mentioned:

Then again, I'd expect high-earning men to also have good legal teams and/or hidden assets, so, who can say, really?

I can tell you firsthand that when shopping around for someone to help with a basic, equitable prenup: Family lawyers generally have some combination of either A: Genuine misandry or B: No desire to advocate for a client who's already predisposed to lose.

Sure you can bill the same amount as when you're representing women, but it's a near certainty you'll be left with an unhappy customer. Why bother?

This is nightmare fuel for me.

I've heard you can get "bulletproof" prenups in the "his/hers/ours" vein. But then I hear horror stories about how because of one slip up in where a certain check went, all of a sudden all accounts have equal claim.

Question: Are there any states that don't have in effect common law marriage for long term cohabitation. If I had my druthers, I'd like to be long term monogamous but with ZERO POSSIBLE involvement from the state.

Seems like Common Law marriage is actually in a minority of states. Even so, someone cohabiting with you and splitting a mortgage will get them a lot of leeway in court to make things messy for you.

I don't think you can eliminate the risk. You need to do a ton of work upfront in picking a partner, then sign a great contract where both folks have legal representation, then still learn to live with a gun to your head.

Alternatively, marry a good woman and don’t let your marriage go to crap.

I mean I know that’s easier said than done, but I would be very surprised if divorce for no apparent reason was common at all. Most of the time it’s either 1) you shouldn’t have married her, and it was obvious at the time 2) you shouldn’t have become an addict or 3) shouldn’t have let the marriage fall apart. The frequency of all three varies along the usual clines.

my favorite anecdote - a friend paid for 4 years of his wife's post-grad degree as a full-time student to the tune of $150,000. She sucked her professor's dick at her graduation party, then ground out the extraction of his credit card points before the end of the divorce! Also received massive alimony payments since she delayed actually starting a job with her nice degree

I've worked enough in divorce law to say straightforwardly: this is retarded. The fact that your friend couldn't argue his way out of a wet paper bag is not an indictment of the adversarial legal system. Literally every aspect of that should have gone differently, and routinely does.

The majority of stories like this are the result of one party or another failing completely to argue their case, or walking into court totally unprepared to argue, or blowing off the court and being subject to a default judgment. These things just don't happen if you don't fuck up somewhere.

I've literally heard the same beer-rants of guys who claimed they'd been divorce raped in cases I knew intimately enough to know what he was leaving out.

For reference, here is a common trick where men who "got fucked in the divorce" fumbled the ball.

Wife's Attorney: You have three children, correct?

Husband: Yes.

WA: What are their names?

H: Kaylee, Kayleigh, and KaeLieh

WA: What are their ages?

H: Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

I'm serious. This happens all the time.

I am sure there's more to the story and/or my buddy kept walking into proverbial rakes.

To circle back to my original point, he's now on a great upward trajectory 4 years later. Alimony timed out after something like 2 years?

The most baffling part of all of it is that they had no kids. I couldn't see the justification for any of it.

Another victim made the "mistake" of moving out after his wife cheated on him, so she got the house by default.

I'd still maintain that I don't understand how a court can arrive at these judgements, not matter how braindead a man's lawyer is.

Basically you're facing impenetrable just-worlding with a touch of refuge in audacity. There's no way it can be that bad therefore it must not be and the people who got screwed must have brought it on themselves.

I think you could look at the existence (or absence) of lobbying groups arguing for either side.

If women were being screwed over by divorce courts, we would expect feminist groups to campaign for their reform, whereas as far as I can tell, most feminist lobbying is to stop reform of the divorce courts. Men's groups campaign for the right to see their children, women's groups campaign against laws that would allow them to do this. Divorced men campaign against permanent alimony, divorced women campaign to keep it.

The very fact that the miniscule and powerless men's rights movement focuses mostly on unfair divorce laws suggests that perhaps they might have some legitimate complaints. After all, even if the law is written in a gender neutral manner doesn't mean it needs to be applied evenly. Hell, two-thirds of divorcing women acknowledge that men are treated unfairly when it comes to child custody. I struggle to think of any woman who is known for losing out from an unfair divorce ruling, and yet multiple men come to mind immediately.

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There's a parallel myth I've run into in the wild multiple times: the iron clad prenup, forced on the bride moments before getting dressed for her wedding, that left the poor bamboozled wife with nothing. What was she supposed to do! Her whole family was there! She had to sign it! And now she gets nothing, no alimony no child support, and she gave up her career too!

Never happened. Court would throw it out in seconds. The only way you got got like that is if you, once again, didn't show up.

But the fact remains that both separate and community property regimes are written gender neutral and provide legal remedies for many of the frequently claimed injustices. Every state now favors joint custody, and there is a strong presumption that fathers should be involved in their children's lives.

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."

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Out of curiosity, what are other common tricks?

Even more, in a case like the above, the cost of education would be removed from the wife's distribution of assets, even absent any debt, as a matter of course.

This is a common situation, and it's not just something courts are comfortable with, it's such a common stereotype that the backstory of a West Wing character is based on it.

Shown here in a flashback to the first campaign. She dropped out of school to support her boyfriend through med school.

Not a divorce or student debt situation, as there was neither marriage nor debt, just the "partner pays other partner's way through grad school" bit.

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No idea, but I bet it would be interesting to break that down by the net worth of the people involved. I suspect that maybe only about ten percent of men getting divorced are worth shearing, as it were. I do know that divorce is often initiated (by the woman) upon a man losing his job or suffering some other substantial curtailment in his earning potential.

Then again, I'd expect high-earning men to also have good legal teams and/or hidden assets, so, who can say, really? Maybe a wife who can afford her own good legal team and competently prosecute a divorce is also more interested in getting her slice of assets than hounding him for alimony, as she'll more often have her own solid income.

When the Manosphere discussed the phenomenon of ‘divorce rape’, they didn’t just mean the issue of alimony payments, they also meant the ways child support payments are calculated, the way those are enforced, and the way child visitation rights are decided. Yes, I speak of that sphere in the past tense because I think it’s warranted, and yes, I’m aware that all of that can affect unmarried men as well, but I think it’s fair to say they mostly affect divorced men.

The presumption in Western courts has long been shared custody. I think MRAs have always had some reasonable points on this issue, especially with courts willing to believe mothers over fathers on some questions. But in general, many complaints about ‘divorce rape’ happen when the father understands that he can’t reasonable split weekday custody with the mother (almost always because he works full-time) and so voluntarily relinquishes this possibility, and then resents the fact that his ex-wife or baby momma is the homemaker (part or full time) on his dime.

Also, while payments are often a substantial part of a poorer man’s income, the only times they’re “ridiculously” high (often an MRA complaint on this issue) is in a handful of cases a year where super rich people get divorced, which is very far away from most divorces, concentrated as they always are among people who are poorer and have fewer resources.

In general, men ‘benefit’ more from divorce than women because a single dad’s romantic market value is much higher than a single mom’s. Single mothers almost always have to ‘date down’, often much older men who are divorced with kids of their own. Single dads - provided they’re young-ish and otherwise somewhat attractive - can often find a childless woman a second time.

The presumption in Western courts has long been shared custody.

The practice has been that child support will be enforced by any means necessary, but father's visitation rights will not be enforced at all.

I’ve heard of quite a few cases where mothers have been charged with kidnap for denying visitation or moving to eg. another state or country to be away from their kids’ dad.

On some level it’s a underclass problem, too. I assume your sympathy for single mothers who don’t get child support from their exes because they’re in jail/unemployed/etc is limited too, so why wouldn’t it be for those men who married women so ratchet/psychotic/etc that they illegally deny their exes visitation?

I’ve heard of quite a few cases where mothers have been charged with kidnap for denying visitation or moving to eg. another state or country to be away from their kids’ dad.

There was a famous case some decades ago where a woman moved the kid out of the country and was held in contempt, and they changed the law to get her released... without, of course, getting her to comply.

I can be sympathetic for single mothers who don't get child support from their exes because they're in jail/unemployed/etc, but you still can't get blood from a stone.

so why wouldn’t it be for those men who married women so ratchet/psychotic/etc that they illegally deny their exes visitation

Because I refuse to accept that women don't have agency, and shouldn't be held responsible for their exercise of it. If they really are so psychotic that they can be effectively said not to have agency, they sure as hell shouldn't have custody.

I mean, even if this is true, the main reason isn't some evil feminists being in charge, it's that it's far easier to garnish a person's wages than to pay enough people to make sure all visitation rights are followed to the letter. You could put this message board in charge of America, and guess what, you'd still see this.

No, they don't stop with garnishing wages. They suspend professional licenses and drivers licenses for unpaid child support. They put "deadbeat dads" in jail, in one of the few remaining uses of debtor's prison in the US. For women who don't co-operate with visitation the system gives a Gallic shrug and admonishes the fathers that they still have to pay child support or else.

There is obviously the risk of that kind of scenario, but I don’t think it considers (as @100ProofTollBooth says) the fact that divorce is pretty much never in a woman’s interest unless (a) her husband is untenably abusive such that being much poorer is worth escaping his grasp, (b) the couple is extraordinarily rich to the point that a settlement will allow her both ‘freedom’ and wealth or (c) the woman in question is still young enough, pretty enough and childless enough to roll the dice again and find a better partner.

A woman over 30, certainly over 35 with kids is pretty much never getting a ‘good deal’ in a divorce unless she married very, very well the first time. I don’t know why this isn’t repeated more in these discussions, men will gladly discuss how they would never date a single mother and how women lose value as their looks fade but then claim some 37 year old woman divorcing her average husband is some great financial coup on behalf of the wife.

In “real life”, she’s likely to either remain single for a long time or remarry to a man far below (in that he’s older, uglier, poorer etc) what she could have got had she remained single the whole time (even at 37). Meanwhile, her 37 year old ex-husband, provided he’s OK looking and gainfully employed, can likely find a 30-34 year old probably-childless woman to start a second family with, or decide not to have more kids and date most of the same kind of people he’d have if he’d never married.

Divorce is generally a bad deal(and men usually don’t come out ahead either), yes, but it happens with alarming frequency because people don’t know that.

Perhaps going back to a culture of shaming divorce would be a good thing.

In my culture we see divorce in the same way that I see limb amputations. There are times where it is absloutely necessary, but you should do everything humanely possible to avoid it unless there are no other options left. Westerners see divorce as like leaving a job, much less serious. Raising the costs of a divorce (e.g. through shaming) is probably a good thing.

I think this is more about the messaging being wrong and close to what you describe as opposed to what people actually think. People don't think a divorce is like changing a job, but a lot of messaging around it is like that.

I think it's the age old tale of the majority of people hearing a message are people who are in need of the opposite and it leading to more harm than good. The messaging is intented to help people get out of toxic relationships, avoid shaming and discrimination etc. Only, this group is tiny and the group anti-needing this message is large.

It's kind of similar to fat acceptance and other similar campaigns. There is a sympathetic intention but it fails to consider that this might be somewhat of a zero-sum game and that there are a costs involved.

Except the divorce rate is going down consistently. The main reason there was such a high level of divorce in the 70's and 80's is a lot of bad marriages finally had valve releases, and a lot of people headed for the exists. Now, you can think that was a bad decision or whatever, but I doubt even many conservative-leaning people are going to be OK with, "let's go back to 1955 norms about marriage."

Westerners see divorce as like leaving a job, much less serious.

I would be careful not to generalize Westerners in this case. There are plenty of groups (in the US at least) where divorce is viewed much more like your limb amputation analogy. For example, I grew up in small town conservative Christian culture, and there it's considered pretty awful to have a divorce. Not necessarily shameful (because sometimes it really is the only option left), but definitely it's viewed as a bad thing which should be avoided if possible.

You are correct that divorce is almost never in a woman's best interests. That doesn't mean it is in the man's, either. Women suffer romantically (because a single mother in her 30s will never be able to get as good of a husband as a childless woman in her 20s, if she can get another husband at all) while men suffer materially (because, as the primary bread winner, he is the one that gets hit with the alimony, child support, etc.). It's mutually assured destruction.

That doesn't change the fact that women are responsible for the vast majority of divorces, either initiating them outright or making their husband's life hell until he files for one. It is just evidence that women cannot be trusted to make their own sexual choices. Which is precisely why they were not allowed to until the sexual revolution.

From "The False Life Plan" by the Dreaded Jim:

Consider the reality show star Kate Gosselin, woman has eight children by a decent, reasonably attractive husband, who loves her and loves his children. Acts like a complete shrew towards the only man who will ever love her and her children. Ditches him. Is shocked to discover that no other male wants a woman past her prime and encumbered with eight children.

Kate Gosselin was videotaped continually treating her husband like dirt, as the man she reluctantly settled for seeing as all her preferred choices would not return her phone calls.

She then divorced him, depriving him of his much loved children, depriving her eight children of a much needed father, and herself of a much needed and entirely irreplaceable husband.

And I have seen a similar dynamic in every divorce that I have observed, though of course with considerably fewer children. In every divorce that I have observed the wife was utterly and spectacularly out of contact with marriage market realities. The result of the divorce is that the man, who very much did not want the divorce, was much better off, free of a hateful and unfaithful shrew, and the wife was very much worse off. As the wife goggles fell from his eyes, he usually found a considerably younger replacement.

At the age of thirty eight, with eight children and a notorious shrew, Kate Gosselin’s chances of marrying even a homeless obese seventy year old alcoholic are about equal to her chances of being kidnapped by terrorists and becoming the wife of the sultan, but she specifically requires her new husband to be rich, six foot tall, physically fit, and childless. (Her previous husband was not rich, not six foot tall, and only ordinarily fit, which is presumably why she divorced him.)

Meanwhile her husband, Jon Gosselin, the father of her children, having lost the wife goggles, promptly got a hot twenty two year old girlfriend to replace his aging thirty eight year old wife, and if the girlfriend is lucky, might marry her. But then, having been burned once, maybe not.

The typical marriage is Kate Gosselin and Jon Gosselin: The wife has a hugely inflated idea of her marriage market value (based on her F-buddy market value when she was considerably younger) and this poisons the marriage.

Now theoretically, if a woman is chaste, men will only approach her that are appropriate to her marriage market value, and she will avoid getting an inflated perception of her value, but no man believes that a chaste women is likely to remain chaste, because, they are not likely to remain chaste. So a woman faces a storm of approaches that would never happen if the boys had to ask her dad before approaching her, and if her dad said yes, they would get not a date with the opportunity of physical contact, but merely the opportunity to court her for marriage. These approaches lead Kate Gosselin to believe that she is entitled to marry a six foot tall physically fit millionaire, and that life, her husband, and the male dominated society is being terribly unfair to her in not giving her what she is entitled to have.

or making their husband's life hell until he files for one.

I don't think this works as well as the women think it does; men have memes about this (ball and chain) that aren't meaningfully replicated across the gender boundary. Head-crushing (by men) and heel-striking (by women) behavior is the baseline for Biblical gender relations within the context of a marriage, after all.

Head-crushing (by men) and heel-striking (by women) behavior is the baseline for Biblical gender relations within the context of a marriage, after all.

Could you elaborate? I've never heard of "you shall crush his head, he shall strike your heel" claimed as having anything to do with gender relations, given that the trade is between man and serpent. Compare the curses directed at men and women respectively from the same passage: men will suffer toil, women will suffer pain in childbirth.

It’s catholic doctrine that part of the woman’s punishment is chaffing under the rule of her husband, but the woman/serpent thing has nothing to do with it.

Huh, must have conflated the two in memory. (It still seems to me to be the main failure mode of how both genders handle being nasty in relationships, though.)

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Why is the assumption that she would remarry? As I see it, the natural counterfactual is one in which both parties never married, and then the delta is that in the married-and-divorced world, there is a perpetual transfer of money from the man to the woman. This suggests that the compound action "marry arbitrarily, then divorce" is indeed in the woman's interest, unless you want to price in opportunity cost - which could then be read as the expected amount of resources that the woman would extract from men as a class, a reading which itself seems sufficient to drive resentment even before you introduce some mechanism (alimony) that serves to place a floor on how far the individual can fall below expectation.

(Yes, the framing of extracting resources from men completely neglects every way in which men benefit from women in partnerships in turn, but those benefits do not come with an alimony-like floor. A society which opts for fairly applying this idea of capping the loss of trad-model marriage benefits by not only compelling divorced men to pay alimony in resources but also compelling divorced women to pay alimony in household chores would be, uh, interesting.)

Divorce sob stories are mostly just people whining because they fail to realize a fundamental and obvious truth. Divorce sucks because it is negative sum. At the end of a divorce, neither party can afford the lifestyle they could afford together.

Marriage, or household consolidation more broadly if we want to bring in things like multi-generational households or communes or whatever, are ceteris paribus positive sum for the participants. The difficulty of chores doesn't scale on a linear basis, doing better than twice as much laundry for my wife and I takes me 15-25% longer than it takes to do my laundry when I lived alone. Cooking a bigger plank of salmon or pan of chicken breast adds negligible time to my cooking prep. Before you even get into any complementarity, living together is good.

Now you take that and smash it, and suddenly both parties are worse off.

Another major thing is housing which is very hard to compensate for.

If you live in high cost of living area living alone is really expensive.

Even if both parents are working you're going to be much poorer after a break up.

You hit it on the head when you said "a single dad's romantic market value is much higher than a single mom's." The only place where this isn't necessarily the case (although, mostly still is) is in the PMC, wherein divorces are so common, along with professional single women running the household, that single motherhood is seen as no-big-deal to almost-a-badge-of-honor.

Very different situation for a working-class woman with children trying to date/re-marry.

This is another reason in favor of the theory that many products of the sexual revolution (no-fault divorce, abundant and common contraception) disproportionately benefited an upper-class that we now call the PMC, while disproportionately penalizing the working-class. You have a whole group of highly educated 1960s women who've tricked themselves into thinking they're oppressed, aided and abetted by the sexually and ethically incontinent Don Draper types. The latter now has no conflict of responsibilities in sleeping around, because the baby no longer has a say. The former can pursue endless responsibility-free self expression and simply jump in and out marriages when the flavor's gone.

All this happening just when the poor (of any color) were able to develop more solid family structures and starting to enjoy the benefits of escaping an agrarian hand-to-mouth existence. Emphasis, there, on family instead of individual.

Within a decade, it all get's ruined for them. Then, by the 1980s, those just above them (the mythical steel / auto factory workers and longshoremen types of the Rust Belt and industrial Northeast) become tragic characters in Bruce Springsteen songs because it turns out they weren't that far ahead. 2023: "Rich Men North of Richmond"

PMC people don't divorce much. You are right that single motherhood isn't seen as bad in the PMC but if we go by a comment above this may well be because two parent households are still the norm in the PMC, so the protective societal effect that single mother's children get from being surrounded by intact families lessens the negative impact of it on them.

Of course the PMC people then take this observation about how single motherhood is not so bad for them and those they know of and apply it to the whole of society, large portions of which don't have the protective societal effect, thereby promoting single motherhood elsehwere in regions less suited to handle it, leading to a twofold hit to the other sections of society, firstly to women directly who are now single mothers and wouldn't have been in the counterfactual, and then again by degrading the environment of these women so the single motherhood hurts them even more now.

is in the PMC, wherein divorces are so common, along with professional single women running the household, that single motherhood is seen as no-big-deal to almost-a-badge-of-honor.

Interesting, I'd expect the opposite: more divorces in the lower classes and more tolerance of single motherhood too.

The latter especially, since lower class people may be less likely to get married.

I'd say the difference is in perception and, unfortunately, what's termed "mood affiliation." Excuse the squishyness of my reply:

Lower class single motherhood is, now, seen as an inevitable reality and par for the course for a huge amount of young women. I wouldn't say it is "approved" of, but, accepted the same way physical injury on the job is assumed / accepted for working class men (every construction worker / roofer / tradesman who's been working longer than 10 years has a dozen scars from accidents, probably a bad knee or shoulder, and maybe some eye damage). Divorce perception is very similar; "Y'all tried, sometimes it doesn't work out. Gotta keep movin on."

Contrast with PMC divorce mood affiliation. It's usually a long, drawn out process (partially because there's more money involved and, therefore, more incentive to use the legal system to divide the pie) full of emotionalized soul searching ("how could it come to this?", "we were so in love"), followed by some semi-established period of Second Singledom (divorced dudes dating bimbo-ish ladies 20 years their junior, divorced women getting "glow ups" and having trysts with "interesting" men of almost any age. High likelihood of European or California temporary relocation), maybe followed by a second marriage (or just long term dating partner) that's really more about mutual companionship than family.

Throughout all of this, however, is the conception than the divorce wasn't a failure or an unfortunate reality of the times, but that it was simply a "stop along the way" to your truer, better, more You-er self. Going back to the idea of scars, how many pop songs and instagram poetry posts essentially say "our physical or emotional scars are what makes us beautiful!" Contrast this to the welder who can plainly state, "No, I really do wish that falling I-beam hadn't smashed off my two little toes. It hurt a lot, I couldn't work for some time, and I still don't quite walk right" or the Appalachian single mother, "It is fucking hard to feed and raise my kids without a man in the house. I do not have the time to "get an education" to try to increase my wage. My eldest keeps getting arrested but, because he's a 17 year old boy, there is no way I can physically intimidate or control him. Very few men will consider dating me because they do not want to help raise a family that isn't theirs - and I wouldn't want to do that in their position either."

Dealing with suffering and failure is part of any life. When it's your own damn fault, you ought to use it as a learning experience and an impetus to better choices and behavior. Other times, it is utterly random or, worse, cosmically unfair. That's when you exercise some sort of value/faith/anti-fragile/discipline system and decide whether or not (or how much) to descend into cynicism or existentialism or just undirected anger and frustration. Nobody's perfect or even very good at this, you just do as good as you can.

Far, far worse than any of those choices, however, is turning personal failure or even random chaotic unfairness into purely joyful and self-reverential deterministic positive affirmation. It's an insane (literally, not correctly functioning cognitive system) level of delusion that can only lead to repeated poor decision making and/or distorted risk appreciation, to say nothing of the personality and character defects it will likely nurture.

Before anyone jumps in with "but a conservative Christian world view doesn't prevent this." Yes! I agree. One of the things I detest the most about pop-culture mainline American Protestants are copes around hardship that are the same "purely joyful and self-reverential deterministic positive affirmation."[^1] You just lost your job and can't pay your bills, "The Lord is just testing me. But I know it's all part of the plan!" Maybe think why you lost the job? Were you bad at it and failing to perform? (Your fault). Has the economy taken a downturn and it wasn't your fault? That's cosmically unfair. What steps did you take to manage such a risk? Or, more forward looking, do you have a concrete plan to regain employment?

[^1]: Intra post self-quote. I am so.fucking.cool.

I think being honest about the depression bit, the huge difference is the difference in expectations that Americans tend to have, especially middle to upper class white Americans. We are often told that hard work always pays off, that college will land you a good job, and that work should be fun and that everyone gets their “dream job”. It’s fantasy for 99% of the population— increasing population, globalization, and the absolute glut of college graduates makes it ever more difficult for a college graduate to land a good paying job out of school without having really good connections and internships. So what happens when you see lots of people doing exactly what you’re being told is the way forward and struggling to make it? When you watch and read about people making $16 an hour and owing $100K, giving up on owning a home and having kids because they can’t afford it?

The difference between the narrative and reality is depression inducing.

In which case maybe the Americans should get a taste of reality and come back down to earth. Billions of people around the world would kill to be in a situation where they are an American citizen making $16 an hour and owing $100k. If these complainers had any special talents then maybe they would have a point but these people tend to be bog standard "generic human units" with nothing going for them at all.

Billions of people around the world would kill to be in a situation where they are an American citizen making $16 an hour and owing $100k.

Happiness is a function of relative status, not absolute economic utility.

For the billions around the world, $16/hour in an unglamorous job would increase their status relative to their neighbors. For an American, $16/hour in an unglamorous job feels perilously low status compared to one's (fictional, learned from advertisements and social media) neighbors. You criticize them harshly as wanting special privileges, but in their mind they are mainly seeking to clear to a respectability threshold.

The problem underlying a great many problems in society — education, purchasing decisions, family formation — is the dangerous gap between the popular perception of average and the reality of average.

One thing I always thought was pretty funny on Reddit, was the way conversations devolved into hurling insults after it was clear one side of the discussion was losing the argument.

I effectively checked out of American society a long time ago, and looked with envy to other countries that were considerably less rich (i.e. Russia, Southeast Asia, pockets of Latin America), as a place where I was happier and lived in relative conditions more suitable to my lifestyle. When it came to laying that out on the table and why other countries might have more to offer and have other advantages over the US, the mockery always ensured with, "what, you gonna' b a broke Ruski gettin' sent to the front lines of Ukraine!," to which my response was always, "... as opposed to what? Paying $4,000 a month to live in a shoebox in the progressive heartland of the Bay Area, where you're persecuted for your political views?" I'd willingly go to war for a tribe and homecoming that's uniquely absent from a homeland that willfully hollowed itself out and transitioned into becoming a marketplace.

There's more to one's happiness than money at the end of the day.

and looked with envy to other countries that were considerably less rich (i.e. Russia, Southeast Asia, pockets of Latin America), as a place where I was happier and lived in relative conditions more suitable to my lifestyle.

have you migrated to either?

It seems to me that you are shitposting for shock value. You mention paying $4,000 a month for rent, that is enough to buy a plane ticket. Note: I am not recommanding doing this.

And you mention conditions more suitable to your lifestyle, not just that you would prefer to be born there.

"what, you gonna' b a broke Ruski gettin' sent to the front lines of Ukraine!," to which my response was always, "... as opposed to what? Paying $4,000 a month to live in a shoebox in the progressive heartland of the Bay Area, where you're persecuted for your political views?"

I will take shoebox over trench, thank you. (as described, neither is nice but it sounds to me you underestimate awfulness of war)

note: I would be willing to take part in war in defence of something I value

And you mention conditions more suitable to your lifestyle, not just that you would prefer to be born there.

Seems more to me like you have a hard time comprehending that some people don't think the US is all it's cracked up to be.

I will take shoebox over trench, thank you. (as described, neither is nice but it sounds to me you underestimate awfulness of war)

I'm curious, do you think most Africans still live in mud huts too?

Seems more to me like you have a hard time comprehending that some people don't think the US is all it's cracked up to be.

No? As evidenced by fact that I am nor trying to move there.

I am just asking how seriously you believe your own claim that trench in Ukraine is superior to renting room in Bay Area.

I think you are trolling/shitposting/lying and you do not actually believe that Russia or trench in Ukraine is superior to your life in USA. But if you are taking steps to emigrate to one of places you mentioned I could admire consistency at least.

(it is hard to take seriously someone who considers trench on frontline being superior place to life in USA, even Bay Area)

I'm curious, do you think most Africans still live in mud huts too?

Construction materials used in Africa have no relation to how awful war is (especially drone/artillery flavoured trenches).

And no, I am not expecting mud to be dominating material nowadays.

No? As evidenced by fact that I am nor trying to move there.

Except for when you criticized me for "not preferring to have been born there." A statement I never made, hinted at, or even remotely gestured toward.

I am just asking how seriously you believe your own claim that trench in Ukraine is superior to renting room in Bay Area.

And I'm saying the reason you're confused is because you missed the principle the example is meant it illustrate and took the example itself too literally and ran with it.

I think you are trolling/shitposting/lying and you do not actually believe that Russia or trench in Ukraine is superior to your life in USA. But if you are taking steps to emigrate to one of places you mentioned I could admire consistency at least.

Which wasn't the point I was making.

Seems more to me like you have a hard time comprehending that some people don't think the US is all it's cracked up to be.

Still the ratio between people coming to US and people leaving speaks for itself.

Seeing people voting with their legs is about the only objective measure of oppression that exists. Genuinely oppressed people are running away from their persecutors (if they have the opportunity, most oppressed people in history had nowhere to go).

I'm curious, do you think most Africans still live in mud huts too?

Not anymore, most Africans now live in favela style housing in mega cities. Hellish by our standards, paradisical by standards of their previous village life.

Still the ratio between people coming to US and people leaving speaks for itself.

Considering it's much harder to be an economic migrant in other countries, this is unsurprising. Sounds like parasites found an easier target.

Seeing people voting with their legs is about the only objective measure of oppression that exists. Genuinely oppressed people are running away from their persecutors (if they have the opportunity, most oppressed people in history had nowhere to go).

In a country where it's significantly easier to immigrate to? This is one of the things native born Americas cite in favor of the declining QOL of this country, of which I happen to agree. It's pretty strange why I should see this as a net benefit to living in this country.

Not anymore, most Africans now live in favela style housing in mega cities. Hellish by our standards, paradisical by standards of their previous village life.

Yeah, that one went right over your head, didn't it?

If you never found your tribe and home in USA, what makes you think Russia would be any different? I can tell you from experience there isn't any more magical sovl in Russian people than the Westerners. Not obvious, at least.

Because I've got quite a good rapport and camaraderie with Russian people that I've known my whole life?

And none with Americans? Or is it that your rapport with Americans left you with the impression that they can't be your tribe?

From where I'm standing, one may convince themselves to think they're "fighting for the Russian tribe". They may even die happy. However, this worldview won't be aligned with reality.

Well let's be fair. This country gave up on me long before I did on it.

And no, I've got plenty of friends who are Americans, who are every bit as disillusioned with the country as I am. But I'm quite curious to know what the best self-aggrandizing vanity pitch for the US is, since it's one of America's favorite pastimes. I doubt it'll be any better than mine, which is also an abject failure.

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$4000 gets you a lot more than a shoebox even in the Bay area (depending on which town exactly), and it sure beats getting exploded by a quadcopter in a frozen shithole you don't care about.

The US has it's problems but contrary to popular belief you don't have to live in the Bay area. I can't help but notice that you are posting on the motte instead of sitting in a trench in eastern Ukraine so it seems you didn't find that option too appealing either.

$4000 gets you a lot more than a shoebox even in the Bay area (depending on which town exactly)...

$4,000 couldn't even get you a run down crack house in San Francisco.

... and it sure beats getting exploded by a quadcopter in a frozen shithole you don't care about.

Whoever's doing that isn't doing it right. You can live rich in a poor country or live poor in a rich country. That's if money's your only concern. There's little pride I have in being American in 2023.

The US has it's problems but contrary to popular belief you don't have to live in the Bay area. I can't help but notice that you are posting on the motte instead of sitting in a trench in eastern Ukraine so it seems you didn't find that option too appealing either.

I don't live in the Bay Area anymore. And unlike plenty of Americans, I've experienced the world, and lived abroad. The world does exist outside the shadow the mainstream media loves to cast over other nation's.

$4,000 couldn't even get you a run down crack house in San Francisco.

  1. The Bay area is not San Francisco.

  2. $4000, 1000 square feet, not a crack house. https://www.zillow.com/apartments/san-francisco-ca/one-henry-adams/9NJvHk/

Why make easily falsifiable claims with no basis in reality?

There's little pride I have in being American in 2023.

How much pride do you have in being Russian in 2023? Keep in mind you will never be a real Russian and the Russian elite is just as degenerate as the West.

The world does exist outside the shadow the mainstream media loves to cast over other nation's.

It's weird to read this when you equated the entire country to San Francisco.

Why make easily falsifiable claims with no basis in reality?

Ah. I stand corrected. I can find two, one bathroom shoeboxes for $1,000 less, right now. Further inventory is currently unavailable until later this year.

Is that better?

How much pride do you have in being Russian in 2023? Keep in mind you will never be a real Russian and the Russian elite is just as degenerate as the West.

I'm not Russian, and yet they still have more reasons to be prideful then I currently see in much of the west. And believe it or not, Russia today isn't 'as corrupt' as you think it is for the average citizen. And saying it's only as bad as the west is quite sad, truly.

It's weird to read this when you equated the entire country to San Francisco

What's wrong with placing the focus on the trendsetters of the country? Would you prefer NYC instead which is even worse?

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I think we’re mostly on the same page here. The problem isn’t necessarily the reality being horrible and tbh if you’re willing to live in a lower cost region it’s probably fine. But when you put that next to what TV told you you would have, it feels like a let down because vulture has told you lies, basically. You are sold fantasies about the world of the adult. Doing what you like, for 99% of the planet is a delusional idea because unless you are extraordinarily talented you won’t even get through whatever the front door is. The vast majority of people who want to do anything related to the arts have a hobby. You won’t be paid for it, and everyone with a brain knows it. Every once in a great while there’s a unicorn, someone who manages to break through enough to make enough to quit the day job. It’s not sold that way, but it’s true. Likewise the idea of what you will have as a lifestyle in adulthood is wildly skewed. The median income is 50K nationwide. You cannot buy a large house and take lavish vacations and wear fashionable clothing on that income.

The problem isn’t the reality. The problem is that we tell everyone that they are awesome, that they will have an upper class lifestyle, doing a job that they’re passionate about, have time off and all kinds of bells and whistles. Most people won’t even come close. And then they feel miserable because they don’t understand that they’re doing just fine. If they were sold on something reasonable (a small apartment, a shitty job, and an occasional trip to a nearby campsite) they’d probably be fine with that. But the difference between the narrative and reality (on most fronts tbh, as the guy pointed out with dating) makes reality seem terrible.

What's worse is that even if you understand it, you can't make other people understand it. I may understand that I have a great lifestyle by historical and international standards, and that even by national standards my lifestyle is at worst average. My family don't, and are disappointed that I am not the kind of average that is depicted in media. Women sure as fuck don't understand; they are resentful of a husband that does not make at least six figures and takes them out to expensive restaurants and exotic vacations.

There's nothing "American," about being an economic migrant. Very few of the people who would work hard to get here, come for the unique American identity and experience. They're seeking a material quality of life that isn't comparable to what they currently have. Those that have it where they are, don't look with so much envy to the US.

I was writing a more detailed response and I lost my comment so I'm going to summarize my main points without diving too much into detail. Lesson learned I guess to draft longer posts outside of the website...

Straightforwardly, yes. American self-reported happiness rates have been on a fairly steady decline since the 70s. With regards to women in particular, there is a phenomenon referred to as the ‘paradox of declining female happiness’, the observation that even as women have attained greater legal rights and generally been raised in status relative to men, their self-reported happiness has declined. This is often used by social conservatives to argue that women were happier as wives and mothers and that forcing them out of their ‘natural’ roles and into competition with men was a mistake.

I did talk about a possible explanation for the 'paradox of declining female happiness' but to summarize my point was that "feminism took a slice of the male population, a slice that is highly irregular, and told women that they should all be just like these highly competitive conscientious men." I don't think its any surprise that having to work a career is not fulfilling for many women. There are also many other explanations I considered "such as social media, the use of drugs and anti-depressants, the sexual liberation of women, dating and casual sex, marriage and divorce, and the decline of religion". The topic of sexual liberation of women is being discussed here so great opportunity to expand on that topic.

What about the dreaded epidemic of single motherhood? Well, as noted above, multiple European countries have single-parenthood rates (and as in the US, the vast majority being single mothers) equivalent or greater than those of the US, without the associated social dysfunction.

Can you fix the link here? Seems to go to an ancient reddit post about a hat.

There’s not as much research as one would like, but from what I have found, the children of widowed mothers do not tend to differ much on outcomes from the children of biological, two-parent households, so “growing up without a father” doesn’t seem to be that important net of other factors.

And widowed single mothers are only a small percentage of mothers, Wikipedia says 1.7%. The other categories of mothers we still see significant outcome differences. From your same source (on page 5 of the document):

Controlling for other factors (race, gender, mother’s education, year, and age), children from single-mother homes produced by parental divorce are significantly less likely than those from two-biological-parent families to complete high school, attend college (given high school completion), or graduate from college (given college entry). They hold occupations that are, on average, significantly lower in status, and they have a significantly lower level of general psychological well-being (or feeling of happiness).

In contrast, children from widowed singlemother homes are not significantly different than those from two-biological-parent families on any of these dimensions, with the exception of having slightly lower odds of completing high school. Interestingly, stepfamily formation seems to offset advantages and disadvantages associated with the experience of a parent’s death vis a` vis divorce. Respondents from both kinds of stepfamilies tend to do significantly less well, on average, on all of these dimensions

There is some additional data to consider regarding the impact fatherless homes have. Source is a right-biased group but they have kindly provided sources for their stats.

  1. 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions come from single-parent homes
  2. It has been reported that fatherless children are anywhere from 3 to 20 times more likely to be incarcerated than children raised in dual-parent households
  3. Some data suggests 72 percent of adolescent murderers and 70 percent of long-term prison inmates come from fatherless homes

There is additional research suggesting young boys fare significantly better raised with single fathers compared to single mothers. According to Dr. Warren Farrel in his book "Father and Child Reunion," "even when the father and mother had equal income, the children who were with their father full time - boys and girls - did better than those with their moms full time... a study from the Journal of Social Issues found that boys who lived with their fathers after divorce were friendlier, had a higher degree of self-esteem, were more mature, and more independent. Boys who lived only with their moms grew up to be more demanding and tended to develop coercive relationships with their mothers. At least for young boys, they do need a father (or male) figure in their lives. Obviously having both parents is even better.

What about the supposedly meteor-tier impact on the ‘sexual marketplace’? This is honestly worthy of its own post, but the short answer. Is, no, the idea that the upper 20% (or 10% or 5% or 1% depending on how blackpilled your interlocutor is) of Chads hoarding all the woman while ordinary guys starve is very thinly supported on the ground.

The blog post here is actually quite thorough and worthy of a read. It's probably the best source you've found as a counterpoint to the blackpill/doompill narrative. I will point out the data being used by the author has also been addressed by professor Nicholas Wolfinger and he says "we shouldn’t declare the sex recession over based on just a single year of data—especially a single year that relied on new survey methods—and a fairly small sub-sample of 229 respondents." Still an interesting point of discussion to consider and brings some attention to some more recent statistics/trends that I previously was not aware of.

As for the “divorce rape” the manosphere has spent the last fifteen years insisting is endemic under our gynocracy, only 10% of divorces actually result in any actual alimony paid.

I previously addressed this point when you brought up it up last time. Definitely an important statistic to consider that isn't brought up but it doesn't address the division of assets (which financially hurts men) and as greyenlightenment's response to your post points out there are other factors to consider other than alimony.

This is all besides the fact that I don't think it's POSSIBLE to retvrn because I think the massive social changes of the past two centuries are down less to the Frankfurt School indoctrinating everyone with Cultural Marxism and more to the seismic shifts in the actual underlying material basis of society, which could not be undone short of some kind of totalitarian anti-technological world dictatorship (which of course would have to make significant use of modern technology to impose itself) enforcing the law of Ted Kaczynski upon the earth, but that is another story and I am tired of writing.

I agree, I don't think it's ever possible to turn back. But I also think it's important to acknowledge the issue. I'm not sure what the fix could be, but it does seem like many people push back against the blackpill/doomerpill narrative and then deny it outright. Perhaps and likely they are exaggerating their claims but there is also an element of truth to their narrative. You can't even attempt to solve a problem if its existence gets denied.

There are also many other explanations I considered "such as social media, the use of drugs and anti-depressants, the sexual liberation of women, dating and casual sex, marriage and divorce, and the decline of religion". The topic of sexual liberation of women is being discussed here so great opportunity to expand on that topic.

Why isn't female happiness declining in Europe, where all of these same factors are in operation? The 'paradox of declining female happiness' is sometimes said to exist in Europe as well, but this is misleading, because while in the US female self-reported happiness has been declining in absolute terms, in Europe it has been declining only relative to men. Both sexes report becoming happier over the past several decades, which doesn't seem like a problem to me.

Can you fix the link here? Seems to go to an ancient reddit post about a hat.

Fixed. It's a graph.

And widowed single mothers are only a small percentage of mothers, Wikipedia says 1.7%. The other categories of mothers we still see significant outcome differences. From your same source

At least for young boy, they do need a father figure in their lives.

The question is whether the lack of a father is what is responsible for these poor outcomes, or whether it's down to confounding. The lack of poor outcomes among the children of widows suggests the latter. Of course it's not 100% positive proof, it's possible that the children of non-widowed single mothers would do fine with a father, but do poorly without one, even though the children of widows seem to do alright either way. But I don't see a better way to test this question short of highly unethical experimentation.

I previously addressed this point when you brought up it up last time. Definitely an important statistic to consider that isn't brought up but it doesn't address the division of assets (which financially hurts men) and as greyenlightenment's response to this post points out there are other factors to consider other than alimony.

I can concede that child support is a drawback of modern society for men (though it seems child support is awarded to only about 60% of custodial mothers, which while a majority, is actually lower than I expected). Overall I think pre-modern society was worse for women than modern society is for men.

Why isn't female happiness declining in Europe, where all of these same factors are in operation? The 'paradox of declining female happiness' is sometimes said to exist in Europe as well, but this is misleading, because while in the US female self-reported happiness has been declining in absolute terms, in Europe it has been declining only relative to men. Both sexes report becoming happier over the past several decades, which doesn't seem like a problem to me.

People in Europe work significantly less than people in America, so I assume women in America also work more than women in Europe. I will admit I'm speaking from a very American-centric perspective but the cultures in Europe and America are very different even if both are Western nations. It's very difficult to compare statistics across countries as it's difficult to account for the hundreds of other factors that could play a role. An analysis on a single country is easier because fewer of these factors have variance to consider (but should still be considered for an actual, statistically valid analysis). I don't know if the factors in consideration are the same and to the same degree between the European countries and the United States.

I'll check later to see if if I can find any graphs/stats but if I recall correctly it's mostly older middle-aged single women who are committing suicide the most among females in the United States. It's usually at that stage in life where if a woman has been unable to secure a partner and a family all she has to show for it is a career which as I explained in my post is not really fulfilling for many women, at least to the degree that it may be fulfilling for men.

Fixed. It's a graph.

Thanks!

It's been difficult to find similar studies of impact of single parent households in the European countries, most are based on US data, but this study has some statistics on European countries. An important caveat the study points out: "because single parents in the United States differ from their European counterparts on a variety of social and economic characteristics (Gornick and Jäntti, 2011), it is difficult to generalize from Europe to the American context." When possible, they did acknowledge/try to account "for a variety of demographic and economic variables" so, on a statistic on childhood accidents from single mother to non-single mother homes they did find that there was no statistical significance once they accounted for other factors. I tried to put below some examples below where they did not call this out:

  1. Consistent with these observations, studies have shown that youth from single-parent households have an elevated risk of being homicide victims in Sweden (Weitoft et al., 2003) and the United States (Winpisinger et al., 1991).

  2. Studies have shown that children living with single parents are especially likely to think about or attempt suicide in New Zealand (Donald et al., 2006; Fergusson et al., 2000) and the Netherlands (Kienhorst et al., 1990). A large-scale longitudinal study in Sweden found that youth (boys as well as girls) living with single parents were more likely to commit suicide than were youth living with two parents (Weitoft et al., 2003). Similarly, a study from Denmark found a link between parental divorce and completed suicide among children and youth age 10—21 (Agerbo et al., 2002). Whether a similar link between single-parent households and youth suicide exists in the United States is unknown.

The question is whether the lack of a father is what is responsible for these poor outcomes, or whether it's down to confounding. The lack of poor outcomes among the children of widows suggests the latter. Of course it's not 100% positive proof, it's possible that the children of non-widowed single mothers would do fine with a father, but do poorly without one, even though the children of widows seem to do alright either way. But I don't see a better way to test this question short of highly unethical experimentation.

I'd like to point out while the paper does say "In contrast, children from widowed singlemother homes are not significantly different than those from two-biological-parent families on any of these dimensions, with the exception of having slightly lower odds of completing high school." they used a p-value of 0.001 which is extremely robust. If their criteria was a p-value of 0.05 as is standard in academic literature it's possible the other dimensions for widowed mothers would also be considered significantly different based on the criteria as defined in the study. Look at the chart and you'll see widowed mothers have -0.19 on 9th grade completion and -0.13 on college completion relative to two-biological parents households. Widowed mothers like I pointed out earlier are a very small percentage of the population so the sample size of widowed women may also have been small enough to make it difficult to achieve the desired p-value of 0.001.

Overall I think pre-modern society was worse for women than modern society is for men.

In some metrics yes, in others worse, It's quite hard to pinpoint anything in regards to an overall evaluation but I think most people would be in agreement that modern life is better for any demographic solely due to technological advancements. Is it possible to have a society with a culture from the past with newer technology? Hard to say, considering social media and the internet have such as huge influence on modern culture.

People in Europe work significantly less than people in America, so I assume women in America also work more than women in Europe. I will admit I'm speaking from a very American-centric perspective but the cultures in Europe and America are very different even if both are Western nations. It's very difficult to compare statistics across countries as it's difficult to account for the hundreds of other factors that could play a role. An analysis on a single country is easier because fewer of these factors have variance to consider (but should still be considered for an actual, statistically valid analysis). I don't know if the factors in consideration are the same and to the same degree between the European countries and the United States.

Cross-country comparisons are always shaky, but it is at the very least clear that it's not as simple as "60s liberalism line go down."

Look at the chart and you'll see widowed mothers have -0.19 on 9th grade completion and -0.13 on college completion relative to two-biological parents households. Widowed mothers like I pointed out earlier are a very small percentage of the population so the sample size of widowed women may also have been small enough to make it difficult to achieve the desired p-value of 0.001.

Those seem like pretty small effects. But there should be more research done on this.

Cross-country comparisons are always shaky, but it is at the very least clear that it's not as simple as "60s liberalism line go down."

That's probably correct because like most things in life, reality is complex and there are likely many factors that go into play. I do think the sexual revolution did play a role but if I had to make a guess I would probably put its impact at explaining maybe at most 10-25% of the total causes that have an impact on the drop of happiness of women in the United States.

Those seem like pretty small effects. But there should be more research done on this.

Yes, it would be good to have more research on this, but I doubt there would be many studies that try to explicitly study this. Usually, anything that can produce results that can be used as a counterpoint against a leftist viewpoint of the world doesn't get produced often out of academia, because it's usually the humanities/social studies/psychology departments producing research/studies on these kinds of topics, and those departments are heavily biased towards democrats/marxists/socialists. It could also be the actually skilled people in academia are putting their efforts into researching other topics.

Did the social revolution of the 60s make everybody unhappy and miserable?

I don't care about individual level self-reported happiness. You agree with this later in your post. I care about generative social functioning in a free society.

This is often used by social conservatives to argue that women were happier as wives and mothers and that forcing them out of their ‘natural’ roles and into competition with men was a mistake.

(First of many "don't put words in a conservative's mouth" notes). No, it's not that "women belong in the kitchen." It's that life is about tradeoffs and with ability comes responsibility. Women are more than free to work the demanding careers they chose. If they find themselves in male dominated fields, they have to compete. They cannot ask for a separate set of rules. As a society, we shouldn't trade new options for old ones; being a stay at home Mom should be viewed as well as it was before, not as a traitors action to the Boss Babe lifestyle.

The problem with the “everyone is depressed and killing themselves because we aren’t based and trad anymore” story is that it doesn’t hold internationally....It’s pretty undeniable that Western Europe underwent the same social revolution as the US. On many metrics like irreligion, illegitimacy, and rates of people identifying as LGBT, what a social conservative would probably call ‘the decay’ is actually significantly more advanced than it is in the US....Yet over the past several decades in Europe, self-reported happiness has tended to either hold steady, or increase.

Apples and oranges. Europe, until the last decade, was still interconnected pockets of monocultures. The U.S. was not. Which leads me to....

What about the dreaded epidemic of single motherhood? Well, as noted above, multiple European countries have single-parenthood rates (and as in the US, the vast majority being single mothers) equivalent or greater than those of the US, without the associated social dysfunction.

Yes, because in a monoculture with massive social safety nets, it's a lot easier to comfortably raise a child as a single parent. Before the knee-jerk "well maybe american social safety nets should get larger!" Please look at real European growth rates. Socially, look at the social-mobility history of Europe vis-a-vis U.S. since end WW2. Social dysfunction is, indeed, rare when social authoritarianism and stagnancy are the rule of the day.

There’s not as much research as one would like, but from what I have found, the children of widowed mothers do not tend to differ much on outcomes from the children of biological, two-parent households, so “growing up without a father” doesn’t seem to be that important net of other factors.

APPLES AND URRNGES. Massive difference between a woman who loses her husband to unexpected death versus a woman (or man) who makes a bad mate-pairing decision early on. It's about choices, risk, and commitment.

What about the supposedly meteor-tier impact on the ‘sexual marketplace’? This is honestly worthy of its own post, but the short answer. Is, no, the idea that the upper 20% (or 10% or 5% or 1% depending on how blackpilled your interlocutor is) of Chads hoarding all the woman while ordinary guys starve is very thinly supported on the ground.

I would argue that this is a point in favor of pre-SR norms. The entire concept of permanent monogamy in marriage is that it moves past the natural order of one male impregnating a whole bunch of females. It prevents the Hobbesian state of the sexual marketplace from occurring. This stabilizes society. It is impossible (as your own statistic clearly state) to deny that the number of sexless and single men has gone up since approx 1980. I see this as a slow regression back to the wild and brutal state of the sexual marketplace.

Last year a headline proclaiming “most young men are single. Most young women are not.” went viral. Specifically, GSS data showed that 63% of young men reported themselves as single while only 34% of young women did. This was of course immediately seized upon as proof that a huge proportion of girls are in “chad harems.” Since nobody bothers to read beyond a sensationalist headline, not many dug deep enough to discover that this proportion has been roughly the same for over thirty years, so if the chadopoly is real, it’s been going on for a long time.

It has, was, and always will be real. The whole point is to minimize it.

As for the “divorce rape” the manosphere has spent the last fifteen years insisting is endemic under our gynocracy, only 10% of divorces actually result in any actual alimony paid.

Difference alimony being paid and judgement rendered. "Actually, too many dudes are too poor to pay anything. They're getting off scott free!" Isn't the counterpoint you want to lead with.

I add this cautiously, because it’s the only study I could find to treat the question, and it’s about the UK, and it’s about twenty years old, but there is at least some evidence that men actually end up richer long term post-divorce. Which makes intuitive sense to me. Most men are breadwinners, so naturally when you don’t have to support a whole other human being, you’re going to have more disposable income on hand.

I appreciate you stating your caution upfront. Single study, old etc.

If you’re a conservative, then you think single motherhood, divorce ... and promiscuity, are bad in and of themselves.

Sure do.

people being gay

("don't put words in my mouth" volume 2) Sure don't. Small-c conservatives don't care about sexual orientation at all. Sexual behavior is different, and that's independent from orientation.

the social revolution of the 60s was tautologically a bad thing since that revolution was explicitly an anti-conservative one.

Yup.

But that is not likely to convince anyone who is not already a conservative.

The SR itself, no. The 40+ years of obivous societal decay ... I'd say that's more .... convincing.

but I also don’t think there’s much evidence for “everything would be better if we RETVRNED” thesis.

Agree! Which is why I'm not actually a reactionary (despite their often above average memes). Anyone who recommends a direct, linear, return back to the actions, rituals, even dress of traditional pre-SR society is looking to break-off to start their own communitarian organization. The Amish have been owning the game on that from the jump (play on, players). What conservatives / tradtionalists today are trying to do is (1) Get people to admit that the SR was on-net bad and (2) Devise ways of using traditional / conservative values to devise ways of change for a more stable society. (In the American context, this has to respect individual liberties etc. which is why I'm nowhere near the pseudo-fascist American torysits etc.)

This is all besides the fact that I don't think it's POSSIBLE to retvrn because I think the massive social changes of the past two centuries are down less to the Frankfurt School indoctrinating everyone with Cultural Marxism.

Yep. It isn't possible to "retvrn."

...and more to the seismic shifts in the actual underlying material basis of society, which could not be undone short of some kind of totalitarian anti-technological world dictatorship (which of course would have to make significant use of modern technology to impose itself) enforcing the law of Ted Kaczynski upon the earth, but that is another story and I am tired of writing.

Conservatives / traditionalists have not provided an adequate response to technology. I will grant that. It is interesting, however, that most of the breathless "social media is the devil, tech companies are the new overlords, AGI needs to be hyperregulated right NOW!" comments find their origin the the modern liberal/progressive left.

I don't care about individual level self-reported happiness. You agree with this later in your post. I care about generative social functioning in a free society.

That’s fine. But these statistics are often marshaled to make a conservative point. That’s not to say you, individually, have done that.

As a society, we shouldn't trade new options for old ones; being a stay at home Mom should be viewed as well as it was before, not as a traitors action to the Boss Babe lifestyle.

It is an article faith among some that modern society shames or devalues motherhood, but is that actually true beyond the extent to which women’s entry into the workforce inherently devalues motherhood? I’m not sure the mass-shaming of SAHM is actually real. If traditional motherhood is viewed as inferior to being a career woman or whatever, I think that’s simply a consequence of the fact that women’s work and the woman’s ‘sphere’ in general has pretty much always been considered inferior to that of men. The ‘women aren’t less-than men, they just have different roles’ line that is common among modern conservatives is really itself a historically recent anti-feminist rear-guard action. For centuries most thinkers had little compunction about saying simply that, yes, women are just inferior to men. It’s why historically, women who distinguished themselves in primarily male fields such as science or statecraft were often lauded (often specifically by being compared to men) while overtly feminine men received very much the opposite reaction.

Apples and oranges. Europe, until the last decade, was still interconnected pockets of monocultures. The U.S. was not. Which leads me to....

So the real cause of self-reported unhappiness and suicide rates is racial diversity? That would be a different argument, since you can have social/sexual libertinism without racial diversity and vice versa.

APPLES AND URRNGES. Massive difference between a woman who loses her husband to unexpected death versus a woman (or man) who makes a bad mate-pairing decision early on. It's about choices, risk, and commitment.

Do you think it’s the case that the children of single mothers do poorly without a father but would do fine with one, while the children of widows do fine either way? That’s certainly possible, but I can’t really think of a way to test it.

I would argue that this is a point in favor of pre-SR norms. The entire concept of permanent monogamy in marriage is that it moves past the natural order of one male impregnating a whole bunch of females.

It’s debatable this is really the “natural order.” Polygamous societies are actually not especially common, even among hunter-gatherer tribes. And where they exist, they’re generally the result of male sexual preferences being enforced upon women rather than vice versa. Very few women want to be in a harem.

It is impossible (as your own statistic clearly state) to deny that the number of sexless and single men has gone up since approx 1980.

Maybe? Slightly? It’s certainly not clear there’s some inexorable trend towards mass inceldom.

It has, was, and always will be real.

It empirically isn’t.

Difference alimony being paid and judgement rendered. "Actually, too many dudes are too poor to pay anything. They're getting off scott free!" Isn't the counterpoint you want to lead with.

The number is for alimony awarded.

Small-c conservatives don't care about sexual orientation at all. Sexual behavior is different, and that's independent from orientation.

If someone is secretly homosexual but never acts on it and stays in the closet his whole life then he might as well not be homosexual. When I talk about “people being gay” I mean people being gay in a way that is apparent to you and society at large.

The 40+ years of obivous societal decay ... I'd say that's more .... convincing.

Can you be more specific?

What conservatives / tradtionalists today are trying to do is (1) Get people to admit that the SR was on-net bad

Plainly I don’t think it’s true.

Devise ways of using traditional / conservative values to devise ways of change for a more stable society.

What would this look like, concretely?

That’s fine. But these statistics are often marshaled to make a conservative point. That’s not to say you, individually, have done that.

Not the person you replied to, but really the only people I see framing it this way are afraid of conceding to their political opponents that they've been on point on a fairly pressing matter for quite a long time now.

Conservatives (and yes, I could myself among that camp) are simply 'factually correct' about the worries surrounding the SR. Ideology need not come before statistics or pragmatism on this point, it just finds itself more at home under the conservative umbrella because they're often the only side that's even willing to acknowledge it's a problem in the first place.

It empirically isn’t.

Not sure how long your time horizon is here, but he's pretty easily vindicated on this point. What's your empirical evidence to the contrary? Because it 'certainly' isn't obvious to me...

Plainly I don’t think it’s true.

Well if the Soviet Union was any indication, I don't think that turned out very well. Their SR was even more libertine than the American one was.

What would this look like, concretely?

In Iran you can get executed for adultery, so at least there's a start.

Not sure how long your time horizon is here, but he's pretty easily vindicated on this point. What's your empirical evidence to the contrary? Because it 'certainly' isn't obvious to me...

Studies that try and infer historical reproduction rates from facts about the Y chromosome have an obvious flaw: that chromosome can only be here today as the result of an unbroken chain of male reproducers. Contrast this with females who pass an X chromosome on no matter the circumstance. There is naturally going to be less genetic variation among Y chromosomes than X chromosomes because any variations from men who had only female children are not going to be present to examine, even though these males had children! So we're comparing genetic variation among the men who had an unbroken series of male children back into history with the genetic variation of women who had any children at all. Obviously there is more diversity in the latter than the former.

Right. I'm aware of over-relying too much on such aged and inferred models. But what other data is there to trust about that timeline? It's better than trusting mine or anyone else's independent and unqualified speculation.

But what other data is there to trust about that timeline?

If there's a lack of reliable data to form an estimate, then the rational response is agnosticism, not using unreliable data.

In absolute terms, sure. In a shade of gray and probabilistic sense, no. Just because some data is unreliable doesn't mean it's completely unreliable. If you can't make 'any' use of it, fine.

In this case, I think the worry is that you should expect apparent divergence between the data for the two populations (men and women) to be different because of a selection effect, so there's no reason to infer that the divergence is actually a property of the populations (rather than your samples). It's like estimating the number of bats in two forests, but measuring one forest at night and the other in the day.

APPLES AND URRNGES. Massive difference between a woman who loses her husband to unexpected death versus a woman (or man) who makes a bad mate-pairing decision early on. It's about choices, risk, and commitment.

I believe this was intentional, since it’s a better way to tease out the causal/marginal effect of divorce than looking at average outcomes.

Specifically, GSS data showed that 63% of young men reported themselves as single while only 34% of young women did. This was of course immediately seized upon as proof that a huge proportion of girls are in “chad harems.”

IIRC this phenomenon is mostly driven by, as Dave chappelle puts it ‘I don’t have a girlfriend, but there’s a lady who’d be very upset to hear me say that’(or something to that effect), not ‘Chad hoarding’.

don’t, I think there are plenty of problems in the world. but I also don’t think there’s much evidence for “everything would be better if we RETVRNED” thesis.

The norms between the two sexual revolutions are not a stable equilibrium, and no one wants to actually go back to them anyways.

And that’s the rub- there were two sexual revolutions, one in the roaring twenties and driven by courtship moving outside of the woman’s family settings, and one in the sixties and driven more by feminism and the decline of censorship. The second sexual Revolution could only have occurred in an environment where the first had happened already, and would have been driven by something if it wasn’t for feminism and declining censorship.

You can, if you want to badly enough, go back to pre-first sexual Revolution norms. It doesn’t work great for the conservative Christians who insist on calling it courting instead of dating, but probably a lot of that is because it needs to be updated to modern social technology(after all, it works a lot better for Orthodox Jews). But most people don’t want to do that, so we’re stuck where we are.

‘I don’t have a girlfriend, but there’s a lady who’d be very upset to hear me say that’(or something to that effect), not ‘Chad hoarding’.

Aren't those pretty similar categories? Guy dates two or three women casually (from his perspective), while the women each consider him their monogamous boyfriend.

I think most of the disparity between young men and women is driven by women dating older men, for what it's worth. In a highly simplified model, if women all date two years older, and you've got an age cohort that's twelve years wide, you immediately get a 17% gap, as the men in the bottom two years have no eligible partners. That does assume that men can't date women younger than 18, but it does a good job of explaining why the large gap in the youngest cohort pretty much disappears in the next youngest cohort.

Aren't those pretty similar categories? Guy dates two or three women casually (from his perspective), while the women each consider him their monogamous boyfriend.

From the little I see online, it's as likely to be "couple are dating for a few years but not living together, woman is sure this is a relationship and maybe leading to marriage, guy just thinks of it as 'yeah I'm seeing someone but we're not, like, boyfriend and girlfriend or anything'".

Reminds me of the joke, "it takes a woman to fake an orgasm, but it takes a man to fake an entire relationship."

Men will often complain that being nice doesn't land them a shot with the ladies, despite being raised with the understanding that good and ethical conduct correlates with varying degrees of success in the different spheres of life. It's a shocking revelation to most of them when they learn that not only is that not true, all too often, the exact 'opposite' of that was true.

Women on the other hand don't understand that sex isn't some kind of vending machine, wherein you offer it up to an attractive dating prospect and a relationship is expected to fall out of it. Women have sex for many more different reasons than men do, but the only valid one to be concerned with is where there's mutual attraction between both parties, otherwise it's a letdown when women give it away, only for them not to have gotten out of the act what they were trying to manipulate their partner into doing by giving it away in the first place. Mutual attraction on the other hand, satisfies both parties.

Aren't those pretty similar categories? Guy dates two or three women casually (from his perspective), while the women each consider him their monogamous boyfriend.

I think a lot of these guys are actually being monogamous, they’re just not offering the kind of commitment we associate with it.

Would it be possible for you to elaborate? Most of the guys I know who have been in such situations are only monogamous in so far as "having a sexual relationship with only one partner at a time" could be stretched to only mean "someone who does not partake in group sex."

I think there are a lot of guys who women think are in a relationship, but the guys aren't having sex with anybody else because nobody is directly approaching them, and the woman is good enough. Ironically, this is far more likely than what many online MRA/incel/PUA types are worried about, which is a chad swooping in and stealing your girlfriend via Instagram DM's or whatever.

My understanding is that it can sometimes be dicey to cross-compare happiness rates across countries due to different cultural understandings of happiness.

There are also...some important differences between European and American culture and geography. Just as a couple examples: my understanding is that part of the criticism of the Sexual Revolution (in the US) is that it expanded the sexual marketplace considerably in distortionary ways. But one would expect that this would be less of a factor in Europe due to national and language barriers that don't exist to nearly the same degree in the States. One would also expect Americans to be much better at committing suicide – it is worth asking if the decrease in European suicide rates is due to better lifesaving technology, just as the decrease in US shooting deaths is partially due to better medical practices. Of course, it's much harder to save someone who has OD'd than it is to save someone who has shot themselves in the brainstem, so suicidal Americans are, all else being equal, probably going to be more successful.

Setting all that aside, though, my superficial understanding is that Europe has always been further along the slippery slope than the United States (at least for certain metrics valued by the RETVRN crowd). I remember reading about a conversation between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Dickens where the latter said that most British men weren't virgins on their wedding night (prostitution being widespread in England, or at least in major cities at the time). Poor Ralph (a transcendentalist who had had Puritan ethics hammered indelibly into his psyche) was shocked and appalled. It seems entirely plausible that

  1. Europe has always been more sexually libertine than the United States, and
  2. ergo, Europeans are better adjusted to a sexually libertine lifestyle than Americans at any historical point

This hypothesis is entirely consistent with sexual liberation being bad or with it being good or with it being a null value - it simply suggests that major cultural changes would 1) cause distress, and 2) that society would adjust to them over time. I think that both of those seem intuitively true.

As I mentioned in the post, I don't really put that much stock in self-reported happiness rates either. But they are routinely used to demonstrate the failure of feminism/liberalism/whatever, so it's worth checking whether they support that argument, even at face value. With regards to the possibility that the European suicide rate is distorted by Europeans being worse at killing themselves and advancing medical technology saving overdoses but not gunshot suicide victims, it seems to add an extra wrinkle. "Americans report being unhappier + they kill themselves more often" and "Europeans report being happier + they kill themselves increasingly less" is suggestive.

As I mentioned in the post, I don't really put that much stock in self-reported happiness rates either. But they are routinely used to demonstrate the failure of feminism/liberalism/whatever...

What 'do' you put your stock in then? You ask me how I rate my life satisfaction in the country I live and I give you an answer, you're telling me I'm an unreliable source on my own happiness?

I wouldn't use 'happiness' alone as the appropriate barometer for gauging the health and well-being of society at large, but that's a bit of a different question. Whether or not feminism/liberalism brings happiness to a large number of women is ultimately irrelevant if it comes at the expense of some other part of society. Declining demographics, lack of family formation, dysfunctional men being raised by single mothers, sending women off to war, bending other important norms to reduce everything to a woman's private advantage, etc.; none of these are worth the cost that has to be paid, for women's fickle and relative sense of short-term happiness. It leaves 'everybody' worse off.

... so it's worth checking whether they support that argument, even at face value.

Everything's a success by sufficiently low standards, and a failure by sufficiently high standards. If running through and enumerating the long list of problems doesn't suffice in convincing you there's something rotten about the way we practice and act out the lifestyles that bring us happiness, then the only thing left at that point is to dispute the standards you bring to bear. But my reflexive reaction is to evoke Jiddu Krishnamurti's axiom on this:

"It isn't a measure of health how well-adjusted someone can be to a profoundly sick society."

Not sure how long your time horizon is here, but he's pretty easily vindicated on this point.

"More women than men have surviving descendants" is not necessarily the same thing as "more men than women reproduced." This doesn't really matter though, what matters is there's no good evidence in the modern, post-sexual revolution west for a minority of men monopolizing a majority of the women.

What's your empirical evidence to the contrary?

What's the evidence for it? As extensively discussed in the link I provided, it's not backed up by partner counts, it's not backed up by virginity rates, it's not backed up by STD rates.

Their SR was even more libertine than the American one was.

For five years in a handful of big cities, sure.

In Iran you can get executed for adultery, so at least there's a start.

Iran has a TFR of 1.7, is regularly roiled by massive anti-regime protests, and religious affiliation is sharply declining among the nation's youth. Not much of a start.

What 'do' you put your stock in then? You ask me how I rate my life satisfaction in the country I live and I give you an answer, you're telling me I'm an unreliable source on my own happiness?

Even if you take this statistics at face value, the conclusion isn't borne out, which is the point.

Declining demographics

Will be rendered a non-issue by the end of the century at the absolute latest, almost certainly sooner.

lack of family formation

What is the argument for this being a bad thing that doesn't begin with the premise, "family formation is good."

dysfunctional men being raised by single mothers

Is there good evidence for the causal impact of single motherhood on male dysfunction?

sending women off to war

This is a non-issue. Why should I or anyone else care?

bending other important norms to reduce everything to a woman's private advantage

I don't know what you have in mind here, so I can't answer.

If running through and enumerating the long list of problems doesn't suffice in convincing you there's something rotten

So much conservative critique of modernity boils down to waving one's hands and shouting, "look how horrible everything is!" with the listener left to draw the conclusion that things would be less horrible if we were more conservative. When I try to quantify things I usually find that the horrible things are A) much less bad than they're painted to be B) have no causal relation to conservativeness or C) are only horrible if you assume the conclusion that conservatism is good.

"More women than men have surviving descendants" is not necessarily the same thing as "more men than women reproduced." This doesn't really matter though, what matters is there's no good evidence in the modern, post-sexual revolution west for a minority of men monopolizing a majority of the women.

Eh, I'm not sure you read that correctly.

What's the evidence for it? As extensively discussed in the link I provided, it's not backed up by partner counts, it's not backed up by virginity rates, it's not backed up by STD rates.

Per the link I provided, historically it's been backed up by reproductive rates. Seems to me to be quite clear.

For five years in a handful of big cities, sure.

A documented case is a documented case. It's one of the things you're asking for, right? There you go... seems like you're trying to now move the goalpost.

Iran has a TFR of 1.7, is regularly roiled by massive anti-regime protests, and religious affiliation is sharply declining among the nation's youth. Not much of a start.

Okay. And? That's unrelated to what you originally asked for. I don't know what this response is supposed to make me think in light of what I quoted.

Even if you take this statistics at face value, the conclusion isn't borne out, which is the point.

And your ultimate conclusion is what? We have 'zero' data that's worth absolutely 'anything'? A hard sell if you ask me.

This is a non-issue. Why should I or anyone else care?

It's most certainly not a non-issue to those women who value their freedom and emancipation getting sent off to die for a narrow set of political interests. It's also quite hilarious that feminism's best argument for 'not' sending women off to war in bulk is the anti-feminist argument.

So much conservative critique of modernity boils down to waving one's hands and shouting, "look how horrible everything is!" with the listener left to draw the conclusion that things would be less horrible if we were more conservative. When I try to quantify things I usually find that the horrible things are A) much less bad than they're painted to be B) have no causal relation to conservativeness or C) are only horrible if you assume the conclusion that conservatism is good.

And so what should they be concerned 'with' in your view? The entire project of politics is about competing visions of society and the group trying to impose their way of life on the community. I think you're being quite disingenuous here, if you're actually suggesting that conservatives writ large should be able to look out the window and say to themselves "there's nothing else left that's worth improving, onto the next unspecified problem that has no tangible impact on the world in which we live." Because that's my takeaway from what you're saying right here:

  1. Much less bad than is made out to be.

Says you and only you. And tell me. Just how 'bad' does it have to get before you start paying attention to it? Because this kind of attitude only has you constantly putting out fires all over the place and never actually addressing the issue 'before it becomes' a problem. Society requires maintenance and upkeep, just like everything else. Civilization isn't spontaneously kicked up by mother nature every few hundred years.

  1. Has no causal relation to conservativeness

I have no idea what this even means, or why "conservatives" should care.

  1. Are only horrible if you assume the conclusion that conservatism is good.

And likewise, my previous riposte is applicable:

"It isn't a measure of health how well-adjusted someone can be to a profoundly sick society."

Iran has a TFR of 1.7, is regularly roiled by massive anti-regime protests, and religious affiliation is sharply declining among the nation's youth. Not much of a start.

Okay. And? That's unrelated to what you originally asked for. I don't know what this response is supposed to make me think in light of what I quoted.

This response is supposed to make you grasp that the most thorough effort in current times to force tradition and religion at gun point failed as thoroughly as it could fail.

Where did ayatollahs go wrong? Were they too soft, were they too concerned about human rights, should they imprison, torture and kill more?

This response is supposed to make you grasp that the most thorough effort in current times to force tradition and religion at gun point failed as thoroughly as it could fail.

This isn't true. In western society that remark is hyperbole and we all know it, because nobody here is forcing tradition and religion down people's throats at gunpoint. Do you know what kind of societies 'are' doing that? Afghanistan. Somalia. Not even Russia or China are doing what you're suggesting, and it's the latter that are facing these problems most intensely.

Where did ayatollahs go wrong? Were they too soft, were they too concerned about human rights, should they imprison, torture and kill more?

He asked what a more traditional solution sounded like. Well, I gave him one. Current trends and demographics seem to be making the case that the latter is the more attractive long-term option. The only problem with my solution isn't the content of the policy, it's that it's too piecemeal and unfortunately lacks the strength and extremism that seems necessary to reverse current trends.

This is why I've repeatedly said in this community, when nation's get caught in a death spiral like this, there's 'zero' historical evidence to suggest that they reform their way out of it. The more severe the problem becomes, the more extreme the solutions become. The more extreme the solutions become, the more unacceptable they become to the population, etc., and you end up stuck in this self-reinforcing negative feedback loop. What history suggests happens is that these nation's die off or get conquered.

This isn't true. In western society that remark is hyperbole and we all know it, because nobody here is forcing tradition and religion down people's throats at gunpoint.

This subthread is not about Western society, it is about Iran.

He asked what a more traditional solution sounded like. Well, I gave him one. Current trends and demographics seem to be making the case that the latter is the more attractive long-term option.

Iran - society with all drawbacks of modernity and none of its benefits - is not attractive at all.

If your solution is Iranian one, it is unsatisfactory.

More comments

Per the link I provided, historically it's been backed up by reproductive rates. Seems to me to be quite clear.

If, of the human population 8000 years ago, only 1 man has surviving descendants today for every 17 women, that doesn’t actually mean that 8000 years ago, only one man had children for every 17 women.

A documented case is a documented case. It's one of the things you're asking for, right? There you go... seems like you're trying to now move the goalpost.

Sexual libertinism did not cause the collapse of the USSR. Nor did it cause the famines, the mass executions, or any of the other bad things that happened in Soviet Russia.

Okay. And? That's unrelated to what you originally asked for. I don't know what this response is supposed to make me think in light of what I quoted.

It means Iran’s reactionary dictatorship has completely failed to arrest the demographic decline or general secularization of the country.

And your ultimate conclusion is what? We have 'zero' data that's worth absolutely 'anything'? A hard sell if you ask me.

The conclusion is that the data doesn’t support the thesis that the sexual Revolution was a bad thing.

It's most certainly not a non-issue to those women who value their freedom and emancipation getting sent off to die for a narrow set of political interests.

We don’t have conscription in the west so anyone, male or female, who doesn’t want to die for a narrow set of political interests can just stay home.

And so what should they be concerned 'with' in your view? The entire project of politics is about competing visions of society and the group trying to impose their way of life on the community.

Conservatives are entirely justified on rejecting the sexual Revolution based on their own conservative premises, but they have no real argument to convince anyone who doesn’t buy into those premises.

I have no idea what this even means, or why "conservatives" should care.

To simplify, the things conservatives hate about modern societ are either good or aren’t the fault of modernity/the sexual Revolution/liberalism/whatever.

If, of the human population 8000 years ago, only 1 man has surviving descendants today for every 17 women, that doesn’t actually mean that 8000 years ago, only one man had children for every 17 women.

I'm honestly scratching my head here and am wondering how you strangely seem to admit the point I'm making with simultaneously denying it's significance. I think there's some profound illogic going on here.

Sexual libertinism did not cause the collapse of the USSR. Nor did it cause the famines, the mass executions, or any of the other bad things that happened in Soviet Russia.

No single factor explanation was ever the cause for anything out there. What you do in any responsible analysis is to examine what it's contribution to the problem was. I'm granting that you're arguing in good faith here, but if it's a body of historical research that you're looking for, the work has been done. And sexual libertinism continues to haunt Russian demographics today. It wasn't responsible for the casualty rate of the Eastern Front. What it 'is' responsible for on January 5th, 2023, is privileging an independent and selfish lifestyle over the continued survival of the community you live in.

It means Iran’s reactionary dictatorship has completely failed to arrest the demographic decline or general secularization of the country.

And so you'll suggest in one breath SR played no role in weakening the USSR, but (conservative) Islamic theocracy is singularly to blame because they haven't reversed their demographic trend? Seems to not be the case in Afghanistan, which certainly isn't a bastion of liberalism in the Middle East. Wasn't the case with General Franco in Spain, certainly not the bastion of liberalism in Europe. I don't get what this is supposed to prove in your view.

The conclusion is that the data doesn’t support the thesis that the sexual Revolution was a bad thing.

The only way I see that someone can conclude that is that they haven't read the data or are indifferent to it. I think this is a good place to leave this conversation.

We don’t have conscription in the west so anyone, male or female, who doesn’t want to die for a narrow set of political interests can just stay home.

That wasn't the point I was making.

Conservatives are entirely justified on rejecting the sexual Revolution based on their own conservative premises, but they have no real argument to convince anyone who doesn’t buy into those premises.

This is exactly the attitude many conservatives have taken. It's also the same reason why religious factions like Conservative and Reform Judaism will be looked at as a historical footnote in upcoming generations. Precisely because it's the ultra-conservative ones that are reproducing themselves. It definitely isn't the alternative. Even the most cynical conservatives I've known here have told me it's a mistake to insist that their liberal/progressive political opponents be concerned with their own reproductive fall off. They'd prefer they all die off in a generation or two. I'm not saying 'every' conservative solution to the problem will be guaranteed to work. I'm saying that 'only' a conservative solution in nature will be guaranteed to work.

To simplify, the things conservatives hate about modern societ are either good or aren’t the fault of modernity/the sexual Revolution/liberalism/whatever.

If you require no further examination of data, I can see why you would support this conclusion. I see little value in continuing it. Be well.

I'm honestly scratching my head here and am wondering how you strangely seem to admit the point I'm making with simultaneously denying it's significance. I think there's some profound illogic going on here.

There are 100 men and 100 women. A a thousand years later, 50 of those women have living descendants, while only 10 of the men do. This does not mean only 10 of those men ever reproduced, it means only 10 of those men established lineages that persisted for 1000 years and were not wiped out at some point over the centuries. It does not mean that, of those 100 original men, 95 died childless.

I'm granting that you're arguing in good faith here, but if it's a body of historical research that you're looking for, the work has been done.

Having never read the book, what kind of historical data does Unwin work with to establish the sexual continence or lack thereof of pre-modern civilizations?

but (conservative) Islamic theocracy is singularly to blame because they haven't reversed their demographic trend?

I have no point except that theocracy in Iran manifestly does not keep fertility above replacement, and I only brought it up because you suggested Iranian adultery laws as a model.

The only way I see that someone can conclude that is that they haven't read the data or are indifferent to it. I think this is a good place to leave this conversation.

I spent my whole OP discussing data.

That wasn't the point I was making.

What point was it?

It's also the same reason why religious factions like Conservative and Reform Judaism will be looked at as a historical footnote in upcoming generations. Precisely because it's the ultra-conservative ones that are reproducing themselves.

If life was going to continue pretty much as it is today for the next century, then the “Haredim and Amish will inherit the earth” people might be right, but it almost certainly isn’t.

just as the decrease in US shooting deaths is partially due to better medical practices

IIRC this is as much about switching to smaller bullets(the ones progressives ostentatiously hate are actually less lethal than what they replaced, old timey criminals used sawn off shotguns, magnum revolvers and .45s. Today they use 9 mm handguns and ar-15s, which shoot smaller less lethal bullets) as it is improving emergency room medicine.

I'm skeptical. I doubt shotgun use has varied all that much, and I'm pretty sure the average crime gun has been a non-magnum handgun for the last hundred years at least. Handgun lethality has definately increased over that time, but I am pretty sure most of that lethal advantage (high-performance hollowpoint/frangible ammo, mainly) has actually seen general adoption by criminals.

I would bet that massive improvements in trauma medicine heavily outweigh shifts in weapon preference among criminals.

The archetypal "Saturday Night Special" was a shittyass .32 (or even .25!) revolver for a hundred years -- magnum revolvers were expensive and thus a good choice for Dirty Harry but not for somebody who probably needs to throw the thing in the river every so often.

was a shittyass .32 (or even .25!) revolver for a hundred years

True, but being limited to card-table guns (in a 400-dollar budget) impose 3 important limitations on the average gangoon:

  • Firepower for drive-by shootings is significantly limited; you have 5 rounds, not 32-33 (you can kind of conceal that but not really)
  • Street shootouts are more viable at longer distances simply due to ergonomics being better; larger magazines also helps with this, especially if they're heavy enough to naturally encourage a proper grip and not that one-handed sideways crap
  • Targeted hits necessitate "dump the entire cylinder and maybe not even then" tactics due to insufficient power; while .25/.32 are still plenty deadly if shot placement is questionable it's still more survivable than the same number of holes from modern expanding 9mm

The fact that it's always the Tec-9 specifically being targetted by "assault weapon" legislation isn't entirely out to lunch, because it was the first gun ever to hit the market that solved all of those issues at once for the average criminal- 200 dollars, 32 rounds, concealable enough, was completely impractical unless it was held properly, and in a caliber of sufficient power to actually take advantage of modern hollow-point projectiles (note also that the vast majority of legislation targeting this pistol came a few years before one of the most famous crimes would be committed with them, though that gun didn't really enable that crime in the same sense it did the average late-80s criminal).

Technically speaking, since the average affordable crime gun is currently either a shitty Taurus or Kel-Tec semi-auto (if you actually care about concealment) or a Hi-Point (if you don't; this is the famous "Glock 40") these restrictions did actually set the average affordable crime gun back quite a ways. The modern service handguns are generally more effective than these, but they're also twice the price on the legal market; likely more on the black market. And when you don't have 1000 dollars to your name to afford one it's essentially unattainable.

(The counterargument is that "average affordable crime gun" is also necessarily "the best self-defense option available for the poor", but reducing firepower for both criminal and poor alike is... politely, something about which bipartisan consensus can generally be achieved. More charitably, if criminals have less then the poor, who are overwhelmingly the target of criminal activity in the first place, "need" less to be on equal footing.)

The point being that swapping some five shot Webley knockoff for a Hi-Point or a Tec-9 as a common crime weapon is unlikely to have been responsible for a decrease in shooting deaths -- I think that we agree?

a Hi-Point or a Tec-9

My point is that the two are not quite the same class of weapon- I think the criminal stock of the latter ramping up may have added a confounding increase at the time it was prevalent, so a decrease after that (when the common weapons for criminals downgraded to Hi-Points instead- if you consider that a downgrade I guess, heh) might not be as completely due to modern medicine.

ar-15s, which shoot smaller less lethal bullets

ARs are actually quite a bit more lethal than their most common size of projectile otherwise suggests due to the cheapest rounds being inherently able to fragment. Those who criticize ownership of them are directionally correct they're more powerful but for exactly none of the reasons they claim.

It's not a great choice for hunting for that reason (well, that and those rounds are generally illegal to use for hunting, but for a completely different reason), since the entire goal is to preserve the body and one jagged hole is easy to cut out of meat.

For defensive applications that obviously isn't a concern, so you want a bunch of holes rather than one big hole since that increases the chance you hit something important. Machines, including biological ones, don't meaningfully malfunction until you sever an electrical connection (parts downstream stop working), a hydraulic connection (parts downstream stop working; other parts lose functionality due to lack of working fluid), or physically destroy the CPU (but only if you destroy the specific parts responsible for executing either the main program or the other two); fragmentation increases the number of holes, thus increasing the chances of those things happening. There are also vital components that run off that fluid- damaging parts closer to its source, the main pump for example, tends to break the machine faster.

Another way to increase the number of holes if you're using a thing designed to punch holes is to use a punch that can make more holes faster; if I have 17 chances to punch a 0.36" hole and 0.25s to re-point the punch vs. 7 chances to punch a 0.45" hole and it takes me 0.5s to re-point the punch (or in the AR's case, 30 chances to punch 1x 0.2" hole with 0.1s to re-point vs. 20 chances to punch 1x 0.3" hole with 1.5s to re-point), obviously more chances are better provided the hole is punched sufficiently hard to break the stuff in the target (which .32/.25 guns from 1900 are not quite powerful enough to do consistently unless you're using the "I can punch more holes" trick- shotguns with 00 Buck are ballistically identical to 10 .32s taped together so they fire all at once; #4 buckshot is identical to taping 25 .22LR rifles together in the same way- or shooting the CPU).

as it is improving emergency room medicine

Modern trauma medicine is really good at patching holes in machines so long as there aren't too many of them, the machine still has hydraulic fluid in it and the CPU isn't shot out (it's not great at fixing electrical connections, but the top half will probably remain fully functional). If a criminal is focused on body count they tend to only put one or two holes in the machines' center mass (for pragmatic reasons)- which is why doctrine for dealing with those criminals is "kill it as soon as possible" and not "wait for the hydraulic fluid of the casualties to run out" or "give the criminal time to consider shooting CPUs".

Comparing a .45 to an AR-15 (assuming standard 5.56mm chambering) isn't straightforward. The 5.56 cartridge weighs much less, but has about 3 times the muzzle velocity, resulting in cavitation of wounds. Both deliver enough force to induce shock even if they strike bone and don't destroy essential organs. Other features of the relevant weapons (e.g. carbines vs. revolvers) are much more salient than the ammunition.

Tangential: It's no longer about caliber, but about shot placement.

Stay strapped or get clapped. Don't skimp on range day. Sight picture and trigger control.

Interesting, although I am skeptical that the .223 is less lethal than a .45, and if the ".45 more dangerous than 9mm" debate had finally been concluded, I must have missed it. I definitely do not think that bullet diameter is the be-all end-all of firearm lethality (for instance, the 5.7mm proved very lethal during the Fort Hood shooting, but the perp survived 4 9mm rounds.)

I also would have thought the old timey criminals (at least in the cities, maybe not moonshiners and the like) would have been more likely to use a lower-powered cartridge like a .32 or a .380, say, 40 years ago, before the rise of the 9mm.

However I suppose it's possible that at the ranges most shootings happen, the 9mm and .223 tend to over-penetrate compared to the .45 or a magnum revolver.

I think you're right. Part of it is that Europe is both less religious and much more dense than most of the US. So there's just a lot more nightclubs, discotechs, etc in Europe that make it suited for that sort of sexually libertine lifestyle. In rural or exurban US, you often have to drive a long distance just to get to one really shitty dive bar that closes early.

How would you know whether its what you describe or just all the worst people with the worst children grouping together?

Straightforwardly, yes. American self-reported happiness rates have been on a fairly steady decline since the 70s. With regards to women in particular, there is a phenomenon referred to as the ‘paradox of declining female happiness’, the observation that even as women have attained greater legal rights and generally been raised in status relative to men, their self-reported happiness has declined. This is often used by social conservatives to argue that women were happier as wives and mothers and that forcing them out of their ‘natural’ roles and into competition with men was a mistake.

I am generally skeptical about self-reported happiness, because it’s not clear if measurement invariance holds over time. Does the question “are you happy?” mean the same thing to someone in 2020 as it does in 1970, let alone 1900?

I think a lot of this can be explained the fact people have gotten better at collecting data and or putting names to problems that have always existed . The tracking of suicides and missing persons has improved since the 19th century.

But the option exists right now for for people to dial things down, to work less, for women to stay home and to settle down, but they are choosing not to. the problem is that the returns to careerism are too high. Wages too high, standards of living too high. America has become spoiled by its success and long-standing peacetime, and I don't see this changing (Pinker is right). The revolution my have been bad in some ways, but people do not want to exit it either.

As for the “divorce rape” the manosphere has spent the last fifteen years insisting is endemic under our gynocracy, only 10% of divorces actually result in any actual alimony paid.

But it's more than that: child support, loss of visitation, and other downsides.

But it's more than that: child support, loss of visitation, and other downsides.

I couldn't find the statistics, but I don't actually think the majority of divorced couples have children.

All good things should be going up by default, as technology advances and more wealth is created. There's supposed to be more and better food, art, housing, more leisure time and so on. If life expectancy is plateauing (declining in the US presumably due to COVID), if people are getting fatter and more depressed, if murder rates are rising... that's a bad sign.

If good things are actually going down despite material improvements, then we're faced with a pretty confronting set of explanations:

  1. Are we dealing with social/political problems that are so powerful that they can overcome increasing material prosperity?
  2. Was economic growth since the 1970s mostly accounting tricks? Is prosperity actually declining?
  3. Is modernity and technological civilization actually a bad thing?

Most importantly, nobody is having children anymore. Our civilization is literally unsustainable with > 2.1 fertility and it seems to still be declining. If that's not a disaster, what is? IMO the massive decline in fertility is a direct result of the sexual revolution. There were other causes like urbanization but the sudden drop in the 1970s is staggering. It's well-established in the literature too - female empowerment, labor force participation and female education are agreed to reduce fertility. Hundreds of millions never born and a declining civilization is bad enough to condemn the Sexual Revolution, putting everything else to one side.

https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-gender-equality-lower-fertility

IMO the massive decline in fertility is a direct result of the sexual revolution. There were other causes like urbanization but the sudden drop in the 1970s is staggering.

Are you for real?

Yeah the decline in fertility can't be attributed to any single known cause, even Saudi Arabia has below replacement fertility now and they certainly haven't had a sexual revolution.

I thought that educational attainment especially on the college/university level was correlated with the decline in ferility levels?

Seems like women in Saudi Arabia are getting a good chunk of the bachelor's and master's degrees: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1195186/saudi-arabia-share-female-graduates-by-degree/

As for what percentage of the drop in fertility levels can be attributed to education that's difficult to answer. There is this study and it might have numbers in there but it costs money to access: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00324728.2022.2130965

I imagine if a woman is pursuing a university education she is also more likely to pursue a career, giving less time/effort/motivation for wanting children. There is also just simply less economic incentive to get married and have children if you can provide for yourself. Also raising children is hard work, and pursuing a career is hard work, can't imagine having to do both. It's the plight of young women today, especially given the short time window to have children.

There was no World War in the 1970s, no Great Depression. It was a time of peace and prosperity and yet fertility went to replacement and then below.

How hard is it to understand this? It's RIGHT THERE in a clear academic consensus, all these sources pointing out that female empowerment and education reduces fertility, how they observe this all over the world. There are all these charts showing what can be easily deduced from common sense - that if women are joining the workforce and higher education en masse they're having fewer children. And yet people still try to confuse this blindingly simple issue. The more empowered women are, the more they choose to do other things than having children. Broadening one's view from the sexual revolution (which neatly arrives right as the post-war baby boom ends), we can look at the whole 20th century. You have female enfranchisement happening all across the West and fertility declining. Countries without female empowerment like pre-1945 Japan lack this trend: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033777/fertility-rate-japan-1800-2020/

Man, the graph has been going down steadily for 200 years barring the post war bump.

Can you guess what it has gone down in inversed tandem with? It is not female labour participation.

The same thing goes for Japan. The fertility collapse predates liberalisation and workforce participation.

Also, why did Swedens ferility rate recover in the late 80s/90s and again in the 10s? I assure you that women didn't get less liberalised or educated, and it's not because of immigration either.

The status of women was advancing all throughout the 19th century in the US plus there are other factors involved.

The same thing goes for Japan. The fertility collapse predates liberalisation and workforce participation.

No it doesn't, go look at the graph. There's a brief fall due to the chaos of the Meiji Restoration then fertility goes back up. A fall with the Great Depression and WW2, as you (or at least I) would expect. Then it nose-dives after equality of the sexes is introduced. Same story in South Korea - static for decades under Japanese rule, then legal equality of the sexes, then straight down as the effects of that decision become clear. At the same time of course, South Korea is urbanizing. But it's not like urbanization started in 1950, that there was no urbanization from 1900-1950.

why did Swedens ferility rate recover in the late 80s/90s and again in the 10s?

At no point did I say that 100% of fertility was determined by female empowerment. There are other factors involved, the state of the economy, politics, cultural quirks and so on. What I am saying is that female empowerment lowers fertility. Speaking broadly, Sweden has empowered women and low, sub-replacement fertility, it's not a hole in my argument.

In 2022, the total fertility rate was close to the lowest observed, 1.52 children per woman.

What explains TFR declines beginning in the 18th and certainly early 19th century in some countries then?

Industrialization driving humans out of the farms and into the cities and removing the competitive advantage of having lots of kids as free labor.

Extremely high TFR was largely ascribed to the needs of labor-intensive agricultural work.

Extremely high TFR was largely ascribed to the needs of labor-intensive agricultural work.

I'd actually say the 1920s (from a modern lens) had extremely low TFR, more than the numbers would suggest. If the US had a TFR of 2.3 (2.0 in the 1930s) and was 50% rural, and rural areas were bringing up that average, then TFR in urban areas would have had to be somewhere around current South Korean birthrates.

I think we are, socioeconomically, simply returning to those conditions (even though rural areas still have more kids these days, modern TFR is by and large functionally just urban TFR, but older TFR numbers very much aren't).

I said there were other causes like urbanization above. Wars and the economic situation also have an impact. It's not a monocausal thing.

If life expectancy is plateauing

Life expectancy is inevitably going to plateau, at least until LEV.

if people are getting fatter

This is pretty straightforward. In the developed world, good-tasting food is cheaper and more plentiful than ever, and manual labor is less necessary than ever. Why would people not be getting fatter.

and more depressed

As noted in the OP, if this is a real phenomenon, it appears to be localized to the US, and not present in other countries that have experienced modernity.

if murder rates are rising

Murder rates had been falling since the 90s, prior to 2020.

It's not actually clear that everything is getting worse.

Most importantly, nobody is having children anymore. Our civilization is literally unsustainable with > 2.1 fertility and it seems to still be declining.

Worrying about whether or not there will be enough children in 50 or 100 years is like those people in 1900 who worried about the cities of the future being buried in horse manure (that's actually a myth but you get the point). The world then is almost certainly not going to look or be configured remotely as it is now.

There were other causes like urbanization but the sudden drop in the 1970s is staggering. It's well-established in the literature too - female empowerment, labor force participation and female education are agreed to reduce fertility.

For me this is an argument against fertility rather than an argument against female empowerment and education.

Life expectancy is inevitably going to plateau at least until LEV.

Why should it plateau until it goes up? Nobody expects an economic plateau before the singularity.

In the developed world, good-tasting food is cheaper

Couldn't people exercise a little self-control and buy quality nutritious food as opposed to artificial slop? I won't demand organic kale and non-GMO quinoa but what about bread, vegetables, fruit, fish, lamb... as opposed to high fructose corn syrup and mystery chemicals? The US is a rich country, it should be possible for its citizens to buy normal food as opposed to calorie-maxxing from low-quality food. Is there no money for education, no capacity to subsidize normal food, no technical capacity to distinguish between good and bad food?

If wealth naturally turns people into disgusting flesh piles dependent upon mobility scooters and diabetes medication then that sounds like an argument against wealth.

Murder rates had been falling since the 90s, prior to 2020

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Murder should've been falling consistently, not going up and down. Medicine gets better over time, more murders are turned into assaults. There's better forensics, more wealth. The US is an older country, so there are fewer young people to go around killing... and yet murder is still higher than it was in 1950 or 1960.

Worrying about whether or not there will be enough children in 50 or 100 years is like those people in 1900 who worried about the cities of the future being buried in horse manure

Yes, we may get massively transformative AI any day now. But it will be young people who make these technologies. We need young people.

For me this is an argument against fertility rather than an argument against female empowerment and education.

Well, you can argue against fertility. But those who reproduce will have the final word.

Why should [life expectancy] plateau until it goes up? Nobody expects an economic plateau before the singularity.

Because the maximum human lifespan has not been increasing, only the average. Unless something fundamental changes, life expectancy is going to plateau somewhere around a century.

Why should it plateau until it goes up? Nobody expects an economic plateau before the singularity.

idk why I said, 'inevitably,' that's not true. It does seem plausible though that we will or will soon hit diminishing returns short of some breakthrough technology.

If wealth naturally turns people into disgusting flesh piles dependent upon mobility scooters and diabetes medication then that sounds like an argument against wealth.

At least in the modern west, you can opt out of eating 6,000 calories a day, while in the premodern world you couldn't opt out of the terrible effects of poverty and disease.

Murder should've been falling consistently, not going up and down. Medicine gets better over time, more murders are turned into assaults.

I am familiar with this point, and it seems undeniable that it's true to some extent, though homicide in the 50s was unusually low even by historic standards. Though I would postulate that plausibly, this is offset to an extent by more widespread access to killing tools, since guns per capita rate has increased pretty steadily in the US for the better part of a century. I wonder how much of the rise in homicide is down to urbanization.

guns per capita rate has increased pretty steadily in the US for the better part of a century.

IIRC this is driven by a smaller percentage of the population having more of them, so it should be more than balanced out by a declining share of the population owning guns.

But it means at the end of the day there are more guns floating around, and most illegal guns were legal guns at one point.

The relationship between medicine and homicide isn’t necessarily clear cut because presumably many ‘survivors’ who return to their previous lives after being treated for gunshot/stab/etc wounds end up killed anyway. People can be ‘harder to kill’ without that guaranteeing a decline in homicide rates in very high crime communities.

The postulated tradeoffs of the Sexual Revolution, even if all the decline in reported happiness and increased suicide/depression are taken at face value and then attributed to it, are within what I'm willing to accept as a tax on my beliefs.

But what do I know? My country hasn't really had one, the norms around sex, dating and marriage in India are closer to 1950s America than they are to what's the case now or for the last half century or so. Still far more liberal than it used to be, it was nigh-Victorian in living memory.

I do not consider an increase in happiness necessary or sufficient by itself to justify any policy, even if it's obviously desirable. My preference for epistemic hygiene and clear thinking rules out any adoption of religion, and I don't deny that the religious are happier. If I was offered to be turned into a Lotus Eater or joy-wired, I would consider it a fate, if not worse than death, but close.

There’s not as much research as one would like, but from what I have found, the children of widowed mothers do not tend to differ much on outcomes from the children of biological, two-parent households, so “growing up without a father” doesn’t seem to be that important net of other factors.

Immense confounders ahoy! The genetics of the kids who are deprived of their dads because they died (accidentally or from illness) are going to be notably different from those who dads went to the corner store and never brought back the cigarettes (at least they avoided indoor smoking). Not to mention the poor taste/lack of judgment in their moms.

As far as I've read, single motherhood overall is terrible for the kids, probably even worse when you carve out the chunk who are single because of being widowed.

My country hasn't really had one, the norms around sex, dating and marriage in India are closed to 1950s America than they are to what's the case now or for the last half century or so. Still far more liberal than it used to be, it was nigh-Victorian in living memory.

Can confirm, I haven't met thirstier guys than Indians. I used to work with a bunch of young Indian men and they had a bunch of photo albums on the network share. Winter ones were the usuall assortment of "dude in (front of) a big pile of snow, dude in front of a thermometer, dude on ice skates". Summer ones? All creepshots.

There was one guy that looked like he was likely to score, as he had the looks and the confidence of a Bollywood star instead of looking like a nerd with panda eyes, but that's probably why he was recalled back to India after just a couple of weeks. Audible miring from the girls around the office must've alerted his boss, who had to protect his chastity before marriage in loco parentis.

One of the most significant differences between men and women is that women appear to able to be significantly more content and happy outside of relationships and are better able to have fulfilling platonic relationships; whereas men are both less happier and purposeful, and suffer far greater loneliness and isolation from being single. Men as a whole have not evolved culturally to the new playing field, and women are often preferring to be in no relationship than be in a bad relationship -- bad sex, more chores and less freedom. We can argue absolutely that society as a whole has left boys behind in so many ways; but the solutions proposed by the online right are more like willful regression than a genuine means to fix things.

The overall highly online right's position on these issues is somewhat incoherent. I understand of course that the highly online right is made up of many people, so a degree of incoherence is inevitable. It is hard enough for even one person's political opinions to be coherent. Yet I think it might be interesting to examine some of the contradictions anyway.

First

The highly online right-wingers maintain that women were happier before the sexual revolution and that this counts as a mark against the sexual revolution. Yet they would not judge many other social phenomena mainly based on whether those had increased happiness. These are the same kind of people who like to glorify war, struggle, endurance in the face of opposition, maturity, a cool-headed and objective look at reality, providing for the tribe, and other such stereotypically "adult man" things.

Now, when a boy grows up and stops believing in Santa Claus, and then has to go make his own living, the boy might become less happy as a result. But none of these highly online right-wingers would argue that becoming a man is a bad thing because men are less happy than boys. They understand that becoming an adult man should be judged by other things in addition to just whether it makes a person happy. Yet they are not willing to look at the sexual revolution in the same light.

Ok, so maybe (if the phenomenon of decreased happiness is even real, which as To_Mandalay points out it might not be) women are less happy after the sexual revolution. Can't this just be explained by the fact that after the sexual revolution, women have more responsibilities, are much more present in the workplace, and have to navigate a more complex sexual landscape than before? But if a boy becoming less happy when he turns into a man is not necessarily entirely a bad thing, then why would a woman becoming less happy when she goes into the workplace be entirely a bad thing that needs to be reversed? For the boy and the trad woman alike, the increased responsibilities and stresses are one price of the greatly increased power and freedom that they come into once they become men and modern women, respectively.

Second

The highly online right-wingers tend to glorify evolution and eugenics. They delight in poring over genetic anthropology theories, presenting HBD arguments, and using genetics to explain why some groups of people are more successful than others. In light of this, the idea that there is something bad about 20% of men sleeping with 80% of the women seems a bit contradictory. Isn't that just evolution in action?

"Ah", some might argue, "but it is not eugenic or good for society for women to sleep with bad boy rappers and violent criminals. That is not the kind of eugenics I favor!". Sure, I understand that point of view. But then you are not saying that there is anything eugenically bad in principle about 80% of men going relatively sexless, you just disagree about which kind of 20% men the women should be picking.

In any case, the idea that there is something bad about most men going mostly sexless sits in unhappy contradiction with the highly online right-winger's typical tendency to glorify evolution, power, and success. As usual, the highly online right is split between a craving for socialism (sexual in this case, economic in other cases) on the one hand and a glorification of power, strength, and individual success on the other.

In light of this, the idea that there is something bad about 20% of men sleeping with 80% of the women seems a bit contradictory. Isn't that just evolution in action?

You minsunderstand the point of eugenics. It's not to promote what is most evolutionary advantagious. That requires no action and no ideology. The point to improve the next generation in acordance to out values. That generally means we want them to be healthier, happier, selfless, and more intelligent. That is why people didn't want poor (which are generally lower IQ), or criminals to have children, and is the reason for the Nobel sperm bank.

That said, ofc people use this kind of thing to argue their own genes and children are great. People are universally biased towards themselves. That applies for both eugenics and intersectionality.

In light of this, the idea that there is something bad about 20% of men sleeping with 80% of the women seems a bit contradictory. Isn't that just evolution in action?

Even moreso, isn't it based on exactly nothing?

I recently saw a tweet referring to some study (I think?) suggesting that it's more like that 20 % most sexually active men have a lot of sex with 20 % most sexually active women, about 20 % of men and 20 % of women have basically no sex at all, and the rest tend to just pair up to monogamous relationships. Bit too tired to find it at the moment, though, so I'm not basing this on very much, either. However, I'm not sure I've seen anything suggesting that the supposed 20/80 ratio is anywhere close to reflecting reality, even among the younger age classes.

I think it's just people generalizing their localized experiences and you're probably right that there are no research/studies/analyses that show that literally 20% of all men are sleeping with 80% of women.

That 20/80 ratio or the sentiment around is probably more grounded in reality if you localize to something like online dating (which is only has a small subset of the population) or perhaps specific dating scenes.

For example, if you look at Tinder, "it was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.". Of course, Tinder is not representative of men and women in general, or even dating apps in general but it is one of the most popular ones out there. There is also a similar analysis on Hinge which found that "the bottom 50% of men combined, which represents 1/3 of the total Hinge users, only receive 1% of the total likes." I also remember reading similar discrepancies in data from OK Cupid but I can't find the exact article right now. So at least in the world of online dating, there are big winners and losers amongst men.

There are some studies on the human genome that suggest that throughout human history, more women reproduced than men. I've heard some ratios around before like 80% of women and 40% of men, or twice as many women as men, but I skimmed through the study and I couldn't find the actual author make those specific number claims, only that "these results are most consistent with a higher female effective population size." So some evidence more women reproduced than men, but in terms of the ratio it's hard to say. There's this other study saying 8000 years ago 17 women reproduced to every 1 man, but that's 8000 years ago when civilization did not even begin to develop.

If you look at more modern data, though, roughly 80% of both men and women reproduce. Monogamy has become the norm and as a result, it's not surprising roughly equal numbers of men and women are reproducing. It is only data up to 2010 though and data strictly on reproduction and not on dating/sex, so maybe the tides are changing. I feel like the idea of polygamy/cuckoldry have entered the mainstream consciousness more in recent years, and there is also the idea of women setting for men they didn't want when they were younger as they become older and have fewer options.

Also, something to consider, it's likely that the people you'd want to date/marry are already out of the dating market (because they can easily find a partner). In other words, the people you come across often who are single/available are likely heavily skewed towards the type of people that are not desired in a relationship. So if you're actively dating and trying to find someone, on average the people you meet are worse than the average person because all the suitable partners are not part of the potential partner population anymore. This can lead to an incorrect conclusion about the population as a whole.

In other words, the people you come across often who are single/available are likely heavily skewed towards the type of people that are not desired in a relationship. So if you're actively dating and trying to find someone, on average the people you meet are worse than the average person because all the suitable partners are not part of the potential partner population anymore.

This is the inescapable factor about the dating market that really blackpills me.

The worse-than-average partners are the ones you have a higher-than-average chance of encountering on a randomly selected date. The more you try to filter these people out, the more incentive they have to bypass your filters. And thus the more they color your perception of what the potential options out there are 'really' like.

And I've seen it play out myself. Almost all my close friends have been married (seemingly happily) around 10 years now, and they're all great people and great partners... and they all got married (and dropped from the dating pool) during or shortly after college, which means the people who are left as I've gotten older are the ones who DIDN'T get married or couldn't maintain it.

Which is to say, people less suited to relationships in general.

Yes, it’s categorically untrue that there’s any data that suggests that a small number of men are sleeping with ‘most women’, let alone 80% of them. Any suggestion as such is a misinterpretation of studies that say nothing like it.

Happiness is a good thing it's just that other things may be important at any given time. It's not bad for a 35 year old man to be unemployed and living in his mom's basement because it makes him happy, it's bad because he's not fulfilling his responsibility to help support the household and he's missing the opportunity for the longer term and more fulfilling happiness he would get from building a life.

If a the sexual revolution made women shirk their responsibilities (to start a family) and it also made them less happy then that's double bad.

I freely accept that the 80/20 split is in of itself not a bad thing (for a western atomised society), what's bad is the traits currently being selected for by women. Men, like all humans, respond to incentives, and what women are incentivising men to behave like to get short term casual sex (which men value higher than women, and it's men's value system that determines how they behave, not women's), is not a good thing. I'm not talking about the long term genetic impacts, that happens over too long time scales to really matter, I'm talking about short and medium term social impacts on society.

In fact the biggest issue with that split is that men are more violent when they have nothing to lose, so society needs to give them something to lose if they behave badly (this can be stuff as simple as skins in their favourite video game). Alternatively you change the societal gender ratio to be more like that of a beehive by gestating 4 female embryos in an artificial womb for every male birth. If women can do everything men can then workforce wise this shouldn't be a societal issue.

Alternatively you change the societal gender ratio to be more like that of a beehive by gestating 4 female embryos in an artificial womb for every male birth. If women can do everything men can then workforce wise this shouldn't be a societal issue.

A brilliant troll for sure. But unfortunately most necessary work outside the household is done by men. To a rounding error, all dangerous work is done by men.

Men are just as culpable for incentivizing women to behave in this way by simpishly responding to and validating said incentives, enabling this kind of dynamic

How? Jane says to John "John, you're so bad boy, come and fuck me". John declines and does not respond. Jane finds another bad boy to have sex with. Dynamic continues.

What incentives are placed upon men to control women's behavior, short of using physical force? Without that, men neither have the obligation nor ability to incentivize them to do much of anything in the sexual realm, because women are the ones who make the choices on who to sleep with, not men.

I totally agree with women here that no relationship is preferable to a bad relationship - but not everyone will have had such an experience to learn such a lesson first (or second) hand.

Agree to disagree I suppose. I've observed nothing but the exact opposite of this my entire life. But then again, a man and a woman will hear this quoted statement in two completely different ways, which privileges only my side of the argument.

The only 'pain' a woman truly endures in a relationship is being with an undesirable man. I remember observing in PurplePillDebate on Reddit, a woman who said that if all men want sex, they might as well pick a man they're sexually attracted to, since an uglier man is no different on the inside, and he can't hold a woman's desire in his appearance; and that comment was catapulted to the high heavens by other women. Unbeknownst to them, it was the sweetest vindication of everything the Manosphere had promulgated. It's a view that says: don't worry about being physically and emotionally abusive to women. They'll look past and forgive every sin you commit against them, except for the sin of being unattractive. I.E., the content of your behavior truly doesn't matter to them. To one man, the man that would beat or slander or rape or otherwise abuse your sister in a relationship is a 'bad' man. To her, it's negotiable if he's attractive.

Women don't understand male sexuality. For all intents and purposes, 'all' men want sex. Those who don't can be written off as atypical outliers for one reason or another. A woman who wants a man that 'doesn't' want sex, effectively wants another girlfriend of hers. An accessory to her lifestyle. A therapist she can vent to. A workhorse to fund her expensive tastes. They can't respect male sexuality in it's own right and see it as a mutually beneficial exchange. A man that sexually desires a woman, desires 'her', specifically. It's not a proxy for satisfying some other need, because men have sex for one reason, and one reason only; and that's to get off. Women have sex for many different reasons, and different men serve different purposes in a woman's life. That's the task for men to understand, and to not let themselves get subordinated to a woman's interests.

Small note on happiness surveys. I do they they can be useful in principle. I couldn't get the archived WaPo article to load so I found a 2017 longitudinal Gallup article, with some more granular data.

TLDR: since 1950 roughly 94% of of Americans said they were "very" or "fairly" happy. There was a slump and rebound centered around 1990 +/- 4 years. The final gradual slide to began around 2007, sinking to the 2019 all time low of 86%.

2007/08 seem to be where the interesting things began. People didn't get unhappy everywhere. Basically, post 2007 non-whites became far less happy (-13), HS or lower education (-10), and Democrats/Independents (-6).

atomized gay atheists

Homosexual behavior is more prevalent in the US for some reason. Also true for LGBT identification.

Determining the number of men who have ever had sex with another man is difficult. Worldwide, at least 3% of men have had sex at least once with a man.[9]

In the U.S., among men aged 15 to 44, an estimated 6% have engaged in oral or anal sex with another man at some point in their lives, and about 2.9% have had at least one male sexual partner in the previous 12 months.[10]

Here you can see multiple European countries with rates of LGBT identification higher than or equal to those of the US.

What are the numbers on homosexual behavior in Europe?

Well, consider me blackpilled and my motivation to learn Russian increasing by 20%. Most of it is identification, which is pathetic.

What are the numbers on homosexual behavior in Europe?

Really hard to find, google scholar is absolutely swamped with STI cases when I try to search for it. Found this but it's not very helpful with absurd ranges etc.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2576725/

HIV is lower though, apart from Russia where it spreads a lot among addicts.

https://www.cdc.gov/travel-static/yellowbook/2014/map_3-07.png

You are comparing the US to countries were homosexuality is forbidden, sometimes leading to death penalty, while the original comparison was with Europe

This is all besides the fact that I don't think it's POSSIBLE to retvrn because I think the massive social changes of the past two centuries are down less to the Frankfurt School indoctrinating everyone with Cultural Marxism and more to the seismic shifts in the actual underlying material basis of society

Plausibly.

But, also, it isn't going to work very well over long periods of time for fertility to continue declining. Now Mexico is below replacement. Land of the large, warm Catholic family. Something will likely have to shift again within the next generation or two. Perhaps more work from home situations for women? That's a longstanding solution. More public disapproval of childless women in their early thirties seeking approval through work, going out, and going on adventures? More support for young parents? The current state is not stable, and is already tending toward regret for many.

It's a self-solving problem. The deeper the lack of parenting drive across society, the more parents are likely to notice and make connections.

'60% of women who go to college never have kids? 80% of women who graduate with a gender studies degree never have kids? 73% of women who attended more than 5 years of public school have fewer than 2 kids? Well I want grand-children so I know what I need to do'

Mexico is secularizing fast, and IiRC data from Europe shows us that Catholicism tends to drive down promiscuity levels but doesn’t necessarily boost the birthrate unless everyone’s married, which is not the case in Mexico.

Iran & Saudi Arabia are having big drops in fertility. The only places that aren't are Israel (who has a national story about being attacked on all sides) and some very poor African countries. That's it.

You can educate women + have accessible modern medicine or you can have high fertility. That's it. It's not society or anything else, it's that it turns out the number of women who become even mildly educated and want to have lots of children isn't that large.

I wonder if it's the education, or just keeping a closer watch on teen girls? As I understand it, a huge chunk of the fall in fertility rates comes from fewer teen pregnancies. Those aren't highly educated career woman choosing whether or not to have one baby, they're 14 teen year olds having multiple babies because they're bored and making impulsive decisions.

I mean, that might explain the drop in rural America (along with longer-acting contraceptives like IUD's and shows like 16 & Pregnant), but not in other previously less-educated countries. I realize there's a meme in communities like this that education is just signaling and OK, fine, I'll believe you when it comes to high-level college education and such if it'll help you listen to my point, but on the lower levels, no access to it is pretty impactful.

I guess my point is, it's not a tension between higher education and fertility. It's between lower education and fertility.

One possible compromise would be to offer a sort of Amish Rumspringa where teens are allowed a lot of freedom to run around and find themselves, combined with a strong welfare state that pays for childcare and also free higher ed. Plus make it easy to get into universities even if you've been out of school for a while.

One possible compromise would be to offer a sort of Amish Rumspringa where teens are allowed a lot of freedom to run around and find themselves, combined with a strong welfare state that pays for childcare and also free higher ed.

Even better compromise would be burn to the ground the scam called "higher ed" and liquidate academics as a class.

The Plagiarism War Has Begun: Claudine Gay was taken down by a politically motivated investigation. Would the same approach work for any academic?

Good question, only way to find out is to try.

Time to sharpen the scalping knives and get to work.

As far as can be told, that explains most of the drop in fertility in Latin America.

I suspect that there was a near zero contribution of unmarried teens to Iran and Saudi Arabia’s birthrates.

because they got married after getting pregnant, not that they never (in the past) had unmarried sex

In Iran and Saudi Arabia? You are aware that these are not just sand Alabama, right?

Yeah, taxing the childless or atrificial wombs being used by the state to raise the next generation are basically inevetable. People also really liked smoking 70 years ago, but through taxation and shame we got them to cut down on a destructive behaviour. We can do the same here.

Except, even a lot of smokers were disgusted with being smokers before there was much social pressure at all. Considering more and more people are childless, and most of that is choice, going to be kind of hard to get people to tax themselves to help people they largely politically disagree with happier.

Someone tell me if my intuition is completely off here:

Could it be that the traditional, pre-1960s lifestyle (single earner household, woman takes care of the home and raising kids, man makes all the important decisions etc.) is more able to adapt to different economic environments?

You can live this lifestyle when fabulously rich as is demonstrated by any number of "old money" type families. But you also see the poorest people on the planet live like this. Yes you have less total income compared to two people working full time but that is not factoring in children. In agrarian societies children are an economic bonus pretty early on, so you benefit from being able to have a constant stream of kids that are getting raised and can then contribute to the family farm. In modern society children don't work but children in households where both parents work full time accrue significant costs for nannies and other services. Whereas if there is a stay at home (or part-time) mom in the picture children are much less expensive and in many european countries the state will offset the difference in income. So if we accept that children are a necessity the traditional family copes better when income goes down.

Meanwhile the modern, atomized, atheistic, gay lifestyle also works wonderfully when you have loads of disposable income and time. You can have a rich social life, decadent parties even while being a single parent, at least in theory. However if there is an economic downturn and you suddenly can't pay your nanny anymore and you don't have enough free time and money to go out to socialize and keep your status high... You quickly become lonely, overworked, miserable and a bad parent to boot. The couple with two full time workers can adapt by having the woman give up her career (realistically) as soon as she produces more value for the family when she stays home vs when she works and has to pay for a nanny, cleaning person etc. But the single parent really is screwed.

Specifically, GSS data showed that 63% of young men reported themselves as single while only 34% of young women did. This was of course immediately seized upon as proof that a huge proportion of girls are in “chad harems.” Since nobody bothers to read beyond a sensationalist headline, not many dug deep enough to discover that this proportion has been roughly the same for over thirty years, so if the chadopoly is real, it’s been going on for a long time

When I looked into this, I found that, across all age groups, the implied number-of-non-single people was roughly equal in both sexes. This strongly suggests the factor driving this are a large number of younger-woman-older-man pairs.

I'm more than open to the possibility of this argument being true, but there's a single big sticking point which can't help but come to mind - the nature of migration to European states and how that changes the statistics. Are you able to provide statistics tracking these changes over the same population, and analysing migrants and their children separately? It seems like you'd very easily be able to cover up the increase in misery if the new migrants are are happy enough (and to my knowledge, a lot of them are substantially more happy in Europe than in their previous homes).

No, I would not have any idea how to find that information. But I don't see why foreigners would mask the effect in Europe but not the USA. And if modernity is making people depressed, why would it not have the same impact on migrants from more 'trad' societies?

And if modernity is making people depressed, why would it not have the same impact on migrants from more 'trad' societies?

Mostly because they grew up in a place with much less comfort, pleasure etc, and the differential of moving from a third world country to Europe would be huge. We tend to be happy based on relative changes, not absolute.

Last year a headline proclaiming “most young men are single. Most young women are not.” went viral. Specifically, GSS data showed that 63% of young men reported themselves as single while only 34% of young women did. This was of course immediately seized upon as proof that a huge proportion of girls are in “chad harems.” Since nobody bothers to read beyond a sensationalist headline, not many dug deep enough to discover that this proportion has been roughly the same for over thirty years, so if the chadopoly is real, it’s been going on for a long time.

Not sure I'm following. If the claim is that the sexual revolution made the chadopoly worse, why does the fact that it's been the same for over 30 years refute this? Examining the period from 1986 does nothing for this, either way you look at it. We'd have to examine the rates over the period from like 1950 through 1990 or something, because that's when the sexual revolution happened, so you'd have a before rate and an after rate.

Generally the claim is that it's been "super-charged" as of late because of dating apps and our ever-worsening gynocracy.

But I'm just saying that if I'm reading your original post correctly, the main thrust of it is that the sexual revolution didn't have terrible effects on society. I guess I was thinking that the paragraph I quoted above was meant to be in support of that thrust. But that doesn't make sense to me, since examining the period from 1986 until now tells us nothing about whether the sexual revolution exacerbated the chadopoly. I'm probably just misunderstanding your post, with regard to how that datapoint you bring up is supposed to fit into your main thesis.

I guess it just doesn’t seem plausible to me that all of the exacerbation in sexual inequality would have taken place immediately in the first decade or two following the 60s with little to no change afterward.


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