site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26862 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom New Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The coming Ukraine/Russia baby boom?

There's a theory that one part of falling fertility is female hypergamy. Since my spellchecker is underlining that word, I'll define it like this:

Female hypergamy is when women seek to marry "up", either into a higher social class or to a mate who is superior to them.

It's harder than ever for women to marry up. Modern femininist societies devalue male traits such as stoicism and aggression but highly value female traits such as conformity and self-control. As a result, women's status relative to men has risen greatly. This has the side effect of making most men undesirable to most women.

You know what raises the status of men? Fighting in wars. It's no secret that women love men in uniform. And many will confess to being aroused by male violence. For better or worse, violence raises male status.

Nearly all nations had a baby boom after WWII. And this wasn't merely making up for lost time. In the United States, the fertility rate peaked at 3.74 children/woman in 1957. Even Russia had a fertility rate near 3 despite a ridiculously lopsided gender ratio where more than 80% of men born in 1922 didn't survive until 1946.

So anyway... I predict that Russia and Ukraine will experience a similar (but smaller boom) in the decade following the end of the war.

There was also a baby boom in countries like Sweden and Switzerland that stayed neutral.

Interesting. Definitely less pronounced but still very much a boom. Any thoughts on why?

Making up for lost time and brighter expectations of the future I'd imagine.

It's not like the war period was good to Sweden or free of stress and worry, Sweden was both economically depressed and cut off from much trade. It was the post war period with intact industry and great demand for both raw materials and goods that was good.

All status isn't relative to the people around you at a given moment but also to what people have previously experienced. If tides are rising quickly then almost everyone is going to be perceived as higher status than before.

This is something like the third time someone has said something on this site that has made me want to link a sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Sound only to find it's not on youtube...

They did a sketch called Switzerland During the War Years or something and it's a faux-documentary about the hardships experienced by Switzerland during the war. Someone complaining about the horror of running out of space in the attic for looted treasure received from trading with Germany. You get the idea.

Not sure how fair an assessment that is, but that's comedy for you.

Everything is relative of course but there was rationing in Sweden during the war, even for basic things like food.

I wonder if that was actually good economic policy, or if it was one of those things that sounded good but actually made things worse for everyone, like price controls.

If there's not enough food coming to your country due to external factors then you basically have to ration food or you start getting starvation and mass deaths.

Or how Finnish TV put it in 90s.

The baby boom really defies easy explanations. In many countries it didn't even really peak with the immediate post-WW2 period but around the late 1960s - the UK, for example.. "A combination of sustained economic growth, hopeful prospects for the future and a strong family-based culture" would probably be the best explanation, since all of those are cultural trends that would cover all of (Western, perhaps in some ways even Eastern) Europe at this time - around the 70s you really start getting the fear of nuclear war and environmental crisis, societal atomization, and the waning of immediate post-war growth period in.

Yeah, it might be that rising expectations (off a low baseline from the Great Depression and WWII) could explain part of the boom in Western countries.

The baby boom is pretty well explained- working and middle class male incomes skyrocketed after the war at the expense of upper end incomes, and the best way for women to get in on this was marriage, which then leads to babies because within-marriage fertility rates are universally much higher than a society’s general fertility rate. Sexism was absolutely a load bearing part of this and a shrinking income gap was part of what ended it.

Something really interesting to me, in a casual way, is that we don't see extremely different cultural and historical trajectories between countries that were involved in WWI and WWII in Europe and countries that weren't.

Something really interesting to me, in a casual way, is that we don't see extremely different cultural and historical trajectories between countries that were involved in WWI and WWII in Europe and countries that weren't.

I can't speak about Switzerland but while Sweden was officially neutral it was far from unaffected - the Nazis were very interested in the country's natural resources and there there was also a lot of Nazi transit through Sweden between Germany and Norway.

There's also the fact that sharing a continent with countries that overwhelmingly were actively involved in the conflict means you probably get swept along in whatever cultural changes the rest of them experience.

There are at least 6 million refugees and the overwhelming majority are women and children. Even if the fertility rate goes up there are going to be far fewer women of child bearing age left. Some will come back but that portion will only drop with time as they put down roots abroad and the situation in Ukraine deteriorates. I think Ukraine is screwed in the long run. The EU no longer has the economic vitality to build them up like they did Poland.

Good point. If the refugees don't return (and they never do these days) then there will be a surplus of men, and male status will remain low.

And I suppose I neglected something else as well. Status is now trans-national. So, if migration is allowed to happen, Ukrainian men have to compete with German men too and won't get the same status bump.

A good metric is the wars in the balkans in the 90s. 2/3s of those who fled stayed and 1/3 returned home. It is likely the numbers will be similar for Ukrainians who fled west. For the several million ethnic Russians who have moved to Russia it is unlikely they will return.

Ukraine's demographic pyramid says no

The future of Ukraine is Somali and Bangladeshi migrants working on farms owned by American financial institutions and managed by HR women educated in the US. Most likely the migrants will actually find their new homeland less enticing to have children in and probably will have fewer than migrants in western countries.

As for Russia the number of Russian men who have served is far below WWII levels. There might be a small effect, but I doubt it will be significant.

By baby boom I meant fertility rate will increase.

Low bar when it's already in the gutter and has been for years.

Between this, and the comment below pointing out how most women of child bearing age have fled Ukraine, the outcome seems obvious. We pressured Ukraine into committing suicide. There won't be a Ukraine in 50 years. It will be an economic zone virtually devoid of native Ukrainians. If the world is lucky, it will be relatively well managed by Russian interest (minus the obligatory corruption, not like that is anything new in Ukraine), and mostly function as the bread basket of Europe same as it used to. If the world is unlucky, it will get flooded with sub room temperature IQ migrants by neoliberal NGOs and utterly cease to function in any recognizable fashion.

But the Ukrainians are over. The only question in 50 years will be, who was morally culpable for the genocide? Russia for starting the war, or the US for not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace back when their demographics would merely decline slowly, as opposed to fall off a cliff? If NATO had been hands off and Russia had won the war, there'd probably be more Ukrainians in 50 years than there will be now. I doubt there will be a million in 100 years.

the US for not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace

To what does this refer? It seems to me that the Ukrainians are no more eager for a negotiated settlement than the U.S. is. Now, it might be in their national interests to negotiate a peace, but they still have to want it to go down that route.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/05/06/boris-johnson-pressured-zelenskyy-ditch-peace-talks-russia-ukrainian-paper

The Ukrainian news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda reported Thursday that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson used his surprise visit to Kyiv last month to pressure President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to cut off peace negotiations with Russia, even after the two sides appeared to have made tenuous progress toward a settlement to end the war.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/diplomacy-watch-did-boris-johnson-help-stop-peace-deal-ukraine/5792502

“Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement,” wrote Fiona Hill and Angela Stent. “Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”

The news highlights the impact of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s efforts to stop negotiations, as journalist Branko Marcetic noted on Twitter. The decision to scuttle the deal coincided with Johnson’s April visit to Kyiv, during which he reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to break off talks with Russia for two key reasons: Putin cannot be negotiated with, and the West isn’t ready for the war to end.

https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/01/did-boris-scuttle-talks-between-ukraine-and-russia/

Yet according to Ukrainska Pravda (a pro-Western newspaper in Ukraine) pledging support wasn’t the only reason for Johnson’s visit. “Sources close to Zelenskyy” told the newspaper that Johnson was an “obstacle” to peace talks because he’d brought “two simple messages”.

The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not. Johnson’s position was that the collective West … now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that here was a chance to “press him.”

Fast forward to August, and an article in Foreign Affairs by the self-described Russia hawk Fiona Hill claims that April’s talks did yield a “tentative” agreement:

According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.

In the end, of course, no such agreement was reached. But the timing suggests it was Johnson’s visit that scuppered the talks.

Boris Johnson is the UK, not the US. The US has been lightly pushing for peace behind closed doors for a while now.

Also, encouraging war from one head of government is very different from "not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace". Total motte and bailey here.

I haven’t seen anything specific but based on Biden not sending more equipment it seems true. They will blame the GOP for not passing bills but supposedly he’s had plenty of authorization.

Setting aside that you confused two different countries in two different hemispheres with over 200 million population difference, your own article has the slight issue with ignoring some inconvenience context- like the numerous Russian demands that were rather obviously not close to being agreed to.

For example, terms like what Ukraine could defend itself with if Russia launched a third continuation war-

The draft treaty with Ukraine included banning foreign weapons, “including missile weapons of any type, armed forces and formations.” Moscow wanted Ukraine’s armed forces capped at 85,000 troops, 342 tanks and 519 artillery pieces. Ukrainian negotiators wanted 250,000 troops, 800 tanks and 1,900 artillery pieces, according to the document. Russia wanted to have the range of Ukrainian missiles capped at 40 kilometers (about 25 miles).

-or who the question of security guarantors for Ukraine in lieu of NATO-

Other issues remained outstanding, notably what would happen if Ukraine was attacked. Russia wanted all guarantor states to agree on a response, meaning a unified response was unlikely if Russia itself was the aggressor. In case of an attack on Ukraine, Ukrainian negotiators wanted its airspace to then be closed, which would require guarantor states to enforce a no-fly zone, and the provision of weapons by the guarantors, a clause not approved by Russia.

In other words, Russia was perfectly willing to accept a peace in which Ukraine dismantled the military that had just stopped it's advance, Ukraine limit itself to being unable to hit back to any significant distance against the extensive Russian use of long range fires, and so long as Russia could veto any external support to Ukraine in case it invaded a fourth time.

Truly, the Ukrainians and Russians negotiators were close to the same page.

Now, there might also be the minor factor that the negotiations in March and April coincided with the discovery and spread of awareness of the Bucha Massacre following the Russian retreat from Kyiv, which might have shaped Ukrainian perception on the trustworthiness of the Russians to bide by a deal and willingness of the public to accept.

Or, alternatively, the Ukrainians lack agency, and the UK-US-ians are to blame.

But my money is that history will remember that the people who launched the war of national destruction, on claims that there was no Ukrainian nation, who went prepared for mass graves and torture chambers and kill lists, and who deliberately attempted to trigger humanitarian crisis of winter power outages and mass floodings and endangering nuclear reactor plants... I suspect they'll be the one blamed for any genocide they cause.

The history will do so iff the GAE wins, which it without a doubt will, because it is invincible, from now and to the end of the human history. I hope I won't wake up tomorrow.

GAE

This acronym is impossible to take seriously. It's like if the dissident right came up with some acronym that spelled HOMO, then told you to "fear the HOMO".

While not strictly an acronym, this already exists as the short form of "global homogeneity/homogenization". It is used in the same way for the same reasons.

t will get flooded with sub room temperature IQ migrants by neoliberal NGOs and utterly cease to function in any recognizable fashion.

No, it will not. Ukraine is the poorest country in Europe for the foreseeable future- it was before the war, and getting bombed flat didn’t help. It’s poorer than South Africa. Even third worlders do not want to live there, and if forced to- well, they’re third worlders, they can walk from there to a nicer country- which is such a low bar to clear that it includes the entirety of the balkans. Notably, Romania and Bulgaria, which are both several times wealthier than Ukraine, have functionally no third world migrants.

You have to be at least as wealthy as Mexico or Russia to attract migrants. Ukraine is as poor compared to those countries as they are to the US and Germany.

My uneducated question to all this is - dude, why does Russia want Ukraine so bad if it was poor before and it's even poorer now? That's like China absorbing North Korea, isn't it? How is this not a net loss for Russia? They spend a bunch of money, catch a bunch of sanctions, kill a lot of people, and get a crappy broken country when they inevitably win.

The rational thing for Russia to do would be to not invade Ukraine, but for regime-legitimacy reasons they’re kinda committed to winning the war.

I think this comes down to the neoliberal obsession with GDP. It completely obfuscates strategic importance and control. It's the sort of myopic focus that allowed us to outsource critical infrastructure to China, and then we got bent over when COVID hit. Because to the neoliberal, if number goes up, who cares who controls a thing? Money is power, not actual physical possession of a strategic resource... right?

Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe. It's coast are Russia's only warm water port. It's an important strategic buffer between Russia and keeping their enemies less than 2 hours away from their capital. How "poor" Ukraine is, however shitty their stock market is doing, however bad their GDP is changes none of those fundamentals.

Russia itself was mocked as being a third world country with a gas station. That hasn't exactly aged well.

Russia itself was mocked as being a third world country with a gas station. That hasn't exactly aged well.

It was mocked as a gas station with nukes. Nobody ever said Russia couldn't be dangerous if it wanted to.

My recollection is that one person mocked Russia as being a gas station, and a second person mocked the first saying it was a gas station with nukes.

Sadly my memory has rotted to the point where I can't recollect whether it was Obama directly who was person one, or a surrogate/policy expert of his. Likewise I can't recall if person two was Romney/McCain or other person in their orbit.

Alas.

"Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country" was McCain's version. I'm finding claims that it was Romney who turned that into "gas station with nukes", though not particularly mocking of McCain, and that Obama's contribution to Putin's seething was to call Russia "a regional power".

Although, apparently this sort of metaphor is way way older than that. "Upper Volta with rockets" was the phrase coined (possibly by a British journalist) in the 80s, updating the German "Congo with Rockets" from the 70s and "Genghis Khan with a hydrogen bomb" from the 50s, and all of this dates back as far as a sentiment from the 1850s, popularized by Tolstoy after Emperor Alexander III's counter-reforms in the 1880s,

"It was not without reason that Herzen spoke of how terrible Genghis Khan would have been with telegraphs, with railways, with journalism. This is exactly what has happened in our country."

Research by Russia Today, so they make it clear from the title onward that these are all variants on "a lazy Russophobic slur", but frankly I'm still impressed they didn't kill the article outright.

More comments

Have you ever interacted with russian citizens outside the moscow and st. petersburg elite? They are poor as shit. Russia is a 3rd world country, this whole war has been an embarrassment. They can't even take over the poorest country in europe.

If you want to steelman it you would probably say Russia is thinking in centuries. Break Ukraine today and permenently put them in their sphere of influence. Then population rebounds and Ukraine maintains its historical place in the greater Slavic empire.

Of course that works in the 12th century but the world today feels less and less like land etc is going to matter.

Russia is thinking in centuries.

That backfired horribly then, since the invasion turned the UA-RU relationship from something that resembled the USA and Canada, to something that resembles RU vs Poland. The Russians might get the land in the end, but they've lost the Ukrainians themselves who were mostly loyal during the USSR. The best Russia can really hope for now is that Ukrainians take a "slavery is better than death" attitude, but that hardly makes for a strong empire.

Sure for 50 years. I was trying to steelman. In 150 years it’s back to Canada and US in the view from Moscow.

Russia believes that Ukraine is a core interest, and NATO encroaching on Ukraine violated their security. Even if the war is a net loss (a debatable question), they model it as a smaller loss than Ukraine joining NATO (de facto or outright).

If North Korea was cozying up to an alliance created for the sole purpose of keeping China in check then China just might feel the need to not let a border state join that alliance, costly as that may be.

why does Russia want Ukraine so bad if it was poor before and it's even poorer now?

First, their gas and oil pipes to Central Europe go through Ukraine. This is both bad for security and for financial reasons. Second, Russia has wanted a warm sea port for approximately the entirety of their existence. Third, Ukraine and Belarus form something of a wall to defend against NATO. Yes, Putin feels very threatened by NATO. I realize that might sound absurd on a mostly western-centric forum. If you're curious about Putin's perspective, here's a great video going over his life and beliefs.

TL;DR: He's actually very easy to understand, all he wants is a stable and safe Russia that is slightly better tomorrow than it was yesterday. He was mildly pro-US before Bush ruined everything. Nowadays, he sees the US as hypocrites telling him to stop his imperialism while acting in a very imperialist way themselves. And in the case of Ukraine, it was a Russian puppet just like Belarus until a violent uprising toppled the government. Putin saw this as proof of the US and NATO meddling with what he considers to be the Russian sphere of influence.

Here's more context for the current situation, if you want it.

Because much of Ukraine is Russian. They speak Russian. They are Russian ethnically and live in a region historically called Novorossiya. The Eastern half of Ukraine is particularly Russian and there are considerable nationalist feelings within Russia about their co-Russians - which prompted the initial civil war in 2014. Strelkov and his band showed up and joined with locals to fight the Ukrainian army in Donetsk and Luhansk, now annexed. Strelkov is not the biggest Putin supporter in the world, he was imprisoned by the authorities. There's grassroots nationalist feeling in Russia that Putin has to respond to - formerly by suppression and now by encouragement.

The western part of Ukraine actually speak Ukrainian and can't be considered Russian. They hate Russians for a bunch of reasons, including the Holodomor. They sought to celebrate Stephen Bandera as a founding father. The Russians (and Poles) consider him a genocidal war criminal. The new 2014 regime sought to restrict the Russian language and Ukrainize the population, prompting the unrest in the east of Ukraine. Russia does not want a Russia-hating state ruling over large number of Russians right next door, aligned with the West.

Furthermore, the Eastern half of Ukraine is fairly industrialized. In the Soviet era it was supposed to be interoperable with the rest of the military industrial complex, engines for Russian helicopter gunships were made there amongst other things. There's lots of mines, coal and factories, the west is more agricultural. Eastern Ukraine also is the gateway to Crimea which is the most Russian part of Ukraine. Eastern Ukraine controls water and power supplies to the quasi-island. The land bridge and Mariupol region Russia took back in 2022 is key to holding Crimea, also a major naval base.

Russian-speaking Ukrainians are not the same as the ethnic Russians, especially now. My anecdotal experience and what I've heard of Ukrainian refugees in Finland is that clear majority speaks Russian (they're usually from Eastern areas since that's where the fighting is) and a clear majority also firmly supports the Ukrainian war effort. The actual ethnic Russian areas (ie. the separatist-controlled areas before 2022 and Crimea) had already been detached from Ukrainian control before 2022.

Nobody thinks that the Irish speaking English means they consider themselves English, but for some reason the idea of someone speaking Russian yet not being Russian seems very hard to understand for many.

There are some born-in-Russia Russians actively fighting against Russia, that doesn't mean they're not Russian. The commander in chief of the Ukrainian army is Russian! There are also many Ukrainians (in the geographic sense) fighting against Ukraine. This conflict has dynamics of both a civil and interstate war, identity is complicated.

Those who fled to Finland would logically be anti-Russian. The Ukrainians who fled to Russia would presumably be the opposite.

Sure, there are all sorts of people. The point is that Ukrainian-speaking Russians and ethnic Russians in Ukraine are two wholly different categories, and even if someone was applying some sort of "liberating the ethnic Russians" logic to pre-2022 conquests, it no longer would apply to the post-2022 conquests basically in any sense.

More comments

They are Russian ethnically and live in a region historically called Novorossiya.

"Historically" is less impressive if one looks at the history: Novorussiya originates from the 18th century, roughly contemporary with Voltaire. Not yesterday but neither Ye Olde Times.

We pressured Ukraine into committing suicide.

That's not how it happened. The west originally assumed that Ukraine would be conquered in three days. It was only after the Ukrainians themselves demonstrated their will to fight against Russia (and their success doing so) that NATO et al started arming Ukraine.

America is not the only country in the world with agency.

US for not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace

This was the UK, not the US. And by UK, it was really just Boris Johnson, and it's not like he was strong arming them to prevent them from making peace, but rather encouraging them to stay in the fight. It still looks bad in hindsight, but there's a large gulf between one head of state saying essentially "hey you guys can do this and we'll help you" vs the implied notion of forcing them into a voluntary conflict.

The US has been lightly pushing for peace behind closed doors since at least November 2022.

I don’t think peace was ever on the table unless it meant return to pure vassal state. And Ukraine stays poor. Poland very well may be the strongest country in Europe in our lifetime. That’s a tough trade to do when you see how well being a real people like the Polish is.

the US for not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace

US hyperagency/rest of world hypoagency is not just for left wingers it seems.

The future of Ukraine is Somali and Bangladeshi migrants working on farms owned by American financial institutions and managed by HR women educated in the US.

Still beats becoming a vassal state of Russia. Europe really needs to get off its ass and start arming the Ukrainians properly (it's understandable why the US doesn't seem to care, but Europe doesn't have the same luxury of distance). Yes, this will cost lots of money, but Europe can easily raise this money by massively slashing welfare and benefit spending.

Still beats becoming a vassal state of Russia.

Does it? Does it really? I'm not sure I'd choose being extirpated from the land of my birth and replaced wholesale by a hostile and alien culture, over being conquered and turned into a vassal state by a co-ethnic I share a thousand years of history with.

I mean, it's like asking me, a 90% British American with roots back to the founding of the the country, if I would rather America be flooded by Africans to the point where white people have been virtually extinguished, or a resurgent British Empire reconquer the USA.

I'd pick this baffling to imagine resurgent British Empire 101 times out of 100. Offers more hope for my descendants than genocide.

A shame that's not a choice actually offered me...

Russia will probably not treat Ukraine particularly well in victory, certainly much worse than Britain would treat us.

A shame that's not a choice actually offered me...

While the USA will likely be minority white in our lifetimes, South African demographics are simply not in the cards. I honestly thought my grandfather was the only person who worried about the US being majority black.

South African demographics are simply not in the cards

I don't see why not. The neoliberal solution to 3rd world poverty seems to be to import literally the entire 3rd world. 10 years ago it was only crazy right wingers that thought, or at least spoke the hate-fact, that America would be minority white in our lifetime. The respectable anti-racist who set the narrative claimed that was a "conspiracy theory". A mere decade later I'm supposed to believe "South African demographics are simply not in the cards." after all the lying and gaslighting I've already been subjected to?

You think America is going to be a single digit percent white? Or 80+% black?

If America’s population tripled entirely with sub Saharan migrants(and this is unlikely), we would still be as white as South Africa ever was- not as it is today. If America maintains its current trajectory we’ll be white plurality but minority for a long time, but without any increase in the black population.

we would still be as white as South Africa ever was- not as it is today

I'm astounded you wrote that so unaware of the consequences you accidentally baked into your own "refutation".

Tripling the population with sub Saharan Africans is a fantastical pie in the sky scenario that won’t happen and was intended to illustrate just how mathematically implausible South African demographics in the USA are.

More comments

America be flooded by Africans

My dude, what the heck are you talking about? The top countries of origin for immigrants were Mexico (24 percent of immigrants), India (6 percent), China (5 percent), the Philippines (4.5 percent), and El Salvador (3 percent). So El Salvador sent more immigrants to the US than any nation in Africa. Concern about the US being flooded by Hispanics would at least be grounded in reality, although most indicators show them following a similar path that the Irish went through.

I think the Irish would very optimistic. More likely criminality is reduced but they are a lower achieving social class that doesn’t contribute anything to national greatness and probably favor more social policies.

Nowhere near as bad as what Europe is facing but manageable.

Perhaps they're referring to one of the oldest immigrations, i.e., the slave trade?

Whites were never under threat of being virtually extinguished in the US in the 1600s - 1800s.

Yes, this will cost lots of money, but Europe can easily raise this money by massively slashing welfare and benefit spending.

This is the one thing Europe will never, ever do.

Well then their hand will have to be forced into it and I can't think of a better force at the moment than the threat of annihilation and subjugation by the Russian bear.

Europe took the "peace dividend" at the end of the cold war and spent it on welfare rather than using it to cut taxes to the levels they were at before WWII, now that dividend is going away and the only place to get this money back is to slash welfare to the levels it was at many decades ago.

France and Britain have H-bombs, why would they fear Russia? It's idiotic to wage a proxy war against your natural energy supplier, they only do it because the US is dragging them along (and not inconsiderable Euro brainrot).

Why would Russia invade NATO countries and risk nuclear war? Risk-benefit doesn't stack up.

I don't know why Russia attacked a nuclear-armed NATO member with WMD, twice, but they did.

You go to war with the enemies you have, not the enemies you would like to have. In particular, we are facing an enemy whose tactics include psyops with the basic theme of "I have escalation dominance because I am a nuclear madman and you are not." Compared to the considered effort that the US and Soviet Union put into not doing that during the OG Cold War post-Cuban Missile Crisis, or the US and China put into not doing that now, I don't trust Putin to make risk-reward calculations about nuclear escalation that I would consider rational.

If Putin really is a nuclear madman and his enemies are not, then French and British nukes don't deter a Russian invasion of Poland, and probably don't deter a Russian invasion of Germany. Unless Russian policy changes, NATO has the choice of nuclear brinkmanship or massive nuclear proliferation. (Polish nukes probably deter a Russian invasion of Poland under any reasonable assumptions). The Russians have involved us in a game of high-stakes iterated chicken whether we like it or not, and iterated chicken 101 is that you should defend Schelling points like, well, a nuclear madman.

From a realist perspective the interesting question is which Schelling point do you defend, and how. The two big options are "Rules-based International Order" - i.e. you defend Ukraine once it becomes clear that Russia is waging an aggressive war of conquest (which it was by 2022, if not earlier), and "Article 5" - i.e. you defend NATO countries only. The "lesson of Munich" is that the stronger but less crazy side should defend the first Schelling point, not the most defensible one, because every Schelling point you fail to defend makes a promise to defend the later ones less credible. We can have an argument about whether the lesson of Munich applies to this conflict - it might even be productive in a way which arguments about who started it are not.

I mean, we could also very marginally raise taxes and perhaps debt levels.

I know Italy doesn’t really have room to raise debt levels; does Northern Europe?

In the Nordics we could raise our debt to gdp by 100 percentage points and we'd still not be as indebted as Italy.

Europe could easily bear more debt, I just don't think it's really needed.

Arm them with what? Europe is a bunch of demilitarized vassals who popped their monocles and scoffed a few years ago when Trump told them to meet their 2% NATO commitment. It's not a video game, they can't magically turn GDP into missiles instantly.

Ukraine was cooked the moment it became clear their last counteroffensive wasn't going anywhere. China is going to go for Taiwan at some point this decade, and the US doesn't want to squander its air defense munitions in a forever war. Otherwise they'd have found a way to arm-twist or otherwise persuade the House GOP holdouts by now.

Europe can easily raise this money by massively slashing welfare and benefit spending

What do you mean by "easily"? I suppose the money is there, but Europe's entire political formula rests on the welfare state. Which nations want to upend this?

The future of Ukraine is Somali and Bangladeshi migrants working on farms owned by American financial institutions and managed by HR women educated in the US

Nonsense. Wokeness and high immigration is not enforced top-down by the US, it's a decision that each nation makes independently. Japan has been under more intense US occupation than any other country, yet it's far less woke than most of Europe.

Has it? Americans understand Japanese culture far less than any European one, and conventional wisdom says that by V-J day the cold war was already going full steam ahead, so the Americans largely decided to leave the system that at least was manifestly not communist alone, rather than trying to impose some sweeping changes, fat-fingering them and risking another North Korea or China.

It also applies to South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines. If there are any nations one would consider woke in the Pacific, it would be Australia and New Zealand. Wokeness is a Western mindbug, not an American one.

How outside "normal" thought is wanting the Russia-Ukraine war to be more devastating so there is a greater number of (attractive and young) single female Ukrainian (and perhaps even Russian) refugees and migrants? I can't be the only one who just wished for it just a teeny tiny bit ? I'm sorry v(o)?l(o|a)dimir I know you would have done the same for me.

Tbh it's a pretty vile thing to say, trivializing the unbelievable amounts of human suffering that are occurring.

I'm totally aware its a very vile thing to say, but my question is how vile is it to think? Maybe my model of my fellow man is way off, but I would be surprised if you explained the idea to 100 (non Russian/Ukrainian) men at least 30-40% don't buy into it. They would do it mostly secretly, but deep down in their hearts, they know what they want.

Can't really respond to your thought experiment because I am Russian, so I feel like I've earned the right to wish my fellow male countrymen to go and gamble their life away.

What would be the version of your proposal from the Russian perspective? Chinese women fleeing from Taiwan war? American based tradgirls fleeing from civil war? Go ahead, tempt me with something plausible.

You're not alone: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oXMjtVnLD4o

Harden your heart Putin, Increase your attacks, Banish them all to Palestine and we shall marry Ukrainian women!

totally aware its a very vile thing to say, but my question is how vile is it to think? Maybe my model of my fellow man is way off, but I would be surprised if you explained the idea to 100 (non Russian/Ukrainian) men at least 30-40% don't buy into it. They would do it mostly secretly, but deep down in their hearts, they know what they want.

It is a socially unacceptable thing to say in the light of day (in comments that might be made public). I cannot tell whether you really think it is vile. For example, if someone did say it (giving voice to what you believe to be the sentiments of at least 1/3 of the male population), would you think that it revealed a serious moral defect in the speaker?

Which seems more vile to you?

"We should maximize the devastation of the war to get more women outside the war zone"

or

"we should maximize the devastation of the war to maximize the number of Russians killed and Russian wealth destroyed"

...Like, where is the "vileness" supposed to be coming from? We're well past the point where people here make straightforward arguments in support of maximizing the misery of others because it provides benefits for ourselves.

I think we can set the bar a little higher than "not the absolute vilest possible (relevant) thing you could say".

The later appears to me to be a mainstream position, not "the absolute vilest possible relevant thing you could say."

I seriously doubt there are very many people who want all that death and destruction for its own sake, at least excluding Ukrainians directly affected by the war. I'd like to think that's something people want instrumentally if they want it at all, certainly not as a terminal goal, and that most would prefer to minimize it all else being equal.

where is the "vileness" supposed to be coming from

The callous disregard for male life in the pursuit of matryoshka pussy?

Is it THAT different from much more popular "any Russian killed is a Russian who will not invade western countries"?

Eh its mildly different as it "triggers" the past-mra in me. The "male disposability" is a well cliched concern.

The animal part of my brain has definitely thought about the distortion of the european sexual market by some of the most beautiful women in the world and their dead male counterparts.

Anecdotally, my divorcee buddy who's living in Europe chained together at least one 8+/10 Ukrainian a month for quite a bit. Ironically ended up dating a Russian long-term.

Incidentally, I've never seen more pregnant Russian women in a single place as I've seen on the streets of Buenos Aires in 2023.

Do you know what women don't like? Losers. Losers, low status, poverty, lack of access to quality consumption, and crucially – personal risk. They just loathe giving birth to children of low-status losers (eg. meat wave pellets with no human rights that are Slavic combatants) in an economically degrading, sanctioned, fascist country fighting an unwinnable war, as the streets get filled with thuggish police, premodern immigrants (some of whom actively support ISIS) and plain deranged cripples. They'd rather flee.

I'd rather not speak as to the state and living conditions in Ukraine.

To be honest, I think women are sensible in this regard.

I've recently congratulated my former friend from the AFU, on account of the birth of his son. He thanked me, and asked whether I know how to get modafinil in Spain.

So it goes.

Do you know what women don't like? Losers.

I present you the Parable of Henry.

Was Henry actually a loser, or was he a winner who happened to treat his women badly?

By any standard but a circular one (that is, he was popular with women therefore not a loser), I think he was a loser. I mean, he's in and out of jail and/or psych hospitals.

Yeah, Henry is about as much of a loser as you can get based on what our society ostensibly says it values. And yet he was able to get plenty of women.

It is extremely plausible that he was high status relative to the women he managed to pull and not a loser. He might be experienced in a job that looks past minor crimes and dating underclass teenagers- a scenario I’ve seen more than once- for example.

I counter with the Susan Inequality Principle.

Fails to counter; that claims women care mostly about physical appearance, not that they don't like losers.

To put it bluntly, I do not feel like pandering to misogynistic copes of people like Aaronson, who imagine themselves "romanceless" or "nice guys" rather than unsettling, mentally unwell, pathetically unmanly and, yes, plain ugly nerds. He is a loser. But on the whole, less of a loser than a penniless drunk conscript who'll get his dick blown off by a Ukrainian suicide drone.

I can only congratulate him for making it to a safe environment and finding a woman who looks past those biological drawbacks and loves him for who he is: a high-IQ prosocial academic with a badly coordinated, potbellied body of a paranoid bullying victim attached.

It's a common mistake, but "misogynistic" does not mean "someone women do not like".

I have a hard time with assigning the label “loser” to someone who has achieved Aaronson’s level of success in life, both professional and personal.

Sure, I can deadlift a lot more than he can, but I’m not a world-class expert on any significant field of research.

There are several strategies men can pursue to achieve status and/or success with women, and “uber successful nerd” can work. Not everyone needs to be well-rounded or “classically masculine” to succeed.

Yes, people should play to their strengths, and it sure has worked out well for him. So now he can feel himself being a persecuted loser nerd who'll surely get crushed by jackbooted thugs one day, while he's a successful academic with a healthy family and significant following, insulated from most any threat in life.

In my opinion, this posture of his is more pathetic than that of actual uncontroversial losers, and in the dating market it'd have been rightly penalized (separately from his appearance).

Regardless, this dispute itself is pathetic wading through someone else's high school traumas. Low-class Russians getting conscripted are not like Aaronson, nor are they like Henry the Slayer from Scott's fable. They are losers on every dimension sans perhaps tactical operational. Unfortunately it seems like I have to disambiguate. Aaronsons of the world, at the peak of their sexual frustration, often tell themselves that women love Henrys, implying that there is some correspondence between losing at conventional milestones of being a full-fledged adult, masculinity, and popularity with the opposite sex. And oppositely, nerds can feel their loss diminish – dumdum broads chasing Chad Thundercock, who cares! – and their success become more substantial, by contrasting it to the animalistic condition of an imagined Henry. Hence the whole of PUA/Redpill doctrine. This is cope. Women love men, not dysfunctional deadbeats. Some deadbeats happen to be manly, or at least more manly than Aaronson, which is not a high bar to clear; but ceteris paribus, women prefer men who are also conventionally successful, powerful and respected. This is very trivial. Nerd-Tate discourse is confused and fueled by resentment.

Transient details (like the fact that high-IQ, often autistic nerds who go to places like MIT and stay virgins until graduation have been economically well rewarded over the last few decades, and so can be considered "winners" despite low initial success with women) do not change much in the overall picture.

Hoe_math actually has a very good chart where he describes male attractiveness for women as two dimensional matrix. The "nice guy" axis is how much resources is the guy willing to provide the "bad boy" axis is about physical attractiveness, assertiveness, dominance and confidence.

If you are ugly nerd like Aaronson, then you either literally not a person to any random woman, or if you attract attention by some lame attempt at niceness such as holding the door then you will only creep them out. It will take some grand gesture of generosity - such as a nice gift or some such - in order for a woman to suppress her disgust and keep you around in eternal friend zone. Also women do not give a shit about "success" such as solving Rubik's cube or winning MtG competition. Math and science is of similar significance. Women of course care about success such as athletic prowess, ability to exert one's will over other people such as being top salesman or politician and so forth. What matters is status, money, power and respect of other manly men and envy of other women. Math and science is good only in as much as it translates to these things. Grigori Perlman may be the most accomplished and important mathematician alive, but to any normal woman he is is nonexistent.

In a sense nerds like Aaronson are even more lame and pathetic as they feel their general niceness is supposed to humanize them in eyes of women. What they actually express is incredible lack of social awareness that they do not even understand their own deficiency and instead of being quiet in the corner and contemplating strategies of how to make themselves, they dare to creep them out. That is what I think @DaseindustriesLtd talks about.

That's a bit too strongly put. Life isn't all high school where jocks rule supreme; you can get away with achievement in obscure fields, adult women can appreciate you being a respected academic. That's part of what people seek (and find) in academia, actually.

No, my beef with Aaronson stems precisely from him having never left high school. From his generalized anxiety that got perfectly exposed in the Airport Episode, and his kvetching about Trumpian Jackbooted Thugs who'd have come for his family, and his indignation at anyone who finds his reactions excessive. He's not merely an unattractive "nice guy" in the toxic manosphere sense, he acts literally like a neurotic woman who's also an autist with a squeaky voice; and real women – in aggregate – are correct to not want him no matter how you slice it. But his wife is a fellow STEM nerd who doesn't mind it, and they are apparently good for each other. Whatever.

Presumably "Henry," to the extent that he's even a real person, was some sort of gang leader. So he had real social cachet among a certain sort of young person, especially the gangbanger young women where a lot of the men are in prison. A middle class office worker might have more money, but hed never meet those wonen and he'd have no gang of followers to impress them with.

What are the Russian women doing in Buenos Aires?

Immigrating with their boyfriends/husbands who are evading the draft. The same is happening in Canada, many European countries (especially Cyprus), Thailand.

Seeking a better passport.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/10/argentina-pregnant-russians-birth-tourism-crackdown

Losers, low status, poverty, lack of access to quality consumption

Nice post, but it is firmly estabished that in most countries wealth and fertility has inverse correlation except top few percent of wealth.

Most of men 'died in SMO' I read about in social media had children.

There's a theory that one part of falling fertility is female hypergamy. Since my spellchecker is underlining that word, I'll define it like this:

Female hypergamy is when women seek to marry "up", either into a higher social class or to a mate who is superior to them.

It's harder than ever for women to marry up. Modern feminist societies devalue male traits such as stoicism and aggression but highly value female traits such as conformity and self-control. As a result, women's status relative to men has risen greatly. This has the side effect of making most men undesirable to most women.

This doesn't sit right with me.

Fundamentally, men must compete for access to women, while women act as gatekeepers. It's simple supply and demand. Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. The biological essence of being a male is having to continually prove yourself under adverse conditions, so when men start complaining that women's standards are too high because feminism gave them naughty ideas, it comes off as a cope. Rather than standards being too high, it's more likely that women are setting the standards exactly where they need to be (or at least relatively close, anyway), in accordance with many millennia of evolutionary adaptation to precisely this task. Yes, it's a hyper-competitive environment, but there are plenty of men who are succeeding. Lots of men are making money and having sex and having kids and generally living very productive lives. If you can't do the same, that's on you.

Not to say that biological organisms are incapable of going wrong, of course. If there is such a severe mismatch between women's standards and men's capabilities such that the birth rate plummets to zero, then it's more plausible to say that that's simply the race/species reaching the natural end of its lifecycle, rather than putting the blame on any one particular event/ideology/movement/etc. Perhaps the industrial/digital environment of modern first world countries is simply poisonous to the type of organism that we are. If it is, then we will decline naturally, possibly to be replaced by a more virile form of life that has a longer future ahead of it, and there is little that can be done as a matter of conscious will to arrest this trajectory.

If you're arguing that genes don't care about human happiness and that eventually (hundreds or thousands of years from now) maladaptive cultures like feminism will die out and be replaced by adapative ones like Hassidic Judaism, then yes, I agree.

But unlike my genes I do care about human happiness, and I think that feminism is working out very badly for women.

If feminine standards are telling them to be an unmarried cat owner looking for Mr. Right at age 35 then maybe we should examine why, rather than just shrug and say "another person weeded out of the gene pool".

But unlike my genes I do care about human happiness

Trust me, I do too. But nature doesn't. Our hopes and dreams have to be tempered by reality.

If feminine standards are telling them to be an unmarried cat owner looking for Mr. Right at age 35 then maybe we should examine why

Well, this sounds like a slightly different complaint than what we had at the start. This is less about women's standards/status being too high and more like women just opting out of the game altogether.

And aren't men doing the same thing? How many men haven't even tried to go on a date in years, instead just retreating inside and living on the computer? I don't think you can pin the blame solely on women here.

And aren't men doing the same thing? How many men haven't even tried to go on a date in years, instead just retreating inside and living on the computer? I don't think you can pin the blame solely on women here.

Presumably, female standards are higher than male standards due to hypergamy. Also, men can marry later and still have a high chance of being fertile.

That said, I don't think women are to blame here. People are attracted to who they are attracted to. In fact, I think feminism hurts women more than men.

And aren't men doing the same thing? How many men haven't even tried to go on a date in years, instead just retreating inside and living on the computer? I don't think you can pin the blame solely on women here.

This is a frequent subject of contention between me and a particular friend. He maintains that heightened rates of male romantic lonliness are almost entirely due to women refusing to date anyone who isn't in the top e.g. 20% of looks/status/earning power (take your pick), whereas it seems absurd to me to ignore the fact that so much more of people's free time is spent in isolation rather than in social settings where men and women are likely to meet and hit it off.

This is a frequent subject of contention between me and a particular friend. He maintains that heightened rates of male romantic lonliness are almost entirely due to women refusing to date anyone who isn't in the top e.g. 20% of looks/status/earning power (take your pick), whereas it seems absurd to me to ignore the fact that so much more of people's free time is spent in isolation rather than in social settings where men and women are likely to meet and hit it off.

Can you be more explicit about your point of contention with your friend? It seems to me like those things can both be true, and in fact reinforce each other. When people are meeting in person at social settings with a healthy gender ratio, two things happen. First, you just meet a lot more single people of the opposite gender. But also, the women are a lot more friendly and responsive. They'll talk to you, give you their number, maybe go on a date with you, just because "hey, why not, this guy seems nice." Whereas if you meet through something like online gaming, social media, or dating apps, they just get swamped with so much male attention from thirsty simps that they all have their guard up, and shut down any guy who they don't absolutely love.

They're absolutely not mutually exclusive - the point of contention is whether or not supposed female hypergamy accounts for the majority of the changes we're seeing in the dating landscape (my friend's POV is that it does).

Yeah but for a male the process of going from the computer lifestyle to adequately interfacing with dating is likely going to equate to making a bunch of lifestyle changes and grinding away at social experience to be anywhere near competitive in the market. For a girl, you create a dating app profile and you can be awash in suitors within 3 hours unless you are like bottom 2 percentile attractive.

I spent about a year on the dating app grind recently enroute to finding a longterm partner, and to get to the point where I was getting consistent positive attention took about 6 month of self improvement between weight loss, social learnings etc and that's as a 6'4, high-earning white guy with low-moderate aspergers tendency. The NEET version of myself is likely still floundering around. I ended up going on about 70 first dates during that year (50~ of which came after I was 'reasonably attractive'), and it's pretty striking to me how many of the women I met who I didn't end up with seem to be still stuck in an endless singleton rut years after the event. Most of these women are attractive, intelligent, had good jobs, 25-30 years old, reasonable educations and ostensibly want kids/commitment yet I believe they are their own worst enemies in a lot of ways.

While filtering out "inadequate" suitors on the dating app (and I can bet there are many) might be easier than changing your lifestyle to adequately date, I don't believe it's no effort. Too many posters give off this "just get a good partner sis" message when they describe women's dating prospects, whereas "just clean up and be confident bro" doesn't work quite as well.

I've got close single female friends. They vigorously filter people who'd frankly be good enough for longterm partnership every week for all sorts of reasons. The majority of the women I met through the apps who I still have on social media are conspicuously single and/or making no progress towards their stated goal of settling down and having kids based on their stories and these aren't clubthots, majority are UMC, educated sensible women. Their main reasons for rejection all verge more around 'he was boring' or 'I did not feel he was my soulmate and my very being was electrified to be around him'. Admittedly feminine sexuality is a lot more 100-0 than male sexuality, but the current state of affairs is a vigorous own goal caused by that.

I agree on the advice criteria since, despite being significantly more difficult to achieve, 'just clean up and be confident bro' is way more actionable advice than 'stop looking for Mr. Perfect' but on the other hand I feel like the average male would be able to solve the dating woes of most women within a week if a freaky friday situation occurred.

If feminine standards are telling them to be an unmarried cat owner looking for Mr. Right at age 35 then maybe we should examine why

I mean, you buried it in your post: equal rights came without equal responsibilities.

Now that men and women are equal, should it not be equally valid to say "another woman weeded out of the gene pool"? If we're judging each gender by their own standards, women had it far easier than men and they're still failing, so why shouldn't men rejoice the same way women do when this happens to a man? They have equal rights, they can take equal lefts.

Not that I think that's a helpful way to look at things, but the only people who can meaningfully change this for women are other women. Do I think that'll happen? Well, maybe; men have largely adapted from losing 200,000 years of biological supremacy overnight by comparison and I see no reason women should not be similarly adaptable after losing their edge to video games and porn.

To clarify, I was saying "another woman weeded out the gene pool". And, yes, people do celebrate that. I'm conflicted whether to celebrate too or feel sorry for the catwomen. A little bit of both I suppose, but my largest reaction is to want the people who have no role in the future to have no role in decision making today.

whether to celebrate too or feel sorry for the catwomen

I think that in any stable system, there will be as many unmarriageable men as there are unmarriageable women, and I don't think that's a big deal. I think the reasons those people remain unmarriageable are intractable, and that their not reproducing is going to have a non-trivial eugenic effect on the populations over which it applies (lower base rate of mental illness, less tolerant of selfishness).

my largest reaction is to want the people who have no role in the future to have no role in decision making today

I'm not as certain; a lot of parents get at least a little stupid when it comes to dealing with the most expensive luxury items they will ever purchase.
Then again, non-parents (especially non-parent women) are somehow even more risk/human-dignity averse when it comes to other people's children (which is why the education system is the way that it is), so maybe it'd still be an improvement.

Then again, non-parents (especially non-parent women) are somehow even more risk/human-dignity averse when it comes to other people's children (which is why the education system is the way that it is), so maybe it'd still be an improvement.

Non-parent women can be quite risk tolerant when it comes to other people’s children for social engineering experiments in the interests of being decent people on the right side of history. Risk-seeking, even.

Out of the four combinations of parent/non-parent and men/women, non-parent women are the most ardent supporters with regard to minor LGBT+ exposure and subjecting Asian/white children to more “diverse” schooling. Other people’s children, by definition.

effect on the populations over which it applies (lower base rate of mental illness, less tolerant of selfishness).

Mental illness is weeded out, but it has average heritability, and high IQ is weeded out, and it has high heritability so decreasing IQ will dominate.

Historically women did not act as gatekeepers. Marriages we're arranged by the parents either directly or by making sure that your daughter only ever came in contact (socially) with acceptable matches.

Hasn't that really only been the case in (relatively) recent agricultural communities? Human sexual dynamics evolved during a period of time in which we were primarily hunter gathers, after all.

Agricultural and hunter-gatherer populations are definitely different enough to suggest that there's a genetic difference driven by evolution.

Nobody really knows what those societies were like since they predate writing. Our best guesses come from the handful of remaining hunter gatherer tribes which are all, by definition, extremely unusual in not having settled down or been wiped out.

Also the dynamics of saying No were different back in the day. Bachelorette status meant living at home under the parental yoke without any particular ability to earn funds independently.

You know what raises the status of men? Fighting in wars. It's no secret that women love men in uniform. And many will confess to being aroused by male violence. For better or worse, violence raises male status.

That's what the Russian government has been betting on long term. They plan to introduce a project called "Time of Heroes" to provide additional training for the veterans and "make them the new elite". The plan is to insert the veterans as educators, allow them to become government officials.

There was a project like this called "School of Governors" which initially aimed to create new cadre for leading the whole regions of Russia, which, IMO, wasn't successful because most of the participants of the school already had connections. It kind of legitimizes the governor positions of the people who graduated it but the participants were specifically handpicked to participate in the program. Kirienko was the organizer and from my understanding "Time of Heroes" is going to follow the same template.

So, in addition to the natural affinity towards the men in the uniform, the government is also planning to boost their attractiveness artificially via increasing their social status. I have reasons to doubt that the program will be successful due to the previous implementations being faulty, but in general I think you hit the nail on the head in this regard.

I am Russian, so I can theorize/speculate about Russia and I'm not that in tune with the trends in Ukraine. All that said, commenting on your thesis in general, outside of the objective measures taken to increase the fertility (like subsidies) and subjective status increase of men (a quick glance through the studies didn't produce anything conclusive about the attractiveness of the males in the uniform), I don't think we can definitively conclude that the conditions in Russia and Ukraine will be conducive to increasing fertility in general. The main reason, in my opinion, is the current cultural environment, which might act as a counterbalance to the conditions you describe. Short theses before I go back to work:

  • More and more over the years, liberalism has been a dominant trend amongst the most fertile population, especially amongst women. The liberal women see the participation in a war as a negative trait rather than the positive.
  • The main task of the government is to bring up the new generation in a patriotic way so that it can counteract the dominant liberal cultural trend among millenials and zoomers. I project this to be the generation alpha rather than zoomers, although I may be wrong. If I am right, it might be a little bit too late for the regime as it hinges on a whim of a single aging ruler.
  • The government has also been failing on the cultural front. They try to create the media which would be appealing to millenial and zoomer generations but they haven't succeeded yet. To an extent, the current media output is definitely not patriotic and is liberal adjacent in its values.
  • Russian liberals have been aggressively importing and adopting western culture war issues (e.g. feminism, trans rights, cancel culture).

More and more over the years, liberalism has been a dominant trend amongst the most fertile population, especially amongst women. The liberal women see the participation in a war as a negative trait rather than the positive. The main task of the government is to bring up the new generation in a patriotic way so that it can counteract the dominant liberal cultural trend among millenials and zoomers. I project this to be the generation alpha rather than zoomers, although I may be wrong. If I am right, it might be a little bit too late for the regime as it hinges on a whim of a single aging ruler. The government has also been failing on the cultural front. They try to create the media which would be appealing to millenial and zoomer generations but they haven't succeeded yet. To an extent, the current media output is definitely not patriotic and is liberal adjacent in its values. Russian liberals have been aggressively importing and adopting western culture war issues (e.g. feminism, trans rights, cancel culture).

That's interesting. From what you say, it seems like the Russian government has been trying to appeal to women, but totally failing. Instead they've created a narrative that appeals to (some of) men, the conservative trad patriotic men, including some of us in other countries (the ones who don't actually have to fight in the war anyway). I wonder what they'll do going forward? Would they be open to allowing immigration from the sort of men and trad-wife couples from overseas that want that sort of culture, or will they insist on being Slavic-only?

I haven't gotten the impression that immigration is restricted for overseas people in Russia all that much. Anti-immigration talk focuses on Middle Asia - cheap labor, Muslim, etc.

There are barriers that would deter a 1st world immigrant. You have to learn the language (less important for Middle Asian immigrants who aren't taking high-level jobs and have many of their own countrymen at the jobs they do take), and you'll have to go through conscription if you're a male 30 (27 until recently) and under. Again, conscription is likely less undesirable for someone already used to a hard life, if not desirable (being fed, clothed, roofed and given an express course in conversational Russian).

I don't see this working for Ukraine, absent a teleporting device that can be deployed accurately en masse from distance.

A baby boom would need young women for which to enable the baby booming. And young Ukrainian women are in Europe living their best Tinder lives and riding the carousel.

It's just so over for the life prospects of (young) Ukrainian men in so many ways, especially romantically.

It's no secret that women love men in uniform

When in war-time, the men in uniform need to win first, at least temporarily (see: French women with German soldiers in WWII). At the minimum: not die. The latter is not guaranteed, much less the former.

Yeah, my theory was a nice thought but it's not going to happen for all the reasons that people posted. This forum found the holes pretty quickly.

And young Ukrainian women are in Europe living their best Tinder lives and riding the carousel.

That's nuclear-grade propaganda right there. If I was a Ukrainian man I would want to burn the world right now.

That's nuclear-grade propaganda right there. If I was a Ukrainian man I would want to burn the world right now.

The thought of getting sent by my government to be shot at and bombed while my countrywomen teehee and scamper away to fuck foreign men is some combination of massively infuriating, degrading, and demoralizing.

If I were Russian military leadership, I’d emphasize such points on social media for (young) Ukrainian men.

Airdropping on mobile (if that’s still a thing) and blasting on TikTok, Snapchat, Insta, VK and whatnot reels of seemingly limitless young Ukrainian women offering themselves up on dating apps/sites in Europe. Some bit about fighting for (magic) dirt and concrete while your (would-be) girlfriends and wives have already ditched you to do who-knows-what in Europe. Offer Russian citizenship to Ukrainian military men in exhange for surrender, no ‘gotcha’ clauses or hard feelings (and make good on that).

You know what raises the status of men? Fighting in wars.

Doesn't it have to be a popular war? WW2 was "the greatest generation" and had a ton of propaganda to back them up. Other wars have been, uh, not so popular, and the stereotype is of soldier's partners cheating on them while they're away on deployment.

On top of that, WW2 is pretty unique in how it massively raised the relative status of men. First it killed and injured a lot of men, so it created a shortage of marriable men for women. Then it gave the veterans training, a war pension, and a GI bill to college, at a time when most people still didn't even finish high school. It was especially rare for women to go to college then, so the men had a higher status. And it was a time when children were less of a burden, and more of a help- you could take a child and put them to work doing household chores, light farm work, or taking care of younger children. I can see how a veteran who wanted kids then would be a nice catch for a young woman. Now... well, while he was off fighting, she was probably going to college and getting work experience, so now she earns more than him and has no interest in having kids.

Agree on all counts. I retract all my baby boom statements about Ukraine.

Maybe Russia.

Self-control is a virtue? As I see it, society is degenerating because weak-willed people are removing the social stigma of whatever people usually do when they lack self-control. Casual sex is the first example which comes to mind, but in short I guess my point is that stoicism and self-control are related. I also think that progressiveness is a step away from the traditional strictness. It's like people have forgotten why we advocate against certain things, and they want the "freedom" or "liberty" to indulge in them without judgement. Take for instance "fat-shaming", rather than self-control in eating they'd rather punish the people who point out that obesity isn't attractive.

Don't get me wrong, I think your explanation is otherwise solid.

Personally I've notice a trend away from autism-like conduct and towards normie-like conduct. A transition from objectivity to subjectivity, one from technical correctness towards social correctness, from spatial intelligence to verbal intelligence. I guess "less masculine" fits all these boxes. Maybe this effect on society is partly explained by dropping testosterone levels or something. Some also mention demoralization (Yuri Bezmenov), oversocialization (Ted Kaczynski) and moral subversion (Nietzsche). I don't think it's a coincidence that "soy" is starting to become an insult. Am I becoming skizophrenic or is all this related?

A Linux Cancellation

Vaxry, the creator and maintainer of hyprland, has been banned from FreeDesktop.Org and its member projects.

Background and Dramatis Personae

The Linux pipeline to an actual desktop is complicated and made of a bunch of moving parts, buried under the actual GUI itself, following the dual Linux philosophies of having everything do one task well(ish), and filling technical discussion with as many three-letter acronyms as possible. A historically important one is the X Window System, also known as X11 or xorg, but is both long in the tooth, covers an unusually wide area of ground for a Linux component, and is incredibly janky. While incredibly important for normal desktop users, the system has a long and bizarre history, with long periods of strife or minimal development: the current FreeDesktop space is technically just an independent github competitor for Linux desktop-specific development, but in practice there's a lot of RedHat Linux people in high places, in no small part because RHEL is the biggest way to be a linux dev and actually make money from it.

In recent years, many X11 developers have moved over to create a new version that better separates responsibility between the display protocol and everything else, along with covering a number of places that X11 just made bad mistakes in 1990 has been stuck with since, and this has turned into Wayland (and some related libraries like wl-roots), developed on the FreeDesktop.org gitlab. It's not quite ready for prime-time, especially for tasks like gaming with a nVidia card, but it's getting pretty close, and there are already some capabilities (eg, multiple displays with different refresh rates) that are a single text-file mod away in Wayland and you'd have an inconsistent time with in X11.

While some existing desktop environments, such as KDE, have worked to directly port over from X11 to Wayland, many Linux devs have taken the opportunity to try Weird and New things, instead, either because the need to develop several components previously internal to X11 seems like the best opportunity for such novel task, or because they're Linux devs. One branch consists of tiling window managers: while not new to Linux (or even Windows, they've taken some increasing popularity in the Wayland environment. Two of the most popular current ones are Hyprland and Sway. Though I'll caveat that popular here means you can find people using it: there's reason it's hard to find packages for them outside, and even harder to find prebuilt distros with it enabled. (Manjaro has a Sway community iso, in case you want to make three bad decisions at once.) Both are independently developed from FreeDesktop, though dependent on the Freedesktop-built wl-roots library.

Hyprland was founded by the psuedoanon Vaxry. I've described it in other contexts as catgirl thighhigh, and even the official github glamour shots are very clearly within that ethos, with many of the community themes being even more so. You could force it to look Professional, but the defaults provide a bizarre combination of mouseless window management, varied and sometimes obnoxious keyboard combinations, a fully text-based and live-updated config system, strong support for transparency and multiple desktops virtual or otherwise, and highly performant and kinda goofy animations (and fucking default-on rounded window corners, wtf). You don't have to own a Blahaj to like the theme, but there's a cluster of personality types that it seems to appeal toward, and the other half of them involve the sorta person that can leave leekspin on repeat for five hours on a second monitor and find it keeps getting funnier every single time they see it. Sway is intended as a drop-in-replacement for the much-older (x11) i3, and [a little more professional/grognardy in its base form, for better (hypr considered a license switch in a PR without having consulted a lawyer first) and worse (manual tiling).

Like a lot of Linux desktop environments (begun, the why-is-gnome-pronounced-that-way wars have), they Don't Like Each Other. Hyprland gives Sway special thanks "For showing how 2 do stuff the overkill way", Sway's original author has written multiple blogposts over the last six months with names like "Hyprland is a toxic community". This mostly didn't matter for Freedesktop.Org, though, since it's the sorta linux space where things like an official irc server would be a little too newfangled and a little out-of-scope.

And They Kept Using Discord

Which means most of the drama happens in weakly-affiliated channels. Hyprland has a Discord server, and while its membership is a mix of Blahaj and leekspinners, its ethos is very much toward the latter. In addition to mainstay stuff like a server ruleset that might as well be summarized as "don't make me come over there", right under announcements channel is the #days-since-vaxry-was-an-idiot, and not far under that is the official list of all accepted fanart of hyprchan, the hyprland mascot. (I didn't say the leekspin side was never trans, anymore than the blahaj side solely trans.) But while the server and Vaxry were willing to tolerate and use what could charitably be called 4chan humor and more accurately be called rude and bad jokes, they do keep to the rule poc||gtfo.

In early March, a Red Hat employee operating under the auspices of FreeDesktop contacted Vaxry about things he, and moderators of his Discord, had done. And to be fair, there's some pretty embarrassingly childish behavior, there: a couple years ago Vaxry joked with wanting to get AIDs as a the same as identifying as gay, and separately a moderator screwed around with a user's public profile (then at the time, the only way to put pronouns up) for yucks. However, toward the end, that employee spelled out that that "... if more bad and more recent behavior ends up coming to our attention - it can be damaging to freedesktop's reputation as well, and we would have to consider steps to protect our community's reputation". Vaxry took this as a threat, and this escalated, first with the Red Hat employee highlighting that "The code of conduct team absolutely has the right to remove you from Freedesktop.org and ban you from the gitlab instance", and then when, when Vaxry said "further emails from the freedesktop.org's Code of Conduct team will now be ignored unless You, as a team, decide to change Your attitude wrt. the issue at hand", the freedesktop Code of Conduct team pulling that trigger, Vaxry put various comments on his blog, yada yada.

Bang-Bang! Maxwell's silver hammer came down upon his head.

Both Vaxry and the unnamed RedHat employee come across as prats in the e-mail chain. It's very easy to read that chain as RedHat wanting on paper an official "It won't happen again" commitment and show of contrition, especially as hypr has become a bigger part of the wayland world (there's no serious census, but hypr's userbase seems the biggest among novel Wayland compositors; hyprcursor is genuinely a major improvement over the fucked-up xcursor, and has no serious competitors). It's also very easy to see this e-mail exchange as somewhere between requiring hypr spaces to act fully under RedHat corporate norms, and more cynically hanging up a Sword of Damocles for later -- even assuming arguendo that Vaxry's behavior retroactively justified the threat in the first e-mail, it made it very clear it was a threat.

((And for various reasons it's a little concerning to have two desktop environment developers that aren't quite clear on how capitalization works.))

There's a certain irony in the stolid and more formal Sway being the Blue-Tribe-themed one, and the purple-and-pink-and-blue-everywhere unprofessional hypr-active world being the not-Blue-Tribe-themed one, but there's another sense where it's not a huge surprise.

Ostensibly, this shouldn't matter much. Yes, hyprland and wayland and wl-roots are still buggy messes. But to the extent hyprland might be more vulnerable now to Wayland or wl-roots bugs, if Vaxry can't supply PRs or even bug reports to wl-roots, it'll drive the fixes to hypr, to the broader Wayland ecosystems' detriment. There are other people using hypr that could still report it up (and Vaxry has already forked wl-roots). In practice, any dev taking hypr-like conventions, especially newer devs, can and should be a little cautious in freedesktop environments, and there's already been a slow siddle away from hypr among the influencer set. There's been calls in some package managers to pull the project after some early posts from DeVault, which to be fair have been mostly rejected; we'll see if that changes. Which still doesn't matter.

But there's a tendency among a Certain Set to talk about how cancel culture has peaked, or how it doesn't impact 'normal' people, or how it's just a fiction, and I think it's worth mentioning the examples that don't show up in google news or conventional culture war channels.

Your posts always seem interesting. I wish they were comprehensible (to me), at least without really digging into them.

I'd really recommend a full paragraph of summary at the top, with no rhetorical flourishes or weird words (like "blahaj and leekspinners") that only make sense in the context of someone who's been following the situation. This screenshot that you linked does a fairly good job. You have that first sentence saying someone linked to the Linux community got banned, but you need more in a place like this where all the topics get jumbled together. I want to know if a topic interests me before I read any further, and you typically only have a single paragraph to hook people like me before my eyes glaze a bit and I scroll down.

This is the first gattpost that I could actually 90% understand if I read slowly, which makes me wonder if I should touch more grass.

To summarize: guy makes a popular window manager for what will be the new standard for Linux desktop window display software, the community around it is composed of half "programmer socks" trans people and half toxic 4Chan shitposters, the toxic parts of his community prompt a Linux dev with more privilege to get him declared persona non grata from working within the "mainstream" of this tech.

Yes, something like this would be great to have at the top of the post. Most of this could be understood by carefully reading the entire post, but something like this would be helpful to know if reading the post would be of interest in the first place.

Confession. I only read gattsuru posts while on ADHD meds and even then, I can't break them down on my own. I have to have a conversation with bots regarding them.

During such a conversation, you get to do things like ask what a leekspinner is, get an immediate response, and go verify it. But I absolutely agree with you. All of the things you cite are additional context costs and inferential distance costs for the reader.

Dear @gattsuru, if you want your posts to filter the audience by requiring them to put in an insane level of engagement, you are doing a great job. Otherwise you should try to budget complexity better.

My advice- Assume that most people have a limit to how many concepts they can hold in their head that is smaller than yours, and that switching windows to look things up is high cost and risks scrambling their current contextual flow when they return. Most of your ideas could be explained to a even a halfwit if you made sure to design your posts to not cause expensive flailing on their brain hardware.

To be fair, this is also my advice to half this forum.

Confession. I only read gattsuru posts while on ADHD meds and even then, I can't break them down on my own. I have to have a conversation with bots regarding them.

During such a conversation, you get to do things like ask what a leekspinner is, get an immediate response, and go verify it.

This is intriguing, are you saying you copy+paste his writing into chatGPT and then ask questions of it? Do you do this for other pieces of writing as well? I've been looking for actual use-cases for chatbots and this seems promising.

Yes. For this post, I skimmed it, then I pasted the full post in GPT. GPT summarized it, which gave me a few more mental handles to start asking questions, and reading the post proper. As I did this, I re-pasted pieces alongside questions about them, followed links sometimes pasting bits from those, and so on as I began to understand it and have questions.

I do indeed do this for other pieces of writing as well, ML papers are a good example. GPT-4 is going to know any ML jargon that came out before 2013 for instance.

Hallucination can still be an issue, but if you treat it like a friendly human teacher who sometimes gets confused, and keep your critical thinking skills about you, these systems can really help introduce you to new topics where it might otherwise be hard to get a foothold.

I do also sometimes craft posts in a similar way. Talking to GPT about my ideas with stream of thought, asking it to summarize them... And then throwing out it's summary because it messed up my voice and changed some of my meanings and social intents. But this is still useful, because it's still often successful at drawing all my scattered ideas together into a structure, so I can then rewrite my ideas again with a similar structure to it's summary, then move on to my reread and edit phase.

This makes me wonder if there are any projects that succeeded in letting contributors just choose not to work with certain other contributors. Big companies make this work just fine, sometimes there are personality conflicts and we resolve them by moving people around to work on other parts of the same product.

I knew one high level IC who got along with his manager so terribly that he ended up reporting to an entirely different manager than everyone else on his team.

Not everyone needs to be a reviewer for every pull request, or to participate in every group chat.

Most projects don't really have enough people for complex structures. I keep pointing to MinecraftForge, and while the commit log is even less good of a record than normal because some parts were ported from other version control, it gives a good idea of how much Zif's Law applies even for these structures. To the extent they end up with multiple maintainers at all, it's much more often to solve the 'hit by a truck' problem than any serious planning.

There's been a few efforts to come up with more robust structures, but I'm skeptical that they're trying to solve the right problem, nevermind actually having a solution. Given that the FOSS ones I can name are QuiltMC and Rust, this is... not the most encouraging endorsement (and Quilt specifically had a big snafu over their original keyholder).

Linus Torvald has lieutenants, and in practice who you draw matters a lot, but in theory and at the edge case he's got veto power over everything and anything that catches his attention. Python has a five-person lead council since van Rossum retired in 2018, but the only way to cycle the leadership is to wait. Occasionally you'll see corp-adjacent groups try to have reviewers selected from other parts of the same project or even from a set who just do reviews, but then the people reviewing the PRs aren't really tied to the code it's changing.

The bigger problem's that the overwhelming majority of FOSS contributors don't stay in any place for that long, especially when it's not their own project, and those that do tend to be a little obsessed.

I second @Ben___Garrison that Im interested, but I need some more explanation to figure out what's going on. Is Free Desktop important? What's hyprland? Is Vaxry important?

Otherwise it kind of just seems like standard tech nerd/trans culture war drama. You, or someone affiliated with you, made a a slight joke somewhere (anywhere) making fun of the sacred trans pronouns? You WILL apologize, or they will cast you out! No mercy, no compromise, no negotiation. Vaxry in his blog post makes an analogy "what if the religious right did this to censor the left?" That misses the point because the religious right has zero power in the world of software development, and I cant imagine it ever will. Whereas the trans activists have huge power and they are not shy to use it. Hopefully someday, enough tech nerds will learn this lessson and stand up to them.

Is Free Desktop important?

FreeDesktop is the space (literally a GitLab instance, may heaven have mercy on their souls) where people build the tools that almost all Linux desktop environments run on, including X11 (the user interface drawing framework that underlies every conventional desktop from GNOME to KDE to Cinnamon to ChromeOS) and Wayland (which is what Linux is starting to move toward as a replacement). So it's about as relevant as Linux On The Desktop is, for better or worse.

What's hyprland?

Hyprland is technically 'just' the window compositor (lies-to-children version: stitches applications together into a function desktop 'screen'), but it's more generally used as a name for the desktop environment produced by mixing it and other pieces together, like GNOME or KDE would be. This is a quick video showing just how it looks, and this some of the different behaviors. Essentially, it's designed for rapid but space-optimized window control, whether by mouse or keyboard, and management of many virtual desktops easily.

Hyprdots is a more fully-featured mix of it and those other pieces.

It doesn't have a huge userbase, even by not-Chromebook Linux standards, but it's easily the most popular Wayland-specific desktop environment. The Discord has a 10k members, for what little that's worth, and most users probably only bother with the discord if something breaks and they can't fix it.

Is Vaxry important?

Vaxry is the founder and lead developer for hypr, along with having done some work for wl-roots, which is a library many projects use to simplify common Wayland requirements. He's not the only person working on hyprland, but the commit comparison looks like this, and the other hypr stuff is even more lopsided.

This ban won't prevent him from writing further hyprland work, but it will block him from writing any pull requests or even issues for Wayland or wl-roots, and the broader response will make hypr-like conventions or projects harder to adopt, even when correct.

Thanks. So, is it fair to say that while Hyprland looks really cool, and has a decent number of fans, it doesn't do anything essential and isn't a major part of the FreeDesktop ecosystem? It seems like Vaxry overestimated his power and is now completely shut out of his community with no recourse. Since it's free software, they can even go on using the tools he wrote without asking him for anything, or fork it and make their own version if they dont' want his name on it.

For the most part. I'm not sure whether Vaxry overestimated his 'power' -- from the e-mail chain, he pretty clearly saw the RedHat dev's starting e-mail as absolutely showing the FreeDesktop team was ready and willing to ban his ass, knew they could and would, and he seemed more concerned that FreeDesktop was going to try to take over as much of the Hypr space as possible. And while he worked on FreeDesktop's git, it wasn't his community, or really even a community given how much of a kludge any communication around the FreeDesktop-specific areas tended to be.

FreeDesktop could always fork Hypr, and Vaxry could (and since, has) forked wlroots, and FreeDesktop was already using a lot of his tools; that's what FOSS means, to a large extent.

The problem's more that this fractures an (admittedly small) portion of the FOSS community: even if we don't get the whole 'bad person touched this thing' reaction, there's definitely people on the "start looking at how they want to see their world curated" chain. A lot of things like 'many eyes make all bugs shallow' or 'working with the best ideas on the planet' start falling apart once you start banning people from your Issues and PR pages.

It wasn't just the rest of the posters. Vaxry himself comes off as overtly hostile to the idea of being empathetic.

Agreeing with posts like-

I think [a Code of Conduct] is pretty discriminatory towards people that prefer a close, hostile, homogeneous, exclusive, and unhealthy community.

and saying things like:

First of all, why would I pledge to uphold any values? Seems like just inconveniencing myself. […] If I’d want to moderate, I’d spend 90% of the time reading kids arguing about bullshit instead of coding.

Yes- I can parse this as (95% unironically) reasonable to an extremely sharp culture environment. Or I can parse it as fully ironic, but OBVIOUSLY its going to be a bad look when the freedesktop.org code of conduct includes "Using welcoming and inclusive language" and "Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences."

There's a paradox of tolerance issue here, banning is not the only way to exclude bright people from your community. You can also do it just by being an asshole to them. Some people are brilliant assets that turn dumb if you start overtly politically attacking them. Some people need to be able to express the "nasty" things they believe to be true to think properly. This is a fundamental competing access needs issue that you can't just gloss over by never banning anyone. You have to actually address individual needs, and if your ideals are explicitly contrary to going through the effort of addressing individual needs... You are inevitably going to find yourself in a bit of a catch-22. That's just the structure of the territory.

I didn't claim Vaxry is blameless or looks good, or even that his faults were merely insufficient empathy. From my first post:

And to be fair, there's some pretty embarrassingly childish behavior, there: a couple years ago Vaxry joked with wanting to get AIDs as a the same as identifying as gay, and separately a moderator screwed around with a user's public profile (then at the time, the only way to put pronouns up) for yucks.

But there's a bit of a problem.

There's a paradox of tolerance issue here, banning is not the only way to exclude bright people from your community. You can also do it just by being an asshole to them. Some people are brilliant assets that turn dumb if you start overtly politically attacking them. Some people need to be able to express the "nasty" things they believe to be true to think properly. This is a fundamental competing access needs issue that you can't just gloss over by never banning anyone.

As a nitpick, Popper's Paradox of Tolerance wasn't using 'tolerance' to mean 'things that progressives like today', but the simple possibility of open debate and discussion.

But more critically, few if any people who try to bring this more expansive non-Popperian version forward do so in any even-handed way. Vaxry's Discord isn't part of freedesktop.org. Vaxry is not accused of behaving poorly in FreeDesktop.org spaces, and I've not been able to find any evidence of such, whether because he's autistic enough to follow their rules in their spaces, or just from lack of opportunity.

You may say that there's a competing access need, but the modern-day variant turns into an insistence that the competition is over. If Vaxry and his cohort can't "express the 'nasty' things they believe to be true to think properly" in a Discord and github issue specific to their project, they can't be 'acerbic' anywhere -- and that's very clearly the target that the FreeDesktop.org held. In that view, the choice is between 'banning' people in the sense that they feel excluded and turned around because of things they found by digging at depth into it, and just directly actually-banning people. The first group will always be able to expand their ranks and justify greater interdiction.

And, to be blunt, the direct-bans get no small amount of people knowing that they'll be excluded by assholes, anyway. It's just that the banhammer-wielders are sort of asshole that the people in charge like.

A case study in why it's foolish to say "it's safe to tolerate they/thems here because we have community norms that prevent their usual disruption and colonization tactics."

Your community norms pale before your server host's wife getting a 2AM phone call from Liz Fong-Jones wanting to have a "girl chat" about how awful it would be for something to hurt her family.
They have infinite will and capacity to escalate over the most trivial of disagreements.

[Disclaimer: I think that this post maybe too low-effort for Culture war thread but other ones don't look appropriate to me]

Can you do too much noticing?

Fallout series released not too long ago and as a fan of games I was reasonably interested, especially after mostly good reviews came in. But while it has quite many political themes I will not talk about them, instead I will focus on some much less important and meaningful thing - casting and specifically race of the actors. Generally I don't want to spoil myself too much, so I ignore teasers, trailers and, of course full-blown reviews, even if they promise to contain no spoilers at all. So at the time right before series release I knew two facts about it, which were gathered from two old stills: protagonist is a woman vault dweller and there was also ghoul sheriff character. Yesterday when I finally had enough free time to comfortably marathon watch it(my preferred way), I saw a third one with a black character that was a member of BoS and my first thought was: "Oh, so it's mc's love interest". And I was right, like I was with similar predictions many times before.

I can easily see how the white woman/black man pairing become so wide-spread in recent years. You don't any conspiracies from 4chan white nationalists imagination, just brutal logic of the modern social justice thought. If you're making action movie, you need an action hero, obviously it should be a woman to combat harmful stereotypes. You can add some other traits: disability, PoC status, mental illness; but most often being a woman is enough for mc so we just return to default, white and pretty. Then you need to add some diversity in main cast, who is the most diverse and minoritiest of them all? - Black people, specifically African Americans. And we already have a woman, why not this one be a man. And if the cast is small or filled with mentors, monsters, villains and characters too young for romance, why not pair up the first two that we designed?

In many ways this is continuation of my previous post because anytime I notice one of the signs of this ideology dominant among American media creators and therefore their creations I feel robbed of enjoying perfectly adequate television because I for some reason decided to read about American politics. While being blissfully ignorant I thought that African Americans constituted at least a quarter if not the third of US population and movie demographics seemed absolutely normal in this light. I, like majority of Eastern Europeans don't have anything to dislike about people of African descent, those few who do live here are students or children of students, are not part of some diaspora and assimilate quite well(though obviously people will look differently at the black Ivan, or Stefan, but it's curious look, without animosity). I compared this feeling to watching soviet-made movies as an American businessman at the time of the Cold War(which of course vanishingly small number of them actually did). You notice propaganda against small bourgeoise like you, but why would it matter if USSR is very far away and communists that you know about are all educated intellectuals obviously against any kind of violence?

One thing that I don't understand is why nobody "inside the kitchen" don't notice how weird their attempts at propaganda seem. I think there wouldn't be so many far rightists in hypothetical America where there is much less to notice. IMHO, Hollywood elites aren't black supremacists and majority of them don't consider themselves in someway being against white race, they are true believers, who try to promote DiversityTM in their media because they think that it will make its viewers better people. My guess is that they do notice, but because of the implication of noticing being bad in itself, there is no one to say: "maybe better make him Asian this time".

I think that this post maybe too low-effort for Culture war thread but other ones don't look appropriate to me

It's plenty high effort enough. One to two paragraphs is fine for a top level post. Some people like to go on longer but you don't have to.

Not only that, I'd really like to encourage people that have a quick point to just go ahead and post it. You don't need a thesis, just a topic of interest and an opinion with at least some degree of reasoning or fact to back it. If you think it's good or bad that SCOTUS has declined to hear the Deray Mckesson case, you can say so without needing to spend all that long on the matter, for example. People will fill in the details and do their own homework if it's an interesting topic.

My main noting of Current Year elements of Fallout has been the lack of tits. The only sexuality in the show so far was a full-body above-the-dick male shot. Because if there was a hint of something a heterosexual man might enjoy, someone somewhere would have complained.

Otherwise, good so far.

They have a whole bunch of tits out in one scene in the second half of the season. The scene didn’t really make all the much sense imo, but there sure were a whole lot of titties out. They were all extras though, the FMC keeps her top on.

I find this satisfactory, the MC isn't a Girlboss and the black guy is more morally ambiguous than people of color are typically allowed to be. It's just good.

One thing that I don't understand is why nobody "inside the kitchen" don't notice how weird their attempts at propaganda seem.

I don't think most people think "white woman protagonist with black man love interest" is "propaganda." Like, propaganda for what? Would it be propaganda if they were both white? If it was an asian woman and a white man? What is the non-propaganda interracial pairing? What makes such a pairing not propaganda?

It's not the individual story, it's the statistical mismatch between stories generally and reality.

If there was a murder mystery series and it turned out the murderer was a Jew 75% of the time, and it wasn't set in Israel, it wouldn't be wrong to infer that the writers must have something against Jews.

What shows or stories are obliged to change their casting decisions in response to other shows casting decisions?

If there was a murder mystery series and it turned out the murderer was a Jew 75% of the time, and it wasn't set in Israel, it wouldn't be wrong to infer that the writers must have something against Jews.

This works in the context of a particular series. I am not sure it works in the context of many different sets of writers on many different series.

  • -13

By the same token, if a bunch of different American shows uniformly showed white men as heroes and black men as villainous brutes, with all of those casting decisions happening independently, would that be indicative of some kind of broader societal bias?

Sure, but the degree of portrayal of interracial couples in media is not anywhere near that density.

  • -13

I believe the contention is that it in fact is near that density. It certainly is much, much higher than observed reality.

It's not the individual story, it's the statistical mismatch between stories generally and reality. If there was a murder mystery series and it turned out the murderer was a Jew 75% of the time, and it wasn't set in Israel, it wouldn't be wrong to infer that the writers must have something against Jews.

Just have to say that is awesome and I will have to remember it.

Like, propaganda for what?

Miscegenation and racial admixture, of course.

Would it be propaganda if they were both white?

Obviously not.

If it was an asian woman and a white man?

No, because that pairing actually reflects reality rather than distorting it.

What is the non-propaganda interracial pairing? What makes such a pairing not propaganda?

There isn't one. This is about race.

No, because that pairing actually reflects reality rather than distorting it.

I don't see how this is true. According to PEW (as of 2017) 11% of interracial relationships in the US were white/black compared to 15% that are white/asian. Black men are twice as likely to have a white spouse as black women, while about 50% more asian women have a white spouse compared to asian men. That's 7% of all interracial marriages that are black man/white woman compared to 9% of interracial marriages that are white man/asian woman. Hardly a substantial difference.

Obviously not.

Why not? Surely it would be propaganda against race-mixing then.

That's 7% of all interracial marriages that are black man/white woman compared to 9% of interracial marriages that are white man/asian woman. Hardly a substantial difference.

It's huge when you consider the relative proportions of Black vs Asian people in the US.

According to the US census there are 41M black people in the US compared to 20M asians. I'm highly skeptical there are more white men married to asian women than black men married to white women.

  • -10

The black male/white female divorce rate is astronomically higher than any other pairing.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4183451/

Well, there are according to your own immediately previous post, about 28% more WM/AW than BM/WW with no particular reason to think the flipped-gender versions would balance that out. This seems to roughly match my own observations for the tiny, potentially biased bit that's worth. The numbers and the way they were arrived at have a lot of room for rounding errors but not enough to cancel out or reverse the conclusion they'd lead you to.

Like anything interracial pairing can be a propaganda or not depending on the context. In the American context there is widespread effort to reduce prevalence of white men in media with the goal of representation and making viewers less racist(in the vein of studies that showed that growing up in more diverse schools leads to being more inclusive). You can of course expect interracial pairs in US media without this factor, America is racially diverse and there are quite many interracial unions, but they are vastly overrepresented in media. I didn't write this in the OP because I thought that here most of the people already know about this.

Was it bad when whites and white men were over-represented in media? Did that make it difficult for you to enjoy a piece of media?

  • -16

I wasn't knowledgeable about US to have an opinion about it when this was true. And I think that the latest part of that period was color blind enough to be just the result of fair hiring practice. But for example native Russian minorities being almost non-existent in Russian media apart from a selected few does bothers me.

Were they overrepresented? I'm sure they were at various points in time, but I'm not sure how much of that was intentional versus the realities of working with the materials on hand.

There is an interesting question as to what exactly constitutes overrepresentation here. If the average USer is white, and I make products targeting that average, then that could entail making films with just white people and never black people. It would be fair to say black people are not represented under that dynamic, but I'm not quite covinced it's fair to say whites would therefore have too much representation. Not that I wouldn't wouldn't find this hypothetical phenomenon somewhat offputting and worth correcting for to some degree.

If I recall films from the 90s to the 10s, I think the average filmgoer saw representation in aggregate that was more proportional to their lived experience. Yes, a lot of movie leads were white. But you still saw occasional movies from Denzel, Sam Jackson, Will Smith, Snipes, and so on. Movies and performances that weren't really coded 'black' and were intended for average peoples' consumption. Depending on where you are, this pattern probably lines up everywhere from your childhood upbringing to your office personnel: mostly white, and a few black people. And while you weren't blind to their skin color, there was a sense that it was wrong to approach them in those terms.

So while you may not have gotten a complete balanced breakfast of diversity and inclusion in any one given film, you probably did get it through a dozen or more films throughout the year. Nobody's wires gets tripped because this pattern matches to more Americans' lives than not. People get cynical - rightly so, I'd argue - when the images they regularly see on their screen is consistently discrepant with their realities. And it's especially repellent when it is clearly being done as a kind of moral mandate. When so many current media products individually reflect this kind of template diversity, you start to wonder what's up.

My humble opinion is that they (the wokies et al) notice, and they will continue and double down and berate you if you point at it at all. They simply don't care if you watch or not, its their vanity project, but that is ok because they are making it better for their people (hint: not you). They are the middle management, the marketing people and the danger hairs with liberal arts degrees.

So far they have been getting their way because they were propped up by pension funds like Black Rock and Vanguard, but now that there have been significant outflows of capital there have been some purges, but it won't be enough. Looking for example at Hollywood, the writers guild's strike looks to have been successful in getting concessions from the studios (chaperoned AI [meaning, AI can only be used by the writers themselves, not the studios to replace writers] and a minimum number of writers in each writer's room of 5 I think).

Battlefields I have seen:

Hollywood
Videogames
Tabletop Games (W40K)
Novels (Nebula award)
Localization of Japanese Entertainment
Gundam Model Kits (This one I think is more a product of the imagination of the antiwoke people, as yuri is an staple of Anime/Manga)

CoC's in Software Dev Projects (This plus the ousting of Linus)
The push for Woke language in programming (example: the Master/slave controversy of a few years)

Marketing in general (Always mixed race or minority pairings, sometimes ads not even related to the product but for the purpose of browbeating their core demographics, the Budlight fiasco, the Gillete ad of "boys will be boys")

The point of it is trying to change the culture from the middle down (remember they are the middle managers and their minions, while some CEO's are probably true believers like the Ice Cream dudes Ben & Jerry, the majority are only looking up to enrich themselves and their cronies like with Bobby Kotick), and if you have any objection it just means you are an enemy and your opinion doesn't matter to them. Just look at the bruhaha that is happening right now with the female Custodes or the Blowback the Lovely Complex Localizer got for giving ammunition to their critics when he went mask off.

You didn't mention comics, they've literally murdered that industry by squandering everything of value to push a message. Right now StoneToss gets more views per comic than mainstream marvel comics franchises.

Comic book media for sure.

  • John Stewart (Green Lantern) and Shayera Hol (Hawkgirl) have a child (Rex Stewart aka Warhawk) in Justice League Unlimited.
  • Luke Cage and Jessica Jones have a child (Danielle Cage) via affair when Jessica Jones was dating Scott Lang (Ant-Man). Danielle Cage becomes Captain America for a stretch.
  • Kara Zor-EL/Karen Starr (Supergirl/Power Girl) is in a sexual relationship with Mr. Terrific and later a romantic relationship with Val-Zod (Superman) in The New 52.
  • (Black) Jimmy Olsen is in a love triangle with Kara Zor-El (Supergirl) in Supergirl television show.
  • Miles Morales (Spider-Man) and Gwen Stacey (Spider-Gwen) have romantic feelings for each other. Justifying it, by saying that it's an alternate dimension Gwen Stacey.

Black men taking formerly white men's superhero mantles and banging white women.

I've stopped paying close attention to any comic book media.

yeah, I forgot about it. Comics gate was so long ago I just remembered it now.

Tabletop Games (W40K)

Assuming this is a racial issue: Shouldn't a true to the setting depiction of 40K be full of POCs? If anything it's weird that all of mankind 10s of thousands of years in the future produces mostly white guardsmen and space marines, given their depiction in various media.

It's the eternal contradiction of
"this is a satire of evil fascism and all the characters are evil white fascists, chuds can't media literacy!"
vs
"Representation matters! More queer trans space marines of colour stomping the faces of screaming children who misgendered us!"

the main conflict in W40K right now is female Custodes and female space marines. Black people was more an issue in D&D where the racists insisted that orcs were representation of African Americans.

But GW isn't introducing female space marines. So that's a non-issue.

Females custodes is a change. I'm not sure I'd denounce it as wokeness.

"But GW isn't introducing female space marines. So that's a non-issue." is the "it's just a couple of kids in college campuses,..." of tabletop. Anyone paying attention to the hobby culture wars already knows what is the next step, especially after the "Warhammer is for everyone" message.

But no. They aren't doing it. Not every slope is slippery all the way down.

What reason do you have to say that they aren't going to do it?

The white woman/black man "pairing" as you put it is not, as far as I am aware, a particularly new concept, though you may be correct in suggesting it has not long been mainstream in terms of characters in film (or games, or whatever, though I am out of my element there.)* In other words, while I do not deny that there may be propagandistic moves made by popular media in the service of progressive goals, and that often these moves are ham-fisted and disrupt story narrative, this does not seem like such an example to me. I agree with @Gillitrut in this regard, unsure where the propaganda angle is, unless seeing such an interracial coupling itself is jarring to you. (Again, based on my ignorance of this and pretty much all games I can't speak to how odd it is in that context.)

*Edit: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was released in 1967 and was presumably a shocker then.

See my answer to him. But also I aren't in anyway shape or form against interracial or even any form of marriage at all. It is jarring to me because it's most likely the sign of ideology that I disagree with. Like maybe this soviet movie about Russian Empire is overtly highly critical of it because it was personal opinion of the filmmaker, but most likely it's because he is a card carrying communist(or it was the censors mandate, but happily US isn't a totalitarian state and it's not on the way there).

The white woman/black man "pairing" as you put it is not, as far as I am aware, a particularly new concept

That this is the most common or ideal pairing is definitely a new concept.

Sure, but has anyone suggested that this is the most common or ideal pairing?

I feel like two or three years ago it became weirdly ubiquitous in advertising. I don't really stay up to date with TV so I couldn't comment on that.

It may be that because of my physical distance from US advertising (I don't really have US commercials, do not see print ads or whatever is on billboards, etc.) I am out of touch to a degree on what is or isn't common in English language advertising.

I would be willing to bet that the most common romantic pairing in American media is still white man/white woman, followed by white man/ethnically ambiguous but relatively pale skinned woman (e.g. Andy Samberg/Melissa Fumero).

Right, but you wouldn't know this from mass media, which misrepresents this reality to a fairly extreme degree.

unsure where the propaganda angle is, unless seeing such an interracial coupling itself is jarring to you. (Again, based on my ignorance of this and pretty much all games I can't speak to how odd it is in that context.)

You know, it sure is harder to take this posture of good-natured misunderstanding at face value after you have explained your situation as a minority father of mixed race children in a country with very exclusionary culture. For you, normalization of miscegenation – whatever else goes in the package – feels necessary, so you will be obnoxiously obtuse, to the point that your rhetorics would've amounted to social violence, were your opponent not anonymous*. «Oh dear me, so do you think there is something… wrong when people of different races join hands in Marriage? Aren't we all God's creatures with inherent value? Huh. So strange, so cruel. But to each his own!».

No (in case this has to be spelled out again): it's more about the hamfisted erasure of the representation of the most typical and normative pairing, and the campaign to code the Blacked.com** image of relationships as the default, whereas in reality it's a distinctly less prestigious and healthy pattern. This is what the producers have in mind, this is what they want the viewers to have in mind, this is no more complex or innocent than casting white men as dumb losers and creeps who get humbled by Girlbosses and Smart-Dressed Blacks (who have good chemistry with Girlbosses) in commercials.

*I have never figured out for sure whether people like you are just liars, or your brains wisely do not distinguish copes and object-level world modeling, for reasons of preserving memory capacity and behavioral fluidity. Either mechanism is enough to make conversation quite hopeless.

**one more "clever" status-preserving maneuver here is to say, for instance, «pardon me, I do not know what you are talking about… oh», and derail the topic into sneering insinuations about racist chuds watching interracial porn. It's a pretty transparent and pathetic development. As I've been warned for baiting people into petty comebacks, I'm stating this to avoid such a development. But neither can I be assed to put this in some other way.

What's more embarrassing, watching Blackeddotcom or watching Hollywood movies and commercials?

That's a joke. But here's my point: I have an adblock, and I don't watch movies unless I expect to like them. And I don't watch many movies in theaters. It's not that I avoid movies with interracial couples or whatever, it's just that I haven't been watching many movies lately. As such, I am to a large extent not exposed to the phenomenon you're describing.

The downsides of eschewing pop culture exist but aren't enormous the way that the downsides of eschewing/being shunned from other stuff are. Pop culture is a pretty small part of culture. The more people read non-pop culture the more powerful it will be and the less powerful corporate dreck will be. That's something I think the right and the left can agree on.

I mainly keep up with Western media through second-hand complaints these days. I am well aware it's more of a religious and educational institution than an entertainment-focused one.

It is a pity. As a kid, I liked consuming American cartoons and such. Now it just doesn't click, the sermonizing is too pervasive and too easy to notice.

Loved Pantheon S2 though. Maybe "Hollywood" should try adapting more content of Chinese authors. It feels fresh, original and open-minded.

I'm honestly not sure where your apparent hostility is coming from here. Obnoxiously obtuse? Jesus. I wrote a pretty benign comment that I didn't see how having a couple of characters where one was a white woman and the other a black man was in some way propaganda or odd. Were this everywhere, in every episode and story and book and TV show, sure it would be notably odd. Also, if this were a game made in Japan for Japanese people (a country where as you say I do live) I'd see it as a bit odd. The fact of the matter is, however, in the US and elsewhere (presumably the primary market for this game, Fallout, though I admittedly do not know and am assuming) these types of pairings do happen and have happened. It's not as if the characters are a trans woman and a gay man somehow finding love, where I'd think there'd be more of a point to be made.

While we're at it, your link to the tweet about IQs strikes me as dubious. Mankind Quarterly? Forgive me if I don't immediately rush out and subscribe. And hauling in the other ideas of propaganda re: girlbosses and dumb males (where I see the point, and agree) seems disingenuous of you. When I've read your comments elsewhere dealing with others you've seemed both better reasoned and more polite.

It's true I don't use terms like "miscegenation" and to me it's not something I give much thought to. I probably should assume that there is at least a certain number of posters on the Motte who think I'm dirtying the gene pool (presumably of the Japanese). It's a bit close to home for me to feel like having that conversation, however.

Barring that, however, normally, as people do on this forum, I'd be interested in discussing the topic with you. But as you're now suggesting I'm a liar and probably a cretin, you're probably right that conversation is hopeless.

Your use of scare quotes struck me as snarky, and you very much did not understand or failed to address the argument being made, which was entirely about a pattern of behavior and the disproportionate representation. The hostility was, I think, a perception that you rather deliberately missed the point.

Very first post I made here was on a related topic . I'm not blind to the idea of this propagandistic swing in media, not am I its defender in some sort of fair-is-fair way. I won't say "the way OP presented the point" because I seem to be the only one who misconstrued, rather "the way I took it" was a focus on one affair as a plot device that happened to be between a black man and white woman. That this has become a widely-played trope I have not myself perceived but I chalk that up to a certain isolation (obviously I don't live in a hole so not complete isolation). Mea culpa.

You may be right that this, along with my use of quotes, fired up a reaction. But so what? Part of the ethos here at least by my understanding is that we suppress the heat and aim for light, or at the very least keep it non-personal. I wasn't trying to piss anyone off despite suspicions otherwise, certainly not OP, who had the humility even to doubt whether his post was low effort (I think it was perfectly fine). Even here you've very clearly explained to me the issue with civility. In any case I've let this irk me way more than it's worth. Thank you for your input.

I mean, the key attribute here is the monotony of it. As he notes, n=1 isn't really enough to say much because the pairing is not exactly unknown. It takes a good memory, a reasonable amount of exposure to modern Western media, and some level of political awareness to, as you put it, "notice". Most people don't have that. TheMotte concentrates those who do, but it's still not everyone here.

As it happens, @George_E_Hale has just admitted that he's not exposed to all that much of this.

Some charity would be nice. Even a reasonable amount of SJers haven't noticed this sort of thing; I didn't until somewhat after I left.

Charity is in order, but I think it's fair to say that George's comment is very easy to read as sarcastic and strawmannish, even if that was unintentional.

Dase, what happened? You seem much more bitter lately.

That's how ascension to a self-made Chad looks like

This kind of petty antagonism is unbecoming of you.

I know there are plenty of regulars here who are fond of noticing, and working that into the conversation, however, George doesn't seem to be like that, but regardless, accusations such as:

I have never figured out for sure whether people like you are just liars, or your brains wisely do not distinguish copes and object-level world modeling, for reasons of preserving memory capacity and behavioral fluidity. Either mechanism is enough to make conversation quite hopeless.

are unacceptable.

You're a valued poster, but please, the angry nihilistic Russian trope can get old, as does lashing out at little provocation.

I explained once.

Dase explained again.

George E could have read my post where I explained exactly what the problem was, but he understood the whole time.

I didn't respond to Gillitrut because I foresaw the same blind-or-lying dilemma and chose not to engage in hopeless conversation. I'm glad someone else said what I wanted to.

Yo, since you're calling me out: A) What post are you talking about where you "explained what the problem was"? I didn't see it or read it. Perhaps you're right that I could have or even should have. I didn't. You're assuming.

You're apparently pattern-matching me to someone who denies there's a problem with media. I do not deny this, as my post history indicates.

The initial post by @FaibleEstimeDeSoi was about video games and a black/white pairing, which didn't and still does not strike me as odd. The issue is not with one game. The issue is larger, as with the tide that goes out--it lowers all boats. For whatever reason I did not make that connection to the post and I felt the issue was with the interracial pairing in and of itself, not a symptom of a larger issue (i.e. focusing on one boat instead of the tide.)

Dase decided to go for it and get personal. That's what I take issue with--well, that and his general writing style, which I find tedious but not because I think he's a liar or cretin. I don't think either of those and he seems quite intelligent. He was also rude and thus far in his interactions with me does not seem to be interested in changing that tack. So be it.

I'm not blind and I'm not lying. I spent three years in Africa and most of my life in Alabama--black men with white women is a thing. That is the issue I was bringing up. I am not Gillitrut.

(Edit: I'm probably one of the most normie dudes in here and need to adjust my expectations. Absurd really how thin my skin is at my age.)

this is no more complex or innocent than casting white men as dumb losers and creeps who get humbled by Girlbosses and Smart-Dressed Blacks (who have good chemistry with Girlbosses) in commercials.

Well, when we have the western white right wing on a complete hair trigger to the point where using a stock photo of a Muslima is enough to trigger something that wouldn't be out of place at a Klan rally you do start to wonder where else they may be hallucinating about Chinese Robbers in commericals.

  • -17

enough to trigger something that wouldn't be out of place at a Klan rally

Where is that something, do you just mean the responses under the the tweet in your link? The pinned tweet on that account, while recent, makes me suspect the shitposting crowd was antagonized before already.

Yeah, just the responses under that tweet.

I guess I should be thankful that Twitter doesn’t display replies to us accountless peasants.

Anyway, this feels like a bit of a non sequitur. What’s Dase got to do with Great Value brand Klansmen?

Suppose we reverse stock photos in this picture.

Does it look like a snide suggestion that immigrants struggle with learning English?

Fair point yes it does.

When I saw the second Dr. Strange movie and Benadryl's character was invited or spoke of the coming wedding of his former love interest played by Rachel McAdams I said to myself "He's gonna be black." He was. When I opened Helldivers for the first time and the cinematic played I didn't know the camera was going to shift to the spokesman's family, but if I did I would have correctly guessed his wife would be black. When the only information I had about the Fallout show was a white woman lead I knew she'd have a black love interest (if she wasn't gay). If I see a mom-coded woman in a commercial the expectation most congruent with reality is if there is a person also in the commercial coded as her partner they will not be white, and this is a pattern so frequent my normie Fox News father and even my normie-leftie brother have separately remarked to me about how all the media they consume, primarily sports so mostly advertising, features interracial couples, most commonly white-woman-black-man.

The Western institutional left is abundantly clear about their desire, intent and efforts to reduce and ideally ultimately eliminate white ethnicities. It is the most perfect case of denying out of one corner of their mouth and bragging out the other, they will not break stride as they say "It isn't happening, racist. It's great that it's happening." That intent is attempting to be realized in casting for shows and films and advertising. The interracial pairing is not "novel" but remarking on it being a thing that has happened is no response. Nobody's saying this has never happened before, what they're pointing out is the obvious politics behind the sudden preponderance in all media of one of the least common pairings in the real world.

Casting a woman to lead a television adaptation of a media franchise primarily consumed by men is a separate expression of the same thing. They are not attempting to meet the expectations and wants of their audience, they are attempting to be proscriptive, views and profits be damned.

The relevant point is that this appears to be widespread, and I apparently, to echo the OP's post title haven't noticed, but then I see about 85% Asian (Japanese, more Korean now than previously) in my print ads, my commercials, my news, my tv shows, the Youtubers my sons watch. My consumption of media is probably, compared to that of most here, therefore skewed, or at least not the usual. Thus my reaction.

You know, I can acknowledge that the pattern you're seeing exists, but I've never taken that much umbrage at it, probably because I mostly limit my content to older, or really highly reviewed stuff. Similar, to the question of whether the demographics of the cast need to match the source material. But I did come across an instance of it recently that bothered me a little, and felt notable.

I really enjoyed Masters of the Air: it was really excellent on most of the axes I care about -- screenwriting, visuals, acting, and such. But at one point, during an ensemble shot of the American air crews, I thought to myself "those guys all look British," so I looked into it on IMDB -- most of the main cast are British or Irish. Even the Tuskegee Airmen weren't played by African-American actors. Some of that might have been due to pandemic restrictions, or using local actors for logistical reasons, but it felt off. Not that there aren't lots of Americans of such descent, but a group of (white, 1940s) Americans should look more diverse than that: I had a [redacted] whose family had recently immigrated from [Europe, not Britain] that served and died in a B-24 over Germany.

Maybe it's that it's intended as a historical account, but it feels like it cheapens the narrative ("heroic American airmen bring the fight to Nazi Germany"), and it's not as if the British weren't there and similarly heroic at the time. A similar series portraying RAF Bomber Command would probably be pretty interesting!

That said, I would recommend the series overall as a worthy followup to Band of Brothers and The Pacific.

I think the vast majority of Americans of all stripes don't care about Brits playing Americans. If they care they care only very slightly and it's mixed with acceptance that Brits are just really good at acting.

I've only ever seen consternation over black British actors playing black Americans, obviously because there's a weird protectionist sensibility over that turf. Nobody was ever giving Christian Bale or Benedict Cumberbatch shit for their American accents. At most, we chuckle a little bit when the accents slip at some of the corners (for some reason the hard pronunciation of 'are' is often a giveaway to me), but we just take it for granted that the British are born with thespian genetics.

To be clear, it didn't really upset me much: I still liked the show quite a bit overall. But now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I've seen a WWII movie written from a British perspective. The war has a very prominent place in American (and Russian) culture, but I'm not sure if I've seen a purely British take on it.

To Americans, WWI is definitely seen as a second-rate prequel to the war that actually matters, but I get the impression that for Brits, the Great War still looms large, with WWII seen as a devastating but still far less psychologically damaging sequel. If I’m right about that, it probably explains why there aren’t (m)any British WWII movies.

There are many British WWII movies. I assure you. Many many.

I highly recommend Christopher Nolan's "Dunkirk" if you want to see a british ww2 movie.

Its not Noticing when the writers state their worldview upfront. You pointed out the two young leads as white and black, yes, but the last lead is a white man... who in the very first scene of the show has his black daughter front and center with him.

It is obvious to Hollywood that there is a deliberate attempt from inside the house to promote blackness, but it is more about reputation laundering than encouraging women to seek black men (dogfart does far more work on that front).

The real dissonance stems from the incongruity of blacks occupying primarily high status and competence positions in modern hollywood portrayals when doing a single Google search on a Name when crime is committed in real life shows where the true disparity lies.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats