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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26433 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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I recently heard of yaslighting, which is where instead of convincing someone their true beliefs are delusional, you affirm their delusional beliefs and convince them they're true.

Seems to apply to a lot of things (especially transgenderism) but what I have in mind is college degree choice. Plenty of female-oriented degrees such as psychology, behavioral science, speech pathology, etc. require a Masters in order to really start working in the field. Seemingly, most of the people who study those majors just aren't aware of this.

I'm unsure whether these women just haven't googled the most basic facts of the career they'll spend their next 4-6 years pursuing, or whether they're semi-deliberately deluding themselves. My guess is the latter. If you're going to college to get married, you need to look like you have your own ambitions. Pursuing a highly-educated mate just isn't a respectable goal for women anymore.

My mother is one of these women. The way she describes it, she finished her Psychology bachelors and only then realized it would take another couple years to make a career out of it. She's extremely smart, conscientious, and logical. I can't imagine her as someone who would just forget to look into these things. During that time she married a man who would go on to become very successful, and I think that (marrying a good man, that is, not necessarily a rich one) must have been the ultimate goal all along, whatever she told herself in the process.

I'm starting to see a similar phenomenon among my siblings. My brothers have laid out step-by-step plans for college and their eventual careers. My sister just wants to study Psychology because it's interesting. None of them would breathe a word about the different expectations between the genders--the topic is somewhat taboo--but they nevertheless have Gotten the Message and are all pursuing seemingly effective strategies optimized for their gender.

My wife and I have broached the subject of Psychology careers a couple of times with my sister, and she seems actively disinterested in thinking it through. I expect she, like my mother, will get married sometime during or just after her Bachelor's degree, and claim she was unaware she needed a Master's to turn the major into a career.

This is all well and good. I find myself continually amazed at how good normies are at unconsciously separating reality from social reality and smoothly living by them both without acknowledging the contradictions. The problem arises when someone doesn't get the message and thinks the social reality is the reality, that men can "study what you enjoy" for 4 years in college with no lasting impact to career prospects or marriagability, or that women can do the same without searching for husbands and things will work out for them.

My wife is a teacher. Most of her coworkers fall into these categories. Some are men who pursued useless degrees and now work as aides. Others (the school's speech pathologists, behavioral interventionists, psychologists, etc.) are women who didn't end up getting married during their Bachelor's, and now are working very slowly towards Master's degrees while working.

American culture gets a lot of things wrong, but imo nothing so badly as gender roles. We encourage women to overeducate, in the process aging themselves out of the possibility of having children, and depriving the next generation of those who could have been their smartest and most capable mothers. It is seen as empowering and feminist to socially pressure women into denying one of the most natural human impulses, that of having and raising children, so that they can get more educated and make more money.

Telling men to pursue fun degrees (creative writing, film, political science, etc.) rather than lucrative ones is like telling them to wear makeup and wait to be asked out by women. It's a fundamental denial of reality. Those who follow such advice will generally have drastically reduced romantic success. Their prospects will be fewer, worse, and less happy to marry them than they would have been otherwise.

Telling women to not look for husbands in college, and focus on education, is similar, though its results manifest in different ways. Such women will (as they get more educated) grow increasingly unable to find comparably "impressive" partners. Many will remain single, sleeping around but never committing, while a few will "settle" many years down the road. Neither situation is great for raising a family.

Sometimes the people in the middle are hardest hurt--those who haven't bought into the modern secular ideology or the trad religious one. Women who don't go all-in on their careers, but also don't actively seek out husbands in college, and so end up in dead-end jobs with whatever mediocre husband they end up with.

American tfr fell to 1.62 in 2023, its lowest rate ever, and is even lower among our most intelligent and conscientious. Financial incentives meant to correct this in places like Finland and Turkey have accomplished very little overall. The problem is not financial, it is cultural and legal. People need to think of advice like "study your hobby and things will work out" as a malicious lie meant to signal a luxury belief. Motherhood needs to be far more prestigious than any career. Couples need to be allowed to mutually agree to contracts incentivizing them to stick together.

The truth is and always has been the truth, but more people need to be made more consciously aware of it. If women want large families, they need to start before finishing their Master's. I burned a lot of credibility with my immediate family getting married as young as I did, and sacrificing my social life and physical health to be financially ready for children quickly. This was the right decision, but it pains me to say I probably won't be able to convince them to do the same until after the crucial window has passed. I hope to convince you, though, or if you are already convinced, to offer you some ammunition convincing those you care about.

For the vast majority of people, the quality and quantity of their children will have far more of an effect on the future than anything else they could do. If you like being alive, and/or find it meaningful, it is likely your kids will too, and bringing them into the world to experience the joy of existence is an enormous gift you have the power to offer them. Less important, but still significant, 71% of Americans are happy with their decision to have children, or wish they had more, while only 10% wish they had less.

Whether for selfish or selfless reasons, having children early is the right call for most people, but our culture has conducted an enormous yaslighting campaign to prevent this from happening until it's too late.

Telling men to pursue fun degrees (creative writing, film, political science, etc.) rather than lucrative ones is like telling them to wear makeup and wait to be asked out by women. It's a fundamental denial of reality. Those who follow such advice will generally have drastically reduced romantic success. Their prospects will be fewer, worse, and less happy to marry them than they would have been otherwise.

My guess is that straight men who do creative writing and screenwriting get laid much more than straight men who do software engineering or physics. Even political science, as @Bartender_Venator says below.

They're around (vastly) more women, will have largely female social circles in many cases, meet more women in the course of their professions and have jobs that women would (in many cases) like to speak to them about. That easily cancels out the engineer's larger paycheck.

If you want to get laid as a man, studying English literature and spending your 20s and early 30s being a bum in a band and working part-time bartending gigs in Brooklyn is far superior as a sexual strategy than literally any white collar profession will be. That isn't a recommendation.

The main problem with creative writing and screenwriting is how extremely difficult it is to get jobs in those fields. The average creative writing major should expect to get a mostly-unrelated job or need more education. The average screenwriting major should expect to essentially not get into the film industry at all.

And I'm talking about getting married and having kids, not finding sexual partners.

(Though, if you want to get laid as a man, getting married is statistically by far your best bet).

Of course, but even if your failed-out creative writing major becomes an English teacher making a modest salary, he's still surrounded by women, many of them young and attractive. Even if they'd rather a doctor, an average-to-good looking male teacher won't have trouble dating or getting married. Male nurses are a himbo profession and always seem to do well with women.

I think creative writing majors becoming teachers is one of the good endings. More often I see them continue to pursue the dream of becoming an author long after it makes sense, only starting a family years down the line. I don't have creative writing friends but this is what is happening with my friends who went into film.

Of course you could argue this is due to the person and their goals, not the major. Maybe. I think people are happiest when they can directly apply the things they learned in college to jobs, and hit the ground running with some pre-built competence in their field. Making the pivot even to something like teaching can be a humiliating decision men especially aren't prepared to make right away.

The average creative writing major should expect to get a mostly-unrelated job or need more education. The average screenwriting major should expect to essentially not get into the film industry at all.

But most people in almost every field except STEM, don't end up working in their degree field anyway right? A lot of white collar jobs are gated behind a degree, but it doesn't really matter what degree you have, as getting the degree is the signal. There simply are not many actual psych jobs or politics jobs, so most people getting any of these are going to end up an office manager or something similar. Might as well study something you are interested in at university level unless you have a very specific plan, and even in a lot of those instances there are simply not going to be enough jobs in that field and you will end up doing something else. And my experience (and I work in academia) is that applies to most of both men and women.

Once you realize the majority of people are going to end up working in a field unrelated to their major then creative writing isn't much worse off. The truth is the vast majority of graduates are going to end up in some kind of mundane office dronish position, unrelated to whether they want to become a writer or an astronaut or a journalist.

This might be true, but for most non-humanity majors, they have a degree that signals a marketable skill and therefore they can often get a job that pays decently enough without the need to go and take a second degree to avoid working at Starbucks or something. Humanities don’t teach you skills businesses need or want. And on the art end, it’s almost anti-career skills. Nobody will ever ask you to write a screenplay or make an oil painting in an office. At least the psych degree requires researching and producing reports, often presenting findings to the public or peers.

The other negative of an artist is that quite often they don’t understand just how unlikely success is in their field and thus some will spend a decade or more “trying to make it” and keeping a low wage job that doesn’t make demands on their “art”. I know a guy who was still spending hundreds every month booking himself studio time to make cds of his music into his thirties. He’d spend time on the weekends playing gigs for free as well. Everyone knew he was wasting his life on this — he’d never actually have a career even as a local artist. But at the same time, he wasn’t moving forward in an actual career until well into his thirties.

most non-humanity majors, they have a degree that signals a marketable skill and therefore they can often get a job that pays decently enough without the need to go and take a second degree to avoid working at Starbucks or something.

Depends on the humanities degree, doesn’t it? Like history majors are doing fine on the job market, and that’s a humanity.

Intellectually rigorous humanities study teaches skills which are valuable in the workplace (rapid assimilation of unstructured information, critical evaluation of qualitative arguments, persuasive writing). I learned to write in history class, not by writing lab reports as part of my physics degree, and definitely not from preparing for the compulsory essay questions in the capstone physics paper.

The problem is that humanities courses are the easiest to grade-inflate without it being obvious what you have done, so most students with high GPAs in humanities majors never actually engaged in intellectually rigorous humanities study. Employers will only hire humanities graduates if they are sufficiently clued in to know which are the intellectually rigorous schools and programmes. Harvard philosophy majors are as hireable for a MBB or Wall Street analyst role as the STEMlords.

Employers will only hire humanities graduates if they are sufficiently clued in to know which are the intellectually rigorous schools and programmes.

Again this may be true for very high end employers but for most all they look for is a degree and they don't care how rigorous that degree was. I did recruitment for both private and government organizations, and while the civil service did care, no-one else did, including blue chip communications companies and local government. And the reason for that is they are not getting to pick from Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard grads or wherever in the first place. Your middle of the road office manager type can easily get a job with a non-intellectually rigorous humanities degree. Sure they might not get into Wall Street or quant jobs, but they were never going to. Your point only applies for the very top slice of jobs, for all the others, just need to have a degree to tick a box on the form, you will be fine with a degree in basket weaving or creative writing or musicology.

Most of the office people in my local government and private business days had humanities degrees, I think you underestimate how little most bog standard employers care about whether the degree is humanities or not. A degree is a degree (with the exception of STEM). As long as you can signal enough that you can sit down, follow instructions for 3 or four years that is good enough.

Now that is seperate from people who think they will succeed in industries which are famously hard to break into.

In the era of contraception, getting laid is at best correlated with reproductive success; I suspect engineers have a higher TFR than roadies and bartenders, although probably not by as much as one would think.

With the exception of the very poor and very rich (which even most highly intelligent and conscientious people will never be), income and tfr aren't really correlated much among secular Westerners.

Sure, income isn't, but stability of income probably is. Male teachers make unimpressive salaries but probably have a good TFR compared to similarly paid servers(and high end servers routinely make teacher money in the US because tips, it's just not very steady). Every butcher I've ever met has had a wife and usually kids if over 30, despite unimpressive salaries, because it's a very stably-paid position. Roadies, bartenders, and other such drifters might have a far-above-average number of partners because they move from social circle to social circle regularly. But I'm skeptical that any of these partners have a kid with them.

It is seen as empowering and feminist to socially pressure women into denying one of the most natural human impulses, that of having and raising children, so that they can get more educated and make more money.

This is often reinforced by the meme that as a woman you should not be dependent on a man. In my experience this does a disservice to those who believe it. My wife and I are mutually dependent on each-other, in our complimentary domains. She's been a full-time homemaker the past 8 years. One of her friends from uni, who is now literally a witch, was shocked to hear that she is dependent on me financially.

I see it as the value she provides to our home and our four children far exceeds the value of her working for an employer. We'd be unable to pay a person of equivalent caliber to perform the work she does for our family.

I think we’ve by and large started yaslighting because of mistaken notions like being nonjudgmental and being supportive. In short, being polite, thus defaulting to whatever media and friends put out in the culture. Telling a kid that his art sucks hurts him and makes you feel like a mean person. Telling him how few people make it in professional art feels mean. And especially in the USA, being nice and polite no matter what harm may come from it is the norm, no matter what the consequences are. I don’t see this as true kindness because it’s often a lie that will eventually come to hurt that person as they make very expensive mistakes or otherwise give up on things they might want. Truth is freeing, and knows that the hobby isn’t going to feed them on the outset is going to allow them to make better choices.

Regarding the hobby-as-career thing, the culture is pushing it in large measure because the older contract isn’t true anymore. Any old job doesn’t give you even a working class life, raises are pitiful, and the cost of living is climbing. One way to keep people from rebelling is to subtly change the contract in the mind of the public. Don’t think about your job in terms of money, think about your job as a calling something that you were born to do. Then you won’t ask for the money or at least not as much.

The "yaslighting" thing is cute.

It seems like a case where something can be good enough advice at an individual level, while also not being very useful systemically, or in a way that's relevant for fertility rates. To the extent that a trend is effecting America, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, etc, it's unlikely to be primarily a matter of personal or subcultural choice.

Sometimes the people in the middle are hardest hurt--those who haven't bought into the modern secular ideology or the trad religious one. Women who don't go all-in on their careers, but also don't actively seek out husbands in college, and so end up in dead-end jobs with whatever mediocre husband they end up with.

Maybe they are themselves mediocre? Not everyone, nor every job can be above average. Thinking of that as a harm is a large part of the problem. A civilization where people won't have kids because their house and job and man are average is not in a good place.

yaslighting

I am so so using that term from now on...

But shouldn't it be "yasslighting"? "Yass queen" has more than 1 "s".

...That does seem better.

This is all well and good. I find myself continually amazed at how good normies are at unconsciously separating reality from social reality and smoothly living by them both without acknowledging the contradictions.

It really is necessary, when we live in a society that puts so many contradictory constraints on us. I think that's why "autistic" and "creepy" have taken off so hard as insults lately- it labels a certain person who can't just "let it be," but consciously questions those unwritten social rules, which makes everyone else uncomfortable because it highlights the contradictions.

And things change in response. Like, maybe it was fine in the past to get an ".Mrs degree," as long as it wasn't made too explicit. But once you go around explicitly talking about it and make everyone aware of what's happening, they have to change their behavior to regain some plausible deniability.

There is a critical flaw with your advice.

The definition of luxury belief is beliefs you can afford to have. "Study your hobby and things will work out" is a luxury belief for exactly this reason, because you can get away with studying your hobby and things will work out for you in the end (if you have additional options to fall back on or money is not a concern at all). Why would you ever broadcast that you can't afford to have these luxury beliefs? What are you, poor?

The problem isn't that these beliefs are wrong, it's that America is the land of temporarily embarrassed millionaires. You see this all the time because it is a culture obsessed with broadcasting their success. Some woman wrote a book in coffee stores and made a billion dollars, why can't you do that? She proved it's possible! What are you, stupid? Kids see streamers their age making six figures a year. Why would you study hard when you can stick your face in front of a camera and make money for acting like a moron and playing video games! What are you, stupid?

What they don't see are all the failures. Failures are invisible. For every JK Rowling there's millions of writers, even published ones, who can't pay a power bill with book royalties. For every Mr Beast there's a thousand people humiliating themselves on Twitch for pennies in the name of Content.

If you're going to college to get married, you need to look like you have your own ambitions. Pursuing a highly-educated mate just isn't a respectable goal for women anymore.

You can, in fact, combine the two- study education and 'need help' with your math homework in the engineering commons, you'll get that MRS degree in no time. It was what my grandfather recommended my sister to do, although she met a law student with a trust fund before she could execute that plan.

Of course, that's what I'm saying. You pretend to be getting an education while dating intelligent, conscientious classmates.

It's not that the education side of the strategy is fake necessarily, but even if you don't care about it at all, pursuing it as your explicit goal is probably the most effective way to find a husband.

Telling men to pursue fun degrees (creative writing, film, political science, etc.) rather than lucrative ones is like telling them to wear makeup and wait to be asked out by women. It's a fundamental denial of reality. Those who follow such advice will generally have drastically reduced romantic success. Their prospects will be fewer, worse, and less happy to marry them than they would have been otherwise.

Generally agree with your post, but this is quite STEMbrained. If you pursue a degree which makes you more interesting and fun to be around, requires developing social skills, and gives you a status hierarchy to climb, you will absolutely have more romantic prospects than if you were just grinding for money. Your future house probably won't be as nice, of course. To take political science as an example, if you're a reasonably-put-together, educated man who can bring himself to tolerate libs, DC is one of the easiest dating scenes in the world, full of attractive women looking for commitment but happy to hook up. The real downside is that these careers and status hierarchies encourage a prolonged adolescence of sleeping with all the easily available women rather than committing to one (and really, everyone ends up losing - if you want to climb a status hierarchy in creative fields, politics, etc., a good woman in your corner will do far more for your success than just the motivation to look good to girls).

On the topic of marriage and kids, I don't notice a particular difference in career paths between the young people I know who are getting married and having kids and those who aren't, except that there seems to be a gulf in fertility and age of marriage between the ones who went to state schools and the ones who went to "elite" colleges.

Political science is a field I was very interested in before I looked into the career prospects. It sounded super fun so I guess I associate it with other "fun" majors like creative writing. I'm willing to believe there are some good prospects in the field, but everyone I know who went into it graduated with a Bachelor's and then got an unrelated office job if they were lucky. One of my wife's aides is a political science major. I think it's a field where if you're 2-3 SD's above average, which should be typical for people on this site, you'll do fine, but the average guy won't find much success there.

I definitely don't think DC is the place to look for a wife and children, though. A girlfriend maybe, but the DC public policy crowd has got to be super progressive, and the women consequently not in any rush to have kids, right?

I don't know any non-STEM graduates who are anywhere near marriage, while literally every STEM graduate I know is already married and starting to have kids.

Yeah, true that a lot of people with polisci degrees don't end up in politics, just in generic white-collar world. You do actually have to be able to climb those status hierarchies to make it worthwhile entering them. But my experience of DC libs is that they're big on "successful liberals live like conservatives". The end goal is absolutely 2.3 kids on a leafy street in NoVA/Maryland (paid for by Joe Taxpayer, you're welcome).

I guess if I had to pick a particularly marriage-minded demographic it'd be non-engineers in tech. Normie values and ability to get a partner young, tech-adjacent salaries. Lawyers, too, the ones who don't give up their 20s to the biglaw grind. Stability, I think, is very important, and the modern economy doesn't provide it in that many places.

What do you do with a political science degree? Go to law school of course…

That's fair. Everyone I knew wanted to be a government official though and ended up elsewhere.

I haven't thought about the major much in a while but it's still a bit embarrassing to have forgotten that path.

I think one angle missing here is why women want the ability to have their own careers, income streams, etc. This post seems to reduce it to a kind of cultural brainwashing which is far too simplistic. Women want the ability to have their own careers and income streams for the same reason men do: they want to have some control over their lives. They want to be able to mitigate the downside risk that comes with being completely financially dependent on someone else. Imagine you're a woman. You give up your career, education, etc to become a homemaker for a man. Half a decade in (perhaps with two or three children) he becomes an abusive alcoholic. What kind of options do you have for protecting yourself and your children? For exiting the relationship? I know, as a man, I would be pretty uncomfortable being completely dependent on someone else due to the potential for abuse. it seems totally rational to me that women feel similarly. I suspect many women have heard stories from family members or friends about such relationships and so the concern seems especially salient to them. How prestigious does motherhood have to be for women, as individuals, not to care about that downside risk?

A lot of women think most men are abusive and that they'll be nearly as fertile in their 40's as they are in their 20's. Our culture is extremely uncomfortable telling women that they need to get started with having kids relatively early, to the point that many women don't get that message at all and are shocked when they learn how female fertility actually works.

I would also be very uncomfortable trusting my finances to someone else. There's not just physical abuse to worry about--you also need to hope that they won't quit their careers to pursue a pipe dream, run away with a woman they meet on a business trip, or just get fired and fall into eternal unemployment due to depression. Getting education, and being capable of providing for yourself, is one way to deal with this possibility. Finding a good husband in the first place, one less likely to do any of these things, is another.

Ideally all women do both--getting sufficient education and selecting good husbands. As a culture, though, we refuse to acknowledge that at some point these strategies trade off against each other. Pursue a challenging and time-intensive degree and the best husbands will probably have already married other women. You may not have the time and resources to find a good spouse in time while dealing with educational demands.

I'm not saying women shouldn't get educations. Speaking as someone with no more than a high school diploma, I think a Bachelor's is probably the sweet spot for most women, but individual circumstances vary. I just think it's a shame so many people, men and women, operate off of faulty information and narratives when choosing how much education to get.

Ideally all women do both--getting sufficient education and selecting good husbands.

...? To the extent that there's any selection going on, it can't be done by all women? Do you just mean the women you personally know and like or something?

If everyone's following my advice now, then I'll tell all women to get married immediately and all men to be good husbands. Problem solved.

Really, though, selection is actually a thing that all women can do. If nobody marries deadbeat men, then deadbeats and the corresponding bottom X% of the female population just never marry. This probably leads to some good effects--the marginal deadbeats realize they need to shape up to have a chance with a woman and do so.

It's good general advice to ask people to be selective about choosing spouses because it encourages everyone to shape up.

And yeah, some husbands will still be deadbeats, but I did say women should do both--be selective and get good educations.

Yeah. 'Pass' is a valid selection.

I don’t think women entered the workforce en masse as a form of insurance against spousal abuse. I think it was to access a higher standard of living by having two incomes, and that husbands were active participants in encouraging this process.

When raggedyanthem was still active on the forum she liked to make the point that normally when the ‘become a stay at home mom’ question comes up, it’s usually the husband who’s opposed. This speaks to the main reasoning for the lack of stay at home moms being mostly economic factors, which men are typically more sensitive to, and not risk-based factors that women tend to be sensitive to. There’s probably external economic factors involved as well; taking the standard of living cut is simply easier when smaller houses and crappier cars exist as a thing that middle class people have access to, and the story of the past few decades in America has been steadily rendering those things more and more the domain of the poor.

Yes, this fits my observations better as well.

I think that you are correct but it is also a broader cultural change that is path dependent. The institution of marriage is unrecognizable to what it was in the past, shaming no longer works and family support is not there. Also in the past the situation was symmetric - being put together man who had quarrelsome wife who constantly created drama and conflict with neighbor was terrible for a man with no way out either. Even if he made all the money it is not as if he could just have a parallel life not supporting his family without massive reputational damage to the extent of destruction. Plus the wife also had family and brothers or uncles and so forth - deadbeat man could end up in a very sorry state if he overstepped his bounds and did not fulfil his family duties.

A similar phenomenon came to be after the advent of the pill. If a young men impregnated a young women, everybody knew that he was responsible to marry her shotgun wedding style. After invention of the pill and access to abortion, suddenly it was all on woman. Are you pregnant? Then it is your fault for not taking pill properly, but you can go and have abortion. You still want a baby? Okay, feel free to be a single mom while the man just leaves and does what he wants.

So yes, maybe women being "independent" and doing some clerical work for government with no husband and no kid is the next best thing in current reality where all the norms are obliterated. But it does not mean it is actually good for them or the society.

I feel very confused by the way this is often talked about.

Women need jobs for the same reason men need jobs. Hardly anyone marries a well-off man at 18. It's not really an available choice for that many women, even in very conservative communities where it's theoretically ideal. Someone might say that they can go be a waitress or barista or something at 18, and sure, that's not that bad. But then unless both partners have really bought into the homeschooling lifestyle, most couples aren't all that happy about a woman who's just at home by herself or spending her husband's money with her friends 8 hrs a day. That was the issue in the 50s -- taking nicer and nicer jello casseroles and sewing unusually pretty aprons is not any more fulfilling than even quite a dull job, and husbands are not impressed by their wives chilling with their friends all day while they're at work. And then their kids grow up enough to take care of themselves, so what are they going to do? Running a non-profit for fun is for the rich, and costs money. and it's not great to be a waitress at 50. Maybe some women can take 10 years off to raise young kids, but there's another 30 years or so there where most of them will have to work, or face resentment and very tight finances. And for what? Lots of leisure is only enjoyable if you have money or similarly situated friends and neighbors.

most couples aren't all that happy about a woman who's just at home by herself or spending her husband's money with her friends 8 hrs a day. That was the issue in the 50s -- taking nicer and nicer jello casseroles and sewing unusually pretty aprons is not any more fulfilling than even quite a dull job, and husbands are not impressed by their wives chilling with their friends all day while they're at work. And then their kids grow up enough to take care of themselves, so what are they going to do?

That's true, but you could also say the same about working a job. Most jobs, even well-paying ones, just aren't that interesting as far as self-actualization and giving meaning to your life. It's an existential struggle that we all face, in this modern age of atheism and material abundance. If she's chilling with her friends, at least that might provide some real community and social circle, compared to the career woman late at night, too tired to do anything except order takeout and watch TV.

This is a post in itself but a substantial reason why so many work outside the home today, and why women working outside the home is correlated with wealth and technological development, is because having access to labor saving devices heavily shifts the economic calculus in favor of women working outside the home. It requires far fewer hours today to achieve what would have been a full time job providing goods for a household historically. One of the few areas where this is not true is child rearing and i s part of why daycare is so expensive and why people sometimes quit work to care for children. Otherwise we have largely automated the tasks of homemaking, freeing people's labor up for other productive uses. Related to this is the idea of a "gold digger." A woman interested in a man for his wealth but who does not proportionally contribute. It's much harder to proportionally contribute without a job when technology can automate most of the things you're supposed to be contributing!

One of the few areas where this is not true is child rearing and i s part of why daycare is so expensive and why people sometimes quit work to care for children.

There is no way that daycare costs aren't artificially inflated. If you're already taking care of a kid full-time, you can throw in a couple more, and barely see the difference (it's the whole reason it's even possible for daycare to work). The reason your SATHM neighbor can't offer daycare as a service is that she's not allowed to, not that it wouldn't be cost effective.

I was formerly the board chair of a local non-profit daycare. Even with free facilities, only a couple of full-time staff, a bunch of part-time high school and college students making barely above minimum wage (this was pre-Covid), and zero excess funds most years, we still were barely cheaper than many of the other local daycares. At least where I live, childcare is a highly competitive field. Any conspiracy to artificially inflate costs would need to include every daycare run by a non-profit, university, church, stay-at-home mom, large employer, etc., including every new entrant into the business, of which there are many. A sinister cabal is just not possible.

A little-discussed phenomenon is that since 2011 or so, low-wage pay has skyrocketed in major urban areas. People who were making $8 an hour in 2008 make $30 an hour today. Meanwhile, white collar workers who made $50 an hour (converted to hourly pay) in 2008 may make $75 an hour today, a much smaller increase.

The cost of childcare, fast food, hotel rooms etc for white collar professionals (ie. the upper middle class) has therefore increased much faster than their own incomes.

Oh, you’re absolutely right. I remember raising the minimum wage for the part-timers to $8/hour ten or twelve years ago. The last I heard, the new starting wage at the same daycare was something like $15–$17/hour, and this isn’t even in an urban area, let alone a major one. I don’t know of any white collar jobs that saw a 100% increase in salary over the same time period.

"Good news everyone! Income inequality has really decreased in the past few years. Bad news: everything is now really expensive relative to your inflation-adjusted wage."

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The downside is half the kids I know making $19/hr are paying $1.5k/mo in rent, $5.60/gal in gas, and there are hardly any used cars for under 10k.

Friends with a guy who drives 25 miles each way to do 2.5hr shifts at $18/hr. $37 after tax, minus $14 for gas. And he needs to save some of that $23 to buy a new car when his '89 with the doors held closed by baling twine finally dies.

I don't know if the math has really sunk in for him.

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If you're already taking care of a kid full-time, you can throw in a couple more, and barely see the difference

This doesn't appear to be true. It's extremely complicated to get a stay at home mom to watch another mom's kids even for a couple of hours of babysitting. I have heard of it happening now and again, or in an emergency, but it is absolutely not a regular thing, and I could definitely not pay my stay at home mom friends to watch my kids reliably, all day, at any price that I would be able to pay. I grew up around stay at home moms, it was definitely not illegal to watch each other's kids, and it also very rarely happened at a greater scale than very light occasional babysitting.

I have heard of it happening now and again, or in an emergency, but it is absolutely not a regular thing

Weird, was pretty common when I was a kid.

it was definitely not illegal to watch each other's kids

Yeah, it's also not illegal to invite someone over to dinner, that doesn't mean you can sell your food.

that doesn't mean you can sell your food.

Yes I can. Nobody bothers the tamale vendors, clearly selling stuff they made in their home kitchens from out of their personal cooler chests. The teachers in the schools are selling their home cooked food (mostly tamales) to each other through the official newsletter. Just if they make enough money at it, they'll be expected to pay taxes.

Maybe you can. Maybe the police will catch you in an undercover sting and you'll actually end up prosecuted.

Are you talking about legality, or are you talking about lack of enforcement? Because, although it was a while back, I distinctly remember stuff like a SWAT raid on a raw-milk co-op.

Similar informal (and illegal) daycare setups also exist.

I think part of it is government regulation but another part is that we often have higher standards for entities we outsource these things to than we have for ourselves. Compare home cooking to eating out a restaurant. I generally want the restaurant food to be at least as good as what I could make or I wouldn't bother going. On top of that the restaurant has to comply with a bunch of food safety regulations I probably don't abide when cooking at home. This makes things more expensive!

On the parenting front, I suspect a lot of parents who would be fine giving their kid an iPad or some other device for entertainment would be mad at a daycare they pay for doing the same.

Sure.

But then you probably can't just advise a young woman to get a frivolous degree and hope to be a housewife, because even if it works out to get married, start a family, and be a stay at home mom from 22 - 35 or something (big if), she'll still either need to develop a very substantial hobby that might as well be a job, but without burning through all their disposable income, or have a plan to get a job that's sustainable as a middle aged and older mom, both of which take some amount of forethought.

This is one reason why teaching is a popular career for women who want to take time off to raise kids. It is easier to get back into teaching compared to other careers as there isn’t as much technical changes.

But then unless both partners have really bought into the homeschooling lifestyle, most couples aren't all that happy about a woman who's just at home by herself or spending her husband's money with her friends 8 hrs a day.

I read this, and think of my parents, who don't really match the picture you've drawn here. Mom was pretty much fresh out of high school when she married Dad — who was about as far from "well-off" as you'd expect a functionally-illiterate high-school-dropout handyman to be. Mom didn't homeschool me and my younger brothers, and yet she still found ways to fill her day — and, in fact, be frustrated by time pressures getting things done — that weren't "spending her husband's money with her friends 8 hrs a day" (being as she had little in the way of money or friends), and only went out into workforce once my youngest brother was off to college. Part of this, I suppose, comes down to a standard element of living on the poorer end of the socio-economic scale (to which I can also attest personally) — that is, doing yourself what others pay to have done, those with more money substituting said money for time. I remember Mom, particularly when we were younger, doing a fair bit of sewing. Lots of cooking. Smoking or canning salmon. Thursdays and Fridays spent packing for weekend trips out of town — hunting, fishing, or just spending weekends at the cabin (and Mondays spent putting everything back). Gardening, once we were no longer in apartments. Shopping trips to Costco. Laundry (lots and lots of laundry). And, of course, plenty of cleaning up after three messy boys and a man with ADD and no ability to organize his collection of work tools and spare parts.

Much of this sort of thing — the "idle 50's housewife" and such — seems to be dependent on class, and not so much a thing down at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Growing up, my family was a good bit more suburban and less rural. Gardening for fun more than sustenance. Sewing to mend the odd item rather than maintain everything. Dad had a somewhat more technical job, and if we were ever desperate for money, they were able to hide it.

With that in mind, like you, I can't think of my mother as idle. Cooking for a family of six is the obvious time-sink. Cleaning, too, even once we were old enough to be useful. She managed most of the groceries, but also all of the clothes, furniture, Christmas presents, road trips, and other intermittent expenses. Not to mention the actual bills. Somehow she also juggled four kids' worth of extracurriculars and social groups while (apparently) managing to bond with her peers.

It's not like Dad was checked out. He loved us and took on his fair share. But the minutiae of raising kids was always Mom's full-time job.

Go back a generation, and both my parents had extremely rural upbringings. I can't imagine their day was any less full.

That makes sense, closer to a preindustrial household economy, where cooking, cleaning, and textiles/crafting were much more important and harder to replace. I think it was CanIHaveaSong who used to write sometimes about (her?) mother hand washing everything and growing up without running water.

On the other hand, the original context was about the kind of woman who might get a degree in psychology but not take her eventual career path too seriously, since ultimately she's more interested in meeting a future husband at college, which to some degree higher status than I am. My grandmother was of the Mrs Degree class, and went to university to get a BA in stage or something before settling down to raise her four children in the 50s and 60s, and even when she lost her husband and became the head of household, I'm not entirely sure what she did, actually. Which isn't judgment on her as a person, and seems to have been appropriate to her class.

So I suppose I was thinking of a socioeconomic situation somewhere between my grandmother's and your mother's, the kind of lower middle class woman who's certified as a teacher or nurse or something. I personally get summers off and spend the time going on road trips with my family, reading Motte posts, and painting in the garden, and would absolutely be a poor candidate for an actually useful stay at home mom. This is related to why old female novels make such a huge deal of women, especially, dropping classes -- they won't necessarily know what to do or have any useful instincts for it, having been trained mostly to read books and paint (or whatever) for their entire childhood.

same reason men

Men frequently want careers / success to improve their likelihood of reproductive success. Career success can even offset other deficits, short stature, asymmetry, etc.

Does education / career improve women's odds of reproductive success?

Do women hold up their degrees in pornography?

I'm not sure I understand the question.

crushedoranges wants to imply that men are mostly picking women for their physical characteristics.

I think that while physical attraction governs who men might want to have sex with, there might be other considerations for long term relationships. At least some men would prefer a spouse who shares their interests, views et cetera, and having a similar degree of education might serve as a proxy for those.

Just as an abstract question, if you were a woman, how would you go about becoming the mistress of Arnold Schwarzenegger? He is undoubtedly at the top in the political, physical, and social sphere of America. How would you do it?

Well, certainly not by going to college!

He had a child by his cleaning maid, a child that seems to have recieved the jackpot in terms of genetics, becoming a Hispanic clone of his father. We're not talking about relationships here: we're talking about reproductive success.

If you're a woman, and you want to have ubermensch children, you don't even need to be attractive. You just need to be available to elite men, be discreet, and be feminine and pliant. That's all it takes. It's not complicated. Women have been doing it for millenia. You don't need a piece of paper to get into Chad's pants. You just need girl game.

Career? Working is for the working class!

Certainly. It's also likely a proxy for 'class'.

To @crushedoranges question then, I don't believe harlots would lead with their pornography credentials unless their targets are similarly credentialed. Any sex industry involvement is a disqualifyer for many men seeking a wife.

I think attraction to physical characteristics plays a role it can be more subtle than simply having two breasts are like two fawns, twins of the gazelle grazing among the lilies...

There had been 'research' that purported to show men ranked women as more attractive when the women's faces looked more like the men. In my own experience n=1 this is true. Though I did not notice / realize until several other people, friends, family drew my attention to the similarities. Then I saw it too.

On the individual level, absolutely.

'years of education' .. is also one of the things most strongly associated with infertility, no ?

Sure, but things correlate with multiple things at once.

Things can't correlate with the same thing both positively and negatively.

Presumably we could see a bimodal distribution of fertility, though I don't believe we do. Most of graphs I've seen look more like a dose response curve.

When the causal graph has more than two nodes, something can have a negative correlation (when measured with no controls) despite having a positive causative effect (which would show a positive correlation in an RCT), or vice versa. People who get chemotherapy are way more likely to die of cancer than people who don't.

I can't imagine the education/fertility relationship being an example of that, though. Nerds go to college more and have fewer kids, but not as many fewer as they'd have had without going to college? Sounds like a stretch.

Starting a company is both correlated with bankruptcy and business success.

100% of businesses that go bankrupt were started

100% of successful businesses were also started

I'm not sure this a a very descriptive or useful corralation.

Bankruptcy and business success aren't mutually exclusive the way high and low TFR are.

I think what you mean is that high education is correlated with both low TFR and with being one of the few women with very high TFR, but this doesn't seem to be true. Those extreme-TFR women generally get there by marrying rich, not via personal education. Maybe they met their rich husbands at college but probably not in PHD programs.

Do you have any data? All the graphs and studies I've seen seem to show tfr declining with increased education / work outside the home.

Regarding not having a plan for a career, I have to say this was always the case for me. I am finished school because it seemed the default thing to do, then studied physics because I thought it was interesting (and to keep my options open with regard to kinds of jobs), then went for a PhD. Me being in Europe, living a modest life-style and being supported by my parents meant that I came out without debt at least. I am not sure if I would have been more careful about my career choices if I felt that I was less employable.

--

Another thing which you touch is that it takes money to raise kids, especially if one wants more than one kid, at least by contemporary Western expectations (i.e. one room per teenager). Typically, there are places which have affordable rents and places which have jobs. In previous centuries, a husband in his twenties could start working and earn enough to feed his family and eventually even buy a house. Today, plenty of people feel they need two post-grad incomes to even consider kids, and few have delusions of being able to afford to own a house from the money they will ever make.

Regarding not having a plan for a career, I have to say this was always the case for me.

I truly don't understand this--what you study has such a large impact on the rest of your life. It's probably the single biggest choice you'll make! If there is anywhere you should exercise judgement it is there.

In previous centuries, a husband in his twenties could start working and earn enough to feed his family and eventually even buy a house. Today, plenty of people feel they need two post-grad incomes to even consider kids, and few have delusions of being able to afford to own a house from the money they will ever make.

I can't comment on Europe, but in America most people have similar beliefs which, to my eyes, are obviously wrong. I have friends constantly complaining about how poor they are and how they can't make rent, but also literally never cook, choosing instead to eat out for every single meal. They spend more than their rent weekly on food, but prefer complaining to budgeting. It seems to me that most who complain about such things have really not put much effort into finding solutions.

Inflation adjusted housing costs in Stockholm have risen +500% in the last 30 years, and its not like it was some thirdie shithole before.

I'm skeptical that it's even possible to measure this. Many things, including housing, have gotten more expensive, but also improved substantially in quality, a factor not really reflected in the inflation-adjusted numbers.

Stockholm has I'm sure grown and become more urbanized as well, meaning that apartments which would previously have been in residential areas are now basically in the city center. So you can probably get by (and access comparable jobs to what was available 30 years ago) living much further from the center of the city than you could before.

Nowadays rural and remote jobs are better too, so in one sense it's easier to live entirely outside the city than ever.

You might think that but you would be wrong.

What has happened is very limited construction, large population growth and a massive credit expansion, leading to a price spiral. Cost increases in housing almost all exclusively comes from increases in land prices. Building is relatively cheap.

The vast majority are living in housing that was built before the 35 year price rally, not a single subway station has been added during that entire period.

Some people, like my family, have won big and are now (dollar)multimillionaires, due to no effort of our own. Others, like people from out of town or their children are just fucked.

Personally, I did have parents who would would probably have talked me out of philosophy or medieval German. But with STEM, the assumption is that you find a job other than taxi driver. Physics is kind of good because it keeps your options open between software development, labwork and a zillion other occupations. If anything, I might have spent more time thinking about the if, why, what field and what school regarding a PhD. I am still okay with how it is likely to work out, though.

Regarding housing, I know of few tenants who spent more food/eating out than on rent. Typically, the rent is more than half of your paycheck. Again, in Germany, most of jobs (in, say, IT) and most of the infrastructure are in the big cities, where housing is crazy expensive. For people living in the big metropolitan areas the decision 'let us have three kids' would necessitate finding another job somewhere else where rents are cheaper, dropping out of their social circle and all that.

How does that work if they can't make rent? Are they getting kicked out? Are they fat?

It means they're consistently getting financial help from their parents. And somehow they're not fat.

Some are men who pursued useless degrees and now work as aids.

Now that's an interesting career choice! How much does it pay?

I think $14/hr. Tbf though these guys aren't the brightest and I'm not sure I'd even describe it as a career "choice." Like leaves, they were blown around by the winds of culture until they happened to end up as aides.

What kind of aid and to whom?

Sorry, aide, as in teacher's aide.

Starting to realize why the school board rejected your generous offer to personally give every student aides.

I'm also working at a school with a lot of EAs, and have not encountered this even once. Aid positions are for those without degrees. Aimless men are substitutes, or go into alternate licensure programs. Perhaps this is a regional difference?

EA--educational assistant?

I just asked; learned I was wrong and her assistants are "technicians" and make $20-25 an hour. Pretty much what you're describing with the alternate licensure program. Not great for a male college grad, but not terrible.

Yeah, educational assistant. Mostly women and a couple of men without college degrees. It's especially popular with moms who don't have a real career and want the same working hours as their kids.

Oh, I see -- yes, we do have those positions, and I think the high schools have even more.

Not terrible?! Those are entry level wages at Costco for guys who didn't finish high school! And customers there won't stab you as often as public school students!

The workers at my local Costco always seemed noticeably polite and efficient, especially compared to the neighboring Sam's Club workers, so they're probably earning it.

Working in schools has good hours, good breaks, decent benefits if they decide to become full time teachers, the same hours as your kids if they end up having kids, very portable if you decide to move, and school stabbings are quite rare almost everywhere, especially ones involving staff members and their non-gang affiliated kids.

Ah ok. We don't have those here.

Plenty of female-oriented degrees such as psychology, behavioral science, speech pathology, etc. require a Masters in order to really start working in the field. Seemingly, most of the people who study those majors just aren't aware of this.

I'm unsure whether these women just haven't googled the most basic facts of the career they'll spend their next 4-6 years pursuing, or whether they're semi-deliberately deluding themselves.

Do you have any statistics here? It looks like 82% of men and 70% of women are employed full time after college, and 3% of both are unemployed, so it's weird how gendered you're choosing to frame this. In my personal experience, suppressing/repressing your future after college is quite common and pretty ungendered.

I've always thought of this as a class issue. The educated class imparts the knowledge of which degrees are ok to their kids while the working class gets taken for a ride by the education industrial complex, ending up with useless or unfinished degrees, a bunch of debt, a sense of failure and missed earnings.

It isn’t merely which degrees but which schools, how to get into schools, etc etc.

Uh, the USA doesn’t have a job market which strongly discriminates on the basis of where your degree came from- everything that isn’t an Ivy or a state flagship is basically interchangeable until you get to the very bottom.

  1. There are schools that don’t meet either of those definitions that matter (eg Chicago, Georgetown, Duke, Vandy, Northwestern).

  2. Good schools also matter to getting into professional school.

I've always thought most psychology degrees(and communications etc) are backup plans for when more rigorous degrees don't work out, not a first choice.

Recalling college: many young women's first and only choice is a psychology degree.

That 12% gap seems pretty large to me (presumably it's mostly driven by motherhood). But OP was talking about working in a particular field, not employment more generally. We should expect college graduates (who are smarter than average) to mostly be gainfully employed. That's different from studying Psychology and actually getting a job as a therapist or whatever.

I agree it'd be nice to have a "job in your field" statistic. It'd be nice if OP would provide one before baselessly claiming that one gender is delusional.

Well I can't speak for psychology majors, but as someone who was dumb enough to major in history there are virtually zero jobs in history outside of actually teaching history (either in grade school or university). I majored in history but went on to become a software dev. My dad majored in history but spent his whole career doing insurance claims adjustment. My grandpa majored in history and spent his whole career as an electrician. My older brother was dumb enough to get a whole ass PhD in history, and somehow managed to land one of the tiny, tiny number of actual history jobs that aren't teaching jobs.

It's not that women are delusional. My point is that there's a social reality we all claim to believe in, and an actual reality, and men and women who mistake one for the other get hurt. The social reality is that college is purely about education and pursuing your dreams. Women who buy into this fail to get married quickly enough, and men who buy into it pick suboptimal careers.

I'm unsure whether these women just haven't googled the most basic facts of the career they'll spend their next 4-6 years pursuing, or whether they're semi-deliberately deluding themselves. My guess is the latter.

Being evenhanded with "both genders that fall into this trap are negatively impacted" is fine. When you claim that women are the ones who predominantly actually fall into the trap, you are making an inflammatory claim made without evidence.

You didn't understand my post at all.

The cited text describes women who didn't fall for the trap.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics provides some "jobs in field of degree" statistics here. For example, among workers with psychology degrees, the top occupation groups are "management" (15 %), "community and social service" (13 %), "educational instruction and library" (13 %), "healthcare practitioners and technicians" (11 %), and "office and administrative support" (9 %).

"Job in your field" is the wrong metric - there are a lot of jobs which require "any degree" which are clearly graduate-class jobs with the social standing that implies but which are not "in your field" for most of the people doing them. The relevant test is "Job which requires a degree".

The social contract was that university guaranteed a white-collar job and middle-class status, not that it guaranteed that you could follow your dream. Middle managers at Proctor & Gamble (back in the days when that was the typical non-specialist graduate career path) were not chasing a dream, other than the two-car suburban lifestyle.

I'm not even sure what I would be looking for. I've known quite a few women who claim to have been taken by surprise by Master's degree requirements for their desired jobs, and no men. These women generally finish with a Bachelor's and enter the workforce doing something only somewhat related to their major.

I looked for surveys asking about how well people understood the educational requirements for their chosen careers and didn't find any.

To claim that modern society has devalued motherhood and femininity, or made them low status, is completely backwards. Motherhood and femininity in general have been devalued for as long as patriarchy has existed, so pretty much the whole of human history. I can't think of any human cultures, let alone any of the big-name European and near-eastern ones that the modern west is descended from, which have not considered the female sphere and female pursuits to be intrinsically lesser than that of men.* The "oh, women aren't inferior to men, they just have different strengths/they're made for different roles" line you hear from conservatives nowadays (what Christians call 'complementarianism') is itself an anti-modernist rearguard action. For the great majority of the history of western civilization, philosophers, theologians, and intellectuals, whether Pagan, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or atheist, have been happy to state that actually, women are just strictly inferior to men. It's the reason you occasionally get figures like Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great who are praised for being essentially men in women's bodies, but you never get men praised for being essentially women in men's bodies.

What happened in more resent centuries isn't that motherhood and womanhood were devalued. Motherhood and womanhood were devalued way back in the primordial past, and only recently have women been allowed to escape such devalued roles at scale.

You can't make motherhood 'prestigious' because motherhood has never been prestigious. Closest thing would just be banning women from doing actually prestigious things.

To claim that modern society has devalued motherhood and femininity, or made them low status, is completely backwards. Motherhood and femininity in general have been devalued for as long as patriarchy has existed, so pretty much the whole of human history.

I see comments like this a lot, and it goes with the general sentiment that men don't respect women and only think of them as sex objects. The truth is that men do value women greatly for certain things that are unique to their womanhood and less for other things that are not unique to women. It's contemporary women who have devalued the qualities they have which men do value.

It's the reason you occasionally get figures like Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great who are praised for being essentially men in women's bodies, but you never get men praised for being essentially women in men's bodies.

I know this is controversial to say these days, but the bodies of men who act like women cannot do the things the real women can do with their bodies and, generally, women are highly valuable because of what their bodies are built to do: nurture life. If I owned a goat who just wanted sit in my chicken coop all day, he wouldn't be very valuable to me because he can't lay eggs.

I'm not saying that all people should be strictly limited to traditional gender roles -- there are outliers that just can't perform those roles. However, society is currently obsessed with making outliers the new normal, which is wreaking havoc on both the healthy operation of human interactions and the self-worth of those who have been yaslit into devaluing their natural gifts.

Really? Sure, there's lots of male respect for the cute twenty/thirtysomething new mom with a baby or two on her hip. Let's even be charitable and assume this does show genuine value for the Life-Nurturing Feminine, not just that hot moms are hot. But whatever that value is, it localizes pretty strictly around the 5-10 years of baby-toddler momhood. In mass culture, middle-aged moms of tweens and teens are bad cops and out-of-touch laughingstocks, older moms of grown-up kids are the ones who get vented about in therapy, accused of narcissism/busybodyness and subjected to aggressive "boundary-setting" if they're even tolerated in the kids' lives at all. Is it a wise choice for a woman to opt into an identity with a mandatory retirement policy that's at most decade out? What's she supposed to envision doing for the rest of the time?

Ah, yes, 40's and 50's girlbosses are widely admired among the masses, the stereotypes of cats and alcoholism are signs of respect.

I think people Just Don't Like Middle Aged Women regardless of whether they're moms or not. Honestly I'm not sure middle aged men get the greatest shake either, although there's positive stereotypes slightly more often I suppose.

Oh, I agree that it's a curse of middle-aged womanhood in general. Underneath that, likely just the bitter animal truth that humans only seek the favor of other humans when they (a) have something to gain from them or (b) have something to fear from them. Men are more physically intimidating into midlife, thus retain the power to command respect and amity for longer.

However, given the choice to be a widely-reviled middle-aged woman with a fat bank account, a nice apartment, some social clout and active power over one or two resentful underlings... or a widely-reviled middle-aged woman with a menial job, no money or future prospects, and the wistful memory of long-ago baby cuddles with grown adults who are now far away living their own lives, calling maybe once or twice a year? It doesn't seem obviously rational to choose the latter.

Family connections bring actual literal benefits; it's probably better to be the lower earning partner in a couple than a higher earning single person. Like the whole thing about a housewife is that it's being a housewife meaning she's married; if a sufficient amount of relationship security is available then this is a rational decision, and given that divorce risk is not distributed equitably then many women- and I would estimate most who consider the stay at home mom route- should proceed under the assumption that they have sufficient relationship/family security to make the SAHM route a more rational decision.

And most adults are not that estranged from their parents, even in early young adulthood, nor do most marriages with a SAHM end in divorce. The median 'retired housewife' is happily married and posting instagram photos of her grandchildren, not alone and working at walmart to pay the bills.

Where do you get the idea that adults' mothers are looked down upon in such a way? All around the world, men will literally kill people for insults directed at their mothers. There is a reason "Son of a bitch" is such a common insult. To denigrate a man's mother is worse than insulting himself, his siblings, or his father.

I was responding to the earlier poster's comment:

The truth is that men do value women greatly for certain things that are unique to their womanhood and less for other things that are not unique to women.

made specifically in defense of the proposition that women should abandon professional careers to pursue instead early stay-at-home motherhood. So the question of whether the average dude would beat up some other guy for insulting his mother isn't really germane to the question.

Do these mother-loving men love motherhood enough to listen to older women's perspectives, defend their rights, respect their ideas, hire them in preference to hot young recent grads, offer them salaries commensurate with the years they spent in this ostensibly ultra-high-value experience? Do they go out of their way to live near their own moms and spend time with them?

Do they deeply admire a CEO's wife who raised his four kids, just as much as they do the CEO for whatever email/boardroom/golf wankery he did during that same timeframe? Would they go to hear her TEDX talk and buy her vanity book afterwards? Because men find motherhood so high-value and so darn important?

Nobody needs to propose anything because women already abandon their professional careers for motherhood. For many of these women, they would have been far happier pursuing motherhood earlier. Are there women who are happier pursuing careers than if they had pursued motherhood? Sure, but the exception should not drive societal policy and culture. You don't hear anyone push motherhood except conservatives, which most young women do not listen to. So your average young woman might hear from their parents/family about pursuing motherhood, and then nearly the rest of social media/entertainment/school/friends/society tell her to pursue a career instead.

Respect for motherhood does not mean men have to treat all mothers with respect, or treat any random mother to a higher degree of respect than they do for any other person. If the parents did a good job raising their children, it is likely there to be a good relationship between a man and his mother. Most men I know that have a good relationship with their parents do in fact respect their mother and take her input into consideration. I personally also regularly talk with my mother for advice. This does not mean if I meet any random mother, I would respect her opinions any more than that of any other person, unless we were talking about something where her experiences as a mother would be relevant to the conversation.

Why would and should anyone respect a CEO's wife to the same level of respect as the CEO? If the CEO was a woman and her husband raised their kids I would respect the CEO more than her husband because she's the one making the decisions for the company. The CEO is making business decisions that likely have a greater impact on my life than a mother does raising her children. A man can also aspire to be a CEO. So of course a CEO get more respect on the basis that it's something men can aspire towards and on the impact it could have on their day-to-day lives. Does this mean men don't respect motherhood? No, what you're doing here is a false equivalency. You're basically arguing that men don't value motherhood or don't value it enough because they wouldn't respect a CEO's wife who is a mother to the same level of degree as they would for a CEO. The thing is, I respect and admire my own mother a hell of a lot more than I do any CEO, and I'm sure many other men feel the same way towards their mother. A man can simultaneously find motherhood high-value and important and still admire a CEO more than they would that CEO's wife.

Plenty of rich and successful people attribute their success to their mother. You don't hear that type of respect and love as often for a father. If anything, in modern American culture motherhood is highly elevated while fatherhood is not. The most common trope of a father you see in movies, tv shows, video games, advertisements, books, academic articles, the news, etc. is a deadbeat dad, a missing father, a dead father, a stupid father, the list goes on. Of course, there are negative stereotypes about women mothers too, narcissistic parents and all that but despite that, your average person seems to still outwardly declare their love and respect for their mother far more often than they do for their fathers. Just because there are negative tropes about mothers does not mean motherhood is not respected, it just means there are bad mothers out there. If a child does not speak with their parents and has a bad relationship with them, to me that is indicative of poor parenting and not reflective of a societal dislike and hatred for mothers or fathers in general.

In modern mass culture, the middle-age dads of tweens and teens are also portrayed as out of touch laughingstocks. At least the moms are portrayed as competent. As for older women, yes, there’s the stereotype of the overbearing mother (or mother-in-law), but there’s also the great respect shown to grandmothers. Just think about the messaging during Covid. Everyone was told to mask and get vaccinated in order to save grandma, but no one even thought to be concerned about grandpa.

Either way, I’m pretty sure dasfoo was talking about the traditional views under the bad old patriarchy, not modern views.

Grandpas typically don't live as long. That's a larger factor towards why grandmas represent the covid-endangered family member than increased respect towards grandmas, I think.

Is it a wise choice for a woman to opt into an identity with a mandatory retirement policy that's at most decade out? What's she supposed to envision doing for the rest of the time?

A person's value can change over time from one asset to another.

I know you want to read a lot into this, but it's reall very simple, and universal for both men and women:

If you want to be valued (beyond the default "all human life has value" value, which is a wash across the board), you need to provide value.

A young man, for example, is generally valuable for his strong back and plentiful energy; an old man is generally valuable for his learned wisdom, accrued wealth and maybe even skill at the management of young men. If an old man is stupid, poor and cannot lead the young, he is shirking his own value. It doesn't matter if other people want to imbue him with value or not, he provides nothing.

Women, likewise, can be valuable for a lot of things when they're younger, and less valuable for those things later, but valuable for other properties that align with their age and experience.

I am not proscribing that women only do certain things -- certainly there is variability with every person, and I'm libertarian in terms of what part the law should play in this -- but rather suggesting that women who complain that they aren't valued are probably not providing value out of their own choice. Just like men who don't feel valued by women. This type of value is not innate but something one must identify correctly and work towards providing. Old-fashioned gender roles were better at teaching young people how they can be of value to others than today's gender roles are.

Old-fashioned gender roles were better at teaching young people how they can be of value to others than today's gender roles are.

The gender roles were also very good at determining/controlling pitfalls, too; a society that is only capable of condemning stupidity/violence in men [who provide value by doing], or anger/entitlement in women [who provide value by being], is inherently divided against itself simply because that is the most common failure mode of each gender. It gets worse when those faults are portrayed as positive.

If you want to be valued (beyond the default "all human life has value" value, which is a wash across the board), you need to provide value.

Maybe, but along came mechanization and post-scarcity, and the West hasn't quite figured out how to deal with that yet; now, men need to act like women to succeed (sit down, shut up, regurgitate is how they'll waste their physical and mental peak times of their lives), and women need to act like men to succeed (you have to waste your physical peak proving you're fit to receive the welfare that is most public service jobs and by the time you've done that you're already starting to wilt- divorce doesn't pay well, after all).

And when "how well you can pass as the other gender" is the order of the day, it's not a surprise that men-acting-as-women aren't attractive to women, and women-acting-as-men aren't attractive to men. And while that's great for man-women and woman-men, maybe most people are better off steering clear.

(And really, it's threading the needle: making sure the bi-gender people aren't held back, but at the same time pointing out that cargo-culting their inherent success is a bad idea. If humanity was capable of understanding that nuance we'd probably be better off, but I don't think the average human is and it doesn't remain stable between generations either.)

So to go with OP's scenario, a woman in her 20s has the option of rendering value through: (a) having babies and raising them, or (b) focusing on her career and developing her ability to offer economic value, maybe while trying to fit in a baby or two for personal gratification along the way.

In option (a), she's maybe got 15-20 years of being valuable to others (since people value mothering mostly through the end of the cute phase); that value is mostly rendered privately, since community members don't much care who breeds or not; and the past value she's rendered is extremely perishable, expiring pretty immediately when her fertility ends and the kids leave elementary school.

In option (b), she can continue to produce value for others, and thus be regarded as valuable in turn, through age 60-65+; her value is rendered publicly and comes with the benefits of stronger community relationships and public respect; and even if something happens so that she gets fired at 55, her compensation thus far has been in investment-friendly cash plus professional connections, which will hold their value well in tough times.

I think this is why old-fashioned gender roles did very much emphasize women's economic productivity, focusing on diligent spinning, weaving, prudent financial management, etc. (Also, creation of children used to be another form of economic productivity/retirement savings, but is definitely less so now that they don't contribute to the household and feel no obligation to look after aged parents.) For better or worse, our grinding middle-management girlbosses are more truly aligned with old-fashioned notions of women's value than the modern sentimental tradwife who stays hot for hubby, bakes cute cupcakes and cuddles the babies all day.

Well therapy culture sucks. See below.

What, as opposed to "she's a witch, burn her" and the associated other super-compassionate pre-therapy approaches to a society's superfluous old women? Can you cite a single historical or modern context where men as a group eagerly step up to show respect and deference for (non-related) moms in their 40s, 50s, 60s, on account of the erstwhile life-giving properties of their bodies? (And no, abstract Marian devotion doesn't count unless you can show it translating to heightened value for real flesh-and-blood older moms).

Even on this forum, would the folks lavishly praising young motherhood also endorse really serious social consequences for wealthy men who ditch their aging wives to pursue younger, hotter options once the kids have become teens? Consequences on the order of the philandering dude's losing his career or identity, since those are the effective results of family breakup for a wife who's made stay-at-home momhood her professional vocation? If not, then it's definitely safer to be Jeff Bezos than Mackenzie Bezos, and you can't blame young women for trying.

Even on this forum, would the folks lavishly praising young motherhood also endorse really serious social consequences for wealthy men who ditch their aging wives to pursue younger, hotter options once the kids have become teens?

Yes. Abandoning your wife is scummy behavior.

Alimony was the social invention. And Mackenzie Bezos got billions for literally marrying a dude.

Mackenzie's contributions to Amazon were a lot bigger than just "being Jeff's wife".

Jeff and Mackenzie started out in their early 20s in roughly the same position, collaborating on a business, both presumably thinking they had talent and some good ideas. So they make a great test case for the options facing young women who choose between (A) early marriage/kids and (B) pursuing their career.

Mackenzie chose A, stayed home with the children and after two decades got to be the unilaterally discarded middle-aged wife with no future, no vocation, no social or professional power, no marketable skills to build on, and zero credit or respect for the 25 years of work she put into the supposedly-so-valuable work of motherhood and family-building (just "literally marrying a dude," in your words). She gets to keep some of the accumulated assets of their joint family project-- much less than half-- and the male public is in broad agreement that she should be damn grateful to emerge with even that.

Jeff chose B, cultivated his career, and gets not just riches but power, public respect, a robust personal and professional network, and a vocation/identity that will stick with him well into his '70s, where his value will increase, not decrease, over time.

Explain to me again why you think young women should follow Mackenzie's path, not Jeff's?

We are talking about billions with a B. The idea that if she worked she’d be in a better situation financially is laughable.

And no, what she did wasn’t as valuable as building Amazon. But that is literally one of the biggest companies in the world. The question is answered by the extremes; it is answered by the average.

People in Jeff's circles who aren't begging for handouts acknowledge pretty openly that he was a scumbag for what he did. He and his duck-faced new woman are viciously mocked by everyone from the well-educated inhabitants of elite tech and political circles to the literal tabloid press that made fun of him for his 'alive girl' texts and delights in publishing pictures of the couple where they look awful.

Being one of the richest people in the world is always going to attract a baseline level of respect from the majority of the people who surround you, since a pittance from you is enough to set them and their descendants up for generations. Still, I'd hesitate to say that Jeff came out of it better than Mackenzie. You also don't acknowledge that she didn't demand her fair share, she didn't care enough to and settled for much less. She could have demanded (and would have been granted) both more equity and voting shares in Amazon if she wanted them.

What, as opposed to "she's a witch, burn her" and the associated other super-compassionate pre-therapy approaches to a society's superfluous old women? Can you cite a single historical or modern context where men as a group eagerly step up to show respect and deference for (non-related) moms in their 40s, 50s, 60s, on account of the erstwhile life-giving properties of their bodies?

Why the non-related requirement? The point of honoring your mother is honoring the sacrifice she and her body made giving you life and then sustaining and raising you.

In many more traditional cultures, men remain more loyal to their parents, especially their mothers, than to their wives. This appreciation-for-life is truly seen as a life-debt which can't really ever be repaid.

Even on this forum, would the folks lavishly praising young motherhood also endorse really serious social consequences for wealthy men who ditch their aging wives to pursue younger, hotter options once the kids have become teens?

Well, I would.

Why the non-related requirement? The point of honoring your mother is honoring the sacrifice she and her body made giving you life and then sustaining and raising you

The original discussion was specifically about young women giving up a career in order to focus on having kids right out of college. The compensation for 5 years of paid professional work in the mid-20s is not just $X salary, but greatly expanded skillset and prospects for future earning, a solid professional network, plus a certain amount of prestige/ social capital that can be traded in for increased power in community interactions, etc. If you're saying the only compensation needed for an equivalent amount of time spent in stay-at-home childrearing should be the freely-rendered love of your own hypothetical someday babies (assuming you don't do anything to piss them off), well, it's a sweet sentiment, but it sounds like a terrible deal for the woman.

I don't think status compensation is the right way to look at it. Kids are their own reward. The main thing women get out of the arrangement is more kids who are more well-adjusted.

Their husbands arguably get the same thing with less personal risk, which is why divorce should bear extreme social and financial consequences in most cases.

Counterpoint: Say something about someone's mom who is from a traditionalist culture and if you survive the reaction you should reevaluate women not being valued. Mothers and matriarchal figures are highly respected.

Inferior is a relative term, it simply depends on what we are measuring. With that said, the standard deviation for achievement is limited for women. Becoming a king is a greater achievement than motherhood. Alexander the Great clearly beat all mother's throughout history in achievement. However, few men live up to that level. The mother's aren't valued aspect is dependent on a culture where people think they can be whatever they want and they are comparing house wife to astronaut. Not average job of a man to mother of 2-3

Alexander the Great clearly beat all mother's throughout history in achievement.

In achievement, maybe. In prestige, Mary the mother of Jesus has him and probably all other men beat.

Does “all other men” include Jesus?

Jesus is the only reason for the "probably," but yes. I can't count the number of Catholics who argued that Mary was greater than Jesus because she was his mother. If I brought up Mary's mother as someone who was therefore even greater than Mary, they didn't have a good response, but I don't think I convinced anyone that way either.

Catholic doctrine holds Christ above Mary (right?) but I'm pretty sure most Catholics worship and respect Mary more.

I'm rethinking it now though--altogether, Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha are probably held in higher esteem.

Catholic doctrine holds Christ above Mary (right?) but I'm pretty sure most Catholics worship and respect Mary more.

Technically, the Catholic position is to worship (latria) God alone, and to merely respect or venerate (dulia) saints, including Mary. However, because of Mary's special status as the Mother of God and Queen of Heaven, she is offered "hyperdulia" the highest form of respect or veneration.

Technically, Mary is defined as the highest created being, above all the angels and saints, but firmly beneath the trinity.

Nothing that I said contradicts your clarification. Hyperdulia is still less than latria.

It goes: latria > hyperdulia > protodulia > dulia. (Or more accurately, latria is qualitatively different than dulia, and not on the same track at all.)

Fun fact: standard Catholic teaching also says that the human body of Christ is to receive hyperdulia, if I remember correctly. (I'm not Catholic, but I'm pretty sure that's right.)

Edit: When I look up hyperdulia, it refers only to Mary, but I'm pretty sure I'd seen it applied to Christ in some theological writings in Latin? If you like, I can try to find it.

I'm not familiar with that, and it sounds like Nestorianism to me. I have never heard hyperdulia applied to anything but the Mother of God.

Looking into the matter, I found Thomas Aquinas arguing the opposite, that Christ's flesh is offered latria on account of its unity with the Word, but also that it receives dulia on account of Christ's human perfection:

And so the adoration of Christ's humanity may be understood in two ways. First, so that the humanity is the thing adored: and thus to adore the flesh of Christ is nothing else than to adore the incarnate Word of God: just as to adore a King's robe is nothing else than to adore a robed King. And in this sense the adoration of Christ's humanity is the adoration of "latria." Secondly, the adoration of Christ's humanity may be taken as given by reason of its being perfected with every gift of grace. And so in this sense the adoration of Christ's humanity is the adoration not of "latria" but of "dulia."

He also adds, "So that one and the same Person of Christ is adored with "latria" on account of His Divinity, and with "dulia" on account of His perfect humanity," which sounds misleading, but is really saying that Christ the Hypostatic Union is worshipped on account of his divinity and venerated on account of his perfect humanity, in an additive and not mutually exclusive sense.

I'd argue that if you're not doing systematic theology like St. Thomas, talking about separate worship for the humanity and divinity of Christ has already taken you far afield of Nicene Christianity. Later on, Chalcedon would seem to argue with any other interpretation:

our Lord Jesus Christ is to us One and the same Son... acknowledged in Two Natures unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the difference of the Natures being in no way removed because of the Union, but rather the properties of each Nature being preserved, and (both) concurring into One Person and One Hypostasis

And of course the Miaphysites, who disagreed with that definition, did so because they believed it wasn't insistant enough on the inseparability of the divine and human! In recent times, they insist on the formula that the humanity and divinity are inseparable "except in thought," i.e. when you're doing a Summa and not in actual worship. Chalcedonians, including Catholic theologians, agree with that stipulation.

Except in the tomb, Catholicism doesn't really like talking about Christ's body apart from his human soul and divine person. It's for that reason, when affirming the Eucharist to be the real body of Christ, they're quick to add the gloss, "blood, soul, and divinity," because separating these things just isn't something they do. The tomb is a weird case -- maybe that's where your quotation was from? I'd be inclined to offer the crucified Lord latria in any case. The body is not separate from the soul, that it ever is is an abberation due to sin, which God will correct on the last day.

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Counterpoint: Say something about someone's mom who is from a traditionalist culture and if you survive the reaction you should reevaluate women not being valued. Mothers and matriarchal figures are highly respected.

Of course women have value in traditional societies. More than livestock. But less than men.

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If that were true, we would expect traditional societies to be more willing to allow women to suffer and die in place of men, because they have less value.

Except we don't. Every human society treats men as disposable relative to women.

However human psychology shakes out in any particular society, I think 'high status vs low status' is simply an inappropriate measure to use when comparing the stations of men and women. Men and women are not competing ethnic or religious groups, where power and status differentials can be clear, deliberate and explicit. The relationship is more complicated than that.

If that were true, we would expect traditional societies to be more willing to allow women to suffer and die in place of men, because they have less value.

Not necessarily. Women are valuable because they can give you sons.

"Female infanticide" is it's own phenomenon deserving of a name but not "male infanticide." The wiki article only gives the examples of India, China, and Pakistan, but gender-skewed infanticide was also not uncommon in pre-modern Europe. Not a lot of men in history were going "awwww man, another son?" when their wife popped out the latest kid.

Ok, then if you're in any shape to continue the experiment, insult someone directly and compare the results to insulting their mother (you probably should pick a different dude though). You really think they'd beat you up more?

To claim that modern society has devalued motherhood and femininity, or made them low status, is completely backwards.

Is your argument that modern society values motherhood more? That there have never been so few women per capita becoming mothers, to me is evidence against this.

Complementarianism, may be expressed more now, I suspect for much of existence it went without saying, but was no less true.

Is your argument that modern society values motherhood more? That there have never been so few women per capita becoming mothers, to me is evidence against this.

Why do you think this was his argument? He says nothing remotely similar to this.

I read OP's post

Motherhood needs to be far more prestigious than any career.

and this had been the case when tfr was higher, though I don't see that @Tenaz actually makes this argument.

To claim that modern society has devalued motherhood and femininity, or made them low status, is completely backwards.

This disagreement with OP leads me to believe @To_Mandalay also believes that @Tenaz has said that motherhood was more valued before 'modern society'.

Though I don't see that he says it I read OP to mean the perceived 'value' of motherhood had declined from the past to the present. @To_Mandalay disagreeing could mean that perceived value had increased over time. Hence my question.

Motherhood and femininity in general have been devalued for as long as patriarchy has existed, so pretty much the whole of human history.

I now take this to mean that @To_Mandalay means the perceived value of motherhood has been flat or unchanged because the patriarchy. I don't find this argument particularly compelling.

Is your argument that modern society values motherhood more?

No.

Complementarianism, may be expressed more now, I suspect for much of existence it went without saying, but was no less true.

I don't think so, I think for most of history it has been the standard belief of most men that women are an inferior order.

Inferior at breast feeding or baby having?

Horses are better than humans at running but the number of people throughout history who would disagree with the statement "horses are inferior to human beings" is very small.

Inferior in what sense or to what end? Would be a more sensible response than agreement.

Inferior typically applies between variations of a type or catagory, and then often for a specific use. Horses would make inferior men, and men inferior horses. Your usage makes little sense.

Inferior in the great chain of being, in absolute worth, closer, in the mind of a pre-modern, to the Imago Dei

I'm not sure I see evidence for this. Men and women are both created in the image of God.

Women historically had been protected or privileged over men in things likely to result in death like drowning on a sinking ship, or serving in combat.

This is the point that @omw_68 made to me in a private message that was perhaps meant to be a reply here.

... if a society has a choice between sacrificing a random woman and sacrificing a random man, most choose a man. And that's been the case for thousands of years based on looking at who is expected to do dangerous jobs such as military service or mining coal.

In other words, it's pretty clear to me that to the extent one had to choose who is seen as superior, at least in terms of value and at least in the West, women have always been seen as superior to men.

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You can't make motherhood 'prestigious' because motherhood has never been prestigious. Closest thing would just be banning women from doing actually prestigious things.

This is the second comment in this thread talking about eschewing motherhood being the more "prestigious" option, hence the more favored.

Healthy women have deep-seated, base, mammalian urges to reproduce and nourish healthy offspring. It is hardwired in them to feel pleasure through these behaviors. The bond a mother has with her children and how they give great meaning to her life is a story in every culture in existence.

Women are forsaking these genetic behaviors for what reason? For whose benefit? Have we stacked the value of the maternal bond against an economic forecast and decided it doesn't measure up?

Healthy women have deep-seated, base, mammalian urges to reproduce and nourish healthy offspring. It is hardwired in them to feel pleasure through these behaviors. The bond a mother has with her children and how they give great meaning to her life is a story in every culture in existence.

A significant minority of women likely do not have this instinct or have it in a much weakened form. Through human and pre-human history women really haven't had that much of a choice on whether they bear children or not, so selection for enjoying motherhood is probably not as strong as you might think.

Women are forsaking these genetic behaviors for what reason? For whose benefit?

Cuz they don't feel like it, I guess? Really nobody is forcing women not to have kids. It's not a matter of it being too expensive or anything. You can be flat broke in a western country and your kids will have an infinitely more comfortable existence than those of the peasant woman in 1312 who popped out twelve children. If women really want to have kids, they can, it's not hard.

A significant minority of women likely do not have this instinct or have it in a much weakened form. Through human and pre-human history women really haven't had that much of a choice on whether they bear children or not, so selection for enjoying motherhood is probably not as strong as you might think.

Children and especially babies require an immense amount of attention and in the premodern environment child mortality was extremely high. There was obviously a strong selection effect for women who enjoyed childcare because their children died less often from neglect.

Children and especially babies require an immense amount of attention

Children really require much less attention than WEIRDos think they do. Historically you could mostly ignore your babies between feedings. And once they becomes ambulatory you can just let them do whatever pretty much except when they have to do work around the house or in the fields. They'll probably be fine, horrifying as most moderns find the prospect. High child mortality was due to illness which pre-modern mothering was powerless to prevent, no matter how attentive or caring, not due to kids wandering off and getting eaten by bears.

This is still the case in a lot of undeveloped countries, or at least it was a few decades ago. I've talked to people who grew up in Latin America in the 70s but essentially lived pre-modern peasant existences and described parenting as being very hands-off.

Like what does a modern "neglectful" mother do? She probably lets her kid eat whatever, doesn't take him to the doctor, doesn't buy him new clothes, lets him go wherever he wants with whoever he wants whenever he wants. None of these were factors in the pre-modern world (everybody was eating the same thing, nobody was going to the doctor for yearly checkups, everybody wore the same clothes all the time) except for the last one which would only result in death at the margins.

If you believe in patriarchy then motherhood was the only way to actually have any prestige. If you mothered successful sons, then you earned status of clan matriarch basically for free due to them. There is a reason why mother-in-law is such a hated archetype especially by women - she achieved the status via motherhood and the bride is there to serve her. There is nothing more dangerous than clan matriarch - some man inappropriately touched some other female as attested by this highly respected matriarch of family? The men of the clan will make sure to defend the honor of the family while the matriarch is sipping her tea on the porch.

Modern women are the ones absolutely fucked. If shit hits the fan, all they can do is call the cops who will ignore them or rant on social media into the void as they are getting robbed by predators. There is nothing more sad, pathetic and useless than childless and bitter old woman.

The Catholic faith reveres a human woman as the "Queen of Heaven" above all other human born men. Extending Marian reverence further, it is believed that her willingness (choice) to bear that child led directly to thecomplete salvation of mankind. That is the model for femininity / motherhood. That's a pretty excellent model.

Sure, you can point to millions of examples of flawed humans perhaps not living up to this. But the ideological / theological apparatus is there. Handwaving it away with your sweeping comment...

For the great majority of the history of western civilization, philosophers, theologians, and intellectuals, whether Pagan, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or atheist, have been happy to state that actually, women are just strictly inferior to men.

...Is to obviously discard any information that could be contrary to your assertion.

You can't make motherhood 'prestigious' because motherhood has never been prestigious.

It's the only way the species can continue. I ... I can't think of anything more prestigious.

...Is to obviously discard any information that could be contrary to your assertion.

What information? Do you disagree with the statement that the general opinion of pre-modern thinkers was that women were inferior to men? Can you find any such figures who disagreed? Maybe you can, I'm sure there were a handful, but they're going to be vastly outnumbered by those who held the contrary position. Mary is a goddess*. She is inimitable. The fact that according to Christian mythology she was once a mortal woman is irrelevant to the role she actually occupies in existing religious practice. She should be compared to her fellow divinities, not mortal men, and she is certainly inferior to God the Father and to her own son. Having warrior and scholar goddesses didn't stop the Greeks from pacing such onerous restrictions on their women that it surprised their own contemporaries. The divine and human spheres are different, and the reverence of female divinities says little more about the role of women in actual existing human society than the frequency of incest in stories of the gods says something about the acceptability of incest between actual flesh and blood human beings.

It's the only way the species can continue. I ... I can't think of anything more prestigious.

Necessary doesn't equal prestigious. Actually it often indicates the opposite, since the mundane and commonplace is rarely exalted.

*Yes I know it's not latria it's dulia etc. etc.

By that logic the serfs were the most prestigious caste of medieval society, because food, unlike swords and castles, is actually necessary for society.

That was not so and isn't so still. Neither was motherhood.

Modern society values femininity more and motherhood less than it used to, leaving the total prestige of motherhood more or less unchanged, but the relative prestige greatly diminished. Women seeking status have better alternatives now than motherhood.

I believe fatherhood and motherhood to be people's highest and most noble roles. There's a reason God generally has us call him Father rather than Friend, Boss, or King. It's good that we value women more now than we used to (if we actually do anyways--I didn't live back then), but if this change had happened without motherhood being correspondingly diminished, the family would have grown more important, not less.

There's a reason God generally has us call him Father rather than Friend, Boss, or King.

God is referred to as the Lord far more then he is referred to as the Father. If you include Jesus it's even more lopsided in favor of king or lord. Lord is substituted for the name of God in the bible not father. You can hardly go a passage without someone talking about the Lord.

That's how the scriptures refer to him, but my understanding is that that's not how he generally asks to be referred to. The Lord's Prayer instructs us to refer to him as "Father".

I'll admit my knowledge here is much more cultural than I realized. My church refers to the Father as "Heavenly Father" much more often than any other name, besides perhaps "God", and emphasizes the familiar terms perhaps more than the scriptures themselves do.

The new testament seems often to use the term lord (κυριος) most frequently apply to Jesus. (And since you are asking for verses instructing to call us that, Phil 2:11: "and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father".) At the same time, it was typically also used as a translation for the Hebrew יהוה, the proper name of God.

Our own ability to call God Father isn't really seen much in the old testament. I imagine it's probably also only a thing because we're adopted as sons of God in Christ.

The Lord's Prayer also talks about the coming of his kingdom on Earth. I don't know why you hide the fact you are Mormon. I assumed you were coming at this from the perspective of a Christian or Jew whose religious texts and practices I am familiar with. "Heavenly Father" makes more sense in the context of Mormonism's theology, but in the context of more standard Abrahamic faiths, Lord is more common.

Not trying to hide it, I just talked a good deal about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints recently here and don't want to be That Guy lol, at least any more than I already am.

He said "my church refers to God as the Heavenly Father most times", which is both a factually accurate statement and hardly hiding the fact that he's mormon to anyone who's moderately familiar with it. That is not "hiding" his mormonism, unless you think online mormons should preface discussion of their religion with "My church (THE KOOKY HERETICAL MORMON CULT, WE'RE NOT NORMAL CHRISTIANS) calls God Heavenly Father"

FWIW, I was raised (catholic) christian, found his remark about God mostly being referred as Father weird & didn't recognize his Mormonism since it's not very common in Europe. I would have preferred if he had been specific.

I was referring to his earlier post. Where he talks about how God is referred to in scripture. Mormon scripture and it's interpretation differs from the Trinitarian majority a lot. He was making claims that only make sense in the context of his Mormonism. The LDS aren't some church, they are a very particular group with very different background assumptions from a standard church that only uses the Bible.

As I said, I didn't realize how much of that was specific to the LDS church, which places extreme theological emphasis on family. I think there's a good scriptural basis for this, but really am not interested in starting another theological debate lol.

Go and say ten Hail Marys for this post….

Said of course in jest but Mary was clearly important.

Mary is a goddess, it's not really comparable.

That's heresy.

I know it's ackshually dulia but if you don't assume Catholic doctrine is true, from an anthropological perspective Mary clearly occupies the role of a goddess in the religion.

South Africa's Election

Since the 1994 election, the ANC (African National Congress) has been in power, and been running South Africa into the ground. Unemployment is sky-high, crime is rampant, power outages are now common (and usually scheduled), by the name of "load shedding", corruption is ubiquitous.

For the first time, in the election occurring one month from now, the ANC risks losing power. But this may not be a good thing, as more radical groups will be eager to form a coalition.

Some background on racial history may be needed.

There are four racial categories used by the government for people in South Africa:

  1. White people are of European descent, of course. There are two main populations: people of British ancestry, who more frequently speak English, and Afrikaners, who are descended mostly but not entirely from a mix of Dutch, German, and French ancestry, and speak Afrikaans, a language descended from Dutch. White South Africans have a distinct group identity. They don't think of themselves as European imperialists, or something. Afrikaners in particular see the Great Trek when they traveled inland after the coming of the British as important ethnic history.

    Currently, white people make up about 8% of the South African population. This is the largest population of European descent anywhere in Africa. Demographically, they are relatively older and have lower fertility rates, so expect this percentage to shrink. Per wikipedia's data, they make up about 5% of those in the 2011 census who were under 15.

    Also of note is that white South Africans are disproportionately wealthy. South Africa has one of the highest levels of inequality in the world. Some portion of this is due to legacy from Apartheid, as whites were privileged economically and lived in regions closer to economic activity, by statute. And, of course, European institutions were better set up to lead to economic prosperity.

    (To prevent economic competition with black workers was actually one of the driving factors behind the establishment of Apartheid.)

  2. Unlike in the US, where colored is taken to be a slur of sorts, in South Africa, coloured is a distinct racial classifier. Coloured people are mixed race, descended from a variety of groups. They are the most ethnically and genetically diverse ethnic group on earth. Among the genetic influences are: the Khoekhoe pastoralists that once lived in western South Africa prior to the arrival of the Europeans, white European ancestry, ancestry from the black Bantu groups, both from eastern South Africa and from slaves imported from elsewhere in Africa, and east and south asian ancestry, especially Malaysians. This population is not homogeneous; different places may have different ratios. Coloured people primarily speak Afrikaans, and make up a large portion of the population in the Northern and Western Cape, the two westernmost provinces. They make up about 8% of the population.

  3. Black refers to the portion of people who have ancestry primarily from the Bantu ethnic groups of Africa. South Africa has many such groups—of the 11 official languages, 8 are Bantu. The largest and most important Bantu populations are the Xhosa and the Zulu peoples, who together are about half of the black population. (The Zulu have existed in their current form for surprisingly little time: the Zulu empire was built in the early 1800s, when the small Zulu clan, under Shaka, violently conquered and incorporated all their neighbors, before being conquered by Britain decades later.) About 81% of South Africa is black.

  4. And Asians, who make up about 2% of the population.

I'm not really entirely familiar to what extent more fine-grained ethnic distinctions matter to group identity and decision-making, as I don't live in South Africa.

Some Relevant History

Apartheid (pronounced uh-par-tate, not -tide) is infamous, of course. Running up until 1994, the Afrikaner National Party was in power, and had regulations keeping racial separation and government-backed privilege of whites in place. Among the key causes in its formation was white Afrikaners wishing not to compete for employment with black people in the early 20th century.

1994, with the end of Apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela was a key moment. South Africa managed to transition relatively peacefully and democratically, as these things go, though not without incident.

The ANC, or African National Congress, was formed under Apartheid. It was communist (the Soviets trained them), and participated in violence. Nelson Mandela, though a peacemaker late in life, was much less of one earlier. And his wife, Winnie Mandela, was far more violent: she was known for necklacing, that is, drenching tires in gasoline, putting them around the necks of victims, and setting it on fire. But nevertheless, the transition in the 1990s was generally peaceful, with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and so forth. Since then, the ANC has remained in power. The ANC remains economically left-leaning. It has implement several racial programs, including Black Economic Empowerment, a form of affirmative action, which pushes black ownership and management, especially, among companies. (You may think that this would lead to whites struggling to find work, but this seems not to be the case; white unemployment is far lower than the national average, though still higher than in the US). The ANC has struggled with high levels of corruption.

Under the ANC, South Africa has struggled. Among the more visible parts of this is the electricity situation. Eskom, the state utility apparatus, has had pervasive issues with corruption. Contributing further to this is issues with crime: stealing electricity (that is, illegally hooking up lines to the power grid, to get free power) is common in the slums, increasing the load on the system, and people have been known to steal the copper from the power infrastructure in order to sell it.

Further, much of South Africa is doing poorly economically more broadly. The unemployment rate is somewhere around 32%, which is the highest in the world, slums exist, roads are often poorly maintained, and overall things aren't great. There has been some inflation of the rand (their currency), though certainly nowhere near hyper-inflation levels.

Crime rates are high in South Africa. Several South African Cities are listed as among the cities with highest murder rates in the world. Of course, the same could be said of the US cities, and it requires that you have a government capable enough of tracking and releasing those statistics even to show up, so that may not be the best measure. Nevertheless, crime rates are still high by any standard. People have gates with bars in front of their doors, and often fences around their property, at least, among the well-to-do. Many live in gated communities, with private security. There is four times as much private security as police officers.

All this said, South Africa is still among the most prosperous African countries, so there is illegal immigration.

Since 1994, South Africa has had four presidents, all of the ANC. First, and most famous, Nelson Mandela. Second, was Thabo Mbeki. Under both of these people, corruption was common, but it was under the third, and most controversial, Jacob Zuma (president 2007-2017), that it became the most extensive and well known.

While most of those in leadership in the ANC were Xhosa, Jacob Zuma is Zulu, which has made him fairly popular with much of the Zulu populace. He has been known for sexual license, for more rampant and open corruption, most notably, with the India-born Gupta brothers, and pushed for left-wing economic populism and racial grievance.

Since 2017, Cyril Ramaphosa has been in power. While some were hopeful that he would be better than Zuma, South Africa has not done especially well. Controversy has continued with Zuma, with him spending some time in jail, before being released early.

The ANC is currently polling at around 40% nationally, under 50% for the first time since 1994. This makes this election a little unstable, as some coalition will have to be formed.

Enough of history of South Africa and the ANC, now to the opposition parties.

Opposition Parties and the Election

The largest such party is the Democratic Alliance (DA). The DA has long held power in the Western Cape province, where there are fewer Black Africans, and has also managed to govern some cities in the province of Gauteng, where the largest city (Johannesburg) is, and one of South Africa's three capitals. Otherwise, though, it has been the largest opposition party.

The DA is generally considered to be much more competent. The Western Cape has been doing the least badly of all the provinces. The DA is fairly centrist, economically, and opposes affirmative action and the radical redistribution programs suggested by more extreme elements within South African politics. Unfortunately, it also has something of a reputation of being the "white people's party." Its base is certainly not entirely white, as it has been getting around 20% of the vote, of late, which is more than double the entire white population, but that is not entirely unfounded. The leadership is more white, at least, and white people are disproportionately likely to vote DA. It's also relatively popular among the Coloured community. But this isn't good for getting elected. Helen Zille, the leader of the DA from 2009 to 2019, also had the scandal of saying that colonization was a net good for South Africa, which, while maybe true, is probably something you should try to avoid saying when you're a minority party trying to hold together a coalition of like-minded people. The DA would like to have more power less centralized, and more at the provincial level, presumably so that they can get to manage more of the western cape and be less hamstrung by the national government.

The EFF (Economic freedom fighters) was formed in 2013, when Julius Malema and his friends broke off from the ANC. The EFF is very far left wing: they advocate for confiscating land and wealth from white people. If you saw online the discourse about the "Kill the boer!" chants, these were those people. Malema has said that he is not calling for white people, for now. (Yes, the "for now" was part of what he said.) They are communist in ideology, like the ANC. Malema has advocated for aid to Hamas. They wish to (quoting wikipedia here), "expropriate White-owned farmland, nationalise the mining and banking sectors, double welfare grants and the minimum wage, and end the proposed toll system for highways." (Remember, South Africa is at 30% unemployment, and economically relatively stagnant.)

It would be bad if the EFF ended up in power. Because in this upcoming election, the ANC is likely to fall belower 50%, the DA has been worrying about a "doomsday coalition" between the ANC and the EFF.

The EFF has drawn most of its voting from young black men. It received about 11% of the vote in 2019, and was feared to be polling at maybe 17% of the population for this upcoming election, up until a few months ago, but is now back down to around 10%.

A few months ago, Jacob Zuma announced the formation of the MK, (uMkhonto we Sizwe), named after the old paramilitary wing of the ANC. Zuma has wished to be eligible, which is constitutionally questionable because of a 2021 conviction. Nevertheless, he still has had courts rule in his favor, though the process is ongoing.

The EFF and MK are fairly aligned, and seem to be willing to cooperate after the election. The MK supports such things as "expropriating all land without compensation and transferring ownership to the people under state and traditional leadership custodianship," change to a more African-based legal system, replacing the constitution, making college (including through post-graduate) free and compulsory, and providing permanent jobs to everyone capable and willing.

MK is most popular among Zuma's base, so it is doing best in KwaZulu Natal, the Zulu homeland. It has been polling overall at about 10%, taking votes primarily from the ANC and EFF.

The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) is affiliated with the Zulu monarchy. Historically, they've done well with Zulus, though that was less the case when Zuma headed the ANC. They support power being transferred to provincial governments rather than the national government, and don't seem crazy. They are polling at only 5% or so.

ActionSA, my vague sense is, like the DA, but more black, and is polling at maybe 3% or so. They left the DA in 2020.

The VF+ (Freedom Front plus) are right leaning, and most popular with Afrikaners. They are in favor of the rights of minority groups, such as Afrikaners and Coloureds, and are against affirmative action, and in favor of free markets and small government. They are in favor of Cape Independence. I think they may have something of a reputation of right-wing racist extremists, because they're Afrikaners disproportionately, and Apartheid was a thing. This perception is funny, because they are policy-wise one of the parties least in favor of racial discrimination. I think they're currently my personal favorite, but I haven't looked excessively deep. They're only polling at 2% or so.

There are more parties.

Of course, all the parties are also gesturing at how Their One Plan Will Work to fix the electricity situation, reduce crime, lead to more jobs, etc.

The DA has organized a Multi-Party Charter to work against the ANC, EFF, and MK, including all the other parties listed above. I haven't yet worked out what exactly that's supposed to accomplish.

It is still unclear what coalition will be formed, and what policies that will result in. I could imagine the EFF or MK being in a ruling coalition could lead to many whites seeking to leave the country.

Provinces

A few provinces are also up in the air. The Western Cape, governed by the DA for the last 15 years, looks like there is a chance that it loses control of the province, or at least has to enter into coalition. This would be bad, as the Western Cape is the province doing least badly. The Referendum Party was recently formed, and is running in the Cape, in the hopes that the DA will need them to enter into coalition to run the province, in order to hold a referendum for cape independence, to get the Western Cape to secede from South Africa. The VF+ also supports cape independence. There were polls not long ago indicating that it is also relatively popular with the people of the cape, with at least a referendum agreed to be worthwhile by the majority. If any such thing happened, it would be strongly disliked by most of the country. The referendum party and VF+ support it, under the right of self-determination, and in order to stop South Africa from dragging down the Western Cape. The Western Cape is the only province that is not majority black, which means that many think cape independence is racist. Of course, even if a referendum occurs, and passes, which are both not especially likely, it's still probably unlikely South Africa just lets them go, and international politics isn't going to want to help the white-coded people by the imposition of pressure.

KwaZulu-Natal, the Zulu homeland, is also uncertain. The MK is doing well, but the ANC, DA, and IFP will all also be relevant.

Gauteng, the most populated and most urban province, containing Johannesburg, Pretoria, Soweto, etc. could also end up governed by a coalition other than the ANC. It was barely won by the ANC in 2019, so it will probably need to be some coalition after this election, but who knows the constituents.

All the others should be taken by the ANC, I imagine.

I guess I'll have to report back later (no idea how long coalitions will take to sort out) how that all turns out. It's looking like we will have a situation where the ANC, DA & co., and MK+EFF will each have enough of a block that any two of them would be able to coalition, but none on their own. I'm not sure what will be most likely to form from that.

If anything radical happens, like the Western Cape seceding, or South Africa Zimbabweing itself, that'll be sure to have an effect on the discourse around the country. (And of course, more importantly, on the people themselves.)

From a South African: great writeup. A couple minor points:

  • "uh-par-theid" is a valid English pronunciation. "uh-par-tate" is the Afrikaans pronunciation, but even Afrikaans speakers (those without strong accents) will say apar-theid when speaking English.
  • The Zulu/Xhosa divide is extremely important, probably more than any other ethnic division in terms of determining backroom politics, given that it dominated ANC internal politics after Mandela. Mbeki's corruption/nepotism crew were nicknamed the "Xhosa Nostra" ("Xhosa" = "Khosa"), and when Zuma came to power the Zulu faction of the ANC saw it as their turn to eat. MK is essentially those parts of that faction who were kicked from the ANC trying to do their own thing. Ramaphosa, the current president, represents something of a compromise (he's from a small tribe, the Venda, not under either umbrella), but leaning towards the comparatively moderate and business-friendly Xhosa faction.
  • Both the IFP and VF+ may sound good now, but they were essentially forced into sanity by irrelevance - both started out as very immoderate parties. Back in the 90s there were very real concerns the IFP would start a civil war in the name of Zulu nationalism, and the original Freedom Front were a hard-right Afrikaans group descended from the pro-Apartheid opposition to de Klerk. Their brands are so tarnished that, realistically, they will stay very small.
  • The DA has done a surprisingly good job on the ground in the Western Cape - their main problem, apart from the central government, is that South Africa's problems are so intractable nobody can live up to campaign promises. Secession is far more popular than comparable movements elsewhere, and also imo a very good idea, but the basic issue is that there's very little organization or money behind it compared to the DA. This may well change if the DA fails or is forced into coalition with the ANC and therefore has to take responsibility for ANC failures. Western Cape opposition is, organizationally and financially, dominated by Respectable White People - but I find their impeccably liberal opinions can quickly change to secession talk after a few glasses of wine.

Thanks, that's really helpful.

Huh, the South Africans I know pronounce it the way I specified. Maybe that's unusual.

Could be a regional/linguistic thing, I haven't been up north to the more Afrikaans parts in quite some time, and most of the Afrikaners I know in the Cape are very Anglicized. Imo it would come across as either pretentious or trying to make some political point if a native English-speaking South African put emphasis on the Afrikaans pronunciation (for a foreigner, of course, it's just "ah, you actually know about South Africa!" South Africans, black and white, tend to be quite happy when people know them as more than a caricature - I've been asked by Westerners more than once "Oh, South Africa? Where's that?")

The one I know best is from the Cape, comes from an English-speaking family, but went to an Afrikaans-speaking university, and hasn't lived in South Africa for a few decades.

On Zulu/Xhosa tribalism- which faction headlines the ANC? Is the general public of the opinion that Zuma’s faction leaving puts the Xhosa nostra firmly in the driver’s seat?

So, the ANC has gone back and forth between the two, and there were always cliques moving in and out of the main Xhosa/Zulu power structures within the party. Money united governing factions just as much as tribe. Ramaphosa represents a mildly Xhosa-slanted compromise with moderate/business-friendlier Zulu factions, but there is definitely fear among Zulus that the old Mbeki way of doing things will come back (Ramaphosa is somewhat corrupt - he definitely pays bribes to get things done - but there's a general sense among business-friendly people that he's corrupt in the interests of the country. Mbeki wasn't as blatantly corrupt as Zuma, but he had some awful people, notable for AIDS denialism contributing to SA's horrific HIV/AIDS problem). It's not quite a Zulu/Xhosa crackup of the ANC yet, particularly because the MK is so Zuma-centric and nobody knows where it will go yet. Educated and better-off Zulus are often embarrassed by Zuma representing them, for obvious reasons, and South Africa has a long history of splinter parties which go nowhere. I'd speculate this is more likely going to be a split among Zulus between Zuma loyalists and those remaining with the ANC, which could well spell a decrease in tribal jockeying within the ANC rather than Xhosa dominance. Worth noting that Zuma seems to have significantly greater ability to organize street violence than the ANC, which is a potentially massive wild card. Johannesburg is iirc the largest city in the world without a natural water source, northern SA's economy is dependent on mining exports, and Joburg's lifeline to the coast runs through the Zulu regions...

Apartheid is almost universally derided. But was it better for South Africa? This is a variation of the Ian Smith argument.

It was clearly better for the whites. Perhaps it was better for the non whites (less crime, better functioning government).

It raises the question of what the purpose of government is (ie is it about creating a good life or is it about self determination). If the latter, then what is the SA argument against allowing the Boers to form their own separate country. There isn’t even the anti colonialism argument.

It depends what you mean by "better". A lot of older black folks look back on it wistfully given the current state of the country (I've had them joke to me about asking if they can vote for de Klerk), but for young black south africans the general attitude is that opportunity for aspiration is worth the price.

The real problem with apartheid is just that it didn't work very well. It was a bureaucratic mess dominated by a small group of hardline Afrikaner Calvinists who wished they could repress whites as much as they repressed blacks. The army was stronger than Rhodesia's in terms of size and equipment, but far less well-run and well-led. The "deep state" acted with complete lawlessness, dabbling in everything from illegal medical experiments to rhino poaching. The government blocked the introduction of TV until 1976, in large part for religious reasons. The system's fundamental contradiction between the desire for separation and the need for cheap black labour created a class of displaced single male labourers who would then become the foundation of modern townships. The racial classifications in mixed cities made no sense - Japanese were white, Chinese were coloured, Muslims were coloured unless they were Turks, in which case they were white, and god help you if some bureaucrat decided to screw with your classification. Generally, things ran on Kafka's playbook with a side of hypocrisy.

Now, could apartheid have worked if it had been set up properly from the beginning by some visionary genius and run efficiently? Yes, I suspect so, given the example of Rhodesia only folding to external pressure, or the possibility of simply jettisoning the "bantustans" as genuinely separate countries (though once SA was addicted to cheap labour, that became impossible). Did apartheid deliver many extremely valuable things, like basic safety, that SA no longer does? Largely yes. Could actually existing apartheid have survived, even without sanctions, without ending up collapsing into a race war? Only, in the long run, by becoming a genuinely totalitarian police state with all that implied - and, ultimately, that would have been a sad fate for a country founded by some of Europe's most freedom-loving children.

Generally, things ran on Kafka's playbook with a side of hypocrisy.

Yes, I’d definitely gotten the impression of apartheid being a corrupt mess running off of cheap labor and limited central control of the state apparatus, which didn’t work as well as it’s thought to have. It’s nice to have that confirmed.

What I’d never heard was the description of it as being fundamentally bureaucratically arbitrary; most people who described living under the system- including one who was half Lebanese and I would have expected to suffer from bureaucratic probes into his racial classification- described the oppressive aspects as being aimed at other people- either blacks or dissident whites who couldn’t keep their heads down. I’m totally willing to believe it could be a problem for some people, though.

And BTW ‘Japanese are white but Chinese are colored’ and ‘Muslims are colored unless they’re Turks’ just seem like common sense to me, although I suppose that’s not the extent of racial arbitrariness.

At least in Zimbabwe, the black citizens now have less economic prosperity and less political freedom than they did in Rhodesia.

I’ve really come to admire Ian Smith. It is a hard thing to “go it alone” but he was of course right. And not in a cartoonish “white people are always superior” way but in an obvious “look around and see what is happening in Africa with these shitty leaders” way. It was a deeply unpopular position but one that actually was best for both blacks and whites. That requires strength of character.

If Smith had followed the British strategy also used in Botswana, Zambia and to some extent Namibia then the white population of Zim would be better off. That’s not to say he could have anticipated how Mugabe’s rule would go but if you look at all three of those countries they still have white farmers owning and running most of the most valuable/productive farmland and relatively little ethnic hostility toward them. A white farmer almost became president of Zambia pretty recently even. Rhodesia abolished strict racial segregation (where Salisbury etc was reserved for whites only) in the mid-1950s. By the early 60s it could have gone either way, but each side was slowly radicalized until the whites panicked at the plan to slowly allow educated blacks to become the majority of the electorate and then the UDI was inevitable.

But the whites don't have it any better, and that's what's important, right?

In both cases, doing some reforms but not going in the direction of black communist nationalists would definetly be much better than handing power to black communist nationalists like Mugabe and the ANC. Indeed, if you want to avoid racism, you not only don't handle power to them, you suppress them by force and not allow them to have organizations. What we got now, is liberal parties worldwide trying to copy the ANC agenda. Global liberalism supporting ANC coming to power is also condemnable. Modern new left liberalism is a very radical ideology that doesn't get sufficient negativity for it.

Even if you have a multiethnic country that isn't going to seperate, you should supress by force this kind of ideology and politics on the basis of protecting a group, in this case whites, either as minority, or as a larger demographic. Democracy as it is understood does not necessarily imply allowing all sorts of policies and the tyranny of progressive supremacists. But in any case, it is the better choose to suppress the choice of voters for black communist nationalists, and even of elites who bypass agenda of voters and are even more supportive of such ideology as has been the case in some european countries. Or even of very influential NGOs of this ideology which become a state within a state.

A South Africa that didn't allow parties like ANC and those more extreme, and such politicians found themselves in prison, and parties and organizations with such agenda banned, would be both a better governed one, and one that seeks the common good and respects the rights of its people, over following an agenda to screw whites, for blacks and promote communist nationalism which is also horrible policy in general. Doubly so when it is black communist nationalism against whites, that pretends their contributions to the economy is due to legacy of apartheid and racism. In both a democratic, and non democratic system you should suppress this ideology and its organizations.

Of course, if a significant part of a different ethnic group population has an agenda that is about screwing over the other ethnic group and pretend they are antiracist when doing so, then I don't see why separation is necessarily the wrong choice. Less problem of inequality between blacks and whites in the same country, if they are in a different country.

It raises the question of what the purpose of government is (ie is it about creating a good life or is it about self determination). If the latter, then what is the SA argument against allowing the Boers to form their own separate country. There isn’t even the anti colonialism argument.

Absolutely valid point, for which the answer is that the movement that is against Boers having self determination is a hypocritcal antiwhite black nationalist and other intersectional alliances movement. It isn't a consistent movement that consistently follows principles for, or against self determination, or for, or against racism. It is who/whom that animates this movement. Even though there are definitely supporters of it who don't see themselves that way.

Modern new left liberalism is a very radical ideology that doesn't get sufficient negativity for it.

No it isn’t. The world bank, WHO, rules-based-international-order of neoliberalism? That’s about as nonradical as you can get. Aggressively not radical. It files the sharp edges off the communists and the reactionaries in order to keep things running a little more smoothly.

A South Africa that didn't allow parties like ANC and those more extreme, and such politicians found themselves in prison, and parties and organizations with such agenda banned

How do you think that’s enforced? How do you make sure the right people get suppressed? For every apartheid SA there’s a lovely Cambodia or North Korea or Rwanda descending into bloodshed. The best situation we’ve found, empirically speaking, is to weaponize tolerance. That’s liberalism.

No, its not liberalism, since liberalism includes more than that, especially modern mainstream liberalism.

New left Liberalism is supporting supression of those most stongly opposing such agendas while promoting itself mass migration of foreign groups, hate speech laws, discrimination and propaganda against the replaced non progressiv demographics (creating future electoral politics also more in line with agendas like black communism nationalism) while concern trolling people who oppose this. Of course new left liberals have supported the trajectory South Africa has followed and promoted similiar policies to their own countries. Including hate speech laws and propaganda that demonizes white people and elevates progressive favored grousp as superior. The new left does have a radical progressive supremacist and authoritarian agenda which is implementing in practice. The ADL that you support and your politics are radical in fact. This idea promtoed by various people that try to seperate this new left agenda from liberalism, is simply not respectful of both present situation and of history. There is not in fact a clear border seperating liberals from the far left.

That is a core aspect of what modern liberalism is in practice. Even if we have supporters of it who try to present it as something else.

As for suppressing black communist nationalists leading to tyranny. Of course it is a core aspect of a free democratic society, and even a free non democratic society to have a constitution and not let just any pollicy run as it goes against the rights. New left, tribalist favoritism in favor of blacks and demonization against. The idea that democratic societies should suprress north korean like extremists is a sound one and we live in a world where far leftists suprress those more even handed than them under the pretense they are suppressing far righters.

The only way we avoid inevitable hardcore bad consequences is to suppress far left extremists. It does not lead to tyranny to do so, it helps us avoid their tyranny to keep them down. And in fact, supressing far left extremists whose agenda is to oppress for example both political opposition and often the case whites, with their policies, propaganda and false history, and authoritarianism, is a core element of getting the promise of democracy. Plus avoiding the enormous problems of decline and corruption from their far left politics that have helped bring south africa enormous decline. So the promise of democracy is a society that protects the common good and respects the human rights of its people, not just whatever elites who pretend represent public opinion says, applies, nor mob rule. The promise of democracy has failed because instead of doing this, we have far left extremists persecuting others.

And in countries like South Africa it was going to be indeed a much more difficult proposition due to demographics. This doesn't change the fact that the best option at play was not to give the power to black commnist nationalists. And the difficulties also relating not just to demographics but global left and liberals pushing things in that direction when they could have been adamant to push for some reforms but not to give power to black communist nationalists. Not to accept the radical premise that inequalities are just due to racism.

The tribe new left liberals and what they believe is bad and should be suppressed but the general philosophy of liberalism, or what is associated with that before or excluding the new left, is not perfect but has important flaws. But there are certain elements/virtues that are valuable. A bit like with the enlightenment, we had reign of terror and far left extremists, with the French revolution, but there were some valuable elements in the enlightenment. Ultimately liberalism philosophically becomes inevitably this radical far left, hypocritical authoritarian dictatorship of progressivism monstrosity, if not combined with a healthy dose of conservatism and also, since a core part of the problem is also extreme favoritism and tribalism for progressive associated tribes and hatred and contempt for the rights while virtue signaling how they are antiracists, also to aknowledge the group rights of non progressive groups, so a certain nationalism in combination with certain internationalism that respects nations, both their own and of foreign ones is also a component of the only thing that has worked well as international justice which is ethnopluralism where different nations have reciprocoal rights. So, things like checks and balances are valuable, but so are laws against treason and not letting far left extremists taking over. I actually do think that this is a compromise on liberalism because it does exist as a purity spiraling ideology that transforms into something more far left. There is an inherent element of whigish progressive doubling down in historical liberalism, that can lead to it becoming far left as it has done. Just like non new left western societies were a compromise between liberal, conservative, nationalist and even in some cases internationalist elements, within them the radical part that saw them following the liberal and progressive doubling down trajectory, also existed.

And today modern liberal organizations instead of applying international justice consistently, we have organisations like Amnesty international pretend that Europeans are not indingeneous in their own homelands.

So yeah, modern mainstream liberalism is completely rotted with cultural marxist, authoritarian agendas and extremely machiavelian. It is a part of the far left. With liberalism as a philosophy contra to liberals as a political tribe and their political philosophy of modern liberalism where things are much more negative because the later are have been supporting something more extreme, what I am suggesting is throwing out the bathwater without throwing out the baby. Successful modern western societies were a mixture of liberal, conservative, nationalist and internationalist elements and which are something more sophisticated, wiser and greater fulfills the high minded promises of concepts like democracy, or positive associations of liberalism. They failed to keep down far left extremists whose agenda is as I described however, and the world is now experiencing the consequences and is on a radicla path of transformation to south africa like agenda.

Of course another element of far left extremism part of liberalism is extreme tolerance for far left extremists and even ethnic authoritarian supremacists, of a more left wing hue, which destroys their society, in combination, in new left liberalism with a hypocritical sharing and being the authoritarian supremacist movement that through law and practice implements a cancel culture to any dissent and enforces the demonization, discrimination, double standards in the justice system too of course and even deliberately follows policies that will lead to the extinction and replacement of their ethnic outgroup. While also tolerating radicals who want something worse and transforming society in a direction where it made possible that eventually they may get their way. Not to mention the race targeted violence and criminality that ensues in a society that has this kind of policies and rhetoric.

The fact that modern new left liberalism denies this nature and tries to present itself as an anti-authoritarian movement, doesn't change the fact that is an authoritarian movement in fact. Indeed, it is a part of its negative element that makes it deserving of a more negative reputation.

This ideology is the problem. I certainly am not suggesting we purity spiral dismantle anything that might seem to fit into liberalism, when I argue that communist nationalists should not have the political power to run South Africa and Rhodesia/Zimbabue to the ground. Wiith murderous consequences especially for the later. In your case the extremely authoritarian and highly influential ADL, brings such objections, but you have sided with them.

And I can't but wonder if you bring such objections because you do think such far left extremists should successfully do what they want and persecute dissent, and not because you genuinely oppose tyranny, but the opposite where you sympathize with black communist nationalist agenda. Because, actually it is the fact that new left liberalism implements similar agendas and sympathizes with them, and allows state within a state NGOs to run riot and both in private sphere, and within goverment, persecute people. Its not a fringe movement but mainstream in modern liberalism and even supposed rightist parties like Torries which aren't right wing, which have adopted modern liberalism have done. And there are few organizations more emblematic of this kind of politics than the ADL.

So no, we should give an accurate reputation of what new left liberalism is doing, instead of this fraud of a consistent movement for tolerance, that is even handed, following international justice and consistent rules. It is a cultural marxist movement that shares plenty with black communist nationalists they supported taking over in South Africa and is increasingly trying to bring more south africa politics in western countries. However, excessive tolerance to such far left extremism in western societies has also been an unwise course that has let to the tyranny of the far left. The reality is that machiavelian hiding their power level far leftists, under the banner of liberalism have been pushing in such direction, but there have also been people who have been more unwisely gullible, who were manipulated by the machiavelian far leftists who concern trolled tolerance and didn't understand how tolerating far left extremists to march on institutions and take over is ruinous and unwise, and not a virtue. That they weren't tolerating an ideology of tolerance and restraint, but a radical ideology.

It goes against a free society to not be in the sweet spot of tolerance, to not have rules against treason and criminals, and not consider treason and criminality when certain agendas that do qualify are implement and factions do take over. The right to accurately label treason as such, is one eroded by far left extremism when it comes to labeling their agenda at such, but this isn't because the end result it seeks is a tolerant society, but the opposite. The only free and just societies that have ever existed are those who make wise trade offs and yes do show a restraint, but still keep criminals down. Obviously, if you don't keep totalitarian political comisars down, if like the Russians 100 years ago, you are passive in the face of radicals trying to take over your country and slow to react, the end result is one that is worse than if you did act.

Another aspect of this, was not tolerance, or be guilible but passivity and lacking will for confrontation, even though this was an important issue that a stand ought to had been made, and also should be made today. Especially for countries which aren't yet South Africa. Letting things go further in a South Africa direction, is going to be another mistake.

In any case, we don't live in an age of consistent extreme tolerance, and we have no reason to let far left extremists ruin things, due to a principle of tolerance that nobody follows consistently and certainly is not seen as incompatible with democracy. Modern liberalism is a movement for tolerating its far left extremists which include actual self identifying liberals and people they sympathize with, with pretense of universalist tolerance they don't follow because they are being incredibly intolerant of others. Western democracies that operate under this ideology are rather intolerant to what they perceive often inaccurately, as too far to the right. Which is categorized broadly in a manner that brings us far left tyranny. This is the time where the pressing need is for taking seriously the enormous problem of far left extremists who are actually a fatal danger to a free, non tyrannical society. And then not letting such ideology destroy countries, both through tyranny and through the other negative consequences of cultural marxist regimes.

So there’s corrupt, banal and incompetent, reasonable but unpopular, and crazy and evil as the three basic blocs.

It sounds like the ANC can caucus with the EFF/MK if they have to; can they caucus with the DA and friends?

And regarding cape independence, I’d be interested in hearing from people with specific knowledge- how much of it is just people with whatever agenda hitching it to complaints about poor national level governance? Texas nationalism is basically that- people with some not-gonna-happen agenda(goldbugs, Russophiles, etc) convince themselves that Texas independence would be their best shot at implementing their agenda, and generate interest off of the fact that everyone in Texas except partisan democrats thinks the state can govern itself better than the feds can. In South Africa’s case one can easily see the same process going on.

It sounds like the ANC can caucus with the EFF/MK if they have to; can they caucus with the DA and friends?

Probably? I don't have too extensive of a sense of how any of the three coalitions would play out—how much each would have to concede, compared to what they're willing, or how much they'd demand.

Looking at the 2021 municipal results, wikipedia lists several coalitions including both DA/EFF and ANC/EFF coalitions, but no ANC/DA ones. I'm not sure how much predictive power that has, though.

I’d be interested in hearing from people with specific knowledge- how much of it is just people with whatever agenda hitching it to complaints about poor national level governance?

My impression is not really? The Referendum party is basically campaigning on "we'll work with the DA completely and entirely, we just want to force a referendum."

That said, I don't know how well independence would work. I'm sure it has some level of dependence on other parts of the country for things, and don't know what Cape Town's economy does mostly and whether that's separable.

(While I was checking its power situation, I ran across the quote that Eskom, as of 2010, produced 45% of all electricity in the entire continent, which was surprising to me.)

To be clear, I really don't think independence is likely, though a referendum is possible.

(While I was checking its power situation, I ran across the quote that Eskom, as of 2010, produced 45% of all electricity in the entire continent, which was surprising to me.)

This seems beyond belief. This USG page makes the claim, but this article deboonks it. IEA statistics back up the deboonking, putting South African generation at 27% of all Africa's generation.

That seems somewhat more plausible, although it's interesting to note that in PPP terms South Africa generates only 1/8 of Africa's GDP.

It looks like past production used to be higher from Eskom, and lower for the rest of Africa, but you're still right that that seems not to have been true.

The site cited by wikipedia puts Eskom at 230 terawatt hours, in 2008. (Eskom's own data puts it at 224 sold, 239 produced.) 2008 also looks to be the peak year of Eskom's power generation.

If Eskom were 45% of Africa's power, going with the more generous 239 figure, then Africa would be producing 531 terawatt hours. But your statistics site puts it at 625 gigawatt hours, meaning that Eskom was only 38%.

I haven't found what the source is for Africa's electricity production is yet.

providing permanent jobs to everyone capable and willing

I can't remember any examples of this system. Without the last word communist states would be close, though "permanent" is a stretch, but with the addition of "willing" it appears impossible. How such a thing would work?

East Germany had something like this. Because of its unique situation with continued flight to the West, many factories and other businesses were constantly begging for employees.

Interesting. Was that just for skilled jobs, or for everything? And why couldn't they just get employees from other Eastern Bloc countries- was it the language barrier, or was travel for work just forbidden?

They got a bunch of Vietnamese, whose descendants are still there today. The equivalent of the Turks in West Germany, though fewer and better-behaved, which is why you don't hear about them much. The same is true of some other ex-Eastern Bloc countries like Czechia.

But no, individuals couldn't just go and move of their own accord. (The exception to that was Yugoslavia, at least at some times, but given the choice, they'd rather go to West Germany obviously.)

It was for quite a range of occupations IIRC.

I know they did bring in some Cubans and even Vietnamese, but that may have been for propaganda value and "proletarian internationalism" points. Don't think they ever had Poles or Romanians.

From their manifesto, "The state will offer employment to everyone who is willing and able to work, at a decent rate above the minimum wage of R4500, with skills development and training opportunities."

You can see the rest of their suggestions there as well.

I might have taken it too literally, I read it as that a job must be provided to any applicant, nobody can be fired, and simultaneously people are not compelled to work. On second thought, this isn't impossible, it's just welfare mixed with LARP.

The DA is generally considered to be much more competent. The Western Cape has been doing the least badly of all the provinces. The DA is fairly centrist, economically, and opposes affirmative action and the radical redistribution programs suggested by more extreme elements within South African politics. Unfortunately, it also has something of a reputation of being the "white people's party." Its base is certainly not entirely white, as it has been getting around 20% of the vote, of late, which is more than double the entire white population, but that is not entirely unfounded.

If you're a bayesian reasoner, you might have a hypothesis - "white people have a higher average IQ than black people for genetic reasons, and this is a large contributor to political stability and economic success". You might have other hypotheses with other explanations for poor political and economic conditions in Africa. And, reasoning about history is hard, there's a lot of contingency and it's hard to determine causation, but if you add up all the small updates it the probability for the first hypothesis seems to steadily move up. So, as a genuine question from someone who isn't confident either way - what are some pieces of evidence against that hypothesis? Not about IQ and genes, that's been done to death , but specifically it as a contributor to political and economic stability. Similar anecdotes to the quote are fine.

This isn't evidence, exactly, but it seems pretty plausible that western institutions and culture (e.g. having more individualistic and high-trust societies) made it easier for those of european descent to flourish, making their success greater than the effects of the IQ gap alone?


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