culture war roundup
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
6hr ago
Is there a reason you're modding a post made by one of the few consistently left-leaning posters, while not modding posts like this? Arguably this post and this post are borderline too. If the issue with this post is that it's making a generalization of a group in a somewhat mean way, then there'd be plenty of posts the mods ought to come down on even in just the past few days. There's also WhiningCoil's post comparing nonwhites to "virulent invasive species" that's been sitting for over 24h without mod action, although you said up above that you weren't equipped to handle that one so OK I guess, as long as it eventually gets handled.
If the issue is that other people are getting triggered and snapping at him, they should be the ones to pay the price alone. Otherwise it's just an informal rule of "anyone who goes against the dominant ideology on this forum (i.e. leftists) gets banned eventually when people get mad at them". The 3 borderline posts I linked don't have this problem because they're going with the dominant ideology.
My personal opinion is that none of these should be warned/banned, except for maybe WhiningCoil's that's a little too egregious.
Goodguy
7hr ago
Not sure if you would consider this anti-MAGA, but it's certainly anti-Trump: https://www.themotte.org/post/2240/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/345537?context=8#context
This one is me criticizing Trump's tariffs: https://www.themotte.org/post/1812/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/315024?context=8#context
Me being concerned about Trump's authoritarian impulses: https://www.themotte.org/post/1681/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/298689?context=8#context
Me criticizing Trump's desire to increase the military budget: https://www.themotte.org/post/1827/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/316103?context=8#context
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
7hr ago
For one thing, they feed into a sense that the people who are writing the comments are like athletes in the middle of an arena, fighting it out to the cheers of the audience.
This is a pretty good analogy.
I write contra-MAGA opinions on here all the time, and they get upvoted more often than they get downvoted.
Care to share an example or two of this? My experience has been stuff like this conversation, where I said I doubted that Biden was pocketing bribes.
I've had contra-MAGA posts that go slightly positive if they're very high effort, but the difference between me posting that and say, posting an antifeminist piece is that the contra-MAGA post will be like +50 | -45, while the antifeminist piece will be +50 | -2 or something.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
11hr ago
· Edited 11hr ago
This one from @WhiningCoil. I can see where she(?)'s coming from, I had my own problems with that comment's plausibly deniable undertones, but Coil's a particularly abrasive poster and I don't think the median Mottezen's opinions are necessarily "tainted by racism".
JustAGuy0
1d ago
Was Mossad actually implicated in this? Or is it just that Epstein was Jewish and had friends who were Zionist Jews (a viewpoint shared by the majority of Jews in the world)?
I haven't actually seen anything beyond Epstein himself bragging about it (while also being a pathological liar) and being tangentially connected to people who may have been but were not confirmed to be connected with the intelligence community. All second and third-order connections.
faceh
1d ago
See it sounds to me like you are trying to treat men and women as the exact same and getting frustrated that they aren't.
I have a generalized model for Western Women:
They have a set of three roles they want to be 'seen' fulfilling:
High-powered career woman (Girlboss).
Freespirited, cultured, 'independent' woman. That is, one who travels everywhere, has a fun and carefree life, and flits from party to party. Thirst traps abound here.
Devoted and effective mother.
I'm actually frustrated that they AREN'T acting more different than men, and eschewing the one role that men can't actually fill.
Women are not and shouldn't be as hardcore about discipline and working out etc. as a man. That's ok.
Yes, indeed, all a woman has to do to be considered 'fit' is 'not be obese.' Just don't be obviously and grotesquely fat.
AND YET, they're still the more obese gender.
I don't know what to tell you man, they have an overall lower bar, and many of them don't even try to clear it.
faceh
1d ago
Why would they continue to work on 'productive' labor when there is no actual purpose to doing so?
I mean that literally, why would they do more than the bare minimum, enough to keep their electricity and internet on?
Why would they do any job that carries any amount of risk or requires excess hours of their time?
And, of course, why wouldn't they just vote for the most radical political candidates in the meantime?
Its prevalent enough in Japan already that they have a term for it: Herbivore men..
Consider that there are two types of 'fuck you' money.
Being filthy rich so that you can afford to lose a bunch of it.
And being so dirt poor that you have nothing to lose and thus don't care about losing.
The only real suckers in this scenario are the guys stuck in the middle class doing most of the productive work and paying taxes whilst receiving very few benefits back.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Knock your girlfriend out, drag her to a campsite outside cell coverage, tell her it's surrounded with bears (and hope she ends up on the right side of the man/bear question), and after she recovers her focus and executive functions, drag her to church?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
To summarize:
@faceh contended that there were about one million women who met the criteria he considered marriagable: Single and looking (of course). Cishet, and thus not LGBT identified. Not ‘obese.’ Not a mother already. No ‘acute’ mental illness. No STI. Less than $50,000 in student loan debt. 5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’). Under age 30. Therefore there aren't enough good women for all the men.
I countered that there were approximately 617,000 American men under 40 meet all the specified criteria: Single, Earning at least $65,000 annually, No felony convictions, Exercise at least once a week, Attend religious services at least once a month, Have not used drugs other than marijuana in the past year, Not classified as alcohol dependent. Therefore, there aren't nearly enough good men for even that small number of women.
I picked 65k because it's about what you make as a Cop/Teacher, or a forklift operator at a local warehouse that's always putting up billboards for workers if you pick up a little overtime.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
1d ago
meanwhile the amplified message is "don't ever lower your standards girlie, in fact, raise them. If you can't find what you're looking for its just proof that you're too good for this world. You owe nothing to men, and their concerns don't matter."
Of course, this is women sabotaging women.
When do we admit the current advice is insufficient?
We will admit it by means of, or coincident with, a concerted effort from women such that women's tears stop winning in the marketplace of ideas. Men can't do that alone; this is a problem women have to solve for women.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
Again, why is the onus on the men to settle, here?
Because female bodies have value, and male bodies do not. You belong to the less valuable half of the human species. We just had a whole ass thread on this.
Although it should be pointed out, said thread also included a post from a woman who said that she felt like she's the one who has to settle, so, maybe the grass on the other side isn't as green as you think it is.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
The two most interesting motte posts that shaped my views on the dating world were one by a poster who I don't think posts here any more, who made an argument that the sexual revolution can't be inherently responsible for the male-female happiness gap because such a large gap is present only in the United States and not in Europe, where the revolution happened even more strongly; and @Terracotta linking a chart that showed the massive climb in obesity in the US, suggesting that if you're looking for a woman who does not qualify as obese or overweight, you're limited to the top 25% of women -- who, of course, are interested in similarly-top men.
Both of these convinced me something funky is going on in the US in particular, and that the obesity crisis, as well as general physical fitness (young men don't have muscle like they used to), are responsible for the unique unhappiness of American dating.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
Of course, I keep pointing this out to @Primaprimaprima, and they keep ignoring the point to drill down to individual solutions, which as we see are just not viable.
Bit of an odd way of phrasing it, considering I just wrote a post a few days ago where I said "we need to look at structural factors for the downturn in dating and not just individual factors".
So why, in spite of that, do you perhaps perceive that I still put a strong emphasis on individual factors?
One of my biggest pet peeves is whining. I can't stand whining. I'm empathetic to a great many things, I pride myself on my ability to consider things from other people's perspectives in fact, but even then, my sympathy has limits. And one of the fastest ways to make me lose sympathy for your cause is for you to start whining about it. We've all got a sob story, and rare is the stranger who will care about yours.
There's a very fine line between whining, and suffering just the right amount of righteous indignation so that you're actually motivated to go out and do something about what's bothering you. A very fine line indeed. It's a tough line to navigate, it requires judgement. We would never be motivated to change anything at all if we didn't suffer some sort of emotional wound. And "doing something" may, indeed, involve enlisting other people to our cause. But you have to thread the needle where you manage to do all that without being a bitch about it.
I'm not criticizing lonely men from the outside. I'm on the inside with all of you! I have a long history of being spectacularly unsuccessful with women. Like, actually embarrassing shit that I still cringe about when I remember years later. I'm a weirdo autist, I can't hold a normal conversation with a normal human. Women, predictably, find these traits repellent. So I know what it's like to suffer.
But I don't just go bitch and moan in the corner about how the world's unfair and how people should like me more and how we need "communism for pussy" as @HughCaulk so eloquently put it. What I do instead is I look in the mirror and say, "I'm a weirdo autist. That's not going to change. That's what we have to work with. So it's time to figure out how to make the best of that, rather than getting all mopey about it."
You are, apparently, suffering from some financial troubles. I'm genuinely sorry to hear that. But there are lots of poor people who fuck, y'know? There are poor people fucking right now, as we speak. There are even poor people in committed long term relationships. You could be one of them. What's stopping you?
It always comes back to your attitude, y'know? Forget about the structural and the individual and the historical and the metapsychological and whatever the fuck else it is. Think about your attitude first. Are you happy with your attitude, or are you being a bitch? Start there.
When the entire world is experience a massive decline in relationship formation simultaneously, I think complaints and concern are merited, and the people who are claiming disbelief are in fact being... obtuse.
Y'all start sounding like boomers saying "sharpen up your resume and go and give the hiring manager a firm handshake."
Everyone seems to easily admit that the job market is harder on new entrants than it used to be, and is dysfunctional for the average person. Most would admit that the housing market is WAY harsher on new entrants than before, and is extremely distorted.
Most people can even acknowledge this is due to broad factors that distort those markets, NOT individual action.
But try to say the same thing about the dating market, and they immediately go "Well YOU must be doing something wrong."
Nah bro. You're just being a spiritual boomer.
Of course, I keep pointing this out to @Primaprimaprima, and they keep ignoring the point to drill down to individual solutions, which as we see are just not viable.
faceh
1d ago
The idea that the woman would spend 4-6 years in tertiary education and come into the relationship with $15-50k in debt is a pretty new innovation though. Only about 30 years old, even.
Which is why I think attacking that particular factor might bear fruit, although women will flip out about it.
The thing that REALLY gets me is that financial troubles are easier to weather with a partner. It's easier to build wealth with a financially sensible co-tenant, even if you aren't joining all your funds together. It just is, by any sane approach.
So guys who are trying to build wealth in order to become worthy of a woman are, BY SHEER DEFINITION, going to take longer than usual to build that wealth and thus will be dating much later in life, missing out on vital experience and still ending up poorer overall.
I'm pretty much moved on from my Ex, but every time I think about how much more financially better off we'd be if she had stuck around I cringe in mild mental pain.
Previously we could split our approximately $2200/month basic living expenses down the middle. And split chores, and helped out with basic stuff like watching the dogs (instead of paying for boarding) or splitting food deliveries and such.
Upon her leaving, I immediately went from shouldering $1100/month in living expenses to just about the whole $2200. In addition, she is now going to have to shoulder a $1300-1600/month for her own separate living expenses.
Granted I could have downsized, and I didn't, but at least now I'm almost immune to lifestyle inflation, can't afford to upsize!
So I, personally, am now $14,000+/year poorer than I would have been in the counterfactual world where she stayed.
Between the two of us, we're collectively like $24,000+/year poorer than we'd have been than if we'd continued splitting expenses.
There's a lot of stuff that could have been done with that money. I guess in a Keynesian sense that having that extra economic 'activity' is somehow better overall, maybe. But there's no doubt that we'd both be wealthier and have a better financial future.
So this logic that "you have to have your own life together and be completely financially independent before you seriously start dating", which is peddled to women AND men, is ass-backwards from my perspective.
Also, I've seen enough Caleb Hammer episodes to know plenty of people will NEVER. EVER. get to that point.
Its financially sensible to find someone reliable earlier on to help contribute to your mutual growth. That's a big point to getting married at all.
And as per usual, I'm starting to lose my mind when the response to this is to put more and more pressure on men to step up, without examining what the actual incentives are, and why the problem is so widespread.
(add in the fact that women are increasingly likely to have a student debt burden as well, so the man will be paying for THAT too!)
Like you say:
This no longer sounds like a problem that can be fixed merely through self-improvement.
Its not viable, UNLESS there is more incentive/pressure on women to date guys who aren't yet financially independent but have all green flags otherwise.
Which is to say, pressure women to settle, and settle earlier. But good fackin' luck finding any voice saying anything like that, meanwhile the amplified message is "don't ever lower your standards girlie, in fact, raise them. If you can't find what you're looking for its just proof that you're too good for this world. You owe nothing to men, and their concerns don't matter."
The system is broken and pretending that individual actions can fix it is, frankly, delusional.
Yep. But saying it out loud marks you as lower status, "hah, this guy is poor and can't get bitches." Well maybe, but a bunch of us are poor and can't get bitches, and if we can't talk about the problem it'll get worse for everyone.
When do we admit the current advice is insufficient?
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
2d ago
To think all the man vs bear discourse was focus testing all along...
faceh
2d ago
It's priced in for me, and I agree that it likely won't be catastrophic.
I think we're already part of the catastrophe in motion and this is just the thing that pushes our head fully underwater. We had a similar conversation not too long ago in the context of flesh and blood women and companionship.
Overall this actually gels with some previous information I've heard that Musk is kind of going full accelerationist. May as well get this particular bottleneck over with.
Hahaha yes, YES! Finally I can dust off my SICKOS shirt. Your move, Anthropic.
Factually, I concur with posters below that actually this isn't markedly different, and in some ways more basic, than the already possible setups for AI gooning (if the system prompt posted on X is real). Not a big fan of the voice either tbqh, although the model rigging seems good, and manic pixie Amane-Misa-at-home is a more natural fit for an AI waifu at a casual glance than whatever eldritch horrors Replika has. I'll likewise point out that while this incarnation is obviously aimed at men, the potential for female appeal is much bigger, and is in fact only a model/voice swap and a system prompt away. Not sure who is actually going to pay $300/mo for it however, the porn equivalent is literally free, and an equivalent ai gf via OR or something is much cheaper if a hassle to set up. Normies hate trivial inconveniences almost as much as steep price tags, I don't think this is how you get buy-in from them, but I assume this is literally the first step and we'll see further developments.
Regardless of technical chops, the real value here is of course exposure, a first decent shot at normiefying the whole edifice. Elon may be a fake gamer, the gravest insult I can levy against my fellow man, but fringe interests make for strange bedfellows, and I'm glad to see the first public attempts at rather literal waifutech make the twitterati seethe. I know what I'm following for the next few days. Though I agree with the OP that the whole Mecha-Hitler brouhaha was 100% a publicity psyop in hindsight, the timing and subject matter is too conspicuous. Based?
On another note, I think that people invoking the Torment Nexus are kind of missing the point. I don't think "authentic" humans are threatened (NB: screeching xitter denizens not considered human authentic). Even the most literal goonette femcel I know consistently finds much more joy in talking/RPing with an actual human over a chatbot, by a rather wide margin, even if the chatbot wins out on 24/7 availability.
Instead, I think the real horror potential here is - may Allah forgive me for uttering this word - gacha games, or more broadly chatbot integration and monetization. I've recently gotten into Girls Frontline 2, and seeing the manic pixie grok gf clicked something together in my head. I can already see the framework, the jewish tricks are practically manifesting before my eyes: gacha girls have affinity/bond levels (here increased by gifts = in-game loot), a certain level of bond unlocks the chatbot functionality with the given waifu, further levels relax the guardrails or change the system prompt (reflecting increased affection)... you get the gist. My cai/Chub experience tells me gacha girls are some of the most popular interlocutors anyway, so the match is eminently natural.
From there the potential for added deviltry is almost limitless:
- obviously, 3d model visibly reacting to prompts like not-Amane-Misa here
- outfits for said 3d model, those are already a gacha staple but maybe some kind of added animations or different "backgrounds"/environments for the chatbot part? (i.e some hypothetical maid costume, with some abstract cafe setting written into the chatbot's system prompt if the costume is on?)
- limit the amount of prompts per day (vantablack ninth circle hell tier: offer paid refreshes)
- lock explicit NSFW behind a paid item (e.g. GFL2 has a
marriageCovenant mechanic, the ring is single-use and costs $5) - give the waifus some kind of actual stat boosts for "cheering them up" before gameplay, grading incoming user prompts to this end like Grok seemingly does (I eagerly await the inevitable rizz meta guides on how to best word your prompts for the optimal boost)
- some kind of voice command integration built on top as an afterthought? GFL2 is turn-based xcom-lite so I imagine voice commands can work given an autistic enough framework under the hood
Granted I sense the danger of metaphysical cuckoldry Chevrolet-tier oopsies and general bad press here, a man in pursuit of his coom is endlessly inventive, but as long as the chatbot is sufficiently insulated on the backend (also just imposing harsh character limits already neuters most prompt engineering) I think this can work. Though it probably won't be a Chinese gacha given the dangerously free-form nature of chatbots, and I don't think anyone else is deranged bold enough to try.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3d ago
My apologies. I was thinking of this related thread, and it's not you I was arguing with.
(Some might even call the mistake I made a hallucination, hmm)
Not in the current form.
I'm dedicated to pursuing a quality of "authenticity," which I don't have perfectly defined, but definitely requires that my partner be a real human, with 'natural' skin, brain tissue, and standard human DNA. The thing that I'm ACTUALLY wired to find attractive, not something that mimics those things closely enough to pass a basic inspection. Related to why I don't really like Tattoos on women.
In many ways, we are descending into my version of hell, where finding meaningful connection with other humans is harder than is needs to be, where women are more focused on careers and adventures, at the expense of their own happiness, than even trying to find joy in bearing and raising kids, where men are fundamentally purposeless and nobody bothers to even try to create a purpose for them, and everybody is busy trying to live at the expense of everyone else, b/c coordinating to create that better future is HARD and we aren't able to see past the short term consequences of these actions. But I can, and it seems increasingly obvious where this is trending. And nobody with power is doing much about it.
And its all being patched over with digital (i.e. INAUTHENTIC) simulacrum that sort of satisfy the various urges without really fulfilling the purpose for which each urge exists, and these experiences that are simply insufficient to make you happy if you care to look and notice the cracks in their facade.
All the worse because I can clearly imagine a better set of circumstances that is happier for everyone, including myself, and I have a vague idea of how we could get there, but no real clue on how to implement that plan, and thus I am left to scrape by with whatever my individual efforts can achieve.
gattsuru
3d ago
Otherwise, what is 'wrong' with letting the AI fill in that particular gap?
I gotta finish writing up the "the things we needed to hear, from the people who should have been there to say them" bit and its siblings, but :
Don't be nervous, No, don't be nervous
I'm not like other guys who have a surface,
What you girls really need's a soft, fuzzy man
(An atmospheric man) A shimmering puff of indistinct love
What's better than the vague embrace of a soft, fuzzy man?
Superstimulus is a distraction, here. "Better" is a distraction, here. They don't even have to be that good or that smart to be dangerous! The machines can be everything you want, and more critically nothing you don't.
Imagine what happens when you can snap away every trivial inconvenience you saw in a relationship. I don't think it'll be a critical problem for everyone or even necessarily a majority of people, but the people who don't handle it will be in very bad shape, either when the fugue breaks or because it doesn't.
faceh
3d ago
Strong Agree from me.
But now we can get EMOTIONALLY ATTACHED to the Algorithm. or at least, the algorithm's avatar.
Think that over for a second.
Nah, came across it because I'm doing a bit of research regarding my previous prediction about someone making a feature-length AI film.
Trying to get a sense of what is possible and what people are working on.
The one that's really impressive is this one. Full 15 minutes of coherent narrative and mostly consistent visuals.
And ALSO has some ironic things to say about AI replacement of humans.
And I'm feeling pretty good about that prediction:
It took nearly 600 prompts, 12 days (during my free time), and a $500 budget to bring this project to life.
If one guy can make a 15 minute film in 12 days on $500... yeah, someone can spit out a 90 minute one by the end of the year if they work at it, especially if they have a team.
Some days I get the sense that I'm staring into the Abyss willingly. But the Abyss hasn't stared back... yet.
Yes?
If you take that random sample of 12 year olds and run them through the education system, where they are force-fed Shakespeare and algebra against their will for another 6 years, you will find that:
The few things that the average man is both actually capable of learning and truly increase his economic productivity thereby are basic literacy, addition and subtraction, and the multiplication table. The average man cannot actually learn rhetoric or geometry, and resets the attempt to teach him. More to the point, the average man never actually needs those for his job, or to function outside of it.
See "Genetic Russian Roulette", "Against Tulip Subsidies", "SSC Gives a Graduation Speech", "Book Review: The Cult of Smart", and "A Theoretical 'Case Against Education'" for Scott's absolutely brutal takedowns of the education system. Then wash it down with some Education Realist, Bryan Caplan, and Various Refrigerator.
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