domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
14hr ago
In my experience a lot of young men would actually like to get married
Yes, and they too would be alienated by the tradcon message that puts 100% of the blame for the decline in marriage on men.
They rely on cheap dopamine fixes and are stuck in perpetual adolescence because of structural problems in the economy and the education system
The unemployment rate is close to zero.
ControlsFreak
14hr ago
I wrote here:
It just so happens to be that we don't see a world where the lack of slavery is causing all sorts of real world problems for individuals and societies. Plus all the good moral arguments and everything. Funny that, both those factors cut the other way for the instant question.
Perhaps see also this chain of comments by @FCfromSSC. He focused on porn in the last comment, but also:
...Conservative Christians no longer need to argue what might happen if the other side gets their way, but rather what has happened, and what results the other side is accountable for. Christians can now operate as a genuine counter-culture, offering a cogent critique of the conditions we are all living in every minute of every day. We can offer meaningful answers to the myriad discontents created by our present society, and through those answers coordinate the systematic withdrawal from and dismantling of that society.
But instead, you seem to want some specific predictions of specific mechanisms that are headline-style events. Things like:
If I wanted to argue that America could become communist, maybe I predict that AOC will finally wrest control of the rudderless Democratic Party.
These are kind of silly. "I predict that [POLITICIAN] will ascend and promote [THING]." Like, okay? Swap someone/something in there. I'm again not particularly interested in playing that silly game.
roystgnr
14hr ago
In 2025 no one is getting a struggle session for DND.
Sure they are; the struggle sessions are just run by the left now.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
14hr ago
Unfortunately Republicans have no solution to the problem of marriage. Neither party does, because the Overton Window only contains solutions that don't work.
faceh
14hr ago
I only did this once. Been trying not to tempt fate.
But I expect that going in and losing quickly would piss me off and make me want to plunk down more money to "win it back" so I don't have to accept the unpleasant sensation of admitting "defeat."
Since that is about how I felt when I took losses during my brief day-trading phase.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
14hr ago
This meant that if one side was a belligerent in a conflict, the other side abstained from officially sending troops as well.
I think the mutually-agreed, informal rule in the Cold War was (after Korea, where both sides violated it for no net gain) that you don't attack the other superpower's client directly, only with your own client. So the US could send troops to defend South Vietnam, but not to attack North Vietnam. (And the USSR couldn't directly participate in North Vietnamese attacks on South Vietnam, but they didn't need to because they had a much better proxy). And the US couldn't invade Cuba with regular forces, which they otherwise clearly wanted to do, given that they did the Bay of Pigs.
Lizzardspawn
15hr ago
There's simply no beating capitalism at making interchangeable consumer goods cheap, it's the one thing it's incredibly good at. Food supply chains are at once critical, complex and old, which means that they are very highly regulated, involve a ton of actors and have been optimized to absurdity.
Good rule of thumb is that whenever you look in any complex system in the USA of lately usually you have shitload of rent seeking and not capitalism. I am not sure that the food chain is an exception from this - I already know that farmers have great problem with rent seeking behavior from John Dreeres and Monsantnos of the world.
2D3D
15hr ago
2010s "don't be a dick" secular humanism is now right wing. Left wing atheism is witchcraft and social justice identitarisnism, right wing atheism is hedonic self indulgence. Split the irreligious into those 2 broad factions, make a 1 second guess on who is more repelled by who, and 'religious identity' is no longer the savior of the left. Maybe they can make a hard pivot to Islam like the European left did, the USA has a lot more runway before critical mass for sharia becomes unmanageable.
2D3D
15hr ago
But any guy who looks and sees how they force any popular young Democrat male through a struggle session
Heres the straight dope compadre, the new democratic party isnt the old boring rubes ya know? Dems spent 20m to learn how to talk like men do and in mens spaces. So get ready for the Committee Approved Male Representatives to drop a few f-bombs in mens spaces like a CSGO Lobby or a weight rack about how manly it is to support a woman and why toxic masculinity is just like the worst. Because clearly what men really want is for someone that simply drops a few swears and hangs out around them to gain traction.
Once the men are listening they'll automatically absorb all the lessons pushed by democrats because men automatically listen to their betters like the pack beasts they all are. Ideally the democrats can have their version of joe rogan. The emblems of democratic manliness, David Hogg and Dean Withers, should be good. Maybe that Hasan Piker guy could work too, but he has visible muscles so he might be a secret right winger.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
15hr ago
Hey another Motte Orthodox convert! There are a bunch of us here. We should start a club or something.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
15hr ago
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
15hr ago
Agreed, that is what Christians should have been doing. Shaming people indiscriminately and without explanation in the name of sin is not showing the love of Christ, imo.
SkoomaDentist
15hr ago
Small changes in daily lived experiences can have an outsized impact. The crime rate can hardly budge on paper, but things that might poll as "crime" can increase exponentially in your daily life.
A sort of opposite example has been the homicide and violent crime rate in Finland up to the late 2000s or so. It used to be quite high officially. The country was also very safe in practise, at least as long as you weren’t a middle aged jobless alcoholic and didn’t start arguments at the hot dog stand queue after bars closed. There used to be a common joke that a typical Finnish murder was an alcoholic drinking at the cottage with his best buddy, getting into an argument, stabbing them with a knife and then calling the cops himself the next morning with no recollection of what happened.
Alas, then immigration and gangs happened and things aren’t as rosy anymore.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
16hr ago
And are you certain that young men will be turned off by that message?
In my experience a lot of young men would actually like to get married, and recognition that excessive porn use or video games are actively emasculating them is pretty common.
They rely on cheap dopamine fixes and are stuck in perpetual adolescence because of structural problems in the economy and the education system, which republicans are the only party actually trying to address.
It’s a key psychological difference between young men & women; addressing these issues are more likely to actually feel supportive & empowering rather than making them feel “under attack”.
Talking to you young men like defective young women is how the Democratic Party got in this mess to begin with.
anti_dan
16hr ago
If Republican candidate quality matters in a red state, the Dems aren't close to being down and out.
WhiningCoil
16hr ago
Small changes in daily lived experiences can have an outsized impact. The crime rate can hardly budge on paper, but things that might poll as "crime" can increase exponentially in your daily life. Where I used to live was fine on paper. I lived there for about 15 years. Then things started getting really weird. Some things would show up on paper as "crime". Gas station on the corner kept getting robbed repeatedly. There was a shooting and a shooter on the loose in my townhouse parking lot after we had our first child. Women were getting dragged off the trails and raped in attacks so lurid and on the nose you'd think they were made up had there not been so much physical evidence and they caught the guy. Turns out sometimes, just sometimes, rapist do wait in the bushes to ambush women jogging on a trail in broad daylight. Same trail we'd walk our infant daughter on in her stroller.
There were plenty of non-"crime" stuff that just added to the overall ambiance of chaos. People suddenly started stopping me in my car on the street and screaming at me for money. There were more loitering gangs of kids smoking and shouting obscenities at my wife as we walked by. Often on the playgrounds we'd go to take our daughter to... and then think better of it. More stores started locking things up. But if you complained about it, some shithead was always there to remind you "Town USA's crime rate is actually below average per capita! And year and year crime has barely budged!" I don't know how to reconcile those insistences with the stark change in my daily life.
So I left. And in the last 5 years I haven't caught a wif of a crime or "crime" anywhere in my proximity. No stores I shop at have gotten robbed, I haven't driven by a house with a squad of police cars trying to disarm a hostage situation (I forgot to mention that one in my old locale). There are no strong "civilization is at the edge of chaos" vibes like I used to get on a daily basis, per capita be damned.
Then who makes money from the food industry.
Processing and manufacturing adds a great deal of value, the actual industrial part of the food industry is huge.
You also got commodity traders and other middlemen, the people who profit from price volatility, storage, transportation, etc; whom you need to stabilize prices.
Then there's input suppliers, the people that sell farmers seeds and equipment.
And I'm not going to name all the other middlemen like the various distributors, who in turn have their own suppliers and logistical needs.
Food supply chains are at once critical, complex and old, which means that they are very highly regulated, involve a ton of actors and have been optimized to absurdity.
There are ways a public option could actually cut prices, but they all involve unacceptable tradeoffs like compromizing food safety standards, not having reliable output or operating at a loss. Not having to pay taxes (which is advanced here as the main method of savings) is far from enough.
You can actually operate at a loss if you want, the commissaries operated by DeCA seem like an obvious example. But you have to accept one of the tradeoffs. There's simply no beating capitalism at making interchangeable consumer goods cheap, it's the one thing it's incredibly good at.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
16hr ago
He has the head of the longshoreman’s union and the head of NATO writing effusive love letters that wouldn’t be out of place addressed to a Chinese emperor.
That is not evidence of Mandate of Heaven, many a failing despot and warlord has required submission and effusive praise while in process losing the grip of power. You know, end of Qing emperors comes to mind. It is evidence of lack of virtue on Trump's part, both on counts requiring subjects to verbally prostrate themselves and being so easily flattered.
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
Minnesota’s continued blue-ness is due, partly, to a highly unionized rural white population. But unions are shifting red, undermining a key advantage for the DFL. Additionally, Minnesota has been getting redder, just not as much as its neighbors, and it’s reasonable to expect current trends to continue. Finally, Minnesota’s blue is nowhere near as sticky as Texas’ red if you look at state level elections, the MNGOP is able to put up a fair fight in a way Texas democrats are not.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
16hr ago
While the 20th century mass democracy was a later development, they were explicitly not setting up an aristocratic government ("No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States"; if Paine was the extreme democrat, the nearly-half-monarchist motion by John Adams to call President "His Majesty" was laughed out of the committee.)
History of idea of "dignity" is complicated, I believe it should be traced back up to mashup of Voltaire and Christianity
Speaking of Adams, heres his Thoughts on Government (1776) on how virtuously organized republican government will inspire virtue among the common people:
A constitution founded on these principles introduces knowledge among the people, and inspires them with a conscious dignity becoming freemen; a general emulation takes place, which causes good humor, sociability, good manners, and good morals to be general. That elevation of sentiment inspired by such a government, makes the common people brave and enterprising. That ambition which is inspired by it makes them sober, industrious, and frugal. You will find among them some elegance, perhaps, but more solidity; a little pleasure, but a great deal of business; some politeness, but more civility. If you compare such a country with the regions of domination, whether monarchical or aristocratical, you will fancy yourself in Arcadia or Elysium.
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
even with the crazy North Carolina guy somehow holding on in a reddish state.
In comparison to Mark Robinson?
And how many of those vote harvesting operations are functional without USAID? How many of them require a DNC not at its own throat?
Lizzardspawn
17hr ago
wants to create public supermarkets (horrible idea all around, supermarket margins are very small)
Then who makes money from the food industry. And this is a very serious question. Farmers are on thin margins, Supermarkets are on thin margins and yet you have manyfold increase in the price from farm to table.
I actually approve this as an experiment. Create couple of stores. Cut direct deals with some farmers in the Midwest, olive oil produces in California, the big corn and wheat mills. Organize distribution and see if you can deliver fresh produce and other staples, pay wages and sell at near cost. And if the whole operation is financially sane - scale it.
Also when will the Dem party figure out that their tactics for stopping Trump like figures don't work as good as they think? People are tired of economic stagnation and hate the establishment.
kky
17hr ago
All that said, it seems very early to call the Dems permanent losers at all. They're in disarray but I don't think they've been dealt a killing blow the likes of which the Tories got. I can totally see a Clinton or Blair type figure come up with a novel coalition formula and reinvent the party.
This I would consider a hostile takeover in the same vein as Trump. Someone on the outskirts of the party enters the running and totally shatters the central machine despite its opposition. I do not think that such an individual can come from the party center, due to their excessive purity testing and effective shadow networks. See the top-level for evidence there. Secondarily, the party center is attached to a convenient notion of a coalition that simply does not exist, or which exists in irrelevant form: the nonwhites plus the women plus the gays who specifically want to organize against white men. In reality, each group and subgroup listed has internal priorities that have nothing to do with targeted resentment (except, maybe, some of the women - which is a different and serious issue), and therefore have nothing to organize around. Gays in particular have already “won” their battle as a group in a decisive manner. Gay sex is legal, gay partnerships are official, and so any gay man or woman has everything required to live a normal life - meaning their own priorities take over and they vote as members of different blocs. Meanwhile, there is no real effort or ability to reach uneducated white men and the people who do not reflexively hate them.
So, how likely is a hostile takeover? In my eyes, not likely. Sanders tried it ten years back and was effectively frozen out after a serious grassroots effort. I remember there being a serious attempt to primary Biden last election which was totally shut down and the instigator punished - before he was eventually proven right. So the party is very powerful at self-policing. A potential challenger would have to break through all that, including an increasingly ideologically concentrated and radicalized primary voter base (the less committed have been driven off - because why would you hang around in areas where people scream hate at you for disagreement), to win. They would need to create a parallel mobilization network to capture disaffected voters for the primary, to weather unequal debates, to get their message out despite hostile legacy media, and to possibly even attempts to procedurally take them off ballots, which has become an actual practice of the Democratic Party! I consider this fairly unlikely, unless some cataclysm befalls the central hierarchy and renders them incapable of organized resistance. I guess a civil war that shatters any unity between young and old could do that, or mass prosecution by Trump, but I doubt it. Thus, a slow continuation of decline ending in irrelevance.
sun_the_second
17hr ago
If it's always harmful then you can always explain how it's harmful, rather than relying on "the Bible explains what actions are sinful" and "sin is what God said is wrong" to do the work for you.
Race and IQ is far more suppressed than anti-porn, and yet the studies keep getting published.
Maybe the anti-porn side can't find it because it isn't there.
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