domain:aporiamagazine.com
naraburns
nihil supernum
1hr ago
You are no one's outgroup and everyone's far-group.
I don't think I've ever specifically had this thought! I usually say something like "the lefts think I'm too far right, the rights think I'm too far left, and the centrists think I'm way too political" but "I'm just in everyone's far-group" has a ring of truth to it... most of the time, anyway. Every once in a while I get picked to be someone's nemesis; fortunately, it rarely seems to last.
Corvos
1hr ago
Partly I think female friendship is closer, more emotional and less contingent than male friendship. Partly of course grandchildren are family and that makes a big difference compared to tfwngf incelish guys.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I think interpersonal exit is an evolved form of the teenage door slam. It’s almost always done publicly, either online or in person, and if done online and the program doesn’t generate a satisfying message that tells the audience that they’re blocking people who say or do X, don’t worry, they’ll announce it. As such Theres a certain level of narcissistic behavior involved — the person must be validated in some way for “having the courage of their convictions” to remove someone from their lives.
To me, I think that at least a partial answer among friend groups is to not give them the narcissistic supply. Don’t support them, don’t acknowledge it happened, make a point of including the shunned in group activities. After a while it stops being fun because nobody’s calling them “stunning and brave anti-racist.” They’re just throwing a teenage girl temper tantrum, and they’ll get over it once they realize that they’re not getting their way.
Sure, but then this cuts both ways. In that sense MGTOw man who regularly goes to pub with his colleagues or who plays D&D with his friends or who organizes grill party for his nieces and nephews or who volunteers for summer camps for children is not lonely either.
Of course this can explain only part of the problem, loneliness is something deeper no matter how women or man try to rationalize it. And maybe in current culture lionizing single powerful women it may be easier for women to do that. Incel has much more shame in it compared to femcel. A lonely childless widow may have more social status than lonely childless widower. Nevertheless in some fundamental way they are still lonely.
aldomilyar
2hr ago
Yeah I just think a decent chunk of men are gravitating towards this existence. My wife's youngest brother is essentially this in his mid-twenties. Games and maintains a hospitality job, but no interest in further education or really building anything. He's 'productive' in the sense that he covers his own expenses but he just doesn't really have any ambitions beyond a gaming laptop, discord etc. I'm surprised your example's in his 40s, but I know quite a large population of late-teens to early-thirties guys who are essentially this. They're not unhappy, just kinda... dudeist. They're not buying into society since they just can't really be incentivized unless they randomly hit it off with a girl one day (which has been the catalyst of the majority of times I've seen somebody right the course in their mid twenties)
I think the messiness of modern dating might be part of it, since IMO a large part of what drives low-motivation men beyond this local minimum is either attempting to get laid or the pressures of a significant other.
aldomilyar
2hr ago
I've met a few examples of this of his age, and a lot more in mid-twenties to early-thirties. Doing just enough to sustain one's gaming in a bottom-tier job and that's essentially it. Not even Hikkimori or obese anti-socials, just... bare-minimum minimum-wage work and gaming or another hobby like Bouldering or Jiujitsu.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
I would think that's just measuring effectiveness of method. Firearms lead to more bodies, pills lead to more look at me attempts.
Tree
2hr ago
It seems pretty clear to me that Lana's personal problems have nothing to do with Trump, or the culture war in general.
I don't think politics has much to do with it.
You’re a mainstream liberal. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but you tend to either be blind to wokeness because it’s like water to fish for you, or ignore it because it’s politically inconvenient to have such illiberal and unpopular allies.
Shunning used to be something cults did, but wokeness mainstreamed it as part of its attacks on free speech.
RenOS
something is wrong
2hr ago
Short story is, me and my wife are both PhDs (me applied math, her psychology), so we have both met quite a few different varieties of nonbinary and trans individuals. Even back when studying we noticed that it's my spaces and in particular Computer Science that has several MtFs (and I've made the same observation in ultra-male online spaces such as mech-themed games or esoteric linux open source projects; they may be 10% female, but it's all G.I.R.L.s), while FtMs are mostly in her circles, particularly the social sciences. Standard gender theory would predict the opposite; And further, my wife (who is, ironically, one of the least feminine woman personality-wise I know) noticed in her interactions in her circle of friends that the majority of FtMs and nonbinaries have virtually no male hobbies, no masculine behaviour patterns, nothing.
When asked how they knew, they talk about how they disliked their growing breasts and how cumbersome they are (my wife does as well), how unpleasant the period is (duh), how scary the thought of pregnancy is (again, duh) how they don't want to be pressured into caring for kids and having to abandon their career (my wife, too), sometimes even how cismen are dirty and gross and they don't want to have sex with them (literally every women ever). It's basically a laundry list of all realisations and fears that many if not all girls get during puberty or slightly later, but instead of having to come to terms with it, they took the easy way out: Just reject it all. Their male identity, meanwhile, consists of superficialities, such as literally wearing lumberjack shirts, or even doing female-coded hobbies but with a male twist, such as really liking to cook, but they cook steaks. They're basically what women think men should be like, not what real men are actually like. Not rarely, they downright detest almost everything about real men as "toxic masculinity", such as competitiveness, dominance, playful insults, not talking about feelings, hierarchies, etc.
The same goes for students I'm teaching now, although it's obviously more distanced so I'm less confident here, but as far as I can see there is virtually no connection between their outward presentation of male-ness and actual masculine behaviour (or vice versa for MtFs).
Blueberry
3hr ago
What is your new wifes opinion on her? Any female understanding/repudiation?
Blueberry
3hr ago
Some of us are extremly online though. Try to imagine explaining every sentence to a normie.
Crowstep
3hr ago
I always found this weird, as mathematically for every lonely man there has to be one lonely woman and vice versa
I assume when people are talking about male loneliness they mean a lack of friends, not necessarily a lack of romantic engagement. Nobody thinks of the widowed church lady who spends all day drinking tea with her friends and looking after her grandchildren as lonely.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
3hr ago
consistent violence, emotional abuse
You don't believe intentional false accusations of the "State, please murder my parents and destroy my family" variety counts as that? People who try to get cops to kill people they don't like via similar means (SWATting) are still attempting murder.
Blueberry
3hr ago
Catturd following Trumper who worships Elon Musk.
Ask him what his opinion of the new rift is between Musk (no more debt) vs Trump (trillions of new debt)!
Ioper
3hr ago
I don't know if you include hybrids in that but I see plenty of people getting hybrids. Its a combination of lack of charging infrastructure and perhaps a Sweden specific issue (in the context of Europe) of people genuinely driving longer distances relatively regularly, leading to range issues. This is not at all a question of cost, seeing as hybrids are as or even more expensive than pure electric.
Its about 50/50 with electric and hybrids sales.
georgioz
3hr ago
One statement I've found that cuts across the bipartisan spectrum is 'the internet made us all crazy'.
It may be one of the factors, but not necessarily the primary one. People in the past refused to date or engage with people of other religions or classes as vehemently. What I think really happened in past decade, is that especially for many secular people the politics basically became the new religion - especially for those more radicalized ones. Internet may spread the radicalization more effectively, but the underlying phenomenon is still the same.
On choosing to have more kids:
This is a personal essay, I'm musing out loud, and sharing here only because I get the sense my own perspective is quite orthogonal to most natalism discussions here.
I have three kids. They're all (in my unbiased opinion you can take with as much salt as you please) smart, talented, physically healthy, and reasonably kind/generous/prosocial as appropriate to their age level.
(Side note: I don't feel I can take credit for my stellar parenting being the cause, although I do sometimes wonder if my more hands-off parenting approach is better for them than the more deeply enmeshed styles I see my therapist friend pursuing (...I have a friend who spends one hour per kid every single night "unpacking" their day. I know this because she was complaining about how exhausting not having any evening time to herself was. I don't know I would stay sane doing that. Possibly relatedly, her kids help way less around the house than mine do.))
In any case I see my kids as probably a net benefit to the world and it would probably be a good thing to have more. The youngest is 2 now, so now is around when I have to start thinking about having a fourth.
(I'm in my lower 30s and got married in my lower 20s, which is relevant.)
Most of my reluctant boils down to fear.
The first fear is having a child who is not, ah, as fortunate as the preceding three. Every single child is a Russian roulette where the bullet chamber features some of the worst misery mankind can experience. I used to volunteer with special needs kids so I have a mental graph of how bad the upcoming disability would be for me to unambiguously want to abort if I knew about it in advance, but so many of the most awful things you can be handed in a child are not something you can test for in advance. A bad child can pretty thoroughly destroy the happiness of their family unit and there's so very many different kind of badness out there. I see my friends dealing with real hard shit and they're not even the top percentiles of bad luck, like having a kid who has gotten expelled three times for violence and no school is willing to take him anymore isn't even the worst hand you can get dealt.
So every time I get pregnant I am risking my entire family's happiness and the number of people I'd be harming grows with each child I've already had.
That's fear number one.
Fear number two is more personal. Every single pregnancy has wrecked my body and health in some way, and it's a different way each time, so I can't even predict and prepare for it in advance. The first pregnancy I spent nine months straight vomiting, which was very unpleasant at the time but also did permanent damage to my teeth and oral health I haven't recovered from, the second pregnancy I got PPD and while my mental health is basically back to stable it took years, the third pregnancy wasn't as bad as the previous two, I just got horrific hip pain that made it extremely hard for me to move or sleep but after the pregnancy I didn't have long-lasting issues. I have been, relatively speaking, lucky, as plenty of my friends have had worse outcomes. (I'm grateful I still have urinary continence, something that's not common for women who've had kids.)
When I think about having a fourth kid, I envision committing to nine months of which somewhere between 6-9 of them will be marked by almost constant physical discomfort, and then hoping the birth goes smoothly (I've been very lucky with my births/labors, so it probably would), and then hoping the recovery goes smoothly, and hoping I don't lose my sanity like the one time that happened, and then all of this on top of the constant anxiety for the health of the fetus and baby, and then I sprinkle "will I get a lifelong health problem as a bonus" on top.
Dead last on my list of concerns is the "everything else" that I see people discussing when they discuss pronatalism. I'm gonna need to get a second car or a minivan since this will be the fourth kid, and our apartment is gonna be less comfortable to live in adding in another person into the small space. Dealing with sleep deprivation yet again will be annoying. I'm not concerned about my career, I've got solid protections and this will my fourth time taking 4-6 months of maternity leave (the variation is based on when daycare becomes available, which depends on when the baby is born, but I don't do less than four months because before that the baby sleep schedule is bad enough driving to work is dangerous). Kids are a lot of work but a fourth kids isn't that much work than three, Bryan Caplan has that much right, I felt overwhelmed at the transition from 0 to 1, and the transition from 1 to 2, and the transition from 2 to 3, but each time the transition was a little bit less extreme and overwhelming and I expect that trend to hold.
But the Russian roulette and the guaranteed health costs, that part makes me really wonder why I want a fourth kid instead of just stopping at three and being done with it.
Why do I want a fourth kid?
My current kids seem like a net benefit to the world, a future one could also be (not every bullet in the chamber is a blank or a bad bullet, you always have the possibility of creating a real great human being)
More siblings is good. Three kids felt like the bare minimum but it's so meagre and miserly. I come from a family of six and my husband from a family of seven, and less than five just feels so small.
Since I'm still at the age where I can have more kids, the nagging question of if I should is basically constantly present, and I hate nagging questions and kind of want to have a kid just so the question goes away for 2-3 years before it comes back again.
The social norm around here is definitely larger families. I don't think anyone would judge me for having smaller, people just assume it's because you couldn't, but I'd feel weird and vaguely jealous.
I'm not a very maternal person and don't enjoy kids very much, but babies are cute-ish and toddlers are very cute and I'm definitely not at peace with just bidding that entire stage of my life a permanent goodbye until I become a grandparent.
I don't have a good reason not to except for the fears outlined above, and I really dislike making decisions based on fear.
All of these reasons feel relatively weak against the reasons to not have another kid, but I still basically want to have another kid, if I can just overcome the barrier of shaking dread I feel every time I think about it. Like even as I start breathing faster with elevated heartbeat every time I think about going off birth control I'm still mostly planning on going off it this year anyway. I just have to psyche myself up for it.
I had an ex-boss who said childbirth must be less painful than getting kicked in the balls because no one chooses to get kicked in the balls twice.
This is quite stupid, if you could have a kid by getting kicked in the balls you'd do it more than once.
I broke a bone while pregnant — this happens, the ligaments get weaker during pregnancy so you're at higher risk of breaks — and I still remembered the pain of getting the bone set when I was in labor, so I had a good basis of comparison for how bad back labor hurt towards the peak of labor, which was basically if they set your bone and then set your bone and then set your bone and then set your bone...
(Although my cousin who has had multiple bone breaks says different bones hurt more or less to break so it's not a perfect comparison, it's just that before labor it was my highest grade for pain).
Normal non back labor hurts a lot less, although hours of it is really exhausting and hard. (Epidurals are of course an option. I got one eventually for the back labor, absolutely magical going from horrific pain to nothing, I was even able to go to sleep. My subsequent births just weren't nearly as painful as that first one so I didn't feel the need)
But labor is a maximum two day long experience, it's the months beforehand that are much more grueling... Or the months afterwards, if you're not lucky (I have only gotten very minor stitches, not like my friend who had severe tearing that then got infected, or all my friends who ended up needing C-sections...)
Typing this out I can't believe I'm voluntarily thinking about going through it again. But anyway that's what goes through my head as I think about it. If I could have a baby inside of an incubator with reliable genetic screening to make sure they were healthy it would eliminate most of the concerns completely. No horrible permanent costs to myself, no constant fear about the baby, what a utopian world that would be.
What does any of this have to do with women who don't have kids deciding to have some? Idk, I think the fear of physical pain and permanent health ramifications for the mother, as well as the fear of a negative outcome for the kid, might rank a lot higher than men discussing the issue seem to assume. I used to attend baby circle meetups with my first kid and a lot of the mothers there turned out by funny coincidence to be single mothers by choice (one had a steady boyfriend, not the father of her child since if he wasn't willing to marry her she wasn't willing to bear his kid, which I found, um, interesting) so my impression might be biased but I do think lots and lots of women would have at least one kid if it wasn't so scary and risky and painful, even if the aftermath (the actual child) involves a lot of work and inconvenience. Even the women like me who aren't especially excited about kids, let alone all the women like (many of) my friends who have actively wanted kids forever and love and adore kids. It's just that the process of actually having kids really sucks and is scary so you can push it off a lot and then eventually you've pushed it off too long.
2D3D
3hr ago
The hypocrisy of the "theres no such thing as social contagion" brigade is, once again, amazing. Adolescence showed that problematic white boys are poisoned by Andrew Tate into killing girls with their misogynistic incel culture, which justifies broad castigation of the adolescent white male as the obvious target requiring remedial action. Meanwhile there is no such thing as transtok telling girls that being queer is simply self expression oh and binding makes the icky male gaze go away and if you think girls are prettier then maybe youre actually not a straight girl blablabla.
Social contagion is real, but its only a bad thing if boys can be blamed. There are no such thing as bad philosophies, only bad targets.
georgioz
4hr ago
I read a lot about the male loneliness crisis, or think pieces on why men are dropping out of the dating pool and I can’t help but draw nebulous connections with these experiences.
I always found this weird, as mathematically for every lonely man there has to be one lonely woman and vice versa. There are some confounders, like that women can have one night stands or situationships. Or that men can pay for prostitutes as a substitute for one night stands. Or that there is more lonely women especially in higher age due to them living longer than men. In any case for each man that lays his head alone in his bedroom, there is a woman somewhere doing the same. It is intrinsically linked phenomenon and it does not make sense to talk about it separately.
Maybe one thing that is different is that in general men who are alone are more aware of it not being ideal situation and they talk more of despair. Even MGTOW community talks about loneliness as preferable to other types of suffering, not as something that is preferable to fulfilling relationship. While on the other side when people are talking about lonely women it is more linked with some sort of empowerment and other positive vibes.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4hr ago
or I imagine you'd retreat to a motte of achieve comparable GDP growth rates to the US
Do you really think this would be a mere "motte"? Canada used to be seen as a “nicer America”, an uncontroversially well-running state. Then they went all in on replacement migration in the name of muh GDP, and achieved GDP growth… proportionate to the population increase, per capita they've stagnated for a decade (quite a feat given that they've been importing hundreds of thousands of "talents" from China and India, I presume many of them legitimate). Now even first generation immigrants flee south for better opportunities, the government barely has popular mandate, and there's increasingly not-jokey talk about Alberta accepting American annexation. Yes, this is exactly how actual state incompetence looks like, the US isn't doing that.
For the case of EU, you can read this.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4hr ago
The issue with state regulation of AI is obviously that all relevant AI in the US is produced in California, maybe a little bit in Texas. This would have never flied with a Republican administration, but even that aside it's clearly discriminatory against everyone else who will experience the effects of Californian regulation.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4hr ago
Spy satellites contribute so little to the total mass to orbit that you never even needed SpaceX for that (i don't consider Starlink a primarily national security project, because it's not).
For delivering payloads, including probably international ones, China will begin catching up next year. I do not assume that Americans will be contracting them, no, so in that sense SpaceX is poised to maintain its near-monopoly.
It is believed that the crop of reusable rocket startups is attributable to Robin Li, the founder of Baidu, getting into National People's Congress, and advocating for legalization of private space businesses in 2010s. So far, there have been three Chinese entities that have conducted VTOL tests for reusable rockets.
- China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), June 23, 2024
- LandSpace, September 11, 2024
- Space Epoch, May 29, 2025
There are others which are further behind.
Technologically, they are several iterations behind, but strategically I'd say they save significant advantages over the current SpaceX (a usual feature of Chinese fast-following). For example Space Epoch Yuanxingzhe-1 is basically a small Starship (or a better, thicker Falcon-9, if Falcon-9 were designed today). Stainless steel, metholox, will naturally plug into the existing and state-subsidized logistics, including military facilities that currently produce aviation parts (as a small point, Falcon's extreme height-to-width ratio is obviously suboptimal and downstream of American highway standards, but China had no problem building dedicated roads). LandSpace Zhuque-3 VTVL-1 is similar (they can boast of the first metholox engine to make it to orbit).
But as you rightfully notice, it's not clear if this will have much effect on the SpaceX bottom line, since Americans can saturate their cadence anyway. In all likelihood it will only unnerve some people in Washington as a symbolic thing.
ThenElection
4hr ago
Rates of completed suicide would work, at least in the senses I'd care about. Link a voter file with death certificates.
Unfortunately, no one has done this yet, afaict. There are state-aggregate studies showing that people in conservative states have higher suicide rates than those in liberal states, but ecological fallacy. I'm also not sure how to correct for demographics--or, rather, whether it makes sense to, since many of the same factors that correlate with suicide also correlate with Republican party affiliation.
Not in any detail. I just googled him and he's still got a profile page at the same law firm he was at 20 years ago.
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