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Stingray3906
2hr ago
No, I'm not against wokeness. I'm aware that my positions align with those of the DNC, but I'm not interested in supporting partisanship. I'm more interested in getting shit done, and I don't think that either party is willing to act with any sense of urgency towards the issues I mentioned. My perception is that they're far more concerned with keeping themselves in office by any means -- courting lobbyists, the wealthy, the influential, the elite, and then using demeaning and insulting rhetoric against their opponents.
Similarly with the Capitol riot -- it's pretty good live newsfeed aggregator on... things that are interesting to poltards I guess. You do need to figure out how to disregard the things that are completely made up, but it's usually easier to tell what that is than other media outlets.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
2hr ago
It always strikes me as silly in that there's no causal explanation, no indication that Thomas or Alito would have voted differently on anything but-for gifts/wives/whatever.
2rafa
2hr ago
A federal government program that pays off law school after 10 years as a full-time public defender (and covers most interest in the meantime) seems reasonable. Or just a scholarship for people with high LSAT scores that covers full tuition in exchange for x years of service, with clawback provisions.
AmericanSaxeCoburgGothic
Happy to be here! Goal is to post the most exclamation points.
2hr ago
What is the point on reporting about the spouses of Supreme Court Justices? This headline and the previous ones I remember on Ginny Thomas seem publicized just for waging the culture and rallying voters. The court members are appointed for life and I doubt these there is political appetite to impeach a justice for their beliefs or family associations after they are already seated on the bench. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/10/us/politics/alito-pride-flag.html The reporting on the gifts received by the justices makes sense to me since that would speak directly to concerns of an impartial judiciary. These type of stories remind me of the reporting and reactions to the Butker speech, wrong beliefs equals condemnation no matter the context.
Taking a step back, I see the same culture war reporting from the other side; see Conservative media reporting on Biden, Pelosi, AOC or Rashida Talib but don't recall where beliefs of their family members was reported as news.
Felagund
2hr ago
I don't think anyone, even the staunchest of free will advocates, believes that outside influences don't have a significant weight in the choices you make. But again, as I understand it determinism is saying that those are the only thing that matter, and that one's course is set in stone from the moment their life begins (with no actual choice to be made).
Again, I'll affirm that we choose stuff, though I'm sure we disagree on what exactly "choose" means—to me deliberation between choices and, based upon that deliberation, coming to have in your will definitive intent would certainly suffice for choice, but you don't think it so, evidently. I'd accordingly affirm that we have plenty of agency, we choose to do stuff all the time, and our actions obviously bear the imprint of our own character and agency—it's not like they're happening apart from and abstracted away from us.
But I fundamentally don't see things like "I'm habitually lazy" as some outside factor in my decision-making. It's something inside, a part of you, and your doing things accordingly is a natural outflow of you.
So, perhaps another question: can choices be accurately be described, in your view, as the product of a mixture of a determined part, including all the reasons motivating, your character, the circumstances, etc, combined with an indeterminate, arbitrary part? Perhaps, could we express it as a random number generator, with the choose/choose otherwise set at some threshold, not necessarily 50% depending on the other factors?
Because that seems to me something like what you're describing, and that isn't at all like what I'd want choices to be like. I want to be the doer, and I'm a thing, with real states and properties, not something arbitrary. Causelessness seems to subtract agency, to me.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
2hr ago
Where does public opinion, or if you are cynical the media manipulation thereof, and other genuine cultural bonds come into your theory of alliances?
Did Helen's face launch a thousand ships because the technical terms of Tyndaerus forced them to, or because being seen to break that oath (whether technically or in the spirit of it) would have done irreparable harm to their ability to rule? To be seen dishonored and cowardly would have destroyed the esteem of their subjects, and lead to their destruction.
Your model seems to be more or less a map-style RTS, with leadership having full autonomy to do whatever they choose within the constraints of their physical ability to do so. It is one where the peaceful, or simply cow-like, public is told who to go to war with and does not resist overly hard. This is not always a clear dynamic.
It seems to me like a major constraint, not just in a modern democracy but throughout history, has been public opinion at home. The public is often bloodthirsty and ready to fight, refusing to abandon those they feel are friends and brothers.
This is less of an issue for making an alliance than it is for refusing to make one. NATO could be abolished along with all other legal alliances among the Anglo states, no British PM would survive refusing to come to the aid of Canada/USA/Australia/NZ if one were seriously attacked.
So it seems like there's a separate category of cultural or natural alliance, that is built less on paper than it is by ongoing natural or planned cultural exchange and cultural depictions. They can be influenced by political leaders, but they are not their creatures. In general I think it is rare for political leaders to face significant opposition to forming alliances with distasteful countries, but more common for a public to get whipped into a war frenzy by aggressive media.
These cultural alliances can form absent a formal alliance, or in concert with a formal alliance, but their terms are less clear. The technical language of an alliance is unimportant compared to the spirit of it, and how that can empower a "War Party" at home against a hesitant or peacenik government, can enable enemies of the regime to rally the public behind the idea that the government is behaving dishonorably.
The USA and UK are the classic example. But I think the USA and Japan provide an interesting hypothetical. The US was probably more firmly committed to defending Japan from aggression in 1954 than it is in 2024, but the American public is probably more interested in or committed to defending Japan from aggression in 2024 than it would have been in 1954. Because the Japanese are widely perceived as a brother people, their video games and film and literature and food are core to modern American pop culture, Ohtani is the Dodgers unquestioned star. The American people would be easy to rally to help Japan under attack. This is an unpredictable element in the story, how the public reacts, and how they can be manipulated into reacting.
2rafa
2hr ago
In every society with widespread infanticide (most of them), the gender ratios of surviving infants almost always skew towards boys.
Indeed, and we might add that in historic times of famine food is often reserved for (male) warriors, but almost never for (non elite) women, and women often miscarry or cannot conceive during famines so this has appreciable effects on communal strength. Women are just as disposable as men, it merely doesn’t make sense for them to be warriors given basic biological differences. That doesn’t really make women ‘advantaged’ in any significant way.
Of course China and India are corrupting Canada: the Chinese and Indians have been given free reign to immigrate, for the former in their stronghold of Vancouver, the latter more concentrated in Ontario. Neither group treats democracy the way whites do, voting for policy, but instead use it as an ethnic tally, and in particular the more you see these races immigrate and vote, the more you see the representatives allowing them to continue immigrating. Both countries are increidbly populous and have grown relatively wealthy over the last two decades, and that wealth is now being used to control places like Canada.
To_Mandalay
3hr ago
It's debatable whether the "sex recession" is even real. Recent data doesn't show the same kind of numbers that made people on the internet freak out in 2018. If it is real, it doesn't appear to be a problem of men in particular, since women report similar, and sometimes higher rates of no-sex. The idea that an increasingly small minority of men are exercising some kind of sexual monopoly appears to have little to no basis in reality.
men have always been the disposable gender
This is an old redpill bromide but not really true. In every society with widespread infanticide (most of them), the gender ratios of surviving infants almost always skew towards boys.
MotteInTheEye
3hr ago
Is any action necessary to suppress them? I didn't read the OP as saying "let's do x, y, and z to stamp out complaints of incels" but "by revealed preferences they are content to stew in porn and video games so why stress about them?"
I don't agree with OP because I am not content to just write off huge chunks of the population which could be leading fulfilling lives and useful to other people, but your objection seems like a non sequitur.
Felagund
3hr ago
Well, most of those things seem like democrats would satisfy more of those. I'm not going to try hard to convince you to vote for them, as I dislike democrats more, and think most of those policies are not worth doing. Is it all the woke things that you see as horrible among the democrats?
(If you like, just say the word, and I'd be happy to give my opinions on those policies in more depth, but no pressure, there's no need to argue over all your political beliefs if you don't want to.)
Baila
3hr ago
*Treason in Canada
Background:
- CSIS (intelligence agency) whistleblower leaks that hostile foreign governments have substantial influence in Canada, including influence over MPs, and no one is doing anything about it.
- An inquiry was eventually triggered. The secret report was recently released to certain parties. The report states that multiple MPs willingly assisted hostile foreign governments in actions against the interest of Canadians. The full text of the report is not public and the names of those MPs are not publically known.
- Trudeau is the PM, and his office controls security clearances and classification. CSIS doesn’t have prosecutorial or police power. RCMP (federal law enforcement) has investigative power, but reports directly to the PM. Moreover, much of the info in the report was gained from CSIS intelligence or five-eyes intelligence, which makes the conversion from intelligence to legally admissible evidence very difficult. Regardless, there appears to be no ongoing RCMP investigation.
- The question of whether the facts in the report can become legally admissible evidence in a particular trial are largely irrelevant to the political problem of treasonous MPs.
- It is widely assumed that MPs from multiple parties are involved, but that Liberal MPs likely make up a majority. Everyone expects China to have the most influence, followed by India.
- The other major parties, CPC and NDP, have called for the names to be released.
- Trudeau’s party, the Liberals, refuse to make any of the MPs names public. In one parliamentary exchange over making the issue, a liberal MP said “Boo Hoo! Get over it!”
- Prior to this, Trudeau and the Liberals have been tanking in the polls, and a new election is expected in 2025; a landslide Conservative victory is expected. Now, Canadians are going into an election where they will have to vote for MPs without knowing which MPs are literal traitors.
--
This seems to be a legit constitutional crisis (for lack of a better term) for Canada. If nothing happens and the names don’t get released, I would expect substantial ramifications for Canadian society. I would expect foreign influence to sky rocket and for corruption in the Canadian parliament to become an open market. If the government is willing protect treasonous MPs, even when they are all but publically outed, why would hostile parties not just openly buy as many MPs as possible?
I would also expect this situation to cause faith in the government to plummet and for separatist sentiment in Quebec and the Prairies to increase. Trudeau has publically opposed the concept of Canadian nationhood/sovereignty. For example, he said that there is no such thing as a Canadian identity and that he views Canada is the world’s first “postnational state.” He has also presided over an aggressive immigration policy which has put incredible pressure on the social fabric, on the housing market, and on health care. Now, on top of all this, is an openly treasonous government.
Will this be the straw that breaks the camel’s back? I'm surprised there isn't more news and discussion about this. @KulakRevolt can we get a QRD from the inside?
*As is true of the US, I’m sure there is a technical definition of treason in Canadian law. Whether the actions of any particular MP rise to that level does not change the political implications.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
3hr ago
Assuming the trend is real, we should care on an abstract level because we'd prefer to maximize human happiness and fulfillment and it's sad to see so many people being lonely.
On a social level, there probably is a disadvantage to having a large number of men feeling useless and lonely, which probably leads to them not being very productive.
Should we actually worry about violence and social unrest? Probably not - I think the notion of sexually frustrated males turning into an army and causing widespread civil disorder is mostly an incel vengeance fantasy. (I have largely the same opinion of every scenario that is supposedly going to "go hot" and cause American Civil War II.)
But it would be more productive to ask "What can we do to help these guys?" than "Why should we care about lonely guys jerking it to hentai in their basements while they imagine they're Rorschach?" For the same reason that any trend of widespread dissatisfaction would be better addressed with some grace and compassion than saying "Fuck those losers."
I don't really like the MENA comparison, because we have lots of historical examples that were, by objective measures, awful places to live for 95% of the population but were still "capable of reproducing themselves."
Felagund
3hr ago
thanks to people buying into the myth that a third party is "wasting your vote"
And Duverger's Law.
It could be worth voting for your preferred third party just as a protest. Colorado's one-sided enough that it isn't vital that you vote for someone with a chance—even if it could still go either way, it'll probably only go red if the election overall is in a best-case scenario for Trump, I imagine.
Those latter groups can easily be ignored and shuffled off to other physical areas for other people to deal with, on a day to day basis. Sexless men seem to sprout up everywhere and are encountered everywhere on the Internet, so they're harder to avoid and need a more forceful hand.
ETA: tongue in cheek
Shrike
3hr ago
the average male was historically much less likely to produce any offspring than the average female
Is this true specifically because of the age-old practice of "killing all the men and keeping all the women," though? My understanding is that that is at least one of the explanations for the genetic footprint we currently have today. Possibly the "80% of women reproduced but only 40% of men" says more about war than about love.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
3hr ago
If you're going to go full кто кого and decide that since you can forcibly suppress a group enough, you don't have to care about their problems, why start with sexless men rather than homeless addicts, criminals, "the poor", etc?
A few years ago I read an article on Quillette called "My Misspent Years of Conspiracism", in which the author describes how he was taken in by Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK which alleges a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy, and how he subsequently came around to the idea that the Warren Commission's conclusions were accurate: JFK was killed by two rounds fired from the Texas school book depository by Lee Harvey Oswald, who acted alone. He explained the turning point in disabusing him of his misconceptions about the assassination was the TV documentary The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy. Not being especially well-versed in the various conspiracies surrounding the JFK assassination, I was persuaded by this article, and by its assertion that pretty much everything in the film JFK (which I haven't seen) is nonsense.
Today I've been reading some of the Wikipedia articles about the assassination, including the master article and the article about the assorted conspiracy theories (there's also one about the Dictabelt recording and the single-bullet theory, which I haven't gotten to yet). I'm currently watching the Beyond Conspiracy documentary mentioend in the article and it's fascinating (available here, but you need a Vimeo account). I was intrigued by this paragraph from the master article:
All remaining assassination-related records were scheduled to be released by October 2017, with the exception of documents certified for continued postponement by succeeding presidents due to "identifiable harm... to the military, defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations... of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure." President Donald Trump said in October 2017 that he would not block the release of documents, but in April 2018—the deadline he set to release all JFK records—Trump blocked the release of some records until October 2021. President Joe Biden, citing the COVID-19 pandemic, delayed the release further, before releasing 13,173 unredacted documents in 2022. A second group of files were unsealed in June 2023, at which point 99 percent of documents had been made public.
Two questions:
- Did the documents released since 2017 contain any bombshells? Have any conspiracies (or any components of conspiracies) been vindicated by the release of these documents?
- Even if the film JFK is a load of tripe, is it entertaining enough to be worth a watch? Or can you only get any enjoyment out of it if you're a true believer? Speaking as someone with decidedly mixed feelings on Stone as both a director and a screenwriter: Platoon was okay, Wall Street is trash, Alexander dragged on for bloody years, Natural Born Killers was eh (although I was probably about twelve years old when I saw it and perhaps too young to really get it), Midnight Express was somewhat entertaining but also the most unabashedly racist Hollywood film I've ever seen - come to think of it, the only film in which Stone had any involvement which I can say I love without qualification is Scarface.
ok-target-7361
3hr ago
I'll support your position as soon as the society adopts the same indifferent view of problems and lesser discomforts that women face.
Access to sex is a major incentive for being economically productive for men. If the distribution of sex becomes more unequal, the marginal utility from additional work or career growth will decrease for men for those under the xth percentile (imagine the derivative of the Lorenz curve; depending on the starting and ending Gini indices, that break even point is around the 65th percentile). Those men will put less effort into moving up the curve through dedicated everyday effort and self-improvement and instead focus on consumption of other goods (video games, porn) and wild unproductive bets that would move them far up the curve in a single fortuitous event (gambling, speculative crypto, GME).
Which means a poorer, less dynamic society. Which is definitely a society that can survive, but I'd prefer a different one.
The US took over that role. China could take that role, they have a much bigger maritime industry than the US does. They're the biggest trading nation, they're naturally interested in controlling sea lanes and trade routes.
They're not a particularly good candidate because they have a harder time projecting power, especially into the Atlantic.
And their demographic problems are even worse and more advanced than the West's... and that's just what they admit. I have no doubt the CCP could attempt some crazy political solutions. But as I mentioned elsewhere in here that still requires 20+ years to raise the children of that new baby boom to the age where they can become productive.
Highly religious groups have high fertility, this is pretty straightforward!
Yes, the Amish, having entirely rejected modern cultural, technological, and economic norms are doing fine here.
But the majority of us are living with the standard set of such norms and have to navigate the system where others hold these norms or similar versions.
I don't think there's a policy prescription I've yet seen which would manage to bring modern society's fertility levels up to that of the devoutly religious without also impacting their material conditions in a way that lowers standard of living.
Now, that tradeoff may be worthwhile, but good luck selling it.
If the US pulls back, other powers will replace America in setting rules and norms. That's why the US isn't pulling back.
But that's why the demographic issue is concerning. Maintaining the order when you have intense economic strain due to aging population at below replacement level unable to produce the necessary output to maintain the country's economy at the level necessary to field an effective naval force. Ukraine's demographics are impacting its ability to field an effective military and they will probably never recover.
The U.S.' military capacity is not immune from this.
Like, this is the point. Historically this scenario is rather unprecedented. Other scenarios where human population decreased in a rapid fashion usually indicate economic collapse.
I've yet to see ANY example from history where human population went on a steep decline without economic fallout attached.
The U.S., if it is suffering economic strain from such a decline, could be rendered unable to intervene if conflicts start breaking out around the globe, and such demonstrated failure would only encourage further defection.. The limits of U.S. hegemony are already on display since the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
And if the U.S. itself is self-sufficient for food, energy, and manufacturing, surely the motivation to keep spending time and effort maintaining the order will sink, too.
And I'm trying not to catastrophize here, but I keep asking for some reasonable solution that has demonstrated success in the past, and nobody has actually provided one.
So my priors would suggest that we have gotten used to being in an era of prosperity that is anomalous in the historical record, and the effort needed to maintain this prosperity could easily outstrip our capacity without some drastic intervention. Such as AGI.
yofuckreddit
3hr ago
I've thought about this occasionally. I'm a member of the "haves" in this scenario, and as more men opt out of the sexual market or become women, in theory that would be great for my prospective harem.
The problem is that I'm monogamously married and am able to raise children with sufficient male attention. The "Alphas" taking advantage of the evolving sexual market (and sometimes breeding) right now are anti-social, absent fathers, creating more candidates for the underclass that will eventually victimize my children. Maybe directly, maybe through voting.
I'd need the social ability to have a harem and rely on a group of beta males to produce enough wealth to support the family (and give me enough bandwidth to effectively father). We're a bit far away from that.
Can you point to the specific examples of the MENA societies you are referring to? What you are saying sounds like a gross exaggeration for contemporary MENA societies. Even in Saudi Arabia, polygamy is somewhat rare and marriage rate is high relatively, although the first website cites a misleading stat. The more relevant one is:
So funnily enough the site claiming 66% young saudis including 15 years to 34 years old to are single also claims that from 25-34 year old men only 23% are unmarried.
Islamic societies are mostly monogamous societies. I am not aware of any example of a society were most women disappear into the harems of rich men and the majority of men are left sexless.
It is a transparently bad idea that is both bad for the people involved and not sustainable. MENA societies with all the things one could criticize them aren't that bad. This is more of a fantasy dystopia.
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