domain:shapesinthefog.substack.com
Another way to think about this is like filter bubbles. People are through the internet and digital media increasingly able to engage in only the activities they enjoy the most, with the people that enjoy them the most (just like with politics). It turns out that the sexes on average have different interests so now they don't meet organically.
The guys play video games and watch porn and the girls are on social media and read romantacy. Both want a partner but the meeting place activities have been outcompeted so they more rarely meet in social settings where forming a relationship is a possibility. Oops!
I read your linked comment and right at the end:
I really do think that a lot of the "singleness epidemic" is due to a combination of personal choice and unrealistic standards
Yes, this is almost precisely what I said about you.
And then this claim:
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.
Is ironic because the communism has been benefiting the 'pussy' for years now.
Like, every single change to the economic structure of the country for the last 50 years has been in favor of women and against men. Tax money flows to help women get medical care (including abortions), to get into school, to get hired, and to otherwise live independently. This is generally pulled from the pockets of the most productive men. All the material wealth they rely on comes from male-dominated industries.
Its male labor all the way down.
So basically, the only thing that ISN'T being redistributed is pussy.
This is the core asymmetry that makes men feel as though the social contract is not working in their favor at all.
MY suggested solution isn't communism for pussy (I DARE you to find where I suggest it), and is dismantling some of the communism that's already in palce.
You are, apparently, suffering from some financial troubles.
Negative. I'm making more now than I was with her, and more than, I believe, 90% of my age cohort.
I'm simply pointing out that I'd be way better off if the woman I thought was worth keeping had stuck around.
And that most women would be financially better off if they settled with a decent guy early on.
That's it. Save me the patronization, I have no need.
You could be one of them. What's stopping you?
Ask the dozen or so women I've tried to date in the past couple years.
Literally none of them, LITERALLY ZERO have gone on to find fulfilling stable relationships. This mystified me until I did the research. Its simply because EVERYONE is encountering difficulties.
Some of them became single moms, some decided to get into deeper debt for a master's degree, some of them got fat. Some just putter along on their course.
If I was the problem, why weren't they scooped up by a better man?
Think about your attitude first. Are you happy with your attitude, or are you being a bitch? Start there.
I'm satisfied with literally every aspect of my life aside from the romantic one. I love my job, make good money, I'm in great shape, I instruct at my gym, I've got a healthy routine, a house (a rarity amongst my peers), a dog, a dedicated and supportive friend group, and enough free time to pursue some hobbies.
Life is objectively great. But that just makes the one portion that ain't working out all the more obvious.
Indeed, part of the issue is most women can't even meet my basic expectations for fitness, fiscal responsibility, and mental stability. And the ones that can are taken.
In other words, you have entirely and utterly misjudged my actual material position AND my arguments on this particular topic. And I don't consider my personal material position relevant to the argument anyway. I'm here advocating on behalf of guys who are worse off than me, so you can't just dismiss me as a miserable incel.
I don't just care about the men... I notice that WOMEN are dissatisfied with things as well. they've got everything they claim to want, and they're miserable.
But you don't tell THEM to put on their big-girl-pants and suck it up, do you?
What is annoying is that, as stated, the spiritual boomers don't want to ever, EVER admit that maybe we need to put a tad less pressure on men and tad more pressure on women.
Because as I've said before, what do you think happens when the current generation of young men hit their 30's, have no family, no marital prospects, poor economic prospects, and yet are continually blamed and put down as though its all their fault?
Seriously. What do you expect? I'm genuinely curious.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
1d ago
New poll on Trump and Epstein:
Republicans are split with 40 percent approving of the way the Trump administration is handling the Jeffrey Epstein files, 36 percent disapproving and 24 percent not offering an opinion.
This, along with Operation Warp Speed, is the only time they are willing to break with Trump. The heart and soul of the thing seems to be conspiracy beliefs.
“He’s dead for a long time. He was never a big factor in terms of life. I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody," Trump told reporters after being asked about frustration from his supporters over handling of the case.
"It's pretty boring stuff. It's sordid, but it's boring, and I don't understand why it keeps going. I think really only pretty bad people, including fake news, want to keep something like that going. But credible information? Let them give it — anything that's credible, I would say, let them have it," Trump added.
Maybe the reason Trump doesn't understand why it keeps going is because he doesn't have an inferiority complex about class that drives him into fantasy about elite pedophile rings.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
Evangelicals are even worse — they're pretty much having the liberal kids current liberals aren't.
US Evangelicals are picking up a lot of younger Catholics and young people from the blander Protestant denominations. There are no young Methodists, Presbyterians or Episcopalians: they are all atheists or evangelicals now.
On a global level, evangelical denominations are getting huge inflows from former pagans in Africa and former Catholics in Latin America.
Totalitarianit
1d ago
We had fertility problems and went the foster to adoption route. The foster training gives you a pretty good idea beforehand of what you're likely getting into, so I felt pretty mentally prepared. Our first foster (that we later adopted) was pulled out of their home at around 3 years old, went to their grandparents who didn't really want to raise a child, then went to one foster parent who was stretched too thin. This kid was eventually brought to us at 4 years old and we've had them for 5 years now. There are some clear personality and learning struggles the kid has but overall they're pretty happy.
Our second foster to adoption was picked up straight from the hospital as a premature infant and is a different race. Interestingly enough, I actually told the foster service that I preferred not to have someone of a different race. This hacked off one of the supervising social workers, but considering the need for foster families, she let it be known how she felt then allowed us to open up our home again. As fate would have it, the next available child was a baby that was not white. Our social worker informed us of the situation, my wife and I discussed it, and we decided to take the baby. The baby, despite having drugs in their system and being born premature, seems to have developed pretty well into a young normal kid. Extremely cute and happy. The race thing may came into play at some point, but they're not black, so I don't expect it to be as big of an issue as it seems to be with black kids adopted by white families.
All I can provide is a stable home and love and security. They have both had that, and will continue to have that. I enjoy watching them grow, and even though they're not angels they seem very social. I do have what I consider to be minimal expectations of structure and responsibility. The older one struggles pretty badly with having any responsibility, and while I think some of that is just engrained in their DNA some of it is also just their youth. Overall, my philosophy toward it has always been one where I accept that I cannot control the inherited traits they bring with them. It just is what it is. I also can't predict the future, but my plan is to let them find themselves without pushing too hard. If they grow up and become menaces to society some part of me will be devastated, but I'll be pretty confident in thinking it wasn't because of their upbringing.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
"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."
Do share. How did you make the best of that? Did you manage to land a wife? Have you had kids? What did you have to settle for? It's all well and fine to say "Git gud", but it helps to show your work.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
In Northern Europe? Just took the girl’s word for it. There were actual incentives often granted for marrying known-not-virgins often as well- most of the high Middle Ages had an indulgence for marrying a prostitute, for example.
There was a custom of high status weddings having witnesses to their consummation. That might be what you’re thinking of. But in Northern Europe girls left the house to work as servants in early adolescence. The Mediterranean(even Christian parts) kept girls at home until marriage in their teens; this was not a Northern European custom.
phailyoor
1d ago
To connect the dots, adoption and / or fostering seems to be a great way for this old man to plant trees,
This is utilitarian logic. You are potentially improving the QOL of some unfortunate kids, but you can say the same thing about buying malaria nets for africans or donating a kidney.
Don't adopt kids out of some misguided idea that you're saving them or saving the world. Do it if deep down you really will be happier taking care of someone else's kids vs being childless forever. Neither is an ideal option but you should choose the one that is best for you personally.
georgioz
1d ago
They were too poor to move. There is a sweetsoot for emigration when people have information from their cell phones and means to do it. Like in Syria and other countries.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
I think a third factor is that women are no longer as much expected socially as they probably were in the past to have the kind of men-pleasing, friendly, docile personalities that a large fraction of men find sexually desirable, which explains part of men's motivation problem.
This. 100% this. I spent many years on dating platforms and saw hundreds and hundreds of young women who were just.... unlikable. Shallow, prideful, promiscuous, and just generally masculine. The number one lie that modern feminism has sold to women is that the male gender role is what defines success: money, strength, ambition, stubbornness, ruthless competitiveness, etc. Men had all of those and that was oppressive and if a woman wants to be successful she needs to have all of those. And women believe this and become strong independent faux-men and don't even try to be good women. To be clear, I think it's acceptable if a woman naturally inherently through her own preferences wants to be ambitious and strong and all that. But that doesn't make her an attractive dating partner, and more importantly we shouldn't have a nation-wide psy-op trying to brainwash young girls into becoming this because they were born too feminine or something. And we shouldn't like to girls and tell them that masculinity is attractive. If we as a culture openly and honestly told young women what men actually want a lot of them would become more feminine on purpose because they like men and want to be attractive to men.
I happened to luck out and eventually find one of the few remaining friendly, docile, feminine women left and married her. But now she's not in the pool anymore. This is not a generalizable solution because there aren't enough of them to go around.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1d ago
The mature civilizations of this planet are becoming less religious. It would be a mistake to assume the immature civilizations will continue their current trend lines exactly.
It would be a mistake to assume that there is such a thing as a "mature" civilization that all "immature" civilizations will develop into, with the same certainty that children develop into adults. The fact that the USA is far more religious (and has stabilized at a far higher level of religiosity) than Western Europe despite being much richer and more technologically advanced should be enough to demonstrate that civilizations do not all end up in the same place. If sub-Saharan Africa does "mature" and become rich we shouldn't be that confident that they will become much more secular. They may take a different route altogether.
Not to mention a significant percentage of global population is in China, which is extremely secular yet shows signs of growing more religious over time. Now you might (correctly) say that China has its own unique political and cultural circumstances, including the fact that atheism is the state doctrine and religions are legally restricted. That's true! But it is another example of how different countries may take very different paths than from Western Europe.
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.
faceh
1d ago
Right, which is to say that it seems like we're really just borrowing all the factors that put duties/obligations on the male side, whilst systematically dismantling the expectations on the women's side.
Or am I wrong that there was some system in place to confirm virginity on the wedding night during that time? I might be wrong.
Tree
1d ago
Everyone’s entitled to their preferences and requirements (abs, height, penis, tits, age, religion, veganness etc), no matter how high, unrealistic or weird they are, but somehow I dislike this cash requirement the most.
Maybe it’s because I’m lazy. Or because feminism has always presented the heavy burden of providing as a male privilege. Or because it seems materialistic and exposes the harshness of the transaction. If a funny guy is with a beautiful girl, in a way he’s exchanged his jokes for her tits. But I find this far more pleasant and acceptable than if he had used actual dollars (if he’s a successful comedian and she doesn’t find him funny). I don’t condemn it morally, I don’t condemn prostitution either, but there’s something distasteful about it I can’t quite explain.
Maybe it’s just the old nagging desire to be loved for yourself alone, unconditionally and forever, which no lover has ever achieved. If she loves you because you're tall, you can't test her love by losing a few inches, and her love is somewhat secure. Otoh you can test or lose her cash-based love by abandoning or losing your job. So that kind of love never feels secure, it's more a sword of Damocles hanging over you. In the neighborhood where I grew up, two fathers who lost their jobs killed themselves.
kky
1d ago
Small note on persuasion. You’ve presented a single anecdote in support of your point - actually fine, to be honest, concrete examples illustrate broader trends powerfully. But you didn’t deliver the goods! What was his life in that family like, at what ages? Ditto the schools? (I’m not sure what it’s like where you are, but where I am the private schools often are for the children of the wealthy who are FAILING in public schools, rather than being too good for them.) Did he have any connections back to the hood?
Then following up: how has he tormented his family? How did they react? How has this relationship developed over what I understand to be the decade of his childhood, and where is it going now?
The lack of detail means that other people paint their own stories on your blank canvas. People who agree with you will of course say: the parents did all they could, he was just a little hellion… but those who don’t will see a tribe of racist middle Americans trying to shoulder the White Man’s Burden and reacting with hostility when a traumatized and isolated little boy does not show proper servility in front of Massa. If you want to convince them (and this forum is about that, no?) you need to bring the goods, without prejudice (i.e. you should not bring your holistic judgment of the individual into your analysis of all isolated events, ESPECIALLY early ones), building up your case slowly and inexorably. Otherwise, the best you’re getting is scaring people off with your obvious if vague malice.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1d ago
Whelp that's enough of TheMotte for me today.
Do you have an actual argument against his position? Or did it just make you feel icky?
I disagree with a great many of @WhiningCoil’s takes, and with the often bilious way he expresses them, but in this case his metaphor strikes me as a fairly reasonable (and certainly within the bounds of discussion) extension of the metaphor you yourself supplied.
FtSoA
1d ago
Unsustainable budget deficits, endlessly accumulating debt, a very serious political situation, where one party is huffing glue and the other is full of not very competent people now ? It doesn't look good.
Oh I agree. But by comparison, at least, the US hasn't gone off the deep end entirely and I pray e.g. the UK's insanity will help us avoid the same fate.
Without getting into a whole thing on Ukraine vs. Russia and also caveating that the US should not be the primary supporter (Europe should), your overall argument is hilarious to me in that Ukraine has been taking on Russia quite successfully for years now with far lower levels of materiel support than we/Europe could have given them. And one technique is simply having the Europeans give their existing hardware to the Ukrainians ASAP. Gotta prime the defense industrial complex pump.
US forgot to develop an industry capable of either innovating and mass producing useful weapons.
Well the defense tech fellas are trying to fix that.
Honestly, if you squint your eyes a little, once Russians win in Ukraine, them taking over the Baltics becomes a possibility.
At present rates of military progress how long do ya reckon that's gonna take? I agree that Putin would love to reassert the ~level of regional control the USSR once had over its neighbors, but boy is that not going well.
I just don't understand how you take the stance this far on that Russia is clearly going to "win" in the sense of a total Ukrainian defeat.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-battlefield-woes-ukraine
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1d ago
Rather like the joke regarding the expanding acronym that no one has less in common than gays and asexuals, no one should think a tradition that opposes hedonism and considers all pleasure to be a distraction would approve of gays.
That said, I can easily see how one would conclude that American Buddhism, such as it is, has had very little to say about interpersonal pleasure and much more about, say, animal welfare.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
But these hidebound traditional cultures have mostly not survived. And not so much because of rebellion by the youth, but in many cases because the parents WANTED their sons (and later daughters) to escape and sent them off to college. I can't even conceive of such a culture in today's world without it being an unfit anachronism.
Every time I hear it, all I can think is, why in the world would anyone think that young men are going to continue listening to this, taking it seriously, and accepting its authority?
Same reason they accepted the authority of the patriarch in patriarchal cultures. Because they have no choice. Actually, they did have ONE other choice in patriarchal culture -- they could leave the culture, go it alone or perhaps form groups of other disaffected young men. This was known as being an outlaw, and it rarely turned out well. You can't actually escape the culture by doing that in modernity.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
There are tiers to this, from just weights release to full data+code+weights. Chinese labs mostly release weights and tech report with a reproducible (given some effort) recipe, sometimes code, rarely some or all of the data (more often parts of post-training data, though in these cases it's typically just links to datasets that have already been open).
I think nitpicking about open source is uninteresting when the recipe is available. This is a very dynamic field of applied science, rather than labor-intensive programming exercise. The volume of novel code in a given LLM project is comparable to a modest Emacs package, what matters is ideas (derisked at scale). Specific implementations are usually not that valuable – DeepSeek's GRPO, as described in their papers, has been improved upon in the open multiple times by this point. Data composition is dependent on your own needs and interests, there are vast open datasets, just filter them as you see fit.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
1d ago
young ghetto boy ... virulent invasive species that will leave the land barren.
Whelp that's enough of TheMotte for me today.
Anyway, my bigger concern in the US is actually having a healthcare crisis with my child and becoming destitute, especially since I've worked diligently to create a life of relative comfort compared to my very blue collar ancestors.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
1d ago
Some thoughts that immediately jump to my mind on this subject:
- The euphemistic treadmill, which is more of a linguistic phenomenon than a "woke liberal" phenomenon. There is a progression that occurs where words are first used academically and scientifically, then colloquially, and then in a vulgar way. Examples being retarded or hysteria. The role of pseudoscience here is also richly ironic from a culture war perspective as well. IMO this aspect of linguistics is inherent to human nature, and opposition to it is not well-founded in reason. Just accept that words change meanings in a highly predictable way, please.
- The leaking of academic or "non-profit" language into colloquial discourse, especially in cases where it disambiguates nuanced concepts within that domain. One example is "unhoused" vs. "homeless", which actually do have utility in terms of what they're precisely trying to describe, but do not have much utility on the 24-hour news cable network.
- When words become "purity" memes in academic subcultures: the word Latinx polls very poorly outside of very specific niches. But, if all of your colleagues are using the word Latinx, and you are not, despite the fact that you don't necessarily agree with it, your paper will not get published. But every subculture has its own "purity" memes, and a lot of them are incredibly cringe-inducing. That's what keeps me coming back!
All of these are great cannon fodder to get the red tribe of the culture war fired up, but I personally think they're pretty weak in terms of showing actual flaws in blue tribe principles. There are plenty real flaws in blue tribe principles that these don't really make me lose any sleep.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1d ago
I think one of the really frustrating aspects of these conversations in the broader public sphere, particularly when strong progressive voices are present, is that so often this conversation devolves into a litany of scolding for young men, while young women are treated as victims, and at the same time, caricatures of traditional societies are still held up as the thing to be avoided. Which is to say, there is an insistence on both a kind of rights based liberal individualism as well as somewhat incompatible oppressor-oppressed dynamics for the male and female classes. It seems like a total dead end.
But (and I guess I'm going to get all Patrick Deneen "Why Liberalism Failed" here) insisting conversations get crammed into these dynamics does a grave disservice to the actual reality of why traditional societies actually worked, and why they worked the way they did. I grew up in a much more traditional religious subculture, and there was an overwhelming sense that people, from birth, were heavily invested in by the broader culture around them (especially by their own parents), and in some sense, they were acting as extreme free riders. And the way that these free riders transitioned from being takers to makers was to settle down, choose an appropriate mate, begin creating families, and pay forward all the ways they had been invested in by the strong, valuable culture that they had had the good fortune to be born into. And in that world, there was an overwhelming sense that young men AND young women who didn't make the transition were not really adults or people of esteem or worth in the community. They were damaging the loving people who had invested so much in them. There was severe cultural pressure for both young men and young women to fulfill that duty. And of course, there absolutely were gender roles that focused on high, distinct standards for both young men and young women, with a notion of complementarity to roles that, one assumed, were supposed to align favorably with existing biological differences between men and women, bolstered external pro-social needs, and help grease the wheels of those interactions, helping men and women find each other valuable and distinct... But in an important way, the specifics of the gender roles were less significant than the broader framework of the role of individuals in relationship to the larger community that had nurtured them.
And obviously, that kind of world can feel restricting. But it can also feel entirely sensible and worth investing in to all parties involved, because that fundamental relationship, between the individual invested in and that broader community that nurtured them, was something worth investing in. And there was absolutely a virtuous feedback loop, too - it might be restrictive to live up to hard pro-social ideals, but you get the benefit (ideally) of other people, especially mates, living up to hard, pro-social ideals too.
This is the framework I can't help but see and compare to when I look at the "young men need to be scolded, young women are always victims" public discourse, because at a basic human level, it just seems so totally anti-human and disconnected from reality. It has a strong "the beatings will continue until morale improves" vibe. Every time I hear it, all I can think is, why in the world would anyone think that young men are going to continue listening to this, taking it seriously, and accepting its authority? And indeed, I think my internal sense of that, for the last decade, is proving more and more well-calibrated.
I totally understand (neverminding questions of faith or metaphysics) how those more traditional societies are suppose to work, just in game theory terms. It's like joining the marines - you have to live up to hard, pro-social standards, and maybe that sucks, but then you get the benefit of being around other high trust individuals who also live up to hard, pro-social standards.
But I can't understand, at all, or figure out what's in it for young men to tolerate the current general public progressive world of atomized individual liberal oriented around rights and liberation (with a strong denial of basic cause and effect) plus oppressor-oppressed dynamics with young men as the enteral oppressor.
And as should be totally obvious from how I'm writing, my sympathies have very much drawn back to those older forms of cultural organization that I was raised in, despite my leaving it in my early young adulthood. I think I, and a lot of people like me, threw a lot of babies out with the bathwater.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Bridesprices are Lindy(as is borrowing from Shylock to afford it), though, and most urban European women from the high Middle Ages until the first sexual revolution married in their twenties- post conventional college age.
It’s true that those women were generally not spending their time getting certificates in literacy, but in broad strokes it’s nothing unusual.
From Slate Star Scratchpad:
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