domain:academic.oup.com
faceh
2d ago
Hmmm.
I can point out that pretty much every heterosexual male goes through a period where they're exclusively chasing 15, 16, and 17 year old girls. Its called puberty and/or high school.
And with that in mind, its actually weirder to think that a guy's tastes would change drastically as he aged, why wouldn't he continue to be physically attracted to the same things he was physically attracted to as a teen? Even if, as his brain matures, he can optimize for personality traits more than pure looks.
And a part of me sure wishes I had gotten around to banging more 15-17 year olds back when I was in that age bracket, but alas I was inconceivably ignorant of the signals women would send me... and I'm glad I didn't end up knocking one up and derailing my life plans.
And as discussed last week, I can imagine a world where a 16 year old girl might demonstrate sufficient understanding of the risks and sufficient brain development that she could legitimately "consent" to sex with an older guy.
But even then, I don't think society would look kindly on the guy that did that. There are in fact many 'normal' behaviors that are pathologized to avoid, I guess, a spiral into an unhealthy equilibrium where, say, 40 year olds are regularly snatching up 16-year-old girls and removing them from the dating pool that would otherwise allow teen boys a chance to get some experience.
FtSoA
2d ago
When they do price fixing, it's bad. When Trump does price fixing, it's bad.
Trump's actions will make things worse, not better. He's not proposing something like I don't know we ban pharmaceutical exports to countries that refuse to pay market rates in order to make others pay their fair share. Imagine if he did that little bit of conflict theory! People would freak the fuck out and call him a mass murderer or something, but he'd be justified in threatening a trade war on that front such that America isn't paying for the bulk of innovation.
So this is a case where I think there is a Trumpian approach to perhaps make things actually better, but he's not doing that.
functor
2d ago
So there are no cases of the local DEI people discriminating against whites and especially typical Trump voting whites? Instead he just happens to chose a small minority that is vastly overrepresented among his donors and his administration. Imagine if a president had recieved a large portion of his funding from China and had a sizeable portion of his administration consist of Chinese people and they were all about owning the libs by taking out DEI efforts specifically hurting Chinese people.
Israel doesn't do work for the US, the US does work for Israel. China doesn't really have a military presence in the region and is the biggest trading partner with most of MENA. Israel wrecks the relationship with middle eastern countries and drags the US into forever wars.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2d ago
Yeah, Negritos tripped me up as well.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2d ago
Yes, you have talked to both.
faceh
2d ago
Or a father who is willing and able to act as the filter.
But yes, 'wait until marriage' works because its dead simple advice (though not easy to follow unless the plausible threat of eternal damnation is attached), it aligns incentives, filters out bad faith actors, and ensures both sides are getting what they want whilst constraining the other side from backing out after extracting value.
If you don't create a Schelling point, the marketplace can end up stuck at a different, very undesirable equilibrium. Rather than agonize over the number of dates before putting out, the issue of trusting the counterparty, or figuring out the 'optimal' period of time to wait... just push everyone towards the same standard and enforce it as best you can.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
As someone who has been in a decade-long relationship with a woman who was four years younger than me (from my age 28 to 38 or so, so not a particularly creepy age difference) and not very emotionally mature, but who is better (i.e. single) now, just from an egoistical male perspective, there are serious downsides to seriously dating younger women. (I mean, a serial PUA could just dump them whenever they send him 20 texts and try to call five times for some emotional crisis, but he will also not get very wholesome relationships that way.) Not that my sample is very large, though.
--
What they mean is that this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace. He can outbid her 20-yo suitors simply because he has 25 years of career growth on them.
I think your first sentence is wrong and in direct conflict with the second sentence, which is right.
The median 20yo likely has a good idea of her SMV. She is unlikely to be in the situation where no man has ever showed the slightest interest in her, thousands of men have swiped left on her Tinder profile until finally, some pennyless, ugly 45yo comes along and sends her a dick pick, and she is immediately falling for him because she is just so happy that she will not have to die unloved.
Instead, she likely has a good idea that a ton of men want to have sex with her, and quite a few would actually be willing to dump their current partner or wife to go exclusive with her. If she is going for the 45yo, that is simply because he is making her the best offer. I mean, sure, the hottest 20yo she could get exclusively would probably be quite a bit hotter, but it would also mean that she would have to work some job to have a decent lifestyle. As you say, with 25 years of career, the (well-situated) 45yo can offer her a much nicer life -- at least until she gets replaced by a younger model.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2d ago
Wait, do I know who is who?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
3744, top 26%. 4 perfect rounds, my biggest mistake was placing
JarJarJedi
2d ago
I got pretty good score with Europeans and Asians, but messed up big time confusing Africans with Indonesians which gave me pretty miserable score at the end.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
a young woman, without having SUBSTANTIAL oversight, can't tell one of these guys apart from a more committed partner,
I think the very traditional advice of "wait until marriage" does actually work here. It may have its other failure modes (well documented elsewhere), but it certainly requires a non-trivial time and legal commitment from a partner that would "tell one of these guys apart."
faceh
2d ago
You don't have 115 lb. females flipping 250 lb. men through plate glass windows, though true enough the cast is quite diverse.
Ironically this is one universe where that can be justified if the female in question has access to Force powers.
Remember 2 foot 2 Yoda taking on the Emperor.
Big government of any sort (including one run by democrats) can just as easily be substituted for the Empire.
The Empire has always Aesthetically resembled Nazi Germany, on purpose, but yeah, its a pastiche of many historical dictatorships that revel in creating huge symbolic projects to demonstrate their power or bombastic, overpowered weapons to terrify their enemies, and employ slave labor and conscripted troops and heavy propaganda in lieu of providing material improvements in people's lives.
Soviet Russia did it. North Korea did it and continues to do is. CCCP China actually does it, currently, South American dictatorships did it on a more modest scale.
Yes the show does present some behavior some might find grating as unquestionably normal (pre-marital sex, etc.) But it does have a moral core, which I mean in the John Gardner sense.
I haven't watched it, but it sounded like this was also true of at least the first couple seasons of The Mandalorian, which is the ONE other piece of consistently decent Star Wars media to come out since Rogue One. And also catapulted Pedro Pascal's career, in all likelihood.
Mildly ironic that only he and Jason Momoa, whose characters both died after relatively brief screentime, are the only Game of Thrones actors to still have serious careers after that series ended.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
2d ago
(ii) They do not engage in and will not during the term of this award engage in, a discriminatory prohibited boycott.
They define that term as:
Discriminatory prohibited boycott means refusing to deal, cutting commercial relations, or otherwise limiting commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies or with companies doing business in or with Israel or authorized by, licensed by, or organized under the laws of Israel to do business.
oats_son
2d ago
Very first entry from Rov_Scam titled "Based on friends who have all gotten long-term relationships from the apps, combined with my own experience, here's what I can tell you..."
faceh
2d ago
Funny enough, I excluded video games as a class, because a ton of absolute BANGERS have come out in that period.
And there's at least a couple counterpoints to Baldur's Gate, like the Harry Potter game that achieved MASSIVE success despite an attempt to boycott it, and Stellar Blade going all in on the conventionally attractive female PC.
I enjoyed the HELL out of Armored Core VI, and that one didn't try to inculcate me with identity politics or carry any overbearing political message, even as it sort of makes you feel bad for certain decisions you make during the course of the game.
Jiro
2d ago
We can just look at the text and see how they made significant additional distinctions for one and not the other.
Exactly what distinction did they make? They certainly didn't say "the bill of rights applies to things that are sort of like what we wrote, but everything else is absolutely literal".
I don't think your two meanings make a difference.
Yes they do. There's a difference between "long after the Constitution was written" and "long after we invented the thing we're asking about". At any rate, the problem is that if you mean "after the Constitution was written" you have no choice but to be arbitrary. If the Constitution just said "the military" you could claim that the Air Force only became part of the military after the Constitution was written, so this is still after the fact and "the military" should be read so as not to include it. There's nothing that could possibly have been put in the Constitution that by your standard wouldn't allow someone to say "you can't count the Air Force, that's after the fact".
We have specific rules (that are different) for Armies and Navies. Which set of rules applies to the Air Force?
You ask yourself "in what ways is the Air Force similar to an army and in what ways is it similar to a navy. Do what is appropriate based on the similarity."
As I noted, this isn't a perfect process. People may disagree on which is more similar or exactly how to apply a rule meant for the army or navy. But it's not unlimited discretion either; there are things that this just doesn't allow.
faceh
2d ago
I am somewhat familiar with Nate Silver's approach to modelling and prediction.
And I'll reiterate the general critique.
If you damn well know your model is going to be inaccurate, include error bars, express how much irreducible uncertainty there is. At least acknowledge that the number is most likely incorrect and is subject to large revisions, downplay confidence.
Actually, it looks like they DO have that option on display and HOLY CRAP the bars are really large on some of these.
Maybe its not a particularly useful estimate if businesses are looking for something something reliable to act upon.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
Trump is also fucking with the Fed, labor statistics, and is demanding drug prices be lowered.
Trump's drug price demands seem to be in response to anti-market demands from other countries. He's not wrong about other countries essentially demanding by law that their market freeloads on the American one.
The actual text, for anyone interested (link from twitter):
(2) Grant award certification.
(a) By accepting the grant award, recipients are certifying that:
(i) They do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, DEIA, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws; and
(ii) They do not engage in and will not during the term of this award engage in, a discriminatory prohibited boycott.
(iii) They do not, and will not during the term of this award, operate any program that benefits illegal immigrants or incentivizes illegal immigration.
As for Fuentes, I think the meaning of 'fed' in these online circles is rather more broad than it ought to be (almost every political radical with a substantial following will deal with the state or states in some capacity), but I don't think he takes himself seriously enough not to be able to justify full cooperation. He has ways of justifying it to himself, as with his Kamala support.
Blueberry
2d ago
https://acoup.blog/2025/08/01/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iiia-family-formation/
The marriage patterns of high elites in a society are often quite different from the marriage patterns of most of the society. The classic example of this is to note that students are often mislead by European aristocrats in the medieval and early modern periods marrying very young and so they assume that everyone in medieval Europe married very young, but in fact, as we’ll see in a moment, medieval western Europe is notable for very late (mid-twenties for women, late twenties for men) typical age at first marriage among the general population.
Discrimination towards Israel is a convenient legal hammer for Trump to pound on adversaries.
Under 42 U.S.C. § 5151, the President’s regulatory authority is limited to ensuring that all disaster assistance is distributed “in an equitable and impartial manner”
Trump is using Israel because he needs to find a credible example of 'partial' behavior by local govts. The American system has special carve-outs for provable hate crimes. There is decades of precedent on methods for associating anti-Israel-movements with antisemitism and therefore provable hate crimes.
Trump's govt (and the project 2025 playbook[1]) are strategic about finding loopholes for executive overreach. For universities, it was provable affirmative action. For local funding, it's Israel.
[1] I have not read project Esther in detail. But at face value, it seems to be the guiding document on how to use antisemitism as a cudgel to beat opposing institutions into submission.
Israel is effectively a forward deployed state of the USA. They do the dirty work on the vanguard, and shield America from criticism. For ex: I don't believe the Israelis could have developed Pegasus without a soft go ahead from the Americans.
I've commented on the issue of Lotharios having an outsize (negative) influence on the pool of 'marriageable' women before.
I had the 'insight' that yeah, these types literally optimize for attracting young, sexually inexperienced women, they know exactly where to look, what to say, how to present themselves, and how to string such a woman along without getting in so deep they can't escape. Its a game they get really good at because they are playing it over and over and over again.
They do it a few times and then it becomes second nature, and since they never stick around, they can keep running up enough of a body count in a relatively short period of time to have a noticeable impact on the local singles market.
And some portion of them, I reckon, fetishize the act of despoiling an innocent girl with no intention of committing, but also take some pleasure from knowing she's been ruined for any other partners that might come along.
I am actually willing to consider straight up execution for such men, IF ONLY for the deterrent effect.
The nature of the problem is that a young woman, without having SUBSTANTIAL oversight, can't tell one of these guys apart from a more committed partner, and if one of these guys gets her first (and as stated above, they're VERY GOOD at this game!), as her first relationship experience it can pretty much ruin her ability to identify and trust a 'good' man, and might make her bitter enough to think all men are like that.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2d ago
This ended up on the cutting room floor and didn't get into my post, but Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire, had sex with barely illegal girls not because that was his kink, but because he got burned having sex with a regular escort.
If you're a celebrity or a politician and your good friend Jeffrey invites you to his island for some frolicking and debauchery, you will want whoever participated in frolicking and debauchery with you to keep her mouth shut and not to blackmail you or to go on a talk show crawl peddling her newest book How I Fucked Bill Gates and Why He Isn't Even in My Personal Top 50. So good friend Jeffrey needs someone who honestly thinks she will get in trouble if people learn what she has been doing with her various orifices.
You've successfully discovered the psychological foundation on top of which "being a liberal" resides: being capable of decoupling X from the rest of the cultural baggage around X (and being disagreeable enough to point that out).
Unless you're in the 1970s (and even then), this is generally a liability, because the logical conclusion of that with respect to sex is "you're OK with fucking 7 year olds", a liberal of this type is ultimately being dishonest if he answers "no"[1], and everyone knows that (and you stated it anyway). This is also the genesis of the traditionalist's "it's a slippery slope from the gays to pedophilia" (but it's only really valid when criticizing classical liberals, which is why progressives appear to be immune to this type of criticism).
And the claim that this is "abuse" hinges on this point. As the risk incurred by having sex is nullified and the marketplace value of sex goes to zero (pornography helps with this), this fades into irrelevance, and "the woman wants to have sex, because having sex is neat" becomes the more salient point.
The fact that this is a childish view of sex is actually really relevant (and I do mean that in a literal sense; when kids- the kind closer to 7 than 17- have sex or do sex-adjacent things, I have it on good word that this is generally why they're doing them). Of course, this only results in a neutral to positive outcome if one or both of the participants can say "I'm done, and this sex was only fucking around", and in practice that's not guaranteed[2].
By contrast, a traditionalist or progressive will say that, because sex is the main thing of value women possess (for a bunch of deep-seated sociobiological reasons), that people being allowed to decouple sex from the cultural baggage around sex is devaluing sex -> destroying a woman's livelihood. And because the traditionalist viewpoint is centered around the willingness of men to pay top dollar for sex, and the progressive viewpoint is centered around forcing men to pay top dollar for sex, those types of people are going to argue that abuse occurs when you devalue sex in that way.
(Note that this doesn't actually consider the age of the participant- which makes sense; neither traditionalists nor progressives are particularly bothered about the subject's lack of age- for traditionalists, we can see that ages of consent higher than that are modern inventions so being married was the salient factor, and for progressives, they think 7 year olds can be meaningfully transgender.)
Only if you started from the traditionalist viewpoint: that the liberals are being dishonest about the above and trying to steal [literal] meal tickets from women. If a traditionalist did that, it would be a grave sin for them to do that: it would be exploitation, abuse, trickery given that they naturally understand sex to be a meal ticket in that way, so obviously, because everyone works like they do, the people not doing that must be lying. (Progressives do this too, just from the other direction because they started out in possession of the meal ticket.)
Of course, to the people who aren't lying about that but can't or won't acknowledge why the traditionalist viewpoint exists, that's going to cause some problems and damage their ability to trust traditionalist motives. After all, if the truth is one way, but they say it's the other way, then the only reason to do that must be hatred and stupidity... which, from the liberal viewpoint, it is.
[1] Which is why the more progressive-sympathetic liberals were very keen on the adoption of "consent" as a framework; it allows them to have their cake (we can do whatever we want) and eat it too (unless society has deemed the other partner sub-human), but is ultimately vulnerable to the fact that, when a society gets poorer and due to the fact the sexual marketplace is a marketplace, regulatory capture in the "declare competition illegal" direction occurs.
[2] Which is the main problem with fucking people who aren't necessarily able to judge that up front, or don't (in fact or perception) have the power to force a disengagement (which is why the "single mom's boyfriend discovered to be fucking the daughters too" thing exists, especially since the mother is herself making that calculation, consciously or otherwise).
That said, fucking people who don't believe they have that power, or are merely giving in, tends to result in dead-fish lays, which means the thing they "should" actually be after (described by faceh in a sibling comment) can't exist in that environment... which is an instant fail condition for someone genuinely interested in casual sexploration (and considering how obnoxious adult women are when they go passive like that, imagine how miserable that experience would be were it an actual kid on the other end- impressionability only goes so far). But that's basically just restating the slightly-hidden thesis that "molester/possessor" and "interested in casual/exploratory sex with for its own sake" are very different things.
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