domain:felipec.substack.com
popocatepetl
6hr ago
Social analysis of the bear-or-man meme is a waste of neurons. The initial poll showed very-online urban women did not know bears were at all dangerous. After that, all discourse has been a toxoplasma of gender war signaling — feminists get to signal how super-duper-extra they condemn men with a cherry on top, while anti-feminists get to grandstand about how stupid and man-hating women are.
There's nothing else to it.
Well they can express that frustration all they want, so long as it's still illegal to implement the mechanisms of tradition, it's pointless.
Just recently the literal boy scouts switched to being gender neutral. This is a small symbolic final step that is but the culmination of the systematic destruction of an institution whose entire purpose was turning boys into men. Not an isolated case either, pretty much all male segregated spaces are gone, certainly most of the ones that would lend themselves to teaching.
I'm sure drunks are also frustrated with the quality of their livers. But unless they stop drinking, it's not going to get any better, however much they complain.
100ProofTollBooth
20hr ago
I am a loser
What makes you say this? I'm not trying to give you an internet pump-up speech along the lines of "you're probably pretty great!"
No, I will accept at face value that you fucking suck, loser. Now, let's identify the problem.
Are you short and skinny? Do you smell and dress bad? You say you have a fair bit of money. Did you earn it or did someone die an leave it to you?
The point is that getting out of loserdom is really just a project like anything else. Identify what is lacking, create plans for compounding improvement, execute those plans, track and log progress, adjust along the way.
Here's a generalize bullet list that 99% of dudes benefit from:
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I'm a physical loser ---> Go to the gym. There are a million beginner lifting routines. Do one. After six months, add a competitive sport. Doesn't have to be MMA / BJJ, just something where there is a definite winner and loser and people take it seriously. Don't do beer league softball.
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I'm a social loser ---> Get good at small talk. Start by making short observations at checkout lines. Try to make simple jokes. If it goes poorly, you're in a checkout line and the interaction will end in literally seconds. You'll know you're getting good when it becomes almost second nature and you can get a chuckle most of the time. Next step, start going to bars and doing this with the bartender (doesn't matter if they're male or female). Most of their day is spent making small talk to medium talk (i.e. bullshitting with regulars about their jobs or whatever). They're pretty much on autopilot and also paid to be nice, so they'll help the conversation along even if you still kind of suck. This will help you get better at developing a few quick "lines" into full on conversations. An option but not really recommended step is to do this at strip clubs. Again, I don't recommend it but have great stories. I digress.
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I'm a loser loser, meaning I have no confidence in myself ---> Paradoxically, one of the easier ones to solve. Confidence comes from exactly one process; demonstrate competence in a difficult task. You will pick a medium term task or project that seems hard, and then you will do it. Build a website, build a birdhouse, organize a party, train for an complete a 10k, something that takes around 90 days. Pick it. Do it. Write about it as you are doing it in a journal style. At the end, after you do it, read the journal, relive the emotional journey and realize "I did it even though it was hard along the way." Boom, confidence.
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I'm an internet loser. This is guy code for "I watch porn." It's easy - stop.
If I were a woman, I would take tinder et al any day over a random pre-1900 mating system.
And that is what they are doing, but as with many of the things modernity has produced, it feels good but is actually bad for you and society.
Tinder basically only selects for looks and short term fun, but unlike your parents, it's not going to pick someone who will want to make you an exclusive partner. So female you is going to suffer from the common malady of the situationship era, she's going to pine for guys out of her league hoping she can lock one up, fail to do so and grow into a leftover woman who resents men and insults them with bear analogies.
Whether that's a better or worse fate than marrying a brutish viking warrior that still provides, I don't know. Maybe it is actually better, it's certainly more comfortable. But the battered viking's wife has children, and the bitter wine aunt does not. Surely that enters into the calculation.
Maybe your parents don't care that much about your feelings when it comes to mate selection, but they do care about important things that are now excluded from the process, to everyone's expense.
ulyssessword
7hr ago
Is there any great work that would be improved by the addition of choice, by the addition of alternate possibilities?
IMO, the core artistic advantage that video games have is that they force the player to experience the decision-making that goes into a choice, not just the rationale and consequences.
One argument in the Teaching Paradox series of blog posts is that the games embody a certain historical theory, and players are essentially forced to make the same choices as the nations did. That is to say, in the "Interstate Anarchy" themed game, you had to build an army, opportunistically raid neighbors, and build unstable alliances against stronger foes. If you didn't, your nation would be overrun and destroyed. If you have an argument against that ("Why can't we just be nice?" etc.), then you can try it in the game and see how well it works for you.
I'm not sure which great works would benefit from that treatment, but I'm guessing there are some. Or maybe those works are "great" because they're perfectly suited to their medium, and we can only make new, distinct ones.
somedude
3hr ago
I'm of essentially the exact opposite opinion. The linear game has almost no reason to exist. If my input has no effect on the outcome, why is it even required? All I'm really getting is a movie, but made objectively worse by the fact that it insists upon repeating a given scene until I complete an arbitrary task.
What's the point? Is there a movie that would be improved by making me win a round of Tetris every ten minutes to stop it from rewinding? Hell, why even have death animations or other displayed failure states in a video game? After all, it's not like the protagonist being eaten by monsters or falling down a hole to their death is what "really" happens.
Those failure states exist to create the illusion of agency. No game advertises itself by telling you the princess can already be considered rescued, because that's the artistic intent, but hey you can come push buttons if you want to see it. No, they want to create at least the pretense of the player's input having consequences.
So stop with the pretense and give me the real thing. Give me actual agency and consequence. Or commit to your singular vision for the story and write a book instead.
zeke5123a
8hr ago
Watch an NFL game this fall. Watch each commercial. If there is a couple, do the same analysis. I’d wager that the interracial coupling far outstrips the base rate.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19hr ago
If US intelligence was most focused on strengthening America's stability, wouldn't they try to shore up American identity? Wouldn't they want colorblind patriotism, the supporting the troops ethos? You want to smooth over divisions, you don't want to create even controlled conflicts. You'd try to subvert and suppress dangerous groups of course but you wouldn't try to suppress the majority's white identity, you try to annex it into American identity.
Look at what Russia does. Rally around the flag, enemies all around us, we're all Russians regardless of race/creed, sacred duty to the motherland... They suppress the liberal/trans/separatist minority rather than the majority.
Here's an interesting article that perhaps deserves a post of its own. There are many things to say about it ("Gorbachev and Yeltsin ruined ice cream, the cowards.") but you get the sense that the state machinery is trying to keep the country together, promoting unity rather than division: https://harpers.org/archive/2024/01/behind-the-new-iron-curtain/
That's not what the US is doing. They're playing the patronage/suppression game, not the national unity game. 'We need more blacks in the Air Force, quotas everywhere, need to fight white supremacy and racism'. Those Stand Down days in the US military to counter extremism, internal conflict over things like migration and national identity.
Choice is great. It rewards creativity, roleplay and general mastery of gameplay over petty linear storytelling. Minecraft, Crusader Kings and Stalker mods simply provide a fundamentally different gameplay experience than The Witcher, Metal Gear Solid and vanilla Stalker. Not an inherently lesser one.
Far from removing immersion, good sandboxes enhance it. Which is why I was far more saddened when I lost one of my founding dorfs than when Aerith met her doom.
The challenge will be here in taking LLMs, which are naturally milquetoast averages of all possible conversations, and making you care about the fiction they create by preventing narrative suspension breaking hallucinations and maintaining coherent sequences of events.
I think the best fit for the tech is actually going to be what old RPGs used to have (like Fallout) where you could just type dialog to the characters and mentioning choice words would trigger secret dialogue. Except way more natural.
Tanista
6hr ago
One argument in the Teaching Paradox series of blog posts is that the games embody a certain historical theory, and players are essentially forced to make the same choices as the nations did
CK2 teaches the incentives of patriarchy better than any other game I can think of.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4hr ago
Yes, there was recently a bit of hubbub after it turned out that the government had sent four guys representing different parties (instead of, say, the female ministers theoretically in charge of such affairs) to a sauna trip to hammer out various details to the latest austerity package. Here's the Green Party's unofficial online magazine complaining about it (google-translated). However, such sauna sessions would presumably be expected to be chaste (if drunken), there's a bit of a taboo with associating saunas to eroticism in the Finnish culture.
NullHypothesis
5hr ago
Here's a 2019 study that looked at 543 couples in advertisements.
Some notes:
Approximately 19% of the 543 couples represented in advertisements were interracial couples. A chi-square goodness of fit test identified that this was a significant overrepresentation from the 10% proportional representation of interracial couples in the US population, according to the US Census
Approximately 59% of the interracial couples portrayed in the television commercials consisted of a white male and a Nonwhite female (WM+NWF). A chi-square goodness of fit test identified that this was not a significant difference from the 55% proportional representation of WM+NWF couples in the US population of interracial couples, according to the Pew Research Center
Approximately 30% of the interracial couples portrayed in the television commercials consisted of a Nonwhite male and a White female (NWM+WF). A chisquare goodness of fit test identified that this was a significant underrepresentation from the 37% proportional representation of NWM+WF interracial couples in the US population, according to the Pew Research Center
The second research question asked about gender differences among interracial couples with a white partner in relation to their actual population. ... To answer RQ2, there were differences in representation, as the combination of a Nonwhite male and a White female were underrepresented, whereas a White male and Nonwhite female were not.
The third research question asked about the positive portrayal of interracial couples, including socioeconomic status (RQ3a), the behavior of characters (RQ3b), and proxemic distance (RQ3c). ... Therefore, RQ3 had mixed results: while there are no significant differences among the portrayal of interracial and intraracial couples with regards to socioeconomic status and character behavior, interracial couples are more often shown at further distances from each other than are intraracial couples
The fourth research question asked about the portrayal of interracial couples regarding the importance of the couple and the para-proximal distance of the couples. ... Therefore, to answer RQ4, interracial couples are not portrayed differently than their intraracial counterparts in 33 relation to whether they were the main character or whether they were shown at closer camera shots.
The fifth research question asked about the prevalence of interracial couples across three networks (Disney, ABC, and Freeform). A two-sample Chi-square test of association revealed that relationship type and network are significantly dependent upon each other (χ² = 9.35, df = 2, N = 543, p < .01). A post-hoc analysis using a Bonferroni correction that accounts for crossnetwork analysis identified that interracial couples are significantly less portrayed on Disney (0.0%) than expected (6.8%) (χ² = 9, df = 2, N = 34, p =.01), while intraracial couples are significantly more represented on Disney (34%) than expected (27.2%, z = 3.0) (χ² (2, N = 34) = 9, p = .01). Disney was the only network with any significant findings.
The sixth and final question asked about the prevalence of interracial couples among different advertisement types. A two-sample Chi-square indicates that there is not a significant association between relationship type and commercial type (χ² = 6.55, df = 7, N = 532, p = .48). Thus, to answer RQ6, there is no difference between interracial and intraracial couples and the types of advertisements they are portrayed in
Additionally, this data was collected from a broadcast market in Alabama, which, as previously identified, was the last state with a standing interracial marriage ban and still has prevalent instances of prejudice against interracial couples.
Unfortunately, the actual raw data isn't provided or summarized in a table anywhere, so we have to go with their analysis only. It also shows the difficulty of actually collecting this type of data, which is probably why there isn't much out there in academic literature on this topic.
To summarize this analysis of 543 advertisements shown in Alabama in 2019:
- interracial couples were overrepresented relative to population size (19% depicted vs 10% actual)
- A nonwhite male with a white female is underrepresented
- Interracial couples are shown to be less physically close than intraracial couples
- Disney had a significant underportrayal of interracial couples.
I imagine the rates of interracial couples being shown in advertisements have only gone up since then. The 19% was for advertisements specifically in Alabama, which the paper suggests may have a lower percentage of advertisements with interracial couples for various reasons.
I'm not sure how much interracial couple depiction in advertisements actually matters that much on its cultural impact versus interracial couples in popular media, TV shows, and movies. The most common examples of an interracial pairing that come into my mind are BM/WF and WM/AF, although it could also just be standing out to me due to my knowledge of black females and asian males being the least desired in terms of dating.
Interesting that there are more Asian males on the list than I would have expected (and much less asian females with white males, and in one of them the Asian female ends up choosing the Asian male.). I have heard the complaint that even if Asian males are now being shown as romantic interests in movies/shows they are still not sexualized (e.g. kissing scenes being removed), but at the same time there does seem to be more Asian males in romantic roles in recent titles than there had been in the past. Has east asian cultural exports made Asian males more palatable to a Western audience, or are there more asian males writing in Hollywood now?
One argument in the Teaching Paradox series of blog posts is that the games embody a certain historical theory, and players are essentially forced to make the same choices as the nations did
CK2 teaches the incentives of patriarchy better than any other game I can think of.
CK2 teaches many things — why the protestant reformation was a big deal (everyone gets a CB on heretics), why national identity didn't play an important role in politics until the 18th century (elites branch-swinging across Europe for different titles), why primogeniture was an improvement over the equal inheritance of the Franks despite the bad son problem (it keeps the dynasty strong and its holdings united).
When I first played CK2, it made me realize how the Marshall Plan mindset clouds my thinking, and that past governments were not "just stupid" for not focusing on infrastructure/tech. My first CK2 game was on Tutorial Island (regular people call this place Ireland), and I immediately sent my spy master to study technology from Al Andalus while saving money to buy an irrigation building. Economy, research, then conquest: the 4X order of operations. Twenty years later, I managed to improve my tech to best in Ireland, and I constructed a fancy new well to double my feudal dues. My neighbor country, meanwhile, had used his spymaster to fabricate a title on my lands, and instead of building infrastructure, he bought mercenaries. He conquered my county. Game over.
Sadly, the sequel CK3 is just a map-painting game. It doesn't have as many embedded historical lessons.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10hr ago
She claimed that many women who responded with "bear" were victims of violent rape who literally would rather die than be raped.
Something's not adding up here.
Suppose we have a rape victim who says this. Then, regarding the time she was raped, she would prefer it if she had died instead.
But she can replicate the effect of having died back then by simply committing suicide now. But she doesn't - she chooses to keep living instead. So it seems that her revealed preference is that she actually doesn't want to have died back then, because she rejects the necessary consequences of that choice.
I certainly believe there are fates worse than death. But I also think that in the majority of cases where people say "rape is worse than death", it's just hyperbolic social signalling rather than a genuinely held conviction.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
10hr ago
Kudos for actually putting in the work. It's not a proper study by any means, but at least trying to get an overview of broader tendencies is valuable.
FWIW, I've also never felt that this is a big deal if it's a modern setting. Even if the stats are slightly off, it's hardly unusual. What I really hate instead is the tendency for making every cast in all media a perfect match for [current year] US urban pop stats, independent of the setting, and for all morals to always reflect [current year] morality. If the setting is a rural backwater with an alleged clan-like family structure, concepts such as "blood money" you have to pay when your relatives screw up, etc. ... but then each clan has a perfect mix of distinguishable races from all over the world, absolutely everyone is constantly bitching about how blood money is unfair and actually, you can just trivially change families through adoption ... Why even bother? It's obvious the writers don't get how people who actually grew up in such a world would think, nor what the implications of different social structures and physical limitations are and how they would shape the world. It's all just "wouldn't it be cool if ..." but then keeping everything else bland and inoffensive.
Ditto6687
10hr ago
I've asked my gf about this.
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Women seem to assume that "in the forest" means "without social consequences, ever". Meaning, they suspect that some significant portion of men do not actually have an innate problem with rape and violence towards women, they simply do not do it most of the time out of fear.
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She claimed that many women who responded with "bear" were victims of violent rape who literally would rather die than be raped.
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She also claimed that most wild animals leave you alone if you are not a threat.
I'm pretty sure (3) does not mean you have a high chance of surviving a bear encounter. I would shit my pants and start running away the moment the bear started approaching me, make myself a threat, and get caught and mauled.
And while this may sound crass, I think getting mauled by a bear is worse than rape. I would rather be raped as a man that get mauled by a bear.
I feel like "be as obnoxious as possible and completely unapologetic" is the way to go. Any other course of action seems to eventually lead to a leftist takeover.
Edit: Leadership is also crucially important. I recently saw a normal forum full of reasonable people get completely taken over and censored by a certain group in the span of <a week. It only had one moderator and he was a little naive but trying to be a decent human being, tolerant, etc. 2-3 mods and the takeover never would have taken place imo.
Gaashk
18hr ago
#2 -- I would recommend trying something more like a farmer's market for this, vs literal checkout lines. Trying to strike up a conversation at a supermarket is in itself a faux pas, actual friends and colleagues barely acknowledge each other there. Bookshops and hobby stores are better. Handcraft markets and galleries with event nights are good -- there are people (probably skewed towards women, which is good in this context) just milling around for the atmosphere, open to a short conversation that probably won't lead anywhere. It is basically normal to just wander around talking to vendors or saying things about the items and not buying all that much.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
19hr ago
Pay a professional photographer to take and edit your photos, pay a "copywriter" on fiver to write your bio. That should handle 75% of it.
faceh
3hr ago
Interesting point.
I've argued elsewhere that martial arts gyms/dojos are pretty much the last bastion of healthy male masculinity that hasn't been invaded by woke culture. Because end of the day, there is simply no amount of social maneuvering that will make up for the strength differential between men and women, and you can't 'fake' martial arts skills without willing participants, which makes entryism nigh-impossible.
But yeah, despite pressure from both sides of the political spectrum, strip clubs and various other sex-adjacent spaces where men can pay to skip the formalities and just get to the T&A do a pretty good job filtering as well.
Implicitly, the females in these spaces are there to look pretty and be quiet (unless it is part of the tease) and this is 'enforced' when they rely on earning tips.
Lefties have given some cover to these places too, by being 'sex-positive,' 'pro-slut,' and 'anti-christian' to the extent they like that dens of vice piss off a certain segment of the right, and (probably) provide a wedge to bring in LGBT matters.
But yeah, the fact that guys can use these places to form reliable partnerships and create networks that aren't so legible while filtering out guys who have hangups that might turn into liabilities later.
I would definitely say I prefer the Dojo as the healthy alternative, but if it works and persists across decades, hard to say its doing something 'wrong.'
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
4hr ago
the sauna, the banya
Can confirm this is still the place of choice for negotiating government-adjacent contracts. I don't know if that's the same in Finland, but perhaps @Stefferi does.
It doesn't even have to do anything with sexual degeneracy, just the shared experience of men baring it all in front of each other and sharing a drink (or dozen) in a relaxing setting.
Tanista
5hr ago
why primogeniture was an improvement over the equal inheritance of the Franks despite the bad son problem (it keeps the dynasty strong and its holdings united).
Funny, I was going to joke in my OP that the one thing it never teaches is why anyone would ever use gavelkind but I think they patched it to make it make more sense (you could only manage so many vassals I think).
When I first played CK2, it made me realize how the Marshall Plan mindset clouds my thinking, and that past governments were not "just stupid" for not focusing on infrastructure/tech.
My first "game over" was forgetting that absolutism wasn't a thing yet and vassals actually have agency in this game and getting myself whacked.
Sadly, the sequel CK3 is just a map-painting game. It doesn't have as many embedded historical lessons.
Hm, a shame. I simply fell off due to Paradox's abuse of the DLC infinite money cheat but it's always at least looked good. I'd hoped to get into it at some point.
I think the roots of SJP in the civil rights movement started with relatable, noble goals and had the bad luck to mostly achieve their goals. So they did what any movement would do and picked further goals. Some, like gay rights, were again noble enough. Some, like insisting on equality of outcomes instead of color-blindness were IMHO harmful, some were mostly silly empty symbolism (like Confederate statues -- if you have the majority to blow them up, whatever, but this is not a decisive battle for the future of the US in any case.).
The civil rights movement was after equality of outcome from the start. Most of the things one finds bad about modern black identity politics existed there. If anything, the original movement was more violent against white people.
You could argue that parts of the broader society that helped the movement on some areas might have had more limited goals, or that they had then more so legitimate grievances too, but the reality is the core movement and a figure like MLK would be all in favor of the modern woke types, and he would be insinuating that opposition as he did as the time with contemporary republicans are nazis, racists, etc. It simply wasn't a movement with just limited goals.
SEX AND THE BIG CITY
or
THE LAST UNINVADEABLE THIRD SPACE
In the digital age of escorts on demand and cheap flights to indulge in sex tourism, why would adult entertainment venues that offer sex-adjacent services persist, when one can get your rocks off for a much cheaper price? In observed practice within Asia, these venues exist not for booze and girls, but for establishing membership in the brotherhood: you are in our world now, and the initiation is sin.
This came about after I made a post about the adult entertainment scene in Singapore in a necro'ed thread when I saw @Pasha complain about the lack of visible seediness in one of Singapores premier red light districts. Details about the mechanics therein can be found here for context and to provide a primer for my below.
https://www.themotte.org/post/981/smallscale-question-sunday-for-april-28/211124?context=8#context
So what is this brotherhood mentioned up top? Basically it can be summed up as 'I need to know you will not fuck me over when push comes to shove'. This is perhaps foreign to professionalised pseudoacademics where people are best experienced as minimizeable windows on a zoom call, but in professions relating to physical goods and services, human trust is a shorthand for task success: better to get shit done with someone you know has your back than to waste tims searching for the MBA approved 'best fit'.
This is not limited to physical tradespeople like laborers and soldiers, but includes B2B sales professionals, commodity traders, shipbrokers, construction/civil engineering. In these environments, decision makers responsible for multi million dollar trades and projects care less about saving a rounding errors worth of marginal savings in favor of knowing who to yell at when shit goes tits up.
In the KTVs and Indian Dance Clubs and Thai Discos in Singapore, the patrons are often groups of men, usually professionals in the same cluster. Oil traders and refinery site managers, construction project managers and engineers with their lawyers and bankers, shipbrokers with agents. The booze and the women show up, the mens wallets open up, but more importantly their mouths open too. Industry gossip is adjacent to insider activity, and being part of these networks gives incredible insight into the movements and activities of not just the people in that group you are with but those groups they are part of as well. By joining or initiating these activities, an opportunity is presented to quickly establish a bond with the other men present, to immediately let it he known that you can be called upon when needed. There is incredible power to be had when you are one of the first names on the tips of powerful peoples fingers, and for many punters a successful night is not when your dick gets wet but when you get the phone number of a useful contact.
So why the sex revue? Well it is because of the steady decline of third spaces that have been invaded by credentialed professionals, especially women, who dislike legacy networks that are impenetrable. There are legit professional reasons for this, such as contravening of KYC protocols or tender processes, but for the most part the dislike of legacy networks stems from jealousy. There are plenty of women who have successfully entered halls of power, especially in Thailand and Hong Kong where female scions are groomed for succession by their fathers, but for the most part a lack of trust in these women to bother with handshake agreements leads to their exclusion from networks of power. Thus, the networks must be dismantled as much as possible, starting with removing the exclusivity of their assembly grounds. Male only social clubs have steadily been eroded to be female inclusive, from the Knights of Columbus to Freemasons, and other threads have highlighted youth organizations being the starting point of this rot, with the Boy Scouts being mixed gender while girl scouts remain female exclusive. Whatever organizational benefit there is to opening up the genders, it does mean there are less third spaces for men to discuss the ongoings of power.
Therefore, the last venue is the strip club, the sauna, the banya, the KTV. The men say they are going there to be sexual degenerates, and many often are purely socially retarded men seeking base human interactions, but the true sustenance of these places is being the third place that women have zero interest in demeaning themselves to enter. That alone will ensure their continued presence even as the world gets continually anonymized into the homogenous digital soup: the last bastions of human connections will concentrate under the pressure, hardening its borders to continual external forces till they are fully impenetrable.
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