domain:streamable.com
Gaashk
18hr ago
Whenever the topic of tradwives and fertility comes up, my first thought is, what do the women on this board think?
Grew up in a very trad wife centric Christian homeschool subculture. It mostly didn't work out. Mostly, we had to get jobs. It isn't trivially easy to find a man who's prepared to be a husband, father, and primary earner fairly young, willing to ask girls out, often at venues like church functions, and interested in those girls. There are some, sure, and some families were formed that way. But now in our late 30s, I'm hearing about even some of the women who did marry a traditional head of household man divorcing, because he's pushy, unpleasant, domineering, and re-training as a nurse or something, now with several children.
Marriages don't have to rise to the level of beating to be worse than working a lower middle class female job. If my now husband hadn't kept inviting me on romantic dates at ancient castles, I would still be basically content with being single, because being a single woman in the modern world is really just fine, with a long educated Anglophone tradition full of slightly lonely but basically fine governesses and nuns. Even at the standards of a century ago, I would certainly rather be a nun than marry a man I didn't like, of whom people said "well at least he doesn't beat you, just have more grit."
I am not a feminist by current standards. My grandmothers and great grandmothers went to teaching colleges, and followed their husbands around the world while they translated Mayan carvings or something, and returned to teaching when their children where older. They kept copies of Virginia Woolf in their houses. There are great grandmothers I don't know much about, because their children ran away from home (and first marriages, I think?) and met up on a Pacific island, and then went on to have those 3-4 kids together, and raise them while teaching. I don't know how to evaluate the alternate universe where everyone had more grit, sticking out their first marriage on some frozen windswept cattle ranch.
Much is made of the state of family formation in Asia lately. Chinese great grandmothers probably had too much grit, breaking their daughters' feet to help their marriage prospects. I don't know how things were for the great grandmothers of the current generation of South Korean women -- the educational issues there sound like an excess of grit -- everyone could just not cram that extra hour, and things would likely be just the same, but slightly more pleasant. It sounds very zero sum after a pretty baseline educational level and some research skills.
Anyway, I'm pregnant with a third baby because I don't think being not particularly successful in America is that bad, actually. Probably none of my kids will go to an unusually excellent college or have an unusually excellent job or win at a high level competition, and that's alright. Someone came in to my classroom today to say that she's pleased that her daughter is shift manager at a Starbucks and leading literacy tutoring over the summer. This is good! People should be able to be pleased with their children living normal, functional lives!
I think you have your causality backwards. It's not that people don't bother asking people out in person anymore because they'd rather use the apps: it's that Western society has become massively atomised as a result of technological progress, which is a void that the apps have stepped in to inexpertly fill.
In the past, where would you typically ask out a girl in person? Common examples included i) a nice girl you met at church; ii) a colleague at work; iii) a classmate; or iv) a friend of a friend. Why i) is no longer viable is self-explanatory. Why ii) no longer works is explicable by the same dynamics Scott complained about in "Untitled": yes, workplace sexual harassment policies are written in an extremely sweeping fashion, and yes, men who are charming and socially adept and who are interested in one of their colleagues will probably just ask her out, without worrying about whether it's technically in violation of the policy or not. But conscientious socially awkward men will worry about this, as well they should given that they're the only men likely to be reported for violating it. (Yes I'm trotting out this meme again, I don't care: I was effectively shunned from an entire community and industry for the crime of politely asking a girl if she wanted to get coffee sometime and I'm still mad about it - anyone saying "just ask her bro, the worst she can say is no" is full of shit.) Regarding iii), some of the same dynamics as ii) apply, and you also run into the problem of a paucity of available women - if you're a socially awkward man in college, odds are good that you're pursuing a degree which is highly sex-segregated (computer science, engineering etc.).
That leaves iv). It's impossible to ask a friend of a friend on a date if a) you don't have any friends, or all of your friends are online friends; or b) all of your friends are people you met through an extremely sex-segregated common interest (Warhammer, D&D, coding, esports, rationalist-adjacent subreddit spinoffs etc.) - something that the internet and social media facilitates far too easily. (People self-segregrating into ideological echo chambers is only the tip of the iceberg: self-segregrating into echo chambers of people who like Obscure Hobby X or want to fuck toasters is the major underlying cause of the demise of any shared monoculture and the enshittification of Western society. I and everyone reading this are guilty of it.)
So you're left with cold approaches: going up to girls in bars or nightclubs. Again, not a problem for charming and socially adept men; big problem for the socially awkward millennials/zoomers you're criticising. Hard to blame them for making a beeline for the apps instead.
Of course it's easy to criticise Millennial and Gen Z adult men for not taking proactive steps to organically encounter single women in real life. Obviously talking to strangers halfway across the globe is not a great way to get laid in real life; nor is spending every day in your local Games Workshop. But the thing is, they didn't make this decision as adults: they made it when their parents gave them a smartphone as teenagers, and all the years of adolescence they should have spent ironing out the kinks in their patter have been squandered watching YouTube and Twitch instead. Gen Z boys are starting college barely more acquainted with the rules of social interaction IRL than Gen X 13-year-olds were, for reasons that are not entirely their fault: no one here thinks someone's life should be ruined because of a stupid decision they made when they were 12, a decision which directly harms only themselves and no one else (but indirectly harms society as a whole, obviously).
And your assumption that dating apps killed traditional courtship hinges on the questionable presumption that Millennial/Gen Z women are exactly as receptive to a stranger asking them out as Gen X women were in their youth. But I don't think they are, and I think the fact that they aren't is part of the problem. See this great article:
I mentioned to several of the people I interviewed for this piece that I’d met my husband in an elevator, in 2001. (We worked on different floors of the same institution, and over the months that followed struck up many more conversations—in the elevator, in the break room, on the walk to the subway.) I was fascinated by the extent to which this prompted other women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet someone that way. And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. “Creeper! Get away from me,” one woman imagined thinking. “Anytime we’re in silence, we look at our phones,” explained her friend, nodding. Another woman fantasized to me about what it would be like to have a man hit on her in a bookstore. (She’d be holding a copy of her favorite book. “What’s that book?” he’d say.) But then she seemed to snap out of her reverie, and changed the subject to Sex and the City reruns and how hopelessly dated they seem. “Miranda meets Steve at a bar,” she said, in a tone suggesting that the scenario might as well be out of a Jane Austen novel, for all the relevance it had to her life.
See also (coming back to "Untitled" above) innumerable feminist comics about how it's creepy for men to ask a woman out in a coffee shop or in a library or in college or on the third moon of Venus or whatever. There are plenty of women who are far less receptive to being asked out by strangers than their mothers were, and make no secret of that fact. Obviously the women writing these comics don't represent all women, but the men reading and internalising these comics don't necessarily know that, and everyone ends up poorer for it. If you are demanding that men not interact with you, and the only men reading (or caring about) that demand are men who care about respecting your boundaries - it should come as no surprise when the only men who interact with you are men who don't care about respecting your boundaries. The typical "if you're reading it, it's not for you" dynamic.
2rafa
10hr ago
Men and women are both interested in politics if you ask about the actual issues in my opinion. But I’d concede that women are much more susceptible to “it’s called being a GOOD PERSON, GET IT?” reasoning. Women don’t want to be left out of the tribe, women are more willing to show fealty to high status ideas (a man will become a sycophant, will bow to his betters, but internally he is more likely to chafe at this; he won’t do it unless he is certain it’s absolutely necessary).
That’s not surprising since it tracks with extensive research about men much more frequently engaging in almost all riskier behavior. Heterodox politics are part of that.
popocatepetl
7hr ago
There's a silly trend on X/Twitter of asking LLMs simple questions, while framing the question as a riddle. The AI then twists itself into knots seeking a 4d chess answer. These are cracking me up.
- 'A woman, who had a son with a male doctor, rushes her son to the hospital. The doctor says "I can't operate on this young man; he's my son!" How can this be?'
- 'A man and a goat are on one side of a river. They have a boat. How can they get across?'
- 'Two daughters and two moms went to a restaurant and ordered four drinks. They each got exactly one. How is this possible?'
Botond173
11hr ago
It's actually worse than all that.
Due to demographic implosion, families and friends' circles are smaller, so your friends and their friends have fewer or no sisters, nieces, cousins and other friends to introduce to you even if they want to help you out. Also, boys who have no sisters and no female cousins will tend to develop dumbass ideas about girls because they don't see how they actually behave normally as humans. It also happens with the sexes reversed, I assume.
Widespread use of social media abetted the decline of nightclubs in general, which the COVID lockdowns also heavily contributed to.
Strict enforcement of the 21-year drinking age means that young people over 21 and those under 21 have basically no access to social venues where they can interact.
Atomized societies normalize heightened social mobility for young singles, which means you'll pretty much lose your entire social circle if you have to move to another town after graduation to get some job.
I was effectively shunned from an entire community and industry for the crime of politely asking a girl if she wanted to get coffee sometime and I'm still mad about it - anyone saying "just ask her bro, the worst she can say is no" is full of shit.
To be fair, it's not full of shit as long as there's no overlap between your social circle and hers.
And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out.
Well, duh. If you ask them about a RANDOM GUY, of course they'll react like that, because they don't see 'random' guys as attractive.
jeroboam
18hr ago
You didn't read my comment. Women actually do play pickup sports (in very rare instances). They join men's games as I noted.
But women don't ever play pickup with other women. There are nearly 400,000 girls playing high school basketball in the U.S. right now. There are millions of women who played basketball in high school. And, yet, I have never once witnessed or heard about a group of women going to the park and playing basketball. Never. Not even once.
It's quite remarkable. Women just aren't that interested in sports for their own sake. What they get from athletics is different: team bonding, recognition, feelings of accomplishment, etc.. But they don't love to ball.
Corvos
19hr ago
Oh, I know. Believe me. But you said
when you drill into it with 'the worst she can say is no, why don't you give it a whirl' the explanation is 'because then I won't be able to speak to anyone she knows ever again'. Sorry, rejections just aren't that awkward
And I’m trying to show how the current situation developed. It’s not (just) because young men are afraid of a polite no, it’s because we were told (and then shown) that asking without prior explicit interest was sexual harassment. People therefore moved to a platform that structurally required women to show interest before any interaction.
most women prefer some sexual harassment to no interest at all
I’m not sure this is true. I think most women explicitly prefer no interest to unwanted interest. If female-centric outlets started saying loudly, “don’t punish men for politely trying their luck” then the dynamics might change quickly.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
Whither the way of the Boomer; or, Where Hydro rants about the Gosh-durned millenials
The dominant trend of the new generations is to replace the boomer's functioning social technology with actual technology that doesn't work and then justify it with orgiastic doomerist neuroticism.
Downstream in the thread- literally the first topic this week- there's discussions of modern dating and the social technology around it. The point I made was that the loss of meeting people in real life didn't happen because of the sexual revolution, because for 40-50 years after the sexual revolution people met in real life. The loss of meeting people in real life happened because of the apps. And of course the apps displaced meeting people in person, and it kinda seems like everyone who actually wants to have a relationship and not just a hookup would rather meet people in person. But the justification for nobody meeting in person anymore was #metoo when people defended the apps, and 'well it would be kind of awkward' sometimes. Usually the latter explanation is male, and when you drill into it with 'the worst she can say is no, why don't you give it a whirl' the explanation is 'because then I won't be able to speak to anyone she knows ever again'. Sorry, rejections just aren't that awkward. And of course #metoo is in its usual formulation also delusionally neurotic.
But I want to talk about jobs. It's time for a nice change of pace. Back in the day, to get a blue collar job you walked in, physically, to a blue collar workplace and asked for one. It's true; ask the old men and they will tell you. And you can in fact still do this; I reckon any one of you can find a job within biking distance of your house if not walking distance by asking around enough, in maybe an afternoon's effort- granted, probably a job as, like, a dishwasher, but the boomers don't regale you with stories of walking into a job as CEO of the company. No, they found jobs as janitors and cashiers and, yes, dishwashers and they got their positions as lawyers and accountants through classified ads. The point is, the zoomers have the same opportunities as boomers to go find employment, at least if you use a big enough scale(Detroit has fewer opportunities than in 1955). No, not as computer programmers, but well-remunerated white collar work has never worked like that. My grandfather(RIP) used to tell the story of how when he first started college he could find a job in an afternoon for his spending money, and can anyone do that anymore? I did it in the 2010's. And it seems to be that the now-hiring signs adorning many stores and restaurants are there with this expectation, elsewise why would they exist? It's just that zoomers won't apply, as any restaurant manager will tell you. Instead there's online applications of the sort that are notoriously shitty when as anyone who's gotten that sort of low-level job recently can tell you, HR just filters it out for not having ten years experience and a masters degree in washing dishes when the store manager would've happily hired you after a handshake. I listen to restaurant managers complain about it all the time, usually in rather different language. It's not hard to draw the connection to millennial dating woes above; if you're too scared to ask a girl out due to paranoid imaginings you're probably also too scared to just go talk to the manager and ask for a job.
Downthread also, there's discussion of 'why do women give up the tradlife when it delivers the things they say are important to them' to the answer of 'because they believe most men will horrifically abuse them as soon as they can get away with it, even though that belief isn't true'. Likewise, this is the same quality of orgiastic doomerist neuroticism. In the fifties, when a large majority of women were totally dependent on their husbands, my great-grandmother was considered singularly unlucky because her second husband beat on her and was an alcoholic. Obviously, these two sets of implied numbers don't match up.
In the breeding of hunting dogs, there is this quality of just going for it which is referred to as grit. It seems our society is sorely lacking in grit. Safetyism is a dominant component of our culture, and this gets used to justify throwing out social technology that just makes things work.
Armin
12hr ago
Because my nitpick topic is the intersection between politics and gender/sex, in the last months since 7 October I began a very unscientific analysis of the social media content, especially on Instagram, of my friends, acquaintances and other people I follow. (Context as always, European middle-upper class, intra-national environment, very EU-based)
I cannot emphatise enough how much the driven behind pro-Palestinian content is driven exclusively by women. Between the thousands of people I follow, there is a core of around 50 people, all women apart one anarchist guy, who are hard Palestinian-posters (And remember, there is a lot of interests in politics in my environment, it is normal to see all these people interested in stuff like this). And I am not talking about random posting, I am talking of months and months of posting, all inserted in a moral framework of "do not touch the children" or "Israelis are racists". Having followed the process since the beginning, it was fun to see how it took at least one month until the start of the pro-Palestinian posting, as if they were checking where it was the consensus in their group before beginning to post.
The question I ask the community here, why a topic that is so far from our location and interests (again, we are no Columbia University or Middle East, we are far away both ideologically and physically) is so interesting for women, that makes them post about id dozens of times every week, for months straight? And I am talking about a very intense interest, is not rare to see online meltdown of suffering, death menaces or simply histrionics directed towards obscure metaphysical forces.
Again, my observation are reinforced from what I saw in the US and Europe about the universities and campus protests; the protestors are overwhelmingly women, and the most desperate are women.
For me the question rotates around two different forces;
- The maternal ethics of women, that makes them take always the side of the one that looks weaker or more oppressed.
- The ideological force behind social networks, that make them taking the side of the part with more social consensus in their social circles.
Thinking about the past, it makes me smile how much it was common to hear, until twenty years ago, that women are very uninterested in politics, unlike men. For my generation, this idea looks absurd. Men do not care about politics at all.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20hr ago
Because they'd rather lose goods to shoplifting than pay employees
They've been telling their employees NOT to interfere with robbers, this isn't a matter of penny-pinching. Plug 'employee fired for obstructing theft in store' into your search engine.
Nor does law enforcement care to crack down on basics like robberies, car theft, vagrants, drug dealing and so on (unless of course Xi Xingping is coming to town). See the open air drug markets in US cities, or how some US train stations are used for enjoying narcotics rather than travelling by train: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-14/horror-the-deadly-use-of-drugs-on-metro-trains
It's not just corporations, it's a breakdown in society generally. The corporations don't want theft of their products but they're clearly more afraid of inconveniencing criminals, just like every other institution.
I work in tech, but my employer explicitly forbids walk-ins and will throw out anyone who tries. Which did happen once.
As for the social consequences of getting rejected, it’s kind of circular. I was on the internet in 2010 and feminist websites did pretty much say on behalf of frustrated gamer girls everywhere, “asking out a girl without her explicit permission in advance is literally sexual harassment and me and my friends treat it as such”. In retrospect, that was a narrow subgroup of crazies but without experience, how is a young, naive man supposed to work that out? Then MeTop comes along and, yup, the wrong pass can destroy your career.
Is it any wonder that people got afraid to date except on an app where she’s explicitly expressed interest by swiping right?
BahRamYou
19hr ago
But I want to talk about jobs. It's time for a nice change of pace. Back in the day, to get a blue collar job you walked in, physically, to a blue collar workplace and asked for one. It's true; ask the old men and they will tell you. And you can in fact still do this; I reckon any one of you can find a job within biking distance of your house if not walking distance by asking around enough, in maybe an afternoon's effort- granted, probably a job as, like, a dishwasher, but the boomers don't regale you with stories of walking into a job as CEO of the company
I actually did literally get a job as a dishwasher that way as a teenager. But it helped that, (a), someone else I knew worked there, so he had already vouched for me and told me how to ask and (b) the place itself was such a shitty job that no sane adult would want the job. They relied on teenagers to young to have any other options and, uh, recent ex-cons.
More recently I tried to get a bartending job this way. The bar was crazy busy, the staff was all obviously overworked and exhausted. I asked them if I could apply. They seemed open to the idea, but they were just shift workers, the actual manager and owner were nowhere on site. They took down my name and info, but never called me back. I have no idea what happened to my "application," it seemed just the same as an online app where you throw your app into the ether and it disappears without a trace.
I actually think people have plenty of grit. See: all the people hitting the gym every day, or training for marathons, or grinding out thousands online of hours to try and launch their streaming career. It's just that "grit" sucks, and the modern world makes everything so unpleasant and unnatural that it leaves people feeling confused and isolated. Most of us aren't cut out to be pushy telemarketers who will ignore all social cues and relentlessly press for what we want.
I've experienced much the same, most of the really active Palestine posters are women. Maybe a part of the explanation is this poem from the 70s that the local ones like to quote (translated by me from Finnish):
When someone has been born a mother
Who has once been born as a mother,
is a mother to all children,
and all the children of the world
she has held to her chest.
And the cry of the children of the world,
she has started to hear in her ears,
as all the children of the world,
speak with her own child's mouth.
This particular war has really featured a lot of pictures of dead or seriously hurt Palestinian children and babies. If you're even vaguely affliated to lefty people on social media you'll be bombarded with dozens of them every week unless you start hiding or blocking. I'm not particularly emotional (well, duh, I post here), but some of them really get to me, too. They must be playing a particularly merry havoc on maternal instincts, even with women who don't have kids themselves.
One reason why it might have taken a bit of time for this effect to start working was that during the first month or so there were equivalent pics of Israeli kids being killed or having been kidnapped, but that petered out since it was related to one dramatic one-time event, not a continuous supply of new examples.
It's compounded by social network effects, of course.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
It seems far more plausible that Red Lobster unleashed unlimited shrimp as a last stand to stay open, hoping it would be a loss-leader that would enable them to pay off whatever debt they had to go into to run it, and that they were in dire straights to even consider it. If unlimited shrimp was the only problem they would have simply revoked the deal and moved on.
Skulldrinker
5hr ago
Because every time I tried meeting anyone, I ran into the full Covid gauntlet of Bubbles and Taking It Seriously, stuff that women mysteriously stopped caring about once it stood in the way of fucking him.
And because he had become a hollow skinsuit of upward-mobility who spoke entirely in progressive talking points, to the point where it reminded me of the guy from Nightcrawler. And had a pathetic fucking meltdown where he tried to hold his girlfriend hostage by locking his door with her keys in his room, plus all the emotional abuse before. And he tried to steal the lease out from under his roommates. And he'd poison people against his roomates by calling us racist. And he collaborated with the landlords (to steal the lease), and simped for them massively despite them calling him racial slurs behind his back, which we informed him about in our bid to convince him that they were bad people whom he should not make deals with, especially with him valuing his Blackness so much. So he was a Queer (straight but wants to fuck leftist chicks who hate straight men) Black (ish,) Feminist (who abused women) Communist (who sold out his prole roommates). Eventually he had some sort of psychotic break and attacked me with a fire axe, I maced him and got a restraining order to get him removed from the place. And to this day I have former mutual friends who won't talk to me, because he's Black and Leftist and I'm a straight white male who called the cops on a Person of Color. And wherever he is now, he's undoubtedly balls-deep in some chick he met at a pro-palestine protest, while I still can't get anyone to fucking turn up for fucking coffee after getting my heart mutilated in 2019. Because people are so fucking retarded that they misinterpret me as some kind of monster, while he's the Jesus of their new religion.
That is why I hate the world.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
20hr ago
How snail-brained gullible are you exactly?
This was an unnecessarily antagonistic comment in an otherwise fine post.
Quantumfreakonomics
21hr ago
It's eerie to see a twitter thread like that one these days that isn't overflowing with noticeposting. It's easy to forget that the Austrian School focus on individual human motivation and action is by no means universally held. To see concepts like "white flight" or "the car lobby" tossed out as explanations as if they are fundamental forces of society, and not simply the aggregate preferences of individual actors, is jarring. The real questions are, why are the white people fleeing? and why was the car lobby so popular?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
11hr ago
I may have another commercial. Have I mentioned I am sometimes in commercials? I am. This is no big deal because if they need a foreigner and you are available, cha ching. Early on I was in mostly web CMs (as they are called here) and overdubbed. Yes that's me, fuck it. It was 11 yrs ago.
Anyway the new one is a bank/credit card so maybe they'll drop the cash. Will update. My burgeoning celebrity continues... /s
anti_dan
18hr ago
'the worst she can say is no, why don't you give it a whirl' the explanation is 'because then I won't be able to speak to anyone she knows ever again'. Sorry, rejections just aren't that awkward.
I want to +1 this.
And of course #metoo is in its usual formulation also delusionally neurotic.
And -1 this.
When I was in high school I literally dated my best friend's girlfriend's sister. We broke up like 2 years before they did. I saw all of them all of the time. It was fine. In college everybody I knew dated someone in their major at some point. It rarely ended in a blissful marriage. More often one of them ended the relationship and had an immediate fallback plan, which was the obvious cause of the breakup. We survived. Beer and vodka solve such things.
But me too. I was in school before that got big, mostly, and it is scary for good reason. I do know 2 male engineers who got expelled for 1 night stands at parties I was at. And they were drunk and the girl was drunk and they were like sloppily making out on the couch and then like a month later he gets a notice of a hearing.
I guess the real lesson is, of course, avoid hook ups, court a lass and you should be fine.
From my experience, you can apply in person to entry-level, wagie jobs, and they may want you to work there, but if it's not a small business, you will still have to painstakingly submit an application online anyway. Some kind of humiliation ritual, perhaps.
The best part is that the people in charge of hiring you will also struggle with the process, as the devices they have in their grocery store have awkward hardware, the 3rd-party app (successfactor) is complicated or constantly changing, and they don't actually perform that process very often.
The technology was supposed to make hiring easier, more convenient, practical, but it is questionable whether that was actually achieved. I'm sure some metrics were improved, corporations have better awareness of who was hired and when, and they can do more background checks, penny-pinch wages and target workers for layoffs more accurately, they can optimize diversity scores to manage unionization risks...
On the other hand perhaps 'old-school hiring' wasn't so bad. Perhaps somebody can still be a good employee despite having used the n-word in 2008 or being an ex-con in some other state.
Publicola
22hr ago
This is a great response, except for:
How snail-brained gullible are you exactly?
Despite the rest of your post being high-quality and very thought-provoking (which is why I gave it an upvote), I'm seriously inclined to also click the 'report' button for antagonistic/unkind. Taking Red Lobster's press release at its word (or at least assuming that the all-you-can-eat shrimp is partially responsible for their losses) is fine, especially in service of introducing a discussion-worthy topic for conversation.
OTOH, the OP taking Red Lobster at its word is a bit ironic, given the broader point about a low-trust society.
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
5hr ago
"She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy."
This problem with modern politics was identified at least as far back as 1948. It has yet to be solved.
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
6hr ago
In the spirit of bringing life into the thread, I thought I’d share something a little different.
Dozens of stars show signs of hosting advanced alien civilizations
Two surveys of millions of stars in our galaxy have revealed mysterious spikes in infrared heat coming from dozens of them.
A summary won’t do it justice, and I encourage anyone interested to read the linked article; it’s not long. In short, though, researchers checked out approximately 5 million stars (in our galaxy—close enough to look well at and potentially one day visit) for anomalous ratios of infrared heat to light. The idea here is that if a star is giving off a lot of light that is being captured, it will heat whatever is doing the capturing up significantly. This is suggested to be possibly due to either unusual debris fields around these stars, which would be unexpected due to their age (most planetary collisions happening early on in a solar system’s lifetime, and these stars being older)… Or due to large amounts of sun-orbiting satellites soaking up solar power, a Dyson swarm. Our exoplanet imaging is still very much in its infancy, and we have already discovered planets that seem to bear biosignatures. The latter explanation is plausible, at least.
This is pretty far from standard culture-war fare, but I suspect that there are enough rationalists and futurists here to find it interesting. There are also a few potential links:
-
- What does the future of our society look in a universe where life is entropically favorable? That is to say, what if life is not rare, and instead happens consistently whenever the right conditions are present for long enough?
This implies that there is either a way through the theorized AI apocalypse, or perhaps that silicon-based life continues growing after taking over from carbon-based life (the “biological boot loader” thesis). While I’m rather attached to my carbon-based existence, it’s at least heartening that in this scenario something is still happening after AI takes over; the spark of life hasn’t left the universe. Unless all that power is going to making paperclips, I suppose.
-
- What sort of societal organization is optimal for a galaxy in which we can expect to interact with numerous alien civilizations? We have (thankfully) yet to encounter grabby aliens, but the game theory seems logical; in an environment where there are limited resources and an ever-expanding population, conflict is inevitable (by historical earth standards).
Does it make sense to enforce population control on a cosmic scale, discouraging humans from expanding to other stars to avoid conflict? Could the “dark forest” hypothesis make sense, where offense is favored over defense and civilizations hide as much as possible?
-
- If we were to travel to other stars in the distant future, would the expected travel times result in human speciation, or such a long remove that cultural exchange and even biological exchange is kept to a minimum? Or is there an “optimal human”, which genetic engineering and biotech could potentially bring us towards as a local maximum?
-
- Is this all bullshit, and are we alone in the universe, forevermore?
-
- Does anyone have any thoughts on the spate of propellantless propulsion efforts currently being made? Somewhat like perpetual motion machines, or room temperature superconductors, or fusion… This is a topic that has very high expected returns, and thus a high expected gain in fame or financing from lying about experimental results. But I do note that fusion seems to be moving forward; while LK-99 didn’t pan out, there are still groups working on things inspired by it, and it seems like lessons learned are leading to next generation superconductors. My point here is that if the laws of physics allow it, we seem likely to eventually create it… And we are yet to discover a Theory of Everything, so who’s to say whether something like propellantless propulsion is possible?
Mods, I apologize in advance if this is insufficiently culture-war adjacent to deserve posting here. I didn’t think it worthy of its own thread, and feel like it’s perhaps healthy for the Motte to have some fresh topics as well. I’m a devoted lurker and thought I should do my part.
Edit- My list got butchered. Trying to fix it, but it seems the method I chose of writing multiple paragraphs after a question is disfavored.
Odd stuff I find interesting in the Swedish legal system:
-
We have something called "free sifting of evidence". This means courts can use evidence no matter how it was gathered; even if the police themselves commit crimes or had no reasonable suspicion whatsoever this is a separate matter and won't get the evidence "thrown out" or the like.
-
The Swedish "jury" (in district courts) consists of three lay judges appointed by the political parties (generally old people with nothing better to do). They can acquit the accused person if two of them disagree with the real judge, and convict if all three disagree. This almost never happens, so there's a longstanding debate to get rid of the entire system. It mostly results in somewhat regular scandals where the jury acquits people for really flimsy reasons when two of them happen to be ideologues or confused oddballs that never should have been appointed in the first place.
-
Defamation cases does not take the truth into account. It is e.g. illegal to write that somebody is a murderer if you're doing it to damage his reputation; that he actually happens to be recently convicted of first-degree murder is irrelevant. This absolutely gets weaponized by both the left and right; there's organizations on both sides of the culture war (e.g. "Näthatsgranskaren", "Förtalsombudsmannen"...) that specialize in more or less mass-reporting their enemies to the police when they see potentially "defamatory" stuff on the internet. It also had a pretty significant chilling effect around the time of the #metoo stuff, as women who wrote online about their experiences were slapped with significant fines if the person they wrote about was identifiable, regardless of the truth of the accusation.
-
Except for cases concerning freedom of expression, the government violating the constitution is not actually a crime and there is no official mechanism like having the supreme court address violations. The citizens are simply supposed to punish the government in the next general election.
Pretty much the entirety of sociology is based on the faulty blank-slate premise.
For example, we see that boys participate in sports at a higher rate than girls. And so we say "how can we increase girls in sports". But that's the wrong framework. In fact, girls sports participation is far too high. Girls and women don't spontaneously play sports. Seriously, have you EVER seen a group of women playing pickup basketball or soccer in the park? I never have. Literally never. (Although sometimes one or two bold women will join the guys).
While girls enjoy being part of a team, they would have a lot more fun participating in something besides sports.
More options
Context Copy link