domain:youtube.com
faceh
1m ago
Right, which is to say that it seems like we're really just borrowing all the factors that put duties/obligations on the male side, whilst systematically dismantling the expectations on the women's side.
Or am I wrong that there was some system in place to confirm virginity on the wedding night during that time? I might be wrong.
Tree
4m ago
Everyone’s entitled to their preferences and requirements (abs, height, penis, tits, age, religion, veganness etc), no matter how high, unrealistic or weird they are, but somehow I dislike this cash requirement the most.
Maybe it’s because I’m lazy. Or because feminism has always presented the heavy burden of providing as a male privilege. Or because it seems materialistic and exposes the harshness of the transaction. If a funny guy is with a beautiful girl, in a way he’s exchanged his jokes for her tits. But I find this far more pleasant and acceptable than if he had used actual dollars (if he’s a successful comedian and she doesn’t find him funny). I don’t condemn it morally, I don’t condemn prostitution either, but there’s something distasteful about it I can’t quite explain.
Maybe it’s just the old nagging desire to be loved for yourself alone, unconditionally and forever, which no lover has ever achieved. If she loves you because you're tall, you can't test her love by losing a few inches, and her love is somewhat secure. Otoh you can test or lose her cash-based love by abandoning or losing your job. So that kind of love never feels secure, it's more a sword of Damocles hanging over you. In the neighborhood where I grew up, two fathers who lost their jobs killed themselves.
kky
7m ago
Small note on persuasion. You’ve presented a single anecdote in support of your point - actually fine, to be honest, concrete examples illustrate broader trends powerfully. But you didn’t deliver the goods! What was his life in that family like, at what ages? Ditto the schools? (I’m not sure what it’s like where you are, but where I am the private schools often are for the children of the wealthy who are FAILING in public schools, rather than being too good for them.) Did he have any connections back to the hood?
Then following up: how has he tormented his family? How did they react? How has this relationship developed over what I understand to be the decade of his childhood, and where is it going now?
The lack of detail means that other people paint their own stories on your blank canvas. People who agree with you will of course say: the parents did all they could, he was just a little hellion… but those who don’t will see a tribe of racist middle Americans trying to shoulder the White Man’s Burden and reacting with hostility when a traumatized and isolated little boy does not show proper servility in front of Massa. If you want to convince them (and this forum is about that, no?) you need to bring the goods, without prejudice (i.e. you should not bring your holistic judgment of the individual into your analysis of all isolated events, ESPECIALLY early ones), building up your case slowly and inexorably. Otherwise, the best you’re getting is scaring people off with your obvious if vague malice.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11m ago
Whelp that's enough of TheMotte for me today.
Do you have an actual argument against his position? Or did it just make you feel icky?
I disagree with a great many of @WhiningCoil’s takes, and with the often bilious way he expresses them, but in this case his metaphor strikes me as a fairly reasonable (and certainly within the bounds of discussion) extension of the metaphor you yourself supplied.
FtSoA
13m ago
Unsustainable budget deficits, endlessly accumulating debt, a very serious political situation, where one party is huffing glue and the other is full of not very competent people now ? It doesn't look good.
Oh I agree. But by comparison, at least, the US hasn't gone off the deep end entirely and I pray e.g. the UK's insanity will help us avoid the same fate.
Without getting into a whole thing on Ukraine vs. Russia and also caveating that the US should not be the primary supporter (Europe should), your overall argument is hilarious to me in that Ukraine has been taking on Russia quite successfully for years now with far lower levels of materiel support than we/Europe could have given them. And one technique is simply having the Europeans give their existing hardware to the Ukrainians ASAP. Gotta prime the defense industrial complex pump.
US forgot to develop an industry capable of either innovating and mass producing useful weapons.
Well the defense tech fellas are trying to fix that.
Honestly, if you squint your eyes a little, once Russians win in Ukraine, them taking over the Baltics becomes a possibility.
At present rates of military progress how long do ya reckon that's gonna take? I agree that Putin would love to reassert the ~level of regional control the USSR once had over its neighbors, but boy is that not going well.
I just don't understand how you take the stance this far on that Russia is clearly going to "win" in the sense of a total Ukrainian defeat.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-battlefield-woes-ukraine
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
24m ago
Rather like the joke regarding the expanding acronym that no one has less in common than gays and asexuals, no one should think a tradition that opposes hedonism and considers all pleasure to be a distraction would approve of gays.
That said, I can easily see how one would conclude that American Buddhism, such as it is, has had very little to say about interpersonal pleasure and much more about, say, animal welfare.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
28m ago
But these hidebound traditional cultures have mostly not survived. And not so much because of rebellion by the youth, but in many cases because the parents WANTED their sons (and later daughters) to escape and sent them off to college. I can't even conceive of such a culture in today's world without it being an unfit anachronism.
Every time I hear it, all I can think is, why in the world would anyone think that young men are going to continue listening to this, taking it seriously, and accepting its authority?
Same reason they accepted the authority of the patriarch in patriarchal cultures. Because they have no choice. Actually, they did have ONE other choice in patriarchal culture -- they could leave the culture, go it alone or perhaps form groups of other disaffected young men. This was known as being an outlaw, and it rarely turned out well. You can't actually escape the culture by doing that in modernity.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
29m ago
There are tiers to this, from just weights release to full data+code+weights. Chinese labs mostly release weights and tech report with a reproducible (given some effort) recipe, sometimes code, rarely some or all of the data (more often parts of post-training data, though in these cases it's typically just links to datasets that have already been open).
I think nitpicking about open source is uninteresting when the recipe is available. This is a very dynamic field of applied science, rather than labor-intensive programming exercise. The volume of novel code in a given LLM project is comparable to a modest Emacs package, what matters is ideas (derisked at scale). Specific implementations are usually not that valuable – DeepSeek's GRPO, as described in their papers, has been improved upon in the open multiple times by this point. Data composition is dependent on your own needs and interests, there are vast open datasets, just filter them as you see fit.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
31m ago
young ghetto boy ... virulent invasive species that will leave the land barren.
Whelp that's enough of TheMotte for me today.
Anyway, my bigger concern in the US is actually having a healthcare crisis with my child and becoming destitute, especially since I've worked diligently to create a life of relative comfort compared to my very blue collar ancestors.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
36m ago
Some thoughts that immediately jump to my mind on this subject:
- The euphemistic treadmill, which is more of a linguistic phenomenon than a "woke liberal" phenomenon. There is a progression that occurs where words are first used academically and scientifically, then colloquially, and then in a vulgar way. Examples being retarded or hysteria. The role of pseudoscience here is also richly ironic from a culture war perspective as well. IMO this aspect of linguistics is inherent to human nature, and opposition to it is not well-founded in reason. Just accept that words change meanings in a highly predictable way, please.
- The leaking of academic or "non-profit" language into colloquial discourse, especially in cases where it disambiguates nuanced concepts within that domain. One example is "unhoused" vs. "homeless", which actually do have utility in terms of what they're precisely trying to describe, but do not have much utility on the 24-hour news cable network.
- When words become "purity" memes in academic subcultures: the word Latinx polls very poorly outside of very specific niches. But, if all of your colleagues are using the word Latinx, and you are not, despite the fact that you don't necessarily agree with it, your paper will not get published. But every subculture has its own "purity" memes, and a lot of them are incredibly cringe-inducing. That's what keeps me coming back!
All of these are great cannon fodder to get the red tribe of the culture war fired up, but I personally think they're pretty weak in terms of showing actual flaws in blue tribe principles. There are plenty real flaws in blue tribe principles that these don't really make me lose any sleep.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
42m ago
I think one of the really frustrating aspects of these conversations in the broader public sphere, particularly when strong progressive voices are present, is that so often this conversation devolves into a litany of scolding for young men, while young women are treated as victims, and at the same time, caricatures of traditional societies are still held up as the thing to be avoided. Which is to say, there is an insistence on both a kind of rights based liberal individualism as well as somewhat incompatible oppressor-oppressed dynamics for the male and female classes. It seems like a total dead end.
But (and I guess I'm going to get all Patrick Deneen "Why Liberalism Failed" here) insisting conversations get crammed into these dynamics does a grave disservice to the actual reality of why traditional societies actually worked, and why they worked the way they did. I grew up in a much more traditional religious subculture, and there was an overwhelming sense that people, from birth, were heavily invested in by the broader culture around them (especially by their own parents), and in some sense, they were acting as extreme free riders. And the way that these free riders transitioned from being takers to makers was to settle down, choose an appropriate mate, begin creating families, and pay forward all the ways they had been invested in by the strong, valuable culture that they had had the good fortune to be born into. And in that world, there was an overwhelming sense that young men AND young women who didn't make the transition were not really adults or people of esteem or worth in the community. They were damaging the loving people who had invested so much in them. There was severe cultural pressure for both young men and young women to fulfill that duty. And of course, there absolutely were gender roles that focused on high, distinct standards for both young men and young women, with a notion of complementarity to roles that, one assumed, were supposed to align favorably with existing biological differences between men and women, bolstered external pro-social needs, and help grease the wheels of those interactions, helping men and women find each other valuable and distinct... But in an important way, the specifics of the gender roles were less significant than the broader framework of the role of individuals in relationship to the larger community that had nurtured them.
And obviously, that kind of world can feel restricting. But it can also feel entirely sensible and worth investing in to all parties involved, because that fundamental relationship, between the individual invested in and that broader community that nurtured them, was something worth investing in. And there was absolutely a virtuous feedback loop, too - it might be restrictive to live up to hard pro-social ideals, but you get the benefit (ideally) of other people, especially mates, living up to hard, pro-social ideals too.
This is the framework I can't help but see and compare to when I look at the "young men need to be scolded, young women are always victims" public discourse, because at a basic human level, it just seems so totally anti-human and disconnected from reality. It has a strong "the beatings will continue until morale improves" vibe. Every time I hear it, all I can think is, why in the world would anyone think that young men are going to continue listening to this, taking it seriously, and accepting its authority? And indeed, I think my internal sense of that, for the last decade, is proving more and more well-calibrated.
I totally understand (neverminding questions of faith or metaphysics) how those more traditional societies are suppose to work, just in game theory terms. It's like joining the marines - you have to live up to hard, pro-social standards, and maybe that sucks, but then you get the benefit of being around other high trust individuals who also live up to hard, pro-social standards.
But I can't understand, at all, or figure out what's in it for young men to tolerate the current general public progressive world of atomized individual liberal oriented around rights and liberation (with a strong denial of basic cause and effect) plus oppressor-oppressed dynamics with young men as the enteral oppressor.
And as should be totally obvious from how I'm writing, my sympathies have very much drawn back to those older forms of cultural organization that I was raised in, despite my leaving it in my early young adulthood. I think I, and a lot of people like me, threw a lot of babies out with the bathwater.
hydroacetylene
44m ago
Bridesprices are Lindy(as is borrowing from Shylock to afford it), though, and most urban European women from the high Middle Ages until the first sexual revolution married in their twenties- post conventional college age.
It’s true that those women were generally not spending their time getting certificates in literacy, but in broad strokes it’s nothing unusual.
TIRM
50m ago
There is another possible framing: many women should reevaluate their standards. The bottom 50% ugly, mean and poor women can settle for someone on their level or choose no one at all.
Like a very poor person saying they would like a car, but insisting on only a brand new Range Rover. They should instead consider options that are attainable given their circumstances.
Goodguy
51m ago
I think that most men who are in about the top 80% of male attractiveness could find a girlfriend or wife if sufficiently motivated, even without changing their income or physical appearance. I agree with @2rafa. Much of this is about motivation. Many guys are just content to do things other than seeking out women. Also, some men are holding out for the most desirable women instead of being willing to lower their standards. I think a third factor is that women are no longer as much expected socially as they probably were in the past to have the kind of men-pleasing, friendly, docile personalities that a large fraction of men find sexually desirable, which explains part of men's motivation problem. The more fun and personable that a man finds the average woman, the more motivated he will feel to go out and interact with women, as opposed to sitting at home. I'm sure that this goes both ways, and many women find themselves far from impressed with the average man's personality.
WhiningCoil
51m ago
So, I know a couple that tried to do a good thing. They adopted a young ghetto boy as an infant, removed him from all the bad influences that afflicted his community, and raised him in a middle-upper class environment with the best private schools, institutions and cultural guidance western civilization could provide.
The boy has terrorized that poor family for over a decade now with no signs of relenting. If this were a nature versus nurture debate, nurture is in a fetal position, ribs kicked in, begging for death as nature relentless curb stomps her.
It's all well and good to want to plant seeds, and failing to plant your own, nurture what you can find. Just make sure you aren't nurturing some virulent invasive species that will leave the land barren.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
56m ago
There is no true free market. Give me a market, and I will provide a counterexample to how free it is.
But there is truth behind "All is fair in love and war": I would agree with primax3 that dating is one of the free-est of markets, which may also be why there's so much complaining about it.
hydroacetylene
57m ago
A repeat of the second Congo war in Nigeria seems likely to send refugee waves towards Europe, this is true(although North African countries are very willing to just butcher transmigration from sub Saharan countries in the Sahara, if Europe tells them to just stop it in exchange for aid while being nonspecific about the how).
I think a flare up in central/Southern Africa would send refugees towards the much more stable and prosperous southern African countries they already migrate to illegally(SA, Botswana, etc). And an Egypt-Ethiopia water war is unlikely to send refugees fleeing through the conflict zone.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
57m ago
Yeah, gardening leave is legal, but again in the UK you can argue that the gardening leave is preventing you from exercising your skills and keeping them up to date, but this is a more complex argument that doesn't just insta win the first time a judge takes a look at the case like challenging a 2 year non-compete would and so you as the employee need to spend more and go through a lot of hassle, just to avoid a period of time where you're being paid for doing nothing... Naturally very few people challenge gardening leave and most prefer to just wait it out and work on personal projects in the meanwhile.
The company gets to protect its IP, the employee gets a long very well paid holiday and both are happy, but that doesn't mean the provision itself is legally watertight.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
1hr ago
Briefly on procreation, the population crisis, homelessness, and foster care:
I'd like to have children for pro-social reasons. I believe that failing to give back to the world when it has given so much to you is somewhat of a metaphysical thievery. My position isn't that everyone needs to have children, but I have contempt for old men who fail to plant trees whose shade they won't enjoy, especially when they have plenty of land and seeds. It's a narcissistic and hedonistic rot.
I'll focus on the word have, though, because my partner and I are not particularly well-positioned to have biological children. I feel that the base urges we have to literally procreate are just that - base urges. I am not Genghis Khan. There are 7 billion people on Earth, and cosmically my specific genetics are not even a footnote within a footnote in the story of humans. My siblings and cousins have me covered anyway when it comes to the genetic progeny of our bloodline, anyway. While the concept of creating something so awesome from almost nothing is romantic, it strikes me a bit as a novelty when put into a modern global context.
The factoid that I always try to bring up concerning homelessness in the US is that, depending on the source you cite, between ~30% and 50% of every homeless adult spent time in the foster care system. Like many social programs, the issues lie with the "cliff": when foster children turn 18 they age out of the system overnight. In 2025, it's a near impossibility to support oneself at age 18 entirely independently, especially if you're struggling to graduate high school or obtain a GED. To be a bit cliche, 22 is the new 18 (and 26 is the new 22, according to health insurers). It seems like, if you were to try to provide better than the "median" fostering experience, you would go a long way by simply supporting the foster child to age 22 instead of age 18.
To connect the dots, adoption and / or fostering seems to be a great way for this old man to plant trees, especially if biological children are completely ruled out. There is undeniably a population crisis and replacement rate is an issue, but from a (gross?) utilitarian perspective the population crisis is about productive members of society. Adopting and / or fostering well kills two birds with one stone: it reduces the population that is at-risk for homelessness, and creates more productive members of society.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Far from being stable, this society regularly engaged in revolutions and warfare.
Sure, if you game the metrics you can prove whatever you want. All these wars made less of a dent than what's happening with the birth rates.
Goodguy
1hr ago
Let's take one popular example of a society that practiced a more old-school approach to dating: Europe up until about 100 years ago. Far from being stable, this society regularly engaged in revolutions and warfare. If you plotted every battle location from the years 1000-1918 on a map of Europe, it would be so covered you'd hardly be able to see any other geographical features. There were numerous peasant revolts, usually brutally suppressed. There were massive wars like the Thirty Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, and WWI. There were bloody revolutions like the French Revolution. There were assassinations, feuds, political plots. Personal crime wasn't low, either. It's hard to estimate the homicide rate from hundreds of years ago, but it was high enough that most people seemed to be fine with using brutal public executions to address it. It wasn't a politically stable society, either. This was the society that invented liberalism, communism, and the modern concept of women's rights to begin with.
Of course technological changes account for much of this. My point is that what to me is the most obvious example of the kind of society you're talking about was, in fact, not actually stable.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
People normally engage with the world using preconstructed schemata, so once a set of expectations is in place, everyone's pleasure or disappointment in you gets measured in terms of those expectations.
I don't know what to tell you except for: not they don't. Like, where did you get this idea? The world you describe is completely alien to me anecdotally, and if you push me I could probably even justify it academically. As far as I can tell people like to engage in some of the old Noticing, but the moment your break a pattern in a visible way, they reassess you individually. I'd sooner believe in actual misogyny-driven patriarchy, than I would in a bespoke expectations-driven "implicit bias" system.
Even what you say about the cat sounds deranged to me. I aged out of caring about it, but a pet like this would be... well, I think the kids these days would call it "a cure for the male loneliness epidemic".
TheDemonRazgriz
1hr ago
I disagree quite strongly with this, I think it represents a failure of imagination on your part. Yes, that war was brutal, involved many players, and had a lot of civilian casualties (especially if you include deaths from famine and disease). But it was frankly not that large of a war. Over the entire conflict only a few hundred thousand combatants, at most, were involved across both sides (Wikipedia actually estimates it as less than 100,000 total). Most combat was in the form of skirmishes; daring but small-scale raids; guerilla actions; and cyclical series of atrocities against civilians, reprisals for the atrocities, reprisals for those reprisals, and so on. You have to consider the possibility of much more industrialized warfare between countries with much larger populations with the ability to raise much larger armies. Consider the possibility of a “water war” between not just Sudanese rebel groups and Ethiopia, but between the Ethiopian and Egyptian armies. Or a war involving the likes of Kenya, or Nigeria. These aren’t realistic possibilities in the short term, it’s true, but after another 10 or 20 or 30 years of population growth and industrialization, maybe throw in some unexpected coups or stronger dictatorships… the worst case scenario is much, much worse than the Second Congo War.
And, perhaps more importantly from a Western perspective, the modal “poor African civilian” has a lot more options for migration— and, crucially, awareness of those options— today than at the time of that war. Not to mention the sheer explosion of population. Even another war of the same scale as the Second Congo War would likely trigger a much larger wave of migration to the West today than it did at the time, never mind a war with armies (and often civilian populations) an order of magnitude larger.
Note that these newly massive populations are also youth-heavy, which means a lot of disaffected fighting-age men. Sure, a lot of the time this just leads to civil war, but all it takes is one charismatic dictator to direct that energy into outward aggression and you could have yourself a good old-fashioned war of conquest. Get two of these situations going at once and you could have a catastrophe. A lot has changed in Africa from 2000 to 2025, and a lot is going to change from 2025 to 2050.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1hr ago
I hate cutting weight. My lifts (never impressive to start with, but acceptable) have gone to crap and I feel tired all the time.
215-220 lbs (at 6'2") overall felt great. My lifts were decent, I still had abdominal definition, and running 2-3 times per week (where my long run was probably 6-8 miles) felt pretty good. Some health numbers were trending in a way I didn't like, though, so I signed up for some trail races and have been working on getting my weight down.
I'm now around 195. My health numbers have shot back down to what they were a few years ago, my running distances are up, and I have way more definition, but as I said, my lifts are now terrible and I'm tired all the time. I'm still 3 months from the first race and having another 5-10 pounds gone would make a marathon much easier, but I'm already wishing I could go back to being heavier.
Bit of an odd way of phrasing it, considering I just wrote a post a few days ago where I said "we need to look at structural factors for the downturn in dating and not just individual factors".
So why, in spite of that, do you perhaps perceive that I still put a strong emphasis on individual factors?
One of my biggest pet peeves is whining. I can't stand whining. I'm empathetic to a great many things, I pride myself on my ability to consider things from other people's perspectives in fact, but even then, my sympathy has limits. And one of the fastest ways to make me lose sympathy for your cause is for you to start whining about it. We've all got a sob story, and rare is the stranger who will care about yours.
There's a very fine line between whining, and suffering just the right amount of righteous indignation so that you're actually motivated to go out and do something about what's bothering you. A very fine line indeed. It's a tough line to navigate, it requires judgement. We would never be motivated to change anything at all if we didn't suffer some sort of emotional wound. And "doing something" may, indeed, involve enlisting other people to our cause. But you have to thread the needle where you manage to do all that without being a bitch about it.
I'm not criticizing lonely men from the outside. I'm on the inside with all of you! I have a long history of being spectacularly unsuccessful with women. Like, actually embarrassing shit that I still cringe about when I remember years later. I'm a weirdo autist, I can't hold a normal conversation with a normal human. Women, predictably, find these traits repellent. So I know what it's like to suffer.
But I don't just go bitch and moan in the corner about how the world's unfair and how people should like me more and how we need "communism for pussy" as @HughCaulk so eloquently put it. What I do instead is I look in the mirror and say, "I'm a weirdo autist. That's not going to change. That's what we have to work with. So it's time to figure out how to make the best of that, rather than getting all mopey about it."
You are, apparently, suffering from some financial troubles. I'm genuinely sorry to hear that. But there are lots of poor people who fuck, y'know? There are poor people fucking right now, as we speak. There are even poor people in committed long term relationships. You could be one of them. What's stopping you?
It always comes back to your attitude, y'know? Forget about the structural and the individual and the historical and the metapsychological and whatever the fuck else it is. Think about your attitude first. Are you happy with your attitude, or are you being a bitch? Start there.
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