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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

Player-Driven Emergence in LLM-Driven Game Narrative (and accompanying discussion on HN):

We explore how interaction with large language models (LLMs) can give rise to emergent behaviors, empowering players to participate in the evolution of game narratives. Our testbed is a text-adventure game in which players attempt to solve a mystery under a fixed narrative premise, but can freely interact with non-player characters generated by GPT-4, a large language model. We recruit 28 gamers to play the game and use GPT-4 to automatically convert the game logs into a node-graph representing the narrative in the player's gameplay. We find that through their interactions with the non-deterministic behavior of the LLM, players are able to discover interesting new emergent nodes that were not a part of the original narrative but have potential for being fun and engaging. Players that created the most emergent nodes tended to be those that often enjoy games that facilitate discovery, exploration and experimentation.

Recently there’s been increasing interest in the integration of LLMs and video games. With currently available models, creating an entire living virtual world with an unlimited number of realistic side quests, characters, and interactions is now a “mere” engineering challenge. No more pre-scripted dialogue trees; instead you can simply converse with NPCs in natural language with no limitations (or at least that’s the promise, as models become increasingly efficient).

This is another step towards what appears to be the natural endpoint of the technological development of video games: the recreation of life in replica, a replica at one’s mercy, an infinite horizon of choice without responsibility or constraint.

For a long time I thought that video games were the necessary next step in a development that could be described as “spiritual”. Games are largely an amalgamation of prior media - literature, painting, music, film - but they do introduce a new element (or at least they develop this element to previously undreamed of heights), and that is the element of interactivity, i.e. the ability to make a choice, to participate as the player in the creation of the art and to make the art be something other than what it would have been in your absence. I conceived of interactivity as the raw material out of which a new aesthetic language would be fashioned which would bring us closer to realizing the promise of art. But I have since begun to grow uneasy with this way of thinking.

In some sense I was too seduced by the possibility of finding something “new”, anything new, to detect the longstanding inconsistencies in my own thought. From a young age I always preferred linear, narrative-driven games as opposed to open world sandboxes. My favorite games were games that were devoid of choice, games that robbed you of the ability to make a choice. I found the idea of multiple endings for a story to be distasteful. Yes, you can choose to save this character or not, you can choose to join the bad guys or not - but now that we’ve had our fun imagining all the what-if scenarios, can you tell me what really happened? Do you have the courage to tell me? Do you have the strength of vision to see the truth, the singular truth?

Choice is antithetical to the aesthetic sacrifice. The artist sacrifices all alternate possibilities to distinguish one thing and one thing alone, to say - this one, and no others! No matter how lowly a thing it is - a dirtied article of clothing (as in Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes), a completely ordinary sequence of events on a day in Dublin in the year 1904 (as in Joyce’s Ulysses) - he is now stuck with it. This is where he signs his name and stakes his wager, for better or worse. It is this seemingly inexplicable devotion to one law, one vision, one truth, that makes possible any kind of experience that may be called aesthetic. An artist who hedges his bets and does not accept the risk that accompanies his act inspires no confidence in us.

The receiver of the message too enters into a sacrifice, insofar as the message may be incomprehensible or even dangerous to him. In this way an oath is forged between artist and audience. The failure to foreclose the horizon of possibility is the deferral of the signing of the bond.

Is there any great work that would be improved by the addition of choice, by the addition of alternate possibilities? Would Plato’s account of the trial and death of Socrates be better if there were a possibility of Socrates simply... not dying? If Callicles’s warning to Socrates, that his devotion to the “effeminate” subject of philosophy would be his downfall, might not come to pass? If Socrates might be able to eloquently defend himself at trial and avoid conviction? If he might escape from prison before his execution?

The deferral of the inevitable here would be nothing more than the refusal to establish the founding myth of philosophy, the myth that links philosophy with the sign of death. The internal law of Plato’s drama is clear (and the law of historical fidelity is irrelevant): Socrates must die. This is not to say that one is forbidden from creating new works in which new possibilities are imagined. Only that the unity of the original work should remain undisturbed in its repose.

Or you can just like, have fun with GTA6 when it integrates LLM-generated missions, I guess. Whatever.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

I've asked my gf about this.

  1. 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.

  2. She claimed that many women who responded with "bear" were victims of violent rape who literally would rather die than be raped.

  3. 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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

I have a somewhat alternate theory to the standard HBD concept, one that may not be original but I haven't seen before, although I haven't delved the HBD forums much.

The standard HBD argument is that different races have different IQs, and that is the primary factor leads to all sorts of different outcomes. Instead of IQ causing so many differences, which I think might be true but is a lesser factor, I think different races are domesticated to different degrees. I read the book The Goodness Paradox about a year ago, and it was about how while humans kill each other in vastly larger scales than any other animal, we're also much less likely to try to tear each other's faces off in the woods than any other animal. The author first divides violence into two categories: reactive and pre-mediated. Sometimes violence is pre-planned and calculated, like a sniper watching carefully for the moment to take the shot. Other violence is reactive, like someone punches you or even just insults your mother and you hit back before you even think. The author presents a simple answer: That there is a relatively straightforward evolutionary process through which animals are domesticated, and domestication leads to much lower rates of reactive violence. The mechanism is that the animal is essentially forever childlike mentally. But not just mentally, also physically; that's why dogs look like wolf cubs, and domesticated foxes have converged on similar traits like floppy ears.

I think black people are similar, in that they are a more "adult" human. They tend to be physically bigger and stronger. I often see black women called masculine, and that is the explanation for why they're less attractive and do worse on dating apps- but I think it makes more sense to call them more adult(whatever the opposite of neotony is). Black women are well known for large secondary sexual characterics like big ass and breasts, that's hardly masculine. And east Asian women by contrast, a race widely considered more on the high end of genetics by HBDers, tend to be more neotonous, with smaller secondary characteristics and young looking faces. And their men tend to be smaller and less physically strong. So I think it's quite plausible that that domestication mechanism, while probably not the sole factor, is a sizeable one in making black people have such higher rates of crime and east asians such lower rates of crime.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

I just got around to reading last month's post about Noticing the increase in interracial relationships we're seeing on screen. @George_E_Hale was mercilessly piled on for supposedly feigning ignorance, innocently asking "what's the big deal?", and claiming that the white woman and black man pairing is not a new phenomenon. Given that I'm also in the camp of "what's the big deal" and "yes, there has obviously been an increase in such representation, but I'm not sure it's as dramatic as painted by most users", I thought I'd investigate all this is a bit more.

First, I looked at the most popular romance/romantic comedy flicks from last year. Disclaimer: I have only seen one of these (Past Lives), the list was compiled from various "best romance movies of 2023" articles, these are only films produced by Hollywood, and I determined the races of the on-screen couples by consulting the movie poster and/or a written summary. Therefore, it's very possible I missed a subplot in a movie that contained further interracial or interracial relationships, and because the list may be not a representative sample, I may be over-or under-counting the number of interracial relationships. Anyway, the list:

  • Shotgun Wedding - Jennifer Lopez and white guy.
  • One True Loves - Mixed race Asian-American (Chinese father & white mother) was married to a white guy who was presumed dead after a helicopter crash. Some years later, she becomes enagaged to Asian-American hunk Simu Liu only to find out that her husband is still alive. She ends picking the hunky Asian.
  • Love Again - Indian woman who happens to be Nick Jonas' wife and white guy.
  • Past Lives - Asian woman and white guy, but there is another Asian man in the picture who she might be in love with. Ends up staying with the white guy in the end. I'm not doing justice to a really great movie.
  • The Perfect Find - Black woman and black man.
  • Happiness for Beginners - White woman and white man.
  • Red, White & Royal Blue - Ethnically ambiguous gay man and white gay man.
  • Love in Taipei - Asian woman and Asian man.
  • Bottoms - Diverse group of lesbians and Marshawn Lynch.
  • Love at First Sight - White woman and white man.
  • What Happens Later - White woman and white man.
  • Anyone But You - White woman and white man.
  • Shortcomings - Asian woman and Asian man.
  • Rye Lane - Black woman and black man.
  • Your Place or Mine - White woman and white man, might contain a subplot featuring black man.
  • Prom Pact - Mixed Asian-American and white man.
  • Beautiful Disaster - White woman and white man.
  • Ghosted - Ana de Armas and Chris Evans.
  • A Tourist's Guide to Love - White woman and Asian man.
  • You Hurt My Feelings - White woman and white man.
  • The List - White woman and Hispanic man wherein the Hispanic dude sleeps with someone on a "free pass list" and then the white woman cucks him by sleeping with a white guy, I think? Having trouble figuring out the plot for this one.
  • After Everything - White woman and white man.
  • The Other Zoey - White woman and white man.
  • Somebody I Used to Know - Alison Brie and black man.
  • No Hard Feelings - Jennifer Lawrence with white man (kid).
  • Challengers - Zendaya has sex with two white guys.

TV shows would take too long to go through, but just eye-balling the posters on Rotten Tomatoes, I don't see any immediately obvious black man and white woman pairings, though I do see a several white man/non-white woman.

I am aware that most of the complaints are about an increased in interracial relationships in advertising. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any research that quantifies this increase. There is one story from 2021 that quotes a professor who says "70% of interracial commercials from the past four years show a white man with a Black woman", which is the inverse of this pairing in real life. If true, this wouldn't be surprising: WM/BW is less controversial than BM/WM. As I was looking into this, I was reminded of that rather infamous Cheerios commercial featuring a white mom and a black dad. Turns out the original intent was not to make the family multiracial:

This wasn’t storyboarded as a multiracial family,” said Doug Martin, chief brand officer for General Mills and in 2013 associate director of Cheerios brand marketing. “With kids, the most important thing is getting the right actor, and this girl (Colbert) just blew everyone away, so we chose the kid first. With kids, sometimes you get a kid that’s one way off camera and on camera you get something totally different, so getting the right kid is key. And Gracie, she’s biracial, so then we went about casting adult actors that would be a match for her."

Also turns out that her parents mirror the races for the mom and dad in the commercial.

Finally, a note on the left's "desire, intent and efforts to reduce and ideally ultimately eliminate white ethnicities". It seems to me that if anyone should be concerned about their racial group "disappearing", it should be black Americans given their numerical disadvantage. If the black-white interracial marriage rate were to significantly increase, we would see a corresponding decrease in people who look "black", even by American standards. The best recent example I can think of Isaiah Hartenstein. No one would ever mistake him as anything other than white, just like no one would would ever mistake his father as anything other than black. Black Americans already have an average of 20% European admixture, so generationally, it wouldn't even take that long. Is this the answer to all our racial woes?

All this makes me wonder if the conversation we're having here is being played out on other forums except it's black women discussing how they're often cast alongside a white man love interest.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

I am a big believer in the idea of revealed preferences—which is fancy econspeak for “Watch what people do, not what they say.”

I also used to be a lurker in various manosphere-adjacent internet subcultures. I just couldn’t help myself: the combination of surprisingly erudite references to Ancient Greek philosophy & evolutionary psychology mixed with highschool-lockerroom levels of pent-up sexual frustration made for some quality threads. And the one thing the manosphere loved to do—above all else—was complain about Western women: how third-wave feminism ruined them, how modern women are masculinized, hypergamous, promiscuous, etc. etc.

Despite all of the complaining, I couldn’t help but notice that the men of the manosphere were devoting the best years of their lives to analyzing how to sleep with the exact people they claimed to despise. They would create Excel spreadsheets for every date that they went on so they could track whether getting the Rocky Road flavor instead of the chocolate correlated with getting to third base at the end of the night. They would write multi-thousand-word “field reports”, detailing in excruciating and anthropological detail, the outcome of their most recent seduction attempt. They would pick up new hobbies, change jobs, buy new clothes—all to get laid.

So on the one hand: their explicit beliefs were that Western women are the worse. But their revealed preferences were that the validation of Western women is the single most important and valuable thing in the world.

Granted, even back then, there were a couple oddballs who would advocate for foreign women, praising their femininity and their “obedience”. There would be a thread like “Struggling with date-closing a flaky HB-9” and a foreign-bro—serene and graceful among the herd of sexually-frustrated chumps—would talk about how stress-free their life was with their Thai wife who cooks and cleans and knows not to talk too much when the Redzone is on. But these men seemed to be a minority. Most of the men of the manosphere were young urban professionals trying to win the affections of their young urban co-eds.

And when I looked at the young couples I knew in real life, most were of similar social class, intelligence, and broad cultural background. They had met in college or on OKCupid or through a friend of a friend. There certainly didn’t seem to be an abundance of men booking roundtrip flights to Caracas to seduce the Latina minx of their dreams.

Maybe all of that talk about “third-wave feminism” was overblown?

But in the past year or so, I’ve been seeing threads pop up on reddit about “passport bros”. A passport bro is a man from a first-world country who goes abroad to look for women, believing foreign women to be more traditional and conservative. It even has a page on Know Your Meme.

Suddenly, the old manosphere advice had become a Discourse-worthy phenomenon.

A lot can be said about the rise of the passport bro: how it's yet another indicator of the decay of our social values, how it represents the arbitraging of sexual market value differentials between Western men and their third-world counterparts, even how passport bros are not something entirely new, going by other names like 'sex tourists' in the past.

But I want to focus on one particular element that has caught my attention: how black the phenomenon of the passport bro is.

An important aspect of the passport bro movement is that not only do they praise foreign women, they dump heavily on black women. From black-manosphere.org:

Ever since going viral at the end of last year, the Passport Bros have become a topic of fierce debate throughout the online Black community… The argument as articulated by my opponent above, is that the Passport Bros, being part and parcel with the Black Manosphere, are dumping on Black women writ large in order to justify their reasoning for leaving the country in search for love.

Before researching for this post, I wasn’t even aware that the Black Manosphere was a thing. Like most Very Online people, if you asked me to draw a caricatured sketch of a denizen of the manosphere, he would invariably be white: perhaps of a Charlottesville, vaguely-Appalachian phenotype. For one, the text-based internet just feels white. Another reason is that the manosphere is closely associated with other rightwing internet subcultures where white nationalism is frequently celebrated by way of dank anuran memes. The surprising diversity of the Internet Right continues.

I’m not interested in wading into the debate about whether or not the passport bros are justified in their behavior. There are many threads about passport bros and all of the arguments are the same. Detractors of passport bros accuse them of being predatory incels who will get scammed out of a green card. Supporters of passport bros call them heroes who are brave for fighting the Leviathan that is third-wave feminism. (The internet is so tiring sometimes.)

But unfortunately, we can’t just ignore the passport bros either. The story of the last sixty years of America is that if you want a glimpse of the future of White America, there is no better place to look than Black America. Starting in the 60s, there were a set of broad changes—both legally and culturally—in American gender relations that are lumped under the umbrella of “second-wave feminism”. As Arctotherium explained in “The Baby Boom”:

[S]econd wave feminism thoroughly redefined marriage. It shifted from a patriarchal institution in which husbands had social (and some legal, though this was mostly dismantled by first wave feminism) power over their wives to one in which wives had effective legal power over the husbands (through the mechanisms of feminist family courts, greatly expanded definitions of abuse, and the replacement of the marriage model of the family with the child support model), and from a lifelong contract to one dissolvable at will (though the institution of no-fault divorce). In JD Unwin’s terms, we shift from a regime of absolute monogamy to one of modified monogamy. This had obvious and immediate consequences on marriage rates.

These changes hit Black America first and hardest. Black people, whose natural inclinations are adverse to lifelong monogamy, quickly devolved back into their ancestral mating patterns when released from the straitjacket of traditional Christian morality. White people, being more “genetically monogamous”, didn’t react immediately to the change in incentive structure. But fastforward to the present and marriage is increasingly less common among the lower classes, now being reserved for upper-middle and upper class families who have the foresight, the ability to delay gratification, and the cultural upbringing to know the importance of raising children in a traditional nuclear family.

It’s interesting that passport bros tend to be black because, theoretically, black men should have an advantage in the dating market. Black men, due to higher muscularity, higher extroversion, and other “traits”, are viewed as the most masculine of the races. This bears out in interracial dating statistics where BMWF couples (excuse the porn-inspired abbreviation—it’s just efficient and I don’t feel like reinventing the wheel here) are well over-represented compared to WMBF couples who are under-represented. And this is not even accounting for the fact that if, instead of looking at stable couples, you look at people’s most recent sexual encounter, the disparity grows even further.

It will be interesting to see if this trend spreads to White America or if it stays confined to Tiktok and Black Twitter.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

Interestingly 1) is basically the conservative Hobbesian view right? That all of civilization is just a skin over our inherent natures. Women it appears are aware of the Leviathian shaped hole, even if they have never heard of Hobbes.

Which probably aligns with memes where men threaten their daughters prom dates with guns. They believe an 18yo man can't be trusted with their daughter without some fear being involved.

The question is are they right or wrong. I might suggest the large amount of rape during invasion and conflict might point to an underlying truth many men are uncomfortable with.

That more men than we might think would rape when the social order is not there.

Of course that is just a subset of the idea that more of us would murder or commit violence in general in the absence of a restraining force. The state of war of all against all.

"It follows that, in such a condition, every man has a Right to everything--even to one another's body. And therefore, as long as this natural Right of every man to own everything exists, there can be no security to any man--no matter how strong or wise he is."

In a Hobbesian view there may not be a lot of difference between a bear and a human unburdened by societal restraint. We both exist in a state of nature.

Of course the bear is atill stronger and has better natural weapons. Is it better to be hunted by a bear or a human (assuming the human only has what they can cobble togerher in a forest)?

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

I think you're actually wrong there- whites are on average more physically imposing and have more facial hair, musculature, etc. I think you're also grossly oversimplifying the domestication process; the gene most associated with domestication is a thing that occasionally occurs in humans and causes williams syndrome, a rare developmental disorder. Insofar as animal intelligence can be measured, dogs are dumber than wolves, cattle and sheep are dumber than aurochs and mouflon, etc, etc- the opposite of whites and asians vs blacks.

Whites and Asians having more domesticated traits also needs a causative mechanism which doesn't run into obvious flaws- eg complex civilization as a domesticating force doesn't account for the middle east today.

Selection pressures on humans within historic times are interesting to talk about. But, I think domestication is definitely the wrong approach.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 12, 2024

Are there any major bloggers in the rat-sphere who are significantly pro-Palestine, anti-Israel? I think everyone I follow is either pro-Israel or basically neutral

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

Is there any great work that would be improved by the addition of choice, by the addition of alternate possibilities

Choice sucks. Most players in Bethesda or freeform character created open world games go for troll runs because the available choices end up sucking pretty hard and are inconsequential or inconsistent. Railroaded games don't offer choice beyond letting players play the game in different styles, and that has always lead to tighter narratives with greater emotional depth. The denouement of achievement is better savored when the outcome is amenable to the player.

LLM generated missions are unlikely to be any better than the standard algorithmically generated quests and maps of Roguelikes or Bethesda style radiant quests. By their very nature within a game a quest cannot significantly affect the world, otherwise other aspects of the game get broken. Unless the world is fully dynamically generated each playthrough and allows full destruction of not just the environment but the very engine itself, any LLM game quest will just be a high quality filler anime episode, inconsequential and distracting from the core experience players are actually intending to invest their time and effort in.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 12, 2024

I think there are so many overlapping drivers of pro-Israel sentiment in the “ratsphere” (many Jews, the scene was largely founded by Jews, respect for Jewish inventions, Israelis as disproportionately active in tech/AI research, general dislike for religious Muslims, contempt for wokeness, dislike of student protestors) that it would seem unlikely for there to be any significant number.

The three core predictors of support for Palestine vs Israel are being Muslim, being leftist/‘woke’ and having a broadly low opinion of Jews. I’ve never met a strongly anti-Israel person who fell into none of those three categories.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

adolescent boys and young single men are no longer vetted by fathers, elders, brothers, uncles and other pre-vetted eligible men

From the context of 'manhood initiation rituals', I would assume that you primarily mean vetting by the family of the male, not the female? I think that in many patriarchal cultures, not being especially rapey was not part of the vetting process on the side of the man. I mean, if you are a medieval woman encountering an adolescent male Scandinavian in the woods, and notice that he bears the signs of a fully initiated viking warrior, that should probably be cause for more concern, not less.

The causal chain might go like this:

  • Claim 1: Modern dating is frustrating for a lot of people, compared to patriarchal mating strategies.
  • Claim 2: For women, this manifests as being more worried about rape in a dating context.
  • Claim 3: This generalizes to being more worried about rape in general, hence the preference for the bear.

The patriarchal vetting process / manhood initiation clearly varied from society from society, Apache, Jane-Austin-England, ancient Rome, fucking Sparta and Aztec all did their own thing. If there was a common denominator, it was perhaps to certify that the male was able to fulfill their expected role in society and support one or more wives and their children. (Of course, such vetting processes are also heavier on the upper end of societies. I am not sure how it was on the lower end: "This helot man has managed to survive for two decades without starving or being slaughtered or maimed by the Spartans, that makes him husband material?")

I am also skeptical of claims that the female's male relatives filtered especially for a kind man. In societies where marital violence and rape were considered normal, why would they? They men were probably more concerned with political implications or making sure that the husband was not some wimp who would get himself killed in the first battle, leaving the woman a penniless widow.

If I were a woman, I would take tinder et al any day over a random pre-1900 mating system.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

More than a few times when this has come up I've looked at the top-grossing ten films of the past years in the US and there generally tend to be more "main pairings" of white men and non-white women in them than the other way around. Of course many of them are with Zendaya with whomever the male lead is, but the sheer amount of complaining about how Zendaya is too ugly to be paired with Hollywood men should by itself indicate that this happens quite often.

Unless there are indications to the contrary, I'm fairly convinced that the "they're pairing black men with white women!" complaints have quite a bit more to do with the complainers themselves remembering such pairings due to getting incensed about them than the ones other way around.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 12, 2024

The three core predictors of support for Palestine vs Israel are being Muslim, being leftist/‘woke’ and having a broadly low opinion of Jews. I’ve never met a strongly anti-Israel person who fell into none of those three categories.

I'm curious how you would fit Irish anti-Israel sentiment into that model? I'm not sure Ireland as a whole is particularly woke, and @Folamh3 makes a decent case against it having much to do with the other two factors you mention.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

Imagine if black people and Muslims in America were allowed to have 4 kids each but white people were only allowed to have 1 child each. That was literally state policy in China until recently. I don’t know how you can say that’s better than the US.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

replica at one’s mercy, an infinite horizon of choice without responsibility or constraint.

What % of people find those games appealing ? That does get incredibly boring, fast.

from a young age I always preferred linear, narrative-driven games as opposed to open world sandboxes. My favorite games were games that were devoid of choice, games that robbed you of the ability to make a choice

I have, at times, suffered what seemed to me like episodes of minor existential horror contemplating the 'world' of narrative driven games like say, Half-Life 2. The protagonist exists in what is, essentially a linear corridor, and he can only move forward. Whatever he may want to do, there's nothing he can do but move forward.

Fuck your art. Games are older than art, and good games are the difference between life and death. Philosophy, meanwhile, is mostly confusion.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

2 sounds like nonsense, but 1 and 3 are at least plausible. I think another underdiscussed component of the dress colour of the bear question is that in recent years, the threat of bears seems to have been massively memed up in American outdoorsmanship-adjacent circles, at least based on sheer volume of "this is how to survive a bear encounter" videos that Youtube injects into my feed, the comments on them and the vibes of the 4chan "innawoods" greentext corpus. If you are a host of this meme (which is likely to correlate with being male), you might think of it as common knowledge and not consider the possibility that women responders don't actually think of bears as uniquely threatening (as in some other cultures), instead parsing the answers as saying that from a baseline of your threat level assignment to bears, they think men are worse.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

Another reason is that the manosphere is closely associated with other rightwing internet subcultures where white nationalism is frequently celebrated

In my more "woke" lurking days it was hilarious to see the tensions here. A common refrain was AWALT - all women are like that. It's just the science bro. But when the WN/HBDers started applying the same judgment to blacks, TRPers had to scramble for some reason it didn't apply to them or their comrades in arms.

A real shame the YT era seems to have more message discipline and people like Fuentes can apparently hang around with black manosphere types for clout without similar drama.

It’s interesting that passport bros tend to be black because, theoretically, black men should have an advantage in the dating market. Black men, due to higher muscularity, higher extroversion, and other “traits”, are viewed as the most masculine of the races. This bears out in interracial dating statistics where BMWF couples (excuse the porn-inspired abbreviation—it’s just efficient and I don’t feel like reinventing the wheel here) are well over-represented compared to WMBF couples who are under-represented. And this is not even accounting for the fact that if, instead of looking at stable couples, you look at people’s most recent sexual encounter, the disparity grows even further.

I have a simpler theory for why black men do better than black women in interracial dating.. This doesn't run into the problem faced by the theory above: "higher muscularity" as an unalloyed good requires not knowing a lot about the US and how groups are perceived.

I'm not going to get into the distribution of passport bros by race (I come from a country where this is so bad old white women are in on it, whites have sheer mass going for them). But, granting for the sake of argument, it seems like there's a simple explanation here too: black men gain more in status being American outside of America than other groups.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

I could imagine it of there was a billion Americans, and it came with none of the self-flagellation. Sorry but there just is no comparison between the two approaches.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

Unless there are indications to the contrary, I'm fairly convinced that the "they're pairing black men with white women!" complaints have quite a bit more to do with the complainers themselves remembering such pairings due to getting incensed about them than the ones other way around.

Seconding this one. Hollywood does not have a secret plot to destroy the white race. In fact, functionally all mainstream media with the message of ‘have kids even if you’re poor’ is de facto specifically aimed at white people, mostly as country music. The population control efforts usually pointed to as examples of TPTB trying to reduce the population were usually aimed at non-white people, often by literally being deployed in Africa.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

Is there a tangible reason why it's getting memed up?

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

the Leviathian shaped hole

I admit to not being enough of a Hlynka scholar. Can someone explain what this actually means?

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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.