domain:kvetch.substack.com
yellowgreenred
8hr ago
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.
This is totally out of left field.
yellowgreenred
18hr ago
Watch an NFL game this fall.
I'll pass.
I don't think most people dispute that there is probably a higher proportion of interracial couples in commercials than there are IRL, but that doesn't mean interracial relationships are an oddity. They're normal, in both a biological sense and as a reflection of what you'd see in cities and towns across the US, so why not portray them and tick your diversity box?
Also, part of the point I was trying to make, and as @Steferri says below, is that the black man-white woman pairing tends to stick out but that doesn't mean it's nearly as prevalent as people assumed in last month's post. Of the two dozen movies in my post, Somebody I Used to Know is the clearest example of BM/WM, but it'll probably stay in your mind over other movies because Alison Brie stars as the white woman.
jacksonjules
11hr ago
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.
Frankly women can enter as well, were it not for the nannying and tutting.
In other words, only transgender women who are sufficiently divorced from [as perceived by the other gender] their gender's primary flaw can enter this space.
That flaw, being (in my opinion/experience) unrestrained anger/disgust, is the GP's point about why non-transgender women are motivated to destroy male spaces in the first place: they're angry that they have to follow the rules to get anywhere, and something inside them renders them wholly incapable of doing that, so their attempts to simply destroy the space for "reeeeeee"-asons are a natural evolution of that.
This isn't to say the standard feminist "all the important things happen in places we're kept out of because something something gender" steelman doesn't still apply (since the primary problem with men is that they're stupid), but that it's almost certainly overblown by people who wish they were more capable than they are; I think it's fascinating that feminist political thought starts with cargo-culting what are effectively transgender behaviors, leading to everyone being shocked to discover that most women aren't transgender, and [the selfish version of] their conclusion was that it's not them that's the problem, it's the notion of gender itself (the productive one was just going out and building other institutions that reinforce transgender behavior in an ostensibly discouragement-free environment; which is why [female division of things men are naturally better at] exist in the first place).
hydroacetylene
15hr ago
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.
non_radical_centrist
8hr ago
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.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
20hr ago
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.
2D3D
17hr ago
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.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
21hr ago
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.
Botond173
22hr ago
Thesis (not a terribly original one, but here it goes) as food for thought / discussion fodder:
The online proliferation of the man vs bear in the woods meme, plus similar earlier social media phenomena with a feminist message are, in reality, generalized and simplified expressions of women's overall frustration and latent anger directed at the loss of manhood initiation rituals that characterizes modern post-patriarchal atomized societies; namely, the current social reality is that adolescent boys and young single men are no longer vetted by fathers, elders, brothers, uncles and other pre-vetted eligible men before they are, in effect, released into their wider social circle from the family environment, which makes it rather difficult and risky for single women to separate eligible men from ineligible men.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
13hr ago
There’s already a Victorian-approved social gathering which brings men and women together in opportunities for status competition. I should set up a series of such events.
Hock? My balls.
Of course many of them are with Zendaya with whomever the male lead is
Maybe we should thank God that Challengers didn't do well; otherwise, we might have been hearing about this for a decade
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.
I think this is part bitter Twitter racist thing and part "woman who glams up (she looks better on the red carpet than in many films) well enough to be liked by women but isn't a sex symbol, so men complain" thing.
You hear similar things about how Taylor Swift isn't really sexy and I don't think she really gets into racial issues.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
22hr ago
“There’s no realistic white nationalist movement in the country” could very well be due to the propaganda against it for more than a decade. In other words, it is as much evidence against my point as for my point. The “unite the right” event was catastrophized in the media specifically to destroy the threat of similar rallies; Nick Fuentes was de-person’d, forbidden to fly and having his bank accounts cancelled, not to mention banned by all social media giants. Literally, anti white nationalism was a major news plot point for years during the beginnings of Trump admin.
I think you're actually wrong there- whites are on average more physically imposing
Despite making up 13% of the population, 53% of NFL players are black
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.
I think there are multiple factors at work for different civilizations/races being succesful. I think HBD is part of the reason for civilizational differences, but I buy into the WEIRDest People in the World cousin-marriages leading to clannish honour culture being why the Middle East is behind the West. I know there's a complexity penalty for theories that incorporate multiple factors like this but it still looks the most plausible to me for why the Middle East is so backwards.
I think it seems very likely that all humans have been domesticated compared to our primitive great ape ancestors. Whether some races are more domesticated than others is a more open question. But I think it's quite plausible that they are.
yellowgreenred
8hr ago
Yeah, I was just trying to be funny.
erwgv3g34
11hr ago
From "The Three Magic Words" by The Dreaded Jim:
Female behavior that appears wicked, foolish, and self destructive to a man is entirely intelligible when we realize that the proud independent rapidly aging overweight barista with one hundred thousand dollars in college and credit card debt is unlikely to have children, and is likely to die alone and be eaten by her numerous cats, but if abducted by Islamic State and sold on the auction block naked and in chains would probably have seven children and twenty five grandchildren, and would die surrounded by loving family.
hydroacetylene
15hr ago
And to note- there is a population control push ongoing in Africa, it’s not particularly working any better than anything else in that continent, but it’s definitely there and definitely a western liberal elite project, and the opponents to it are overwhelmingly conservatives who bemoan low western birthrates!
100ProofTollBooth
17hr ago
You're right. And it wasn't lost on me the weird parallel between Hobbes and feminists that emerged when I wrote the response. I can't say I've totally wrapped my own head around it. All of us Trads do say "We need trade values or else society will fall apart." But it's couched heavily with the idea of personal choice; "You can choose to not follow Trad values, but then your life is going to be shitty." I'd contrast that with the progressive concept of culture which is fundamentally authoritarian; "You MUST adhere to the approved cultural norms, or else you are dangerous and will be excluded from society."
"Teach men not to rape" is too far of an extreme because I think the implicit assumption is that men are born with the rape module turned up to 10. I don't think this is the case. Men (and women!) are born with the basic mammalian firmware desires for food, water, shelter, reproductive activity. The duty of society is to teach men and women how to go about fulfilling these fundamental needs in pro-social ways.
Appreciate your comment. One of the better "stop and made me think" situations I've had on here in a while.
SSCReader
17hr ago
Well if it takes a well developed cultural system to leverage us into not behaving that way, then are we not just repressed rapists? Just ones buried under years of conditioning? Teach men not to rape indeed..
Just to be clear I don't 100% agree with Hobbes here, though I think it is as you say partially true. Just noticing the similarity in positions between somewhat feminist thought and the Hobbesian conservatives.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
8hr ago
Israel hasn't been in Gaza since 2005
Are you going to claim that Israel hasn't been exerting any kind of pressure or influence in Gaza since 2005? Even if you grant that absurd falsehood, the idea that their actions prior to 2005 couldn't have any kind of lingering impact is equally farcical.
slaughtering all 9m inhabitants of Israel to "reclaim" a land no Gazan has any living memory of,
If a people lacking a living memory of their land is enough to deny their claim to it, why should Israel exist at all given that none of the zionists and British people involved in creating it had any living memory of it either? Plenty of Irish people were born with no living memory of independence, but that doesn't actually justify anything the British did to them.
How about a more extreme example then rather than just the revealed preference as shown by the Berlin wall needing to be put up. Just about anyone in the world would rather live in the USA than Bangladesh. One country and society is obviously better by any reasonable metric I can personally think of. Just because both governments may do something you don't like doesn't make them the same.
2rafa
15hr ago
How about the extreme amounts of organized crime by various non-ethnic-Russians that the Kremlin largely tolerates and which de facto amounts to huge wealth transfers to these minorities? Sure, there aren’t many state handouts (although there are some), but that isn’t the only thing that serves that effect.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
15hr ago
Yes, I do too, but I'd rather not have the wheels come off while I'm driving.
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:
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:
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.
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