domain:betonit.substack.com
WhiningCoil
4hr ago
If the OP has experiences anything like myself, you hate the world because "the world" seems to be actively propagating preposterous lies and blood libel enabling sociopathic behavior among a select group of untouchables. And the "victims" that choose the sociopathic untouchables over yourself have credulously lapped up every lie, directly leading to you being thrown under the bus by people you trusted. Family with deep ties, friends you've known for decades, coworkers you overcame profound challenges and found success with. The anointed sociopath with politically relevant melanin content washes all that away. You're lucky if even a single person overcomes the firehose of bullshit propaganda, overcomes their cognitive dissonance, and even privately supports you. If you expect public support, you are out of your fucking mind.
Goodguy
6hr ago
I'm not sure this makes sense. Many men admire murderous, rapey barbarians too. Right-wing Twitter is full of odes to romanticized Indo-European chariot riders replacing the original populations of Europe and India.
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
8hr ago
In the spirit of bringing life into the thread, I thought I’d share something a little different.
Dozens of stars show signs of hosting advanced alien civilizations
Two surveys of millions of stars in our galaxy have revealed mysterious spikes in infrared heat coming from dozens of them.
A summary won’t do it justice, and I encourage anyone interested to read the linked article; it’s not long. In short, though, researchers checked out approximately 5 million stars (in our galaxy—close enough to look well at and potentially one day visit) for anomalous ratios of infrared heat to light. The idea here is that if a star is giving off a lot of light that is being captured, it will heat whatever is doing the capturing up significantly. This is suggested to be possibly due to either unusual debris fields around these stars, which would be unexpected due to their age (most planetary collisions happening early on in a solar system’s lifetime, and these stars being older)… Or due to large amounts of sun-orbiting satellites soaking up solar power, a Dyson swarm. Our exoplanet imaging is still very much in its infancy, and we have already discovered planets that seem to bear biosignatures. The latter explanation is plausible, at least.
This is pretty far from standard culture-war fare, but I suspect that there are enough rationalists and futurists here to find it interesting. There are also a few potential links:
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- What does the future of our society look in a universe where life is entropically favorable? That is to say, what if life is not rare, and instead happens consistently whenever the right conditions are present for long enough?
This implies that there is either a way through the theorized AI apocalypse, or perhaps that silicon-based life continues growing after taking over from carbon-based life (the “biological boot loader” thesis). While I’m rather attached to my carbon-based existence, it’s at least heartening that in this scenario something is still happening after AI takes over; the spark of life hasn’t left the universe. Unless all that power is going to making paperclips, I suppose.
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- What sort of societal organization is optimal for a galaxy in which we can expect to interact with numerous alien civilizations? We have (thankfully) yet to encounter grabby aliens, but the game theory seems logical; in an environment where there are limited resources and an ever-expanding population, conflict is inevitable (by historical earth standards).
Does it make sense to enforce population control on a cosmic scale, discouraging humans from expanding to other stars to avoid conflict? Could the “dark forest” hypothesis make sense, where offense is favored over defense and civilizations hide as much as possible?
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- If we were to travel to other stars in the distant future, would the expected travel times result in human speciation, or such a long remove that cultural exchange and even biological exchange is kept to a minimum? Or is there an “optimal human”, which genetic engineering and biotech could potentially bring us towards as a local maximum?
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- Is this all bullshit, and are we alone in the universe, forevermore?
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- Does anyone have any thoughts on the spate of propellantless propulsion efforts currently being made? Somewhat like perpetual motion machines, or room temperature superconductors, or fusion… This is a topic that has very high expected returns, and thus a high expected gain in fame or financing from lying about experimental results. But I do note that fusion seems to be moving forward; while LK-99 didn’t pan out, there are still groups working on things inspired by it, and it seems like lessons learned are leading to next generation superconductors. My point here is that if the laws of physics allow it, we seem likely to eventually create it… And we are yet to discover a Theory of Everything, so who’s to say whether something like propellantless propulsion is possible?
Mods, I apologize in advance if this is insufficiently culture-war adjacent to deserve posting here. I didn’t think it worthy of its own thread, and feel like it’s perhaps healthy for the Motte to have some fresh topics as well. I’m a devoted lurker and thought I should do my part.
Edit- My list got butchered. Trying to fix it, but it seems the method I chose of writing multiple paragraphs after a question is disfavored.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1hr ago
The 1960s social revolution was driven by sex, making it ipso-facto female-dominated. Not because they were intellectual or political leaders in a revolutionary movement, but because they became entranced by Sex, Drugs, Rock n' Roll. The 1960s social revolution would have gone nowhere without women.
I would also make a distinction between religious cults and revolutionary movements. The "Dionysian Force" Richard is talking about falls more on the former than the latter. Women are more susceptible to cults, but then they kind of become kingmakers for the cults that blossom into political/social movements.
White identity is ideologically-crafted, as opposed to, say, Jewish identity? All identity is ideologically-crafted, and identity is always weaponized against political and cultural opposition.
Do Jews weaponize Jewish identity against white people? The answer to that question is obviously- yes, they do. So you accept the reality of this situation, but you think it's justified because of the "gas chambers" or something. The result is, in your view, White people can't have an identity because they would use it to resist or fight back.
Jewish identity is highly exclusionary. I am not Jewish, I am a gentile or goy. They even have special words to denote me as part of the outgroup. So there's nothing wrong with a Jew telling me I am not one of them, but it's wrong for me to tell a Jew he is not one of us?
My own view on the matter is that European Jews are white, or at least they can become white by forgoing their Jewish identity to the same extent that white people have let go of their former European national allegiances. Some Jews indeed take that path. But for many others they insist on retaining a Jewish identity and special ethnic regard, which they often hold above regard for white people. Forgive me for identifying them as part of my outgroup in no more salacious a manner than they also regard me as part of their outgroup.
YE_GUILTY
5hr ago
Does anyone have any thoughts on the spate of propellantless propulsion efforts currently being made?
Until I put my fingers in the nail marks, and put my hand in its side, I will never believe.
I think you have your causality backwards. It's not that people don't bother asking people out in person anymore because they'd rather use the apps: it's that Western society has become massively atomised as a result of technological progress, which is a void that the apps have stepped in to inexpertly fill.
In the past, where would you typically ask out a girl in person? Common examples included i) a nice girl you met at church; ii) a colleague at work; iii) a classmate; or iv) a friend of a friend. Why i) is no longer viable is self-explanatory. Why ii) no longer works is explicable by the same dynamics Scott complained about in "Untitled": yes, workplace sexual harassment policies are written in an extremely sweeping fashion, and yes, men who are charming and socially adept and who are interested in one of their colleagues will probably just ask her out, without worrying about whether it's technically in violation of the policy or not. But conscientious socially awkward men will worry about this, as well they should given that they're the only men likely to be reported for violating it. (Yes I'm trotting out this meme again, I don't care: I was effectively shunned from an entire community and industry for the crime of politely asking a girl if she wanted to get coffee sometime and I'm still mad about it - anyone saying "just ask her bro, the worst she can say is no" is full of shit.) Regarding iii), some of the same dynamics as ii) apply, and you also run into the problem of a paucity of available women - if you're a socially awkward man in college, odds are good that you're pursuing a degree which is highly sex-segregated (computer science, engineering etc.).
That leaves iv). It's impossible to ask a friend of a friend on a date if a) you don't have any friends, or all of your friends are online friends; or b) all of your friends are people you met through an extremely sex-segregated common interest (Warhammer, D&D, coding, esports, rationalist-adjacent subreddit spinoffs etc.) - something that the internet and social media facilitates far too easily. (People self-segregrating into ideological echo chambers is only the tip of the iceberg: self-segregrating into echo chambers of people who like Obscure Hobby X or want to fuck toasters is the major underlying cause of the demise of any shared monoculture and the enshittification of Western society. I and everyone reading this are guilty of it.)
So you're left with cold approaches: going up to girls in bars or nightclubs. Again, not a problem for charming and socially adept men; big problem for the socially awkward millennials/zoomers you're criticising. Hard to blame them for making a beeline for the apps instead.
Of course it's easy to criticise Millennial and Gen Z adult men for not taking proactive steps to organically encounter single women in real life. Obviously talking to strangers halfway across the globe is not a great way to get laid in real life; nor is spending every day in your local Games Workshop. But the thing is, they didn't make this decision as adults: they made it when their parents gave them a smartphone as teenagers, and all the years of adolescence they should have spent ironing out the kinks in their patter have been squandered watching YouTube and Twitch instead. Gen Z boys are starting college barely more acquainted with the rules of social interaction IRL than Gen X 13-year-olds were, for reasons that are not entirely their fault: no one here thinks someone's life should be ruined because of a stupid decision they made when they were 12, a decision which directly harms only themselves and no one else (but indirectly harms society as a whole, obviously).
And your assumption that dating apps killed traditional courtship hinges on the questionable presumption that Millennial/Gen Z women are exactly as receptive to a stranger asking them out as Gen X women were in their youth. But I don't think they are, and I think the fact that they aren't is part of the problem. See this great article:
I mentioned to several of the people I interviewed for this piece that I’d met my husband in an elevator, in 2001. (We worked on different floors of the same institution, and over the months that followed struck up many more conversations—in the elevator, in the break room, on the walk to the subway.) I was fascinated by the extent to which this prompted other women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet someone that way. And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. “Creeper! Get away from me,” one woman imagined thinking. “Anytime we’re in silence, we look at our phones,” explained her friend, nodding. Another woman fantasized to me about what it would be like to have a man hit on her in a bookstore. (She’d be holding a copy of her favorite book. “What’s that book?” he’d say.) But then she seemed to snap out of her reverie, and changed the subject to Sex and the City reruns and how hopelessly dated they seem. “Miranda meets Steve at a bar,” she said, in a tone suggesting that the scenario might as well be out of a Jane Austen novel, for all the relevance it had to her life.
See also (coming back to "Untitled" above) innumerable feminist comics about how it's creepy for men to ask a woman out in a coffee shop or in a library or in college or on the third moon of Venus or whatever. There are plenty of women who are far less receptive to being asked out by strangers than their mothers were, and make no secret of that fact. Obviously the women writing these comics don't represent all women, but the men reading and internalising these comics don't necessarily know that, and everyone ends up poorer for it. If you are demanding that men not interact with you, and the only men reading (or caring about) that demand are men who care about respecting your boundaries - it should come as no surprise when the only men who interact with you are men who don't care about respecting your boundaries. The typical "if you're reading it, it's not for you" dynamic.
I've never read Bear, but Forge and Anvil have been recommended several times. Are they any good?
I loved saberhagen's berserker series. Templar Radiant is brilliant, and The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron is a gem of classic sci-fi shorts.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
7hr ago
The participants depicted in the pictures and videos here look pretty gender-balanced to me, and my FB feed seems to have one person each being virulently pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, both male and getting maybe 2-3 likes per post. Are you sure your view doesn't just reflect the demographics of college activists?
As a somewhat related observation, I moved to Europe with my SO from the US a few years ago, and the single biggest culture shock experience for her was when we ran across a massive anti-COVID-measures protest and the participants were mostly women. I remember at the time this forum would also have periodic posts that it is only natural that women are the ones pushing for masks and vaccines because of conformism, risk aversion, valuing care over freedom and being for social pressure; however, it turns out that almost always random contingencies override grand theories of how and why the genders believe what, usually formed deep in the bowels of a single cultural bubble.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
If there’s two prisoners, it’s semi plausible that neither of them defects. If there’s 200 prisoners, it only takes one defector.
And if we assume that even advanced civilizations are mostly planet bound, and that there’s physical reasons limiting the ability to chart exoplanets, then it’s pretty easy to miss an extermination attempt. Maybe finding the homeworld of these aliens is difficult, even if we can tell which star. Can we predict the actual location of known exoplanets well enough to launch a missile which can’t course correct? I’m betting no. Not to mention any individual case could be something other than a civilization, even if it’s phenomenally improbable they all are.
We should adopt an attitude of reflexive paranoia towards possible aliens until they are known to be friendly, and use this as an impetus for dispersion.
Folamh3
4hr ago
But Julia was an outlier, and only avoids repercussions by putting on a tremendously convincing performance of the type of woman Winston thinks she is.
The maternal instinct for the children is mixed with adoration for murderous, rapey barbarians. Personally, I suspect the second to be stronger than the first, but the first to be more what they talk about. Women love a killer, but which killer they love is a function of their social class and politics.
In the '70's, rich white girls used to form terrorist cells, break black felons out of prison, serve as a harem and follow him into battle against the evil white people, by which they meant assassinating black people.
KMC
59m ago
Yes, but also because it's damn close to so many things shifting. Maybe it was gold, maybe it was oil, but by god something changed.
Botond173
13hr ago
It's actually worse than all that.
Due to demographic implosion, families and friends' circles are smaller, so your friends and their friends have fewer or no sisters, nieces, cousins and other friends to introduce to you even if they want to help you out. Also, boys who have no sisters and no female cousins will tend to develop dumbass ideas about girls because they don't see how they actually behave normally as humans. It also happens with the sexes reversed, I assume.
Widespread use of social media abetted the decline of nightclubs in general, which the COVID lockdowns also heavily contributed to.
Strict enforcement of the 21-year drinking age means that young people over 21 and those under 21 have basically no access to social venues where they can interact.
Atomized societies normalize heightened social mobility for young singles, which means you'll pretty much lose your entire social circle if you have to move to another town after graduation to get some job.
I was effectively shunned from an entire community and industry for the crime of politely asking a girl if she wanted to get coffee sometime and I'm still mad about it - anyone saying "just ask her bro, the worst she can say is no" is full of shit.
To be fair, it's not full of shit as long as there's no overlap between your social circle and hers.
And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out.
Well, duh. If you ask them about a RANDOM GUY, of course they'll react like that, because they don't see 'random' guys as attractive.
Thinking about the past, it makes me smile how much it was common to hear, until twenty years ago, that women are very uninterested in politics, unlike men. For my generation, this idea looks absurd. Men do not care about politics at all.
Yeah, well, look how it's working out for 'The West'.
Absolute shambles. In the 'Great Game' of global hegemony, the 'West' is the drunk guy who thinks he's playing checkers, but he's so drunk he doesn't understand he's actually playing chess, against a guy who's perfectly sober.
Meanwhile, in China, you're only supposed to care about politics if it's literally your job. Any random civilian caring about politics is viewed (rightly) with suspicion, perhaps partly genetic due to the millenia of rebels getting executed.
So, you had an absolutely typically female hysterical reaction to Ukraine war, with sanctions that resulted in exports to Russia crashing, and exports to Russian neighbors booming. Russia is still chugging along with the war, meanwhile European economy doesn't look too hot.
But a less well known example: 1 million 244: The 40 year long rare earth mineral boondoggle.
TL;DW:
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rare earths are crucial for renewables (wind turbine magnets etc) and nice for electric cars.
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processing them is very hard, harder than uranium enrichment actually to be cost-effective at it. It's a whole bunch of chemically very similar elements that occur together.
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China having little energy has a strategic interest in energy production and e-cars that actually makes sense. They went into this in early 1980s
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'The West' gimped rare earth processing companies in 1980s with a nonsensical rule change that put 'thorium', byproduct of RE processing on par with uranium. I'd love to know whether this preceded the Chinese strategic decision to aim for e-cars and so on.
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all the processing was outsourced to China. China stole and improved upon all the IP. They also subsidize RE processing and control the market. RE processing, thanks to their subsidies, is unprofitable everywhere. IF you try to set up your own industry, they'll tank prices just to make every startup go bankrupt.
This is all very funny because:
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rest of the world doesn't really need most RE. Renewables are a scam. Chinese mandate electric cars ( you won't even get a car plate) unless the car is electric, in preparation for WW3 and the naval blockades.
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e-cars don't really need them, but it's apparently mildly easier to make them good if you have ample RE.
Armin
13hr ago
Because my nitpick topic is the intersection between politics and gender/sex, in the last months since 7 October I began a very unscientific analysis of the social media content, especially on Instagram, of my friends, acquaintances and other people I follow. (Context as always, European middle-upper class, intra-national environment, very EU-based)
I cannot emphatise enough how much the driven behind pro-Palestinian content is driven exclusively by women. Between the thousands of people I follow, there is a core of around 50 people, all women apart one anarchist guy, who are hard Palestinian-posters (And remember, there is a lot of interests in politics in my environment, it is normal to see all these people interested in stuff like this). And I am not talking about random posting, I am talking of months and months of posting, all inserted in a moral framework of "do not touch the children" or "Israelis are racists". Having followed the process since the beginning, it was fun to see how it took at least one month until the start of the pro-Palestinian posting, as if they were checking where it was the consensus in their group before beginning to post.
The question I ask the community here, why a topic that is so far from our location and interests (again, we are no Columbia University or Middle East, we are far away both ideologically and physically) is so interesting for women, that makes them post about id dozens of times every week, for months straight? And I am talking about a very intense interest, is not rare to see online meltdown of suffering, death menaces or simply histrionics directed towards obscure metaphysical forces.
Again, my observation are reinforced from what I saw in the US and Europe about the universities and campus protests; the protestors are overwhelmingly women, and the most desperate are women.
For me the question rotates around two different forces;
- The maternal ethics of women, that makes them take always the side of the one that looks weaker or more oppressed.
- The ideological force behind social networks, that make them taking the side of the part with more social consensus in their social circles.
Thinking about the past, it makes me smile how much it was common to hear, until twenty years ago, that women are very uninterested in politics, unlike men. For my generation, this idea looks absurd. Men do not care about politics at all.
RegularlyExpressed
4hr ago
My grandfather(RIP) used to tell the story of how when he first started college he could find a job in an afternoon for his spending money, and can anyone do that anymore? I did it in the 2010's. And it seems to be that the now-hiring signs adorning many stores and restaurants are there with this expectation, elsewise why would they exist?
This is anecdotal and not hugely relevant to the wider point you're making but this doesn't resemble my experience of looking for menial jobs during the year between high school and University (early 2010s as well). I must have asked for a job at most stores or establishments in my hometown of about 10k people, until after four months or so I managed to get a job cleaning a petrol station at 6am in a town 10 miles away. These were mostly in-person applications of the sort you described, occasionally on the phone, and sometimes online (for places like supermarkets that have official hiring channels). I also remember that those stores and restaurants with now-hiring signs in the windows would always ask if I had any prior experience, and then let me know that they weren't interested in hiring someone who had none.
Pynewacket
2hr ago
sorry, I will try to be better than this potshot, but when the OP reacted like the classical Progressive I couldn't resist the impulse to try to find if he was a troll or just part of the herd.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
5hr ago
I got a good laugh at the man ping ponging across the river after dropping off the goat.
Gaashk
19hr ago
Whenever the topic of tradwives and fertility comes up, my first thought is, what do the women on this board think?
Grew up in a very trad wife centric Christian homeschool subculture. It mostly didn't work out. Mostly, we had to get jobs. It isn't trivially easy to find a man who's prepared to be a husband, father, and primary earner fairly young, willing to ask girls out, often at venues like church functions, and interested in those girls. There are some, sure, and some families were formed that way. But now in our late 30s, I'm hearing about even some of the women who did marry a traditional head of household man divorcing, because he's pushy, unpleasant, domineering, and re-training as a nurse or something, now with several children.
Marriages don't have to rise to the level of beating to be worse than working a lower middle class female job. If my now husband hadn't kept inviting me on romantic dates at ancient castles, I would still be basically content with being single, because being a single woman in the modern world is really just fine, with a long educated Anglophone tradition full of slightly lonely but basically fine governesses and nuns. Even at the standards of a century ago, I would certainly rather be a nun than marry a man I didn't like, of whom people said "well at least he doesn't beat you, just have more grit."
I am not a feminist by current standards. My grandmothers and great grandmothers went to teaching colleges, and followed their husbands around the world while they translated Mayan carvings or something, and returned to teaching when their children where older. They kept copies of Virginia Woolf in their houses. There are great grandmothers I don't know much about, because their children ran away from home (and first marriages, I think?) and met up on a Pacific island, and then went on to have those 3-4 kids together, and raise them while teaching. I don't know how to evaluate the alternate universe where everyone had more grit, sticking out their first marriage on some frozen windswept cattle ranch.
Much is made of the state of family formation in Asia lately. Chinese great grandmothers probably had too much grit, breaking their daughters' feet to help their marriage prospects. I don't know how things were for the great grandmothers of the current generation of South Korean women -- the educational issues there sound like an excess of grit -- everyone could just not cram that extra hour, and things would likely be just the same, but slightly more pleasant. It sounds very zero sum after a pretty baseline educational level and some research skills.
Anyway, I'm pregnant with a third baby because I don't think being not particularly successful in America is that bad, actually. Probably none of my kids will go to an unusually excellent college or have an unusually excellent job or win at a high level competition, and that's alright. Someone came in to my classroom today to say that she's pleased that her daughter is shift manager at a Starbucks and leading literacy tutoring over the summer. This is good! People should be able to be pleased with their children living normal, functional lives!
I've experienced much the same, most of the really active Palestine posters are women. Maybe a part of the explanation is this poem from the 70s that the local ones like to quote (translated by me from Finnish):
When someone has been born a mother
Who has once been born as a mother,
is a mother to all children,
and all the children of the world
she has held to her chest.
And the cry of the children of the world,
she has started to hear in her ears,
as all the children of the world,
speak with her own child's mouth.
This particular war has really featured a lot of pictures of dead or seriously hurt Palestinian children and babies. If you're even vaguely affliated to lefty people on social media you'll be bombarded with dozens of them every week unless you start hiding or blocking. I'm not particularly emotional (well, duh, I post here), but some of them really get to me, too. They must be playing a particularly merry havoc on maternal instincts, even with women who don't have kids themselves.
One reason why it might have taken a bit of time for this effect to start working was that during the first month or so there were equivalent pics of Israeli kids being killed or having been kidnapped, but that petered out since it was related to one dramatic one-time event, not a continuous supply of new examples.
It's compounded by social network effects, of course.
Goodguy
6hr ago
I think this is cherry-picking. Revolutions against established Order have not, historically, been dominated by women more than by men. The rise of Islam and of Protestantism, as far as I know, were not mainly driven by women. There was nothing female-dominated about the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution. The 1960s social revolution in the US was not female-dominated either.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
7hr ago
Assuming our current understanding of physics holds, much of this doesn’t matter. If there are Taelons 100 million ly away from us, it is highly unlikely they’d care about us. We don’t have anything they don’t already have. So hiding makes no sense — it would take them millions of years to get here, for no gain. You can find most of the material in our solar system in thousands of other places much closer to the alien planets and can extract them without having to mess with people or other animals.
And from the other end, it’s all speculative. The aliens are undoubtedly weirder than we can possibly imagine, and our views on culture and government are largely based on our own history. And I’m not sure what these aliens have to do with AI. Maybe they solved the alignment issue, or maybe they destroyed all their AI and have been huffing Spice. They might have stalled on on technology before AGI. We don’t know anything and frankly can’t know anything. We found some odd chemical signatures, that’s it. Trying to pointlessly speculate on what this means for the future of space travel, propulsion, AGI, or alien human relationships is premature in my view. This might be something interesting, but it might not.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
In the event of discovering many advanced alien civilizations, proceeding as if the dark forest hypothesis is true becomes a priority, because it’s game theoretically optimal in an environment where communication and thus cooperation is impossible, and functionally no warning would precede a dark forest attack due to relativistic kinetic impacts being the obvious default strike method. That means civilizational dispersion becomes a top priority, and whatever we do, we should not beam some ‘hi, we’re friendly!’ Math problems at these stars.
We extensively study all sorts of animal and microbial species here on earth, simply out of curiosity, even though these species don't "have anything" for us. Sometimes this research leads to medical advancements, but usually it doesn't. Most academic research is in the same boat. There's no "practical" reason to study obscure religious treatises from late antiquity, or the cultural practices of a hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa, but people do it anyway.
Maybe. But if they are, then that means that we'd be impossibly weird to them! Which would make us rather more interesting.
Of course, it's an open empirical question whether aliens would find any value in studying us or interacting with us. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't. But thinking that humans couldn't possibly be interesting to a scientifically advanced alien intelligence is just as much of an unfounded bias as thinking that humans are always at the center of the universe.
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