domain:worksinprogress.co
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
46m ago
I would definitely say I prefer the Dojo as the healthy alternative, but if it works and persists across decades
The sex clubs have certain protections against the segment of the left most eager to ban them that the dojo does not share- specifically, that the left can't both continue to use the concept of sex-positivity as a skin suit and be seen shutting down places that "empowers women" [by that definition] at the same time.
faceh
19m ago
I wouldn't bet on that.
If they can play the "exploiting vulnerable minorities" and "objectification of women" angles they can attack from that side if they want.
Or they can start pushing the "healthy at any size" and "trans women are women!" angle to force said clubs to accept... less enticing employees.
Now, prostitution will continue to exist in spite of any and all attempts to thwart it, but I do think they can make it impossible for such 'third spaces' to exist easily.
The Dojo has the unavoidable barrier to entry of physical fitness, and I've yet to see anyone who can undermine any martial arts/combat system other than by producing a better system (i.e. how BJJ took over MMA for a long time).
ArmedTooHeavily
just now
I think that technocapital has already selected for "inhuman" traits in some populations (though I do think calling it "inhuman" is maybe not the most descriptive, because traits that humans have are definitionally human traits). These traits are the ones that make people more effective as components in the civilizational machine, the populations are the more heavily historically "civilized" ones, and there is a lot of crossover with the cultural traits identified as the "aspects and assumptions of whiteness and white culture" in the infamous smithsonian infographic (https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333#slideshow/1610610).
Individuality, neuroticism, self-reliance, "protestant" work ethic, respect for rules, avoidance of overt conflict, objective/linear thinking, etc are all traits that are unusual in pre-civilizational humans and that make for better members of civilization, and I think that technocapital has selected for those traits in humans both biologically and memetically/culturally.
All of this to say, it's not "What if it changes human nature?", that ship has sailed. The question is "What's anyone doing to take technocapital out of the driver's seat?", and the answer is "pretty much nothing, Kaczynski and Land are right, we are not our own masters, and it's acceleration from here on out."
2D3D
7m ago
You can shove any number of ugly 'women' there as you want, you can't force men to select them and a joint that does so simply ceases to make money. The selecting entity in this case is the mamasan curating her stable, not some admin forcing a DEI hire in.
Folamh3
10m ago
For what it's worth I disagree that Ireland isn't "particularly woke". I mean, the general population finds wokeness bizarre and alienating, but that's true of every country in which wokeness has found any kind of purchase: it's an ideology by and for the elites, and for the most part the elites in Ireland are just as woke as in any other Anglophone nation. We have self-ID (and the attendant rows about males in women's prisons and sports); controversies over youth gender medicine; massive BLM protests in 2020; the incidence of words like "racism", "transphobia", "homophobia" etc. in our two national newspapers has skyrocketed since 2010 and demands for draconian hate speech legislation - in short, everything you'd expect from a woke nation. The point I was trying to make is that Irish support for the Palestinian cause predates Ireland's great awokening by decades, and pro-Palestine marches were a common sight to see long before anyone here had heard of a preferred pronoun.
I also think @2rafa is being a bit sweeping by putting a slash between leftist and woke. Many wokes are liberals, many leftists are not wokes, although they do both tend to favour the Palestinian cause if for different reasons.
Tollund_Man4
40m ago
I was in Belfast in January, and when driving through heavily Catholic districts of the city (e.g. the Falls road), I saw Palestinian flags hanging from every pub, which were conspicuous by their absence in the Protestant districts
In the more loyalist areas (I think more moderate Protestants are kind of embarrassed by all the flag-waving) you’ll also see Israeli flags being flown in response to this.
hydroacetylene
43m ago
Sure, but the use of IRL social networks didn’t change with the sexual revolutions; it changed with the destruction of IRL social networks.
erwgv3g34
24m 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.
Turniper
36m ago
My synthesis take is that the ideal game has actual narrative consequences for gameplay events. You fail a fight? Someone dies saving your ass. It's the total divorce of choice from consequence that so many modern games favor that makes the design space feel stale, everyone is afraid to actually make choices matter.
RegularlyExpressed
58m ago
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.
hydroacetylene
44m ago
Unironically, the best way to safeguard the white demographic cohort going forwards.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
50m ago
By contrast the modern FBI went after organized black gangs to the extent that the whole culture fractured and the drugs business is no longer even the main cause of internecine conflict in eg. the South Side.
Interesting, so what is the main cause now, if you don't mind my curiosity? I'm not familiar with this situation at all, so I'm now just intrigued.
Tanista
59m ago
If my input has no effect on the outcome, why is it even required?
Forcing a player to do something may have a more visceral impact than making them watch someone else do it.
But I agree. OP makes too good a case against his own position and then never truly debunks it. Gaming is clearly different, I don't see why the same standards should apply.
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:
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”:
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.
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