Corvos
1d ago
I have no real Roma tic experience but it sounds like perhaps she has an image of her future that involves her living essentially where she is now, and that even the core of an ‘urban-ish enclave’ doesn’t fit with that.
It could also be that she finds this difficult to convey and is trying to spare your feelings given your existing terror of moving and the potential incompatibility of her current intended life plan with your needs and budget, thus avoiding causing you harm and upset in the short term whilst potentially causing you upset in the long term (a common failure of very kind people).
It sounds like you care for each other, so I can only wish you good luck talking.
Corvos
1d ago
I would agree except to say that the government has considerable influence on it, but the BBC will fight this influence with every tool if the government is right-wing and accede easily of left-wing (though maybe not as left as Corbyn).
Corvos
2d ago
Much respect for working hard in a difficult situation, and good luck for tomorrow.
One word of caution: be careful relying on your therapist’s judgment about external individuals. By the nature of the interaction she gets the evidence you select for her and is predisposed to see things your way, so remember to account for that.
At the end of the day, Alec was a traitor. He smiled at his colleagues every day while secretly he plotted to undermine everything they were working to protect. I find it hard to think of such a man as a hero.
Furthermore, the story is at the very least more complex than he tells it. What responsibility did the British owe to the Cossacks? They had fought for the enemy (Nazi Germany) against an ally. Giving them to Stalin was inglorious in a perfect world, sure, but it’s silly to treat it as a betrayal.
Corvos
2d ago
Sure, that’s always been there too. There have always been lots of bachelors and playboys, especially amongst the upper classes. The working-class boys at the university were much more of the ‘get as much clunge as possible’ mindset which ironically probably put them in a better position to date and marry later on.
So many who wanted to play around. But also a good number who didn’t. For myself in my ideal life plan I wanted to meet a nice girl at university, move in together a year later, spend a couple of years getting to n ie each other and then marry and have children around say 26 years old.
Of course, if I had been popular with the ladies perhaps I would have got a big head and started fucking around. No way to say.
Corvos
2d ago
Hmm, yes, I see. Although arguably the emigration was responsible for the Celtic Tiger and Ireland’s prosperity generally. When America etc. were looking to see how to invest in Europe, having a lot of Irish-Americans and the general diaspora in high places saying it should be Ireland was probably very important.
Corvos
2d ago
If you ever felt like contributing an example to the nostalgia genre (80s Ireland?) I’d love to read it.
They too want freedom, a career, and as much fun as possible before they settle down.
In all seriousness, I think this is where you are going wrong. A lot of young men, especially here which skews conservative, were totally ready to start settling down young (or at least a year or two after university when they had an income) and raising a family. There’s a reason several people were yeschadding your post about young men being over educated, and I say this having done a PhD.
Painting with a broad brush, the problem from my perspective is that we were prepared to be lovers and providers, and the other side never turned up. Indeed, they seemed to flock in droves to the young men who openly disdained responsibility and family while those men were busy getting as broke and high and sexed as humanly possible.
I am ready to believe that this is a mutual illusion arising from young women disproportionately meeting the fuck-around men and not seeing the quiet ones who worked hard, and likewise young men nmeeting the girls who came to parties and not the quiet ones. I don’t say that it’s true, but it’s possible.
But this is how things looked on the other side of the screen.
Corvos
4d ago
Interesting turns of phrase and very good for atmosphere (or at least the descriptions are novel for now) but it gets details wrong and steers all over the place.
Corvos
4d ago
Having written a few scientific papers in my time, and read an awful lot more, I strongly disagree that this approach will yield good results. Third-person passive writing effectively acts as consensus building by default - it is designed to ape a full objective perspective that by definition cannot be achieved. "It is well-understood that rents are too high and women are over-educated" just leads to constant passive aggressive arguing about what it means to be well-understood and what citations are acceptable etc. etc. where two people have essentially a personal disagreement using sock puppets, whereas first-person "I think that..." encourages clear demarcation between one's own personal feelings and expectations, and claims made about the broader world.
Corvos
5d ago
Some people strive for modship. Others have it thrust upon them, and find to their surprise that they wear it well.
Corvos
5d ago
you are a literal masochist.
Ohh, that's why the people in the gym make those noises...
Corvos
5d ago
I see, thanks. I apologise for misjudging your convictions in various areas. I don't think I have that much to say as a follow-up right now, beyond a few points:
if you want to argue "Feminism was bad for society and we should repeal feminism," uh... I kind of agree with the first statement (for some value of "feminism") but I do not see how you achieve the second (given that "repeal feminism" tends to mean "repeal the entire concept of female emancipation writ large") without winding up at "Women are property."
Broadly, I agree with you, with the caveat that I don't think the mores and customs of the pre-1900s West or the Mormons/Amish/Harethi are as bad as 'women are property'.
The problem with all legislation is that even the best-intentioned legislators do not have a crystal ball or the ability to foresee all second and third-order effects.
I also agree with you here, which is why I would ideally like us to take a gradualist approach to this kind of thing, starting off with:
- abolishing/banning the various legalities and practices aimed at achieving higher female numbers in various fields (including those which are already majority female)
- trying to do something to reduce the level of middle-management sinecures in HR/marketing/etc.
and going from there. I don't think that this is actually politically possible - even such relatively minor measures would only become possible if mores have shifted so far that those changes are the first movements of a giant landslide. It seems to be the nature of human society and democratic politics in particular to careen rather than adjust, and I think we will end up at the bottom of the slope no matter what. Not much to be done about that IMO.
"Society would be better if people did X, therefore we will force X through legislation" is ironically the sort of authoritarian thinking communist governments try to implement to reorder society for the greater good.
Certainly, but it's also the thinking of anyone who writes legislation! I don't know you very well, but I don't think you are the kind of full-fat libertarian who thinks that all regulation should be repealed, that we should remove all central attempts at law-enforcement and go back to privately-leased thief-takers and bounty hunters, etc. etc. Assuming that you aren't, the next obvious question is, 'when and to what degree should we force X through legislation, and when should we refrain?'. My previous reply was an attempt to argue that for the last 70 years or so we have been too liberal in the area of 'relationships between men and women' and 'female employment', that the results have been bad on net, and we need to roll that back somewhat.
This is a pretty autistic Motte-pilled take. "If we measure how much happier most men would be, and how much happier many women would be, we can calculate that the net increase in happiness X is greater than the decrease in happiness Y of the women who don't like this arrangement, therefore they can suck it up."
Well, there's a reason I'm writing here and not in a byline for the Times. But more seriously, this is simply a reversal of the argument from feminism for the last 70 years. That argument being that 'men have had a good run of it for centuries, and they now need to take a hit to vastly increase the happiness of women'. You may well be a principled libertarian who objects to this particular argument equally whether it comes from women or from men, but it is clearly not a moral bridge too far for many people.
Let's say we blithely handwave away your "long tail" of abuse and misery which was much of the motivation for the rise of the feminist movement in the first place.
keep in mind you're not just telling them to settle for an average guy who'd be a good if unexceptional husband, you are (at least from the incel viewpoint) telling them they should settle for a man who viscerally hates them and will treat them like a fleshlight. [...] You can either say you don't care about that because society as a whole will be better off, or you can have some understanding for why this is a hard sell for anyone who does, um, think women are human.
I have two responses to this, neither of which will probably satisfy you:
The first is that I do not think we should aim for a 100% marriage rate. Some men (and some women) are simply so toxic that people will not marry them even under pressure, and that's okay. Good, even. Similarly there are people who simply can't be in a relationship for various reasons. I want to give the curve a firm shove back to times of much higher marriage rates, not to ensure that even the most spittle-flecked violent maniac gets a government-mandated girlfriend. But yes, there will still be sad cases. There are sad cases today too - we have domestic murders, abuse, and deeply vile things perpetrated up and down the land - but they are likely to increase somewhat under this system. And it is indeed a hard, even an impossible sell in a modern democratic society operating under today's social mores. I write these things for my own satisfaction and to clarify my thoughts, not as an act of political activism.
The second is that we are now in the realm of competing intuitions, axioms and viewpoints:
- In general, I perceive much of the social movements of the last 70 years to have been an attempt to stamp out visible tragedies affecting a small minority of people at the expense of the long-term happiness and healthy functioning of the majority, and I don't think that this was a good idea. That's a moral intuition I don't necessarily expect you to share.
- I also think that the number of true misogynists is very low, with the caveat that I define those as people who deeply hate women to the extent of wanting them to suffer as a terminal goal, plus those who are so deeply callous that they are totally unmoved by the legitimate suffering of a woman they know. In short 'viscerally hates them and will treat them like a fleshlight', as you say. I see no sign of this in the Dread Jim essay you link, which like it or not, expresses its thoughts in terms of making both men and women better off.
In practice, I suspect that your informal definition of misogyny is much more extensive, very broadly along the lines of 'sees men as being rational enlightenment agents who have high moral worth and deserve respect and high levels of liberty, and treat women with some combination of having reduced rationality, reduced moral worth (depending on the tradition) and believes that they should be constrained i.e. not granted liberties to the same degree'. Would I be right in saying so?
If so, I think you are then vastly inflating the number of misogynists and unintentionally hopping between the motte and the bailey by using the latter set of beliefs as dogwhistles for the former. I'm sure that's true sometimes, but I think it's also very untrue sometimes, and you can tell because it basically condemns all humanity prior to 1900, plus the Amish, many Mormons, etc. etc. all of which clearly contained men who valued and loved their wives for more than being a warm orifice. It's always dangerous to make assumptions about other people's POV but assuming I'm correct, I believe this is a place where your beliefs aren't quite cleaving the joints of reality correctly, though of course that doesn't mean you have to approve of either.
I don't think it can happen at all, not when half of voters would take the initial hit and have been heavily propagandised against, and a good chunk of the other half would prefer to please them. I just think that it probably should. Maybe things will change as the demographic pyramid changes, but frankly I don't think anything will happen until we have a collapse of some sort and probably not then either.
Moreover, I am not advocating for RETVRN to medieval peasant life or turning off the factories. I agree with @TheNybbler that a lot of white-collar female jobs are really direct or indirect government sinecures; beyond that we have a huge legal and social apparatus dedicated to making it almost impossible to be a large company that doesn't hire a large %age of women, and there is no technical reason why that can't be reversed to apply pressure in the opposite direction.
I do not believe most true incels are so productive that they must be appeased with government-issued wives or society collapses
I don't think you and I are talking about the same people. I work in tech and a big chunk of my colleagues (as well as myself) are intelligent, productive, reasonably well-socialized... and can't get a date. I think @Goodguy gave the number of about a third of men being out of a relationship and AFAIK that skews high-IQ and high-conscientousness. 'Literally every single man' is too much of an ask, but if we can get the marriage rates up to 90% or so like they used to be, that would do it for me.
use technology to connect pair-bondable men to pair-bondable women for once
I don't think this works, for the reasons I gave. It might help but the problem is that pair-bondable people don't have the external pressure to actually break through their fears and actually pair-bond, or to bond on a long-term basis once married. I went to a pair-bonding event recently and it seemed to me that even the girls who had nominally come there to pair-bond were deeply ambivalent about actually doing so. That's the problem.
Consider it this way: when the Chinese government banned cram schools, one might think they were attacking a deeply beloved institution. People paid huge amounts of money to the cram schools, kids spent huge amounts of their time there. Surely they would be really upset at having them taken away?
But no, of course not. Everyone hated and resented the cram schools. They existed because of a specific set of incentives that were unchangeable from the inside, and that could only be changed by a large-scale coercion.
I can’t speak for the Dread Jim etc. because I don’t follow them, but IMO the point is that men and women more naturally form loving bonds when a) they are paired together, and b) their interests are broadly aligned.
Modern society has broken both of these conditions, in an attempt to solve the problems that arose in cases when the previous system went wrong. By allowing women to work in the same paying jobs as men, and by providing unconditional support, it deliberately ensured that women didn’t require a man to take care of herself. A noble goal to be sure, but the result is that the natural fear of opportunity costs, generalised fear and distrust of men, (and, yes, a certain hypergamous tendency) combine to ensure lots of women don’t end up paired. (The same dynamics apply on the male side to but I think to a lesser degree).
Likewise, we have worked hard to ensure that even when married, a woman’s interests are kept separate from her husband’s, in order to avoid genuinely nasty abuses that occurred under the previous system. Women now retain their property when married, they usually retain their jobs, and they can decouple with minimal difficulty. This means that even during marriage, a woman often has one eye on being ready for an exit and her own private interests often conflict with the interests of her husband and family.
IMO the goal is lots of loving, happy relationships. (With, yes, an inevitable long tail of grudging-but-functional relationships and some pretty nasty ones). This benefits a big fraction men very clearly, because the current system is straightforwardly inimical to them; it’s hard to say whether it benefits women because they will gain certain things and lose certain things and probably different groups of women will benefit. I would like to think that the averaged outcome for women would be better, but even if it is mildly negative, ultimately the end effect will be positive when averaged across the sexes.
I think everyone broadly agreed that the famines were a product of collectivisation, and the difference between callous indifference + culpable stupidity vs. deliberate malice is hard to differentiate at the best of times.
My complaint is more that in the West it seemed to me we switched over from ‘the famines in the USSR were a semi-deliberate result of Soviet malice and mismanagement’ to ‘the Holodomor was a deliberate attempt by the Russians to destroy Ukraine and now they’re at it again’ and this shift seeed to be based on political needs and vibes rather than the production of new evidence.
Like, every country that’s ever been colonised has a story about how the evil oppressor engineered famine to punish them. Britain gets it from the Irish and the Indians, and at least in the latter case I’ve looked into it (I did a post last month) and the case is very dubious. As a result I distrust these maximalist claims being presented as fact without backing evidence.
For example, Famine-33 is a fictional work made 60 years after the events it depicts, based on a novel written by a Ukrainian (Vasyl Barka) who as far as I can tell wasn’t actually there at the time, having gone to work in an art museum in Krasnodar in 1928, four years before the famine.
Again, I’m not asserting anything. I merely note that I distrust very heavy claims (deliberate genocide of Ukrainians) being made at a time of high political tension based on little or no presented evidence. I am quite happy to be shown something more substantial.
If you’re saying the soviets were mass-murderers with a yen for collective guilt, I agree with you. Likewise I agree that the famines were broadly Stalin’s fault.
But how does the Soviet desire to kill wealthy landowning peasants, or the role of Soviet economics in the famine more generally, support the specific claim that the Soviets deliberately engineered famine specifically in Ukraine in a genocidal attempt to wipe out the Ukrainian national identity?
You say that loads of evidence for that specific claim exists but in the nicest possible way you haven’t actually provided any of it. My (very half-assed) investigation (the specific Section about Ukraine that I mentioned) seemed to indicate that it’s a controversial claim that’s being actively debated by academics.
EDIT: the links from your other post re: deportations are to some extent the kind of thing that I was looking for. At the very least the Soviet Union regularly conducted mass operations to dissolve certain nationalities and ethnicities within the broader USSR, often resulting in mass casualties. I’m not sure that the famine in Ukraine was part of that - the deportations have a much more specific and direct character - and I would generally incline to the view that the famine resulted from a combination of the Soviet hatred of successful farmers + total disdain for learning how farming actually works + total lack of concern about whether the Ukrainians (or anyone else) lived or died. But I’m much more open to the possibility.
Corvos
7d ago
FWIW I would be interested to read the original, please do feel free to post it.
Having had it said to me by a communist in my social group IRL, I didn't feel exactly threatened in the moment but it certainly contributed to making my politics far less forgiving than they used to be.
I take your point, and would prefer to split the difference by saying that the international rule-based order is a polite fiction that constrains smaller and weaker countries most of the time, but doesn't change the fundamental reality that larger, more powerful nations have international interests and will find a way to justify violent warfare, regime change and other such things in pursuit of them. This is true IMO regardless of one's feelings on the morality of the matter.
I personally am not sure I find straightforward annexation in the general case to be clearly worse than regime and culture change as America tried to carry out in the Middle East (for example). I am quite willing to believe that Russian are fairly unkind and extractive rulers, and among the people you would least like to be occupied by, although I also find @Botond173's point convincing:
I ask you to consider the difference between A and B in the following two cases:
One:
A: The effects of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Germany on the national identity and patriotic sentiments of local Germans, as evidenced by their average propensity to vote for right-wing nativist parties since 1990
B: The effects of US hegemony in Western Germany on the national identity and patriotic sentiments of local Germans, as evidenced by the displayed level of their willingness to preserve themselves as a nation since 1949
Two:
A: The effects of Soviet hegemony in Poland on the Catholicism and patriotic sentiment of the locals
B: The effects of US hegemony on the same in the last 25 or so years
I’d say there’s clear evidence that it’s US and not Soviet hegemony that has the larger detrimental effect on national identity and survival.
On a personal level, I find the West's attempts to destroy their enemies (and their friends) through slow corrosion to be... unappealing, perhaps. Having long since lost faith in the liberal project, the attitude of, "Don't worry, you* will choose to dissolve your country" repels me as much or more than blunter, more ham-handed attempts to do the same thing.
*or the leaders who pass our filtering process.
If this also means that Putin fails to conquer Ukraine, that is a bonus, but for the international supporters of Ukraine that is not the essential outcome. The goal is to make the war net negative for Russia by making them pay a high price in blood and economy.
As long as the Ukrainians are fine with dying for that, it seems like a no-brainer for the West to give them the materiel to continue their war.
I have heard this argument before, and acknowledge its force, but I think it's important to acknowledge that 'the Ukranians' are not a homogenous group. There was a huge exodus of young men who fled recently when Zelensky relaxed the borders, and apparently it has become commonplace to Ukranian families to send their male children abroad before they reach 18. As with many wars, I am not convinced that the young men actually doing the dying are doing so voluntarily, and being a young man myself that weighs upon me with disproportionate force.
In short I find your position broadly reasonable and defensible, but disagree.
Very neatly put, I might borrow that. I’m sorry to hear your early life was so awful.
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