coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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2hr ago
That’s only two brief sentences in the whole movie. I don’t think they ever really talk about home apart from that. The whole film, the viewer follows the men plotting and fighting against the Acheron. They spend more time romanticizing about the ship and Lord Nelson than their homes and wives. That’s what makes it such a good movie: there’s none of that sentimentalslop that guys don’t actually care to watch.
The whole mafia genre is another case of this. Why do guys love mafia movies? It is not because of the subtle sociopolitical commentary and ironies of the Sopranos.
If you were a soldier fighting for your King against another kingdom, the whole “ancestral-tribal cognition” related to ingroup and outgroup was activated against that nation; it was activated and deactivated according to political interests of the Kingdom. Songs and propaganda and stories would be disseminated for this purpose. Particular acts of bravery in slaying the enemy might bring you praise or greater status, or sometimes some reward. In the medieval era the common soldier often had no blood ties to the noble families who decide on war, but they still had all of this collective / tribal / dominance cognition going on. The noble families were united by shared ancestral heritage, unless they had just lost a war, in which case they would be united by heritage within a few generations.
In the modern era you see much more explicitly “deep visceral intertribal” cognition: https://www.napoleon.org/en/magazine/napoleonic-pleasures/le-chant-du-depart-2/
Let us know how to conquer or know how to perish; A Frenchman must live for her, For her, a Frenchman must die.
Tremble, ye enemies of France, Kings who with blood have slaked your thirst! The sovereign people see advance To hurl ye to your grave accused. Come, brethren, the Republic calls; For her our hearts and lives we give; For her a Frenchman gladly falls, For her alone he seeks to live.
And the famous Marseilles anthem
This horde of slaves, traitors, plotting kings, What do they want? For whom these vile shackles, These long-prepared irons? (repeat) Frenchmen, for us, oh! what an insult! What emotions that must excite!
What! These foreign troops would make laws in our home!? What!
Let us march! May impure blood water our fields!
May your dying enemies see your triumph and our glory!
These were the favorite songs of Napoleon’s troops, the avowedly White supremacist Napoleon who has such quotes as
I am for the whites, because I am white; I have no other reason, yet that is reason good enough
Now the Minnesotan can theoretically use any of the tribal cognition package he has; it is hypothetically possible that he can draw whatever criteria for ingroup that he wants, by any criteria. But culture prevents from doing this, and so he has no interest in solving the crime.
coffee_enjoyer
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10hr ago
Napoleon’s soldiers were conscripted from the general population, not a filtered group of people.
I say this particularly because the evidence you've presented is... what, that boys like playing action video games?
This is like scratching your head at someone injecting themselves with heroin and saying, “what, humans enjoy the experience of activating their endogenous opioid system?” Uh, yeah! The strongest evidence of what males innately like to do is what males volitionally choose to do when they could do anything: their leisure. That boys like to pretend to shoot each other, pretend to “raid the flag”, form snowball fights with ramparts, and watch people shoot each other on TV, and listen to gangster rap about slaying opps, is strong evidence of an innate disposition and innate pleasure. Because of course, we evolved to do this as much as we evolved to eat and copulate. At least most of us. Neither you nor @Amadan have supplied a convincing explanation for the universal leisure activity of males esp. young males.
Do modern men have a particularly different attitude to violence than historical men? I'm not convinced they do
Being taught that they can have no tribal allegiance in America, and being presented with endless media and stories about how such tribalism is low-status and thus deserving of ostracization, they cannot engage any of innate tribal cognition WRT to Somali fraud. Not being able to engage in this cognition, they can find no enjoyment in combatting Somali fraudsters. They cannot engage in fraud against Somalis, but more importantly they cannot even organize to defeat the Somali fraud politically, because this requires a certain incentive pleasure or fun: dominance and victory over an enemy. To get any pleasure out of defeating the Somali fraud requires that you see Somalis as your enemies, and to see the defrauded Somali tax payer as your teammates. This is impossible for those Minnesotans who believe that (1) every American is on the same team && (2) distinguishing between cohorts with the team violates the most sacred rule of the team’s moral law which is called “racism”.
The Somali community, of course, has tribal and religious customs which maximize their in-group affiliation. They know they are a team, and so they engage in politics as a team. This makes politics incredibly fun and filled with those pleasures which are normally associated today with games. Every Somali gets enjoyment out of donating money to his team’s character and working to increase the victories of his team’s character. The Somali can engage in politics the way a boy engages in Guild Wars II, or a man engages in Eve Online, or a teenager watches his favorite streamer beating a game. They have no compunction about taking the resources of the native Swedes because, well, why would they? It’s a game and you are my enemy.
This is what I mean about the sociobiological asymmetry; I’m not quite making a claim about quantities of innate violence
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
But we aren’t talking about 12th century warrior aristocrats, we are talking about civilized Europeans from 1600-1860. You claim, for some reason, that these men wwre socialized to make them want to kill acquaintances who insulted them in duels and to loot the cities they conquered. But the church was against dueling at this time, and men continued to do it up until the punishments became prohibitive and accuracy ruined the fun. You’re asserting this like it is fact, but there’s nothing in their culture that would have made them do this. Being brought up to serve in the military does not translate into a willingness to duel a colleague. And the reason I note Napoleon is that his army was decidedly not made up of “warrior aristocrats”, and yet they all looted, everywhere they went. I think it was the most looting since antiquity. You have a just so story that these men were all socialized into behaving this way, but they weren’t. Vikings were socialized to behave that way, but a Frenchman in the Napoleonic Era was not.
On what basis do you say that the behaviour of 21st century men does not reflect natural instincts
Men are placed in a mass indoctrination facility (schools) with omnipresent mass media, and they pretty much can’t get away with crimes. Additionally, they have endless leisure to satisfy their instincts. And in this leisure they do a simulation of what their ancestors did.
but I don't see anything in the conversation before now that says that under-18s don't count
Many teenage boys are not allowed to buy any game they wish, so Splatoon may not tell us what they prefer to play, only what they can play. This is a family friendly, child friendly title.
I think you should contemplate more why boys like to play Fortnite. Sure, the developers took out blood and replaced it with a shock effect so that they can still sell it to children. But what is the game mechanic, and what does that tell us? You and your squad go around killing enemies and looting their corpses. You also destroy buildings and loot chests from them. Your enemy might dance over your fallen corpse. It is not sanitized in any psychological way, there just isn’t any blood. But Skyrim, the Witcher, Halo, Call of Duty, etc etc all include blood. Forget blood for a second. If Fortnite was only for males and males of all ages could play whichever game they want, I have no doubt it would include more violence, but a lightly sanitized version is required to bring in the female and children demographic.
How can you possibly look at the mechanics in these games and believe that males don’t have the aforementioned instincts? The popularity of this game would be literally inexplicable without understanding psychology. If males don’t have these instincts, then Fortnite should not be enjoyable because it’s filled with violence, right? And people don’t ordinarily like to be the recipient of violence; very few people want to watch videos of people dying. Yet they like to inflict violence in their evolved conflict scenarios. And this perfectly explains why a boy would want to aim a weapon at an enemy and destroy him and loot his body. What is your alternative theory for why this mechanic is popular throughout so many titles? Why don’t they want to aim a flower at a friend and blow a kiss, like the girls playing SIMS or Animal Crossing or whatever?
And yes men have other instincts: the “building things” instinct explains why they love Minecraft (and why no one plays Tetris now really, Minecraft bring its superior outlet). The systems-oriented instinct, unique to men, which is why they play city skylines and etc. all of these instincts coexist and you can combine them to predictably create a best selling title, like Minecraft. The skeletons and other mobs are just stand-ins for humans, which the player has to kill and loot.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
I don’t know exactly what you mean by “what is the difference” between those things; I assume you’re asking rhetorically? I don’t believe the nobles we were talking about were socialized to enjoy killing; historical military training did not focus on dehumanization of enemies. They were also raised in a Christian environment, although probably one less obsessed with pacifism, and were merely socialized to stop being shamed about violence. You can look at toddlers, who are “violent” in the sense that they constantly hit and throw until corrected.
Splatoon
This seems like a game that is mostly played when parents don’t want you playing a violent game; one study finds the majority of players are under 19. If you look at Steam’s Most Played by Hours, it is all violent games with the exception of Stardew Valley and a cat that plays the bongos. This doesn’t include FortNite which is likely the most popular game among young males by a margin. The reason Tetris is on the list is because of tech limitations in the 80s / 90. Pokémon is popular because of children in both genders (especially in 90s and 00s), not because of teenage or adult men. You’d really have to look at a list of only titles males play since technology has allowed shooters, so since ~2000. Final Fantasy is there because it’s been around since 1987 and played by both genders. I’m not quite sure if “franchise” is even the right thing to look at, rather than genre; if boys play 100 different “war simulators”, but there’s only one hegemonic soccer simulator, then it would seem that they prefer the one soccer game over the hundreds of split up violent video games. Eg Medal of Honor is 40mil units that should just be combined with all shooters
I think this is the way to go. Armies historically bestowed titles, fashion accessories, accolades, and other conspicuous signals of status in order to direct human behavior toward an intended aim. The Boy Scouts used to do this to much success. The most popular RPG games do this, and it works because people can immediately see your status, and this feels satisfying even when it occurs in a totally virtual world with no influence on real life. Reddit does this, the world of finance does this. Literally the most addicting activities incorporate this feature. Paul, when motivating Christians, tells them to seek the heavenly crowns and prizes, and Jesus promises that the one who overcomes will sit on a throne, working with this same instinct.
(It looks like I stole Yarvin’s substack post in the OP quote, but I promise I did not; maybe we both read something that inspired a similar thought)
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
I don’t believe the naval training would have translated into a willingness to demand a duel for honor from a fellow officer. The training would have been drills, target practice, and so on, rather than making them wholecloth insensitive to death. That’s a big leap to go from “fire at a target when I say so” to “demand that the brother who insulted you show up with a pistol or he loses all honor”. And the fact that they typically lost honor is telling, it was expected that they would duel.
and that modern men are uniquely wussy
My point is different: they have been trained out of applying their instincts at a young age. Not quite “wussy”. A bear that has been trained not to bite isn’t a wussy, it’s just a trained bear. But really, my main point isn’t even about violence per se, but about all the powerful cognition we have for labeling enemies and wanting to defeat them — cognition which is wasted in leisure rather than being applied toward any Genuine Social Good. This could be expressed with total pacifism! The Somalis express their warrior instincts with total pacifism: they rally in political brotherhood, steal resources, and create propaganda to label their opponents as evil racists. The natives can do the same, or they can use their instincts to rally around and punish them draconically, or do whatever they wish as free men in a free land that their ancestors conquered with blood and sweat. But maybe move beyond the strategy of “complain and game”, which characterizes the youth of every longhouse’d male, myself included.
To me it seems we are remarkably sensitive to death today, and I think it comes from a denial of our own absolute and impending mortality. We refuse to grasp that we will be dead and before we die we will live a number of unremarkable and fleeting years in old age where we watch war movies of men dying honorable deaths. This denial is the drive behind transhumanism, probably. Whereas our honorable and civilization-building ancestors grasped their mortality and did not want to go out as coward or losers, our ancestors like Lincoln and Hamilton who showed up for duels. At any moment our oligarchs — like those in Russia and Ukraine — will demand that we will all just perish in agony in no man’s land, similar to our ancestors in Vietnam, WWII, and WWI, and the civil war, but worse, because of drones. We should accept this. At any moment, we will actually be forced by a corrupt and selfish government to kill people who don’t even deserve to die.
simulated violence in video games is firstly fictional and secondly usually extremely sanitised
“Fictional” is irrelevant, because people do fictionally what gives them pleasure. There isn’t a fictional homework simulator, or a fictional laundry simulator. There’s no fictional “comfort dying grandmother” or “be broken up with” simulator as this would be unpleasant. And “sanitized” is not my understanding of male video game culture. When a teenage boy sees that he can shoot his enemy’s head off, or that impaling them leads to his moaning in agony, he finds it awesome. That’s why developers put those features in. Out of all the millions of possibilities to have fun, males consistently choose “pretend to kill my enemies realistically with my friends” simulator, which they do because they like to imagine doing that. They could instead play “paintball simulator” or “airsoft simulator”, if they were averse to violence, but those don’t even sell. No one wants to play fencing simulator, they want to play “literally chop my opponent’s hand off” simulator with the blood level set to realistic. And they listen to raw odes to violence in rap (near ubiquitous now, to my displeasure), and they watch movies like John Wick where the protagonist mercilessly kills his enemies under the faintest pretext of justification. And they watch Game of Thrones and find it awesome that Jamie Lannister kills a bunch of people.
and invited them to shoot real human beings (and let's say I guaranteed them immunity from reprisal, prosecution, etc.), even human beings belonging to outgroups, that gamer would hesitate
That’s because of socialization. This same man will clap as the rebels in Inglorious Basterds execute a surrendering soldier. And that’s also because of socialization.
In my last reply I wrote “if”, as in, cause and effect, a diagnostic thing. That is descriptive, not prescriptive. I am not Minnesota and am not advocating for anyone to do anything, but opining that if they wanted to solve the issue there are certain prerequisite steps.
I think that study’s theory is likely bunk as this was never a concern in premodernity. Like, I doubt there is a passage from an ancient writer (most of them familiar with war) claiming that men are afraid to kill, though many would certainly be cowards. Then you have the normative duelling culture among nobles for a long stretch of time, eg
Between 1798 and the Civil War, the U.S. Navy lost two-thirds as many officers to dueling as it did in combat at sea, including naval hero Stephen Decatur
and it is estimated that between 1685 and 1716, French officers fought 10,000 duels
which strongly suggests that men, at an insult of honor, would be willing to kill or maim a member of even the same tribe. This is a defensible ritual IMO because it rids your upper class of cowards, though it also has a bad dysgenic effect. The optimal dueling culture would probably involve less accurate pistols so that you still filter out the cowardly and overly-pacifistic while retaining the genes of the nobility.
It’s a leap to ”all men yearn to destroy and pillage”
The really crucial bit is their enemies. In the games they play, men aren’t typically attacking innocent parties, but only enemies. And I do think this is real. It’s just as real in the “civilized pacifist” who wants to levy high taxes on only his political enemies or who wants BLM rioters to target a specific part of a city. I remember how happy the online “pacifist liberal” was to see a police station or a gas station set on fire during BLM.
If the Minnesotan wants any chance of solving a Somali scam epidemic, then they likely must activate the instincts God gave them for solving such things. That means treating them as an enemy, so that every uncovered scam comes with a feeling of victory and pride; it means rallying men around pursuing justice, with rituals and celebrations; it means retribution in some judicial or approximate way; etc. If they don’t activate these instincts then they will never find the energy to actually fix it.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
You’re not coming up with any direct or circumstantial evidence to forward your theory, though. Your worldview lacks explanatory power.
Your philosophy, like KulakRevolt's, is that everything else is all just a veneer over our desire to rape and kill
This is a poor misreading. My theory is that men have an instinct to dominate alien or defecting groups and thus find it gratifying. American men waste this instinct on video games and have been wrongly taught that they can’t express it politically. Somalis express it politically, which is why they are stealing the Swedes’ resources and replacing them in Minnesota. The Somali allows himself to feel joy at his victories, just like the Puritans felt joy upon vanquishing their enemies, but the modern American male is only told to feel such joy in worthless video games.
It’s very normal in video game culture to say things like “you ruined his night”, “he will cry himself to sleep tonight”, “you made him uninstall” after vanquishing your foe. Why do you believe boys and men say this? Or are these just evil people in your mind? Usually when you make the enemy quit the game, this makes the male player happy. You would have to explain why this occurs, if not for causing misfortune and pain upon your enemy.
They justified it with pride, with self-defense, with national interest, but not "Cause it's fun to destroy what other people have”
Do you really think the soldiers did not enjoy the prospect of taking things from their enemy? Then why did all of Napoleon’s soldiers loot? Why did the British loot the Chinese? Why did the Catholics loot the Byzantines? Why did Rome loot their enemies? It’s possible you have an atypical mind a la typical mind fallacy. Hell, I know a guy who proudly showed of Saddam’s execution sword, which of course he looted in Iraq while in the army. And again, male leisure activity involves looting mechanics for precisely this reason — video games are fun for a reason and the reason relates back to our innate psychology. We like to play the assassin who kills enemies and loots their bodies because deep down we have some kernel of an instinct which comes from prehistory, though of course moral compunction overrides this. What boy didn’t want to be a ninja in his adolescence? Why do people play GTA and not “give out compliments simulator”?
The whole point of the movie is that they are trying to defend their homeland
That’s just a speech to give them a just cause on top of their mannerbunding; Britain had declared war first and the ship was off the coast of Brazil. No one is watching the movie because they sympathize with the cause of the King, instead they see themselves in the männerbund who are singularly interested in destroying their enemy through trickery.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
After lighting their wigwams on fire resulting in the death of hundreds, the Puritan preacher of the Christian army made the following sermon:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/pequot-war
But God was above them, who laughed his enemies and the enemies of his people to scorn, making them as a fiery oven. Thus were the stout-hearted spoiled, having slept their last sleep.... Thus did the Lord judge among the heathen, filling the place with dead bodies.
Or elsewhere:
Thus was God seen in the Mount, Crushing his proud Enemies and the Enemies of his People: They who were ere while a Terror to all that were round about them, who resolved to Destroy all the English and to Root their very Name out of this Country, should by such weak Means, even Seventy seven (there being no more at the Fort) bring the Mischief they plotted, and the Violence they offered and exercised, upon their own Heads in a Moment: burning them up in the fire of his Wrath, and dunging the Ground with their Flesh: It was the Lord's Doings, and it is marvellous in our Eyes! It is He that hath made his Work wonderful, and therefore ought to be remembred.
Thus the Lord was pleased to smite our enemies in the hinder parts and to give us their land for an inheritance; who remembered us in our low estate, and redeemed us out of our enemies’ hands. Let us therefore praise the Lord for his goodness and his wonderful works to the Children of men!
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
The question is what the Christian colonists would have done against a community of Muslims which were continually stealing from them. What do you think they would have done, and do you think they would do it joyfully? “Commit unorganized violence all the time” is a strawman of my position.
According to the revealed preference of their favorite leisure activity, men really love raiding enemies and aliens. Your counter-hypothesis needs evidence, and it will have a difficult time explaining why men pay for the opportunity to recreate what they did in the past. And why men loved to do it in the Napoleonic Era, or during the 1527 Sack of Rome, or the 1850 sacking of the Summer Palace. Or during any of the completely normal raiding activities during the Age of Sail. And why it comprises the subject of the most popular “guy movie”, Master & Commander, which is literally just about a hierarchical männerbund seizing a trophy ship through trickery. Is it okay because the authority says it is okay? This would not be a very masculine take, as the King himself was established through men simply willing it.
No amount of Biblical exegesis can rationalize a Jesus who says yes, it is right and good to crush your enemies and hear the lamentations of their women and take joy in it.
The Psalms which were inspired by God are filled with curses of destruction for enemies, so the eseigesis isn’t completely impossible. But you don’t have to do exegesis, you simply have to understand that very devout Christians have always engaged in the joy of taking from enemies. If this is a sin, okay, it is probably less of a sin than the one your critic is engaged in, so they can be quiet and criticize themselves + repent for seeing a speck in his brother’s eye, which is a much worse sin.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
The Christians who founded America excluded those outside the fold, not just from obtaining something of a resource but even from stepping foot in their towns; they happily executed anyone who tried to step outside their social value ecosystem (eg witches); they were happy to kill the Indians who tried to kill them. But more to the point, the particular saying regarding enemies was never intended to be literal, because it exists squarely in the middle of sayings which we know for sure were never taken literally (“If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away” … “when you pray, go into your room and shut the door”). It was a mistake to ever interpret this rule as some invincible principle of all affairs, and indeed no Christian country ever did in civic matters. It’s simply a jolting reminder that we should make up with the brothers whom we think are our enemies, so that the collective is stronger and thus better able to solve in-group / out-group problems.
I’d like to write a larger post on this but the fraud in American minority populations is fundamentally the result of a sociobiological assymetry between the immigrant population and the native population, because the native population has neutered their natural instincts through culture and biological adaptions. Culturally, White Americans are presented with trauma-inducing and phobia-inducing stories and lessons at an early age to reduce their natural in-group affiliation, much like a dog that has been punished not to naturally bark; biologically, Northern Europeans like the Swedes in Minnessota have the highest rate of OXTR rs53576 G/G expression which is a unique evolutionary adaption that allows them to see racial others as part of the same “tribe”; for those carrying A/A, no amount of in-group allegiance is sufficient to make them to see racial others as part of the same tribe. The Swedes in Minnessota have maximal cultural and genetic pressure to see the Somalians as simply an ailing faction of their own in-group, thus deserving special treatment, like a sick or mentally handicapped member of the tribe; the Somalis in Minnessota have maximal pressure toward the exact opposite: piracy, tribal supremacism, and the clearest friend-enemy distinction you could possibly develop on this planet, due to their culture + history + religion + biology.
The sociobiological asymmetry is the most important thing because it’s a motivational asymmetry. To use a quote from Conan the Barbarian, there is literally no pleasure greater to a young man than to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women. This pleasure is so great that when a teenage boy in America has any free time, it is quite literally all they want to do and think about. They want to raid a stranger’s base in Rust that took them weeks to build; they want to track down a secret base in Minecraft that took years to build and light it on fire; they want to hop on Fortnite with their männerbund and ruin the fun of a rival gang of men; they want to raid Orgrimmar and kill an enemy race’s chief; if they play football, they want to exert dominance over a man they just tackled and flex at the other side’s cheerleaders; if they are some sociopathic looksmaxxer, they want to steal someone’s date or girlfriend while live-streaming; in chess, they want to lay a trap that see’s their enemy’s Queen captured; and so on. When I would play Call of Duty with the boys, the funniest moments were always a direct similitude of the Conan-Genghis principle, when the rival team had someone’s girlfriend playing: we kill the members of a group (usually through trickery, sometimes through gratuitous torture), steal their precious belongings, and then hear the lamentation of their woman (rather annoyed yells) as she is the last one alive. This always made us laugh hysterically, it’s just innate. Stealing things from the alien group in a game is even a popular YouTube topic and the basis of the popular game Sea of Thieves. Secretly backstabbing someone that you are pretending to be allied with is the whole basis of Among Us, maybe the most popular game of this decade, a game popular solely because of that mechanic.
The joy that men get from fulfilling these natural instincts is intended to be set against defectors and foreign invaders; that is why humans have this instinct. But American education has made them phobic about this truth at a young age, and modern Christian theology erroneously leads them believe that it is evil. But the Somali, with his rich history of piracy and tribalism, and his religion which celebrates war against the Kafir, is not confused by any of these illusions. The scamming is fun in itself. It is one of life’s greatest joys. They would do it even if they only make out with a single dollar, just as American men do it for free in virtual pretend worlds. They are laughing, dancing, and singing after stealing the Swede’s money, because it represents a victory over an alien race in their midst. They consider if a victory because it really is a victory, while the Swedish Minnesotan is looking at pixels rejoicing over something retarded like winning a match of Clash of Clans. The Somali male has the same motivation to commit a scam as an American male has to play a round of CounterStrike or Escape from Tarkov. This is the fundamental reason the scams are all over the place.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
Carlo Gesualdo is one of the few renaissance composers who boasts a “homicide” section in his Wikipedia article, though his life overlaps with Caravaggio who also boasts such a section. A very interesting time for sacred art.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
• Do you have a favorite piece of sacred music?
• Is there any piece from a video game or anime which feels like sacred music to you?
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
I don’t think the Westerner has the genetic disposition to compete against the Brahmin or Han in terms of raw Olympian memorization and test-taking, but he makes up for this lack with greater prosociality, collaboration and novelty. Unfortunately, the West has decided to structure its educational culture on the oriental mode of study, rather than leaning into its generic and cultural strengths. (An elite British university in 1800 was more about the cultivation of social skills than learning; lectures were nonexistent, learning was one-to-one with a tutor, and tests were fewer). The Brahmin has been selected by his religion to master the art of memorization and recitation in complete obedience to authority, but this is not so for Christian-derived Europeans. I think there may be clever ways to structure education to uniquely benefit the European genotype, by adding more independence, fellowship, and sense of moral purpose, but that’s just a hunch.
coffee_enjoyer
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11d ago
What is even going on there in 2025? The political board has been unusable and IMO totally botted since maybe 2018
coffee_enjoyer
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13d ago
I think this is pretty nitpicky. In America, everyone pursues status according to financial success unless they belong to a cult or a university. It can be called any term you like. Your point above that the Haredi would compete over wealth upon entering the workforce doesn’t really make sense, as (1) Haredi in the workforce have lower status than the Rabbis and (2) such a competition wouldn’t harm TFR any more than the already-fierce status competition over learning the most Torah. It would need to be argued that participation in the workforce for the Haredi would somehow harm the status competition around having large families.
coffee_enjoyer
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14d ago
Right but today we just throw our mentally ill and drug-addicted onto the populous streets to haunt the low-wage workers who take public transportation. Intermittently they spend an expensive night in jail or take an expensive ambulance ride to an expensive hospital. Sometimes they kill each other or give each other AIDs or just die. It’s very costly as is. I imagine the religious extremist would just confine them somewhere for their own good, which results in a fraction of the social and economic costs and is also morally superior.
coffee_enjoyer
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14d ago
Capitalism enforces a zero-sum status competition, regardless of whether it is positive sum in its economic consequences or not; actors compete over obtaining more wealth than their peers and a greater position than their peers. As you said, “enjoy more wealth, a de facto higher status”, that’s a relative position which is zero-sum; having more wealth and prestige = more status = better marital outcomes.
coffee_enjoyer
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14d ago
This wouldn’t be unusual for Europe or America before the 20th century, though. Problematic people were normally shunned from the community. This was done either through shunning them from polite society (simply never invited anywhere) or literally kicking them out of the town. Christians would have a certain place where the lifelong penitents would stay during mass, in some eras. Also, don’t we shun them now? We just put our mentally ill on the street. Why is this an argument against copying the Haredi TFR scheme, and more precisely, why would you believe this criticism weighs against civilizational catastrophe? When nations face civilizational catastrophe from war, they postpone freedom and force men to be warriors and then force them at gunpoint to march to certain death in the most degraded condition. Surely we can expend 0.01% of the stress and just orient culture toward pronatality.
coffee_enjoyer
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14d ago
Haredi culture already has a zero-sum, winner-takes-all status competition reminiscent of capitalism in the form of obtaining Rabbinical positions, something that commends a man more status than being even a billionaire. That’s part of the reason the older guys still continue to study. Yet even with this ruthless competition over status, the TFR remains high, because of the aforenoted confluence of pro-fertile cultural attributes. The Haredi man with a lot of money has worse marital odds than a poor Haredi man at a good rabbinical school. But both are getting married and both are having children.
Get a job, get married, have lots of babies to solve your own TFR rate but don't worry too much about everyone else's TFR.
If everyone focused on this alone then it would cement the ruin of the entire civilization. Though I agree that’s the best advise for normal people, you actually do need people obsessing over TFR because our elites are lowkey retarded and senseless.
I don’t recall seeing an alternative explanation for the popularity of the violent männerbund video game genre in my replies. I’ll look again. There has been the argument that male video game players actually like a variety of genres, and while this is true, there’s still reason to believe that they especially like the violent genre. The reason this is the edifice of my argument is that it’s a surprisingly strong edifice. If there is one strong argument, there’s not really a reason to reinforce it with additional arguments, which often proves cumbersome in forum discussion imo.
I am curious why you keep bringing up rape. I never mentioned rape in my post. Why do you have rape on your mind? The Conan the Barbarian quote only mentions the lamentations of the defeated women. Very odd.
You’re welcome to peruse the script. They get very sentimental about Lord Nelson (in real life: an impious and vainglorious adulterer, who happened to be exceedingly good at killing the French, and thus became the eternal hero of Britannia). The sentiment is all between the männerbund. Here is what they have to say about the women back home: “(toasting) to wives and sweethearts: may they never meet”.
They do. But that’s not why they enjoy warring. And it’s not why the premiere guy movie is the premiere guy movie. I think the only women are some topless natives.
You must have watched a different Sopranos. Money and chicks factor very little in the show. Tony has, what, one mistress? Two? And an annoying wife? And enough money for a boat and a McMansion. This isn’t Entourage. The Sopranos is popular because it follows the conflict of Tony and his crew as they pursue dominance against their competitors. It’s crew vs crew conflict and inter-crew conflict. Men like to see Tony steal the resources and fealty from rivals. They like to see men act within a männerbund to win resources and power. Does the average male viewer really crave to learn about the sociology of the mafia in the turn of the 21st century? Is he a criminologist who wants to explore the depths of narcissism in Tony Soprano? IMO, no.
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