BahRamYou
2mo ago
That's a good breakdown. But I have to say, when you lay it all out like that... it sounds of grim, doesn't it? Not to go all "men's rights activist" but... it sounds like the typical modern man is in a marriage where he needs permission from his wife to go outside, feels guilty for everything, and relies on parasocial internet relationships to replace real-life friendships. Pretty dark. As a cope he says "Oh, I no longer need to spend time with real life frends like I did when I was in my 20s. Now that i'm older, it's so much more satisfying to stay at home by myself." And then he drinks himself to death.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
or it's gone.
Bear in mind that evolution works exceedingly slowly. Like, over millions of years. "Modern" human civilization- meaning like, agriculture- is only like 10,000 years old. Maybe we're now in the "it's gone" phase of human evolution.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
think, if you live in the suburbs, one of the only ways to build a functioning social network in your middle years is by having kids and connecting with their peers' parents.
This is true, and is also what I hate about the suburbs. There's no authentic, direct, adult connection. it's all "oh little timmy is in the same club as your little jimmy, and isn't that nice?" It turns all the adults into glorified babysitters who have no identity of their own outside their kids.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
I also remember that time from middle school. But uh, isn't that just a temporary phase? Most guys eventually learn to balance having a girlfriend with having friends. It's incredibly cringe how some guys will betray their closest friends and become completely pussywhipped by a girl they just met the day before. We don't need to encourage and reward that sort of behavior. But it seems like so much of modern American life is built around this ideal of "the nuclear family" where the father comes straight home from work, sits in "the family room" with his kids, watching TV, and has no friends or hobbies outside the house.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
Perhaps this is cope on my part, as I have kids and don't get out much any more -- but kids also completely reset what one thinks as important. Much of the "going out" I did in my 20s, from trivia nights at the pub to going to the movies to trying out the new exotic restaurant now seems frivolous and uninteresting. At a deeper level, a lot of young adult socialization is about forming networks that allow us to access status and ultimately money and sex. Having reached a stable level of both, socialization becomes a lot less interesting, and most of my socialization is now with fellow parents, since we have more common goals.
I'm not a parent but I've been on the other side of that way too often. I definitely get that impression, from people that I used to think were my friend, that now they think of my friendship as something temporary, trivial, and meaningless. The only thing that matters to them is their children.
It's... I don't know, I'm conflicted. Maybe you and them are right, that family is something "higher" that makes everything else seem small in comparison. But from my perspective, it's more like all of my friends are being brainwashed by a cult that forces them to drop connections to anyone outside the cult. They can now only socialize in approved "play dates" with other parents of children the exact same age as their own. And that's, like, 2 hours a week. Most of their time is spent in "family time" which I strongly suspect is just them sitting on the couch watching inane g-rated cartoons with the kids.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
It is absolutely impossible for natural selection to cause a species to not want to have children. No, it is emphatically not natural that women would desire to have no children, and instead have to be forced into it, throughout all of human history. The "logic" proffered borders on absurd; "well, people tend to avoid pain and inconvenience, so logically it must be the case that they would also avoid such in childbirth as well!" reasoning from first principles while obstinately avoiding all of known history that shouts otherwise. One would think we would see evidence of such "nature" prior to the Sexual Revolution, were it so.
Why not? It's well accepted science that humans are exceptionally bad, among animals, at having children. We are terrible at giving birth. Humans evolved a large brain, but that large brain comes at a terrible price. A very long incubation period, a horrifically painful pregnancy, and then years of being a helpless baby. No other animal species puts anywhere near that much effort and pain into having kids, because no other species evolved giant brains. And unfortunately the modern world puts even more premium on the brain so... here we are, I guess. The Great Filter of human extinction is our own brain.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
Fair point. It's easy to think of "the USSR" as being a singular country, but it really wasn't. It was the Russian Empire. So you could slide them into that side of "winners of the global imperialism game" alongside the English, French, Dutch, etc. But they were kind of different in that they didn't have any wealthy, 1st-world "core" to the country the way those other countries did.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
Welll, what's the point of comparison? Compared to the UK and USA they were decidedly backwards. Compared to Russia and Eastern Europe they were more advanced. Compared to the rest of the continent... I don't know, that's a tough question. Probably not a huge difference, but France and the low countries might have been a bit more advanced since they weren't suffering from WW1 reparations. I know the Germans seized a lot of material from the occupation of those countries, which was absolutely critical for them to keep their war economy going.
At any rate, its important to keep in mind just how pre-modern this country was. It was not, for most average people, a country of cars driving through cities the way Nazi propaganda films made it look. It was a country of people living in rural farms, where they didn't have electricity or radios, and had to take a train to the nearest city if they wanted to watch a news reel.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
Assuming Germany won the war, they'd inevitably find that there just weren't enough Germans to populate the enormous swathes of land they conquered, even including their optimistic reclassifications of the Danes, Dutch and so on as German. This would probably necessitate moderation. The Allies moderated their post-war plans (to render a diminished Germany a deindustrialized wasteland), it's reasonable to assume that a post-war Germany would also moderate.
My take from Wages of Destruction was that the problem was more short-term. Between war production, the blockade, the bombings, and the linger effects of WW1 and the great depression (plus them just being kind of a backwards low-tech economy to begin with), they were really struggling even to feed their own people. Conquering a bunch of farmland was one of those "yeah, in the long run this will help, but in the long run we're all dead" kind of things. There was so little food to go around, they had to make some hard decisions, and there was a certain cold logic to it. Full rations for the soldiers and key factory workers, half-rations for the civilians and prisoners from the people they liked, slim-to-nil rations for the people they didn't like. But OK, maybe they would have moderated in a hypothetical future where the war was over, the blockade was lifted, and there was plenty of food to go around.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
1, 2, and 3 are not all that different given the economics and politics of the.
Basically every wealthy country followed the same idea, of not just free-market capitalism, but imperalistic capitalism. The way to get rich was to conquer some 3rd countries, take their resources, and then sell them back manufactured goods at an inflated price. Then you use your high-tech manufacturing to dominate the world, forever.
Britain especially, but also France, Dutch, Belgium, and some others had all emerged as "winners" of the great imperialism game of the 19th century. They had nice little empires for themselves, and were raking in the cash. Germany, eastern Europe, Italy, and Japan were "losers"- potentially strong nations which had lost their chance to grab an empire and were now falling behind. Russia was sort of a weird case where it had a ton of land and resources but was still undeveloped and uncolonized, so it had the chance to either emerge as a great power in its own right or get colonized by someone else.
Once you're in that kind of system, there's an obvious dividing line for how the alliances would shake out. Britain et. al. wanted to maintain the status quo of capitalism. Germany and the others still wanted to do capitlism, but rearrange the map a bit to grab some colonies for themselves. Russia wanted a whole different system where they could develop and be left alone. Nobody was thinking "let's just develop our service sector and leave the 3rd world alone in peace" because that just wasn't how people at the time thought, at all.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
Hey, i had a job at 13. It sucked, but it was still a real job. I dont know why you think its impossible for 13 year olds to be useful (but somehow also smart enough to do college prep classes)
BahRamYou
2mo ago
First, I think it's not at all obvious that a time-travelling 13-year-old would actually prefer it now. Maybe some would, but it would vary. I think a lot of them would really chafe at the lack of freedom now, and being forced to do everything digitally instead of physically. Immigrant children aren't always wide-eyed with glee at being brought here by their parents, you know.
Second- we mostly don't have factories anymore. At least, not factories that higher large amounts. Almost everyone now works in some sort of service-sector jobs. And many of those jobs are now crying out for lack of workers! McDonalds is closing early and raising prices almost everywhere, because they just can't find the staff. That's not a job that requires a college education, it just requires someone to work hard and be willing to learn.
In your idealized world where everyone spends their entire youth in school and is not allowed to work. Well, that was kind of what life was like for women, when they were restricted from most jobs. They didn't like it, it made them both bored and completely dependant on their husband. Allowing people to gain job skills and financial independance is a good thing!
BahRamYou
2mo ago
Sure, there are downsides
making the life of all teenagers completely pointless and utterly dependant on their parents for everything is one heck of a downside. It notably leads to a lot less people having children. Works OK as long as we can keep filling the gaps using immigrants to handle all the low-wage jobs, but we'll be in trouble if that source of cheap disposable labor ever goes away.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
To be clear, I didn't mean kids who have severe mental issues- they probably belong in special-ed or juvenile detention. (but what will you do witih them after they turn 18....?) Just basic, normal kids who might sometimes misbehave or slack off a bit, but are perfectly capable of following simple directions. There's no reason to think they'd be any worse at doing most low wage jobs than the people currently doing them, other than lack of experience.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
Yeah, something like that sounds perfect! But it does illegal now, and even if it wasn't, I would have had no idea how to find a job like that as a 12 year old growing up in the upper-middle-class suburbs.
Contra @FlyingLionWithABook, I do think you'd have to subsidize and regulate it a bit though. The idea would be for everyone to get a job like that, or at least most people. Including the very below-average kids. I don't care whether they're actually "productive" at it though, the point would be to gently guide them into the workforce, sort of like how we have Kindergarten set up to get kids used to being at school without really testing them on anything. All of the part-time minimum wage jobs I had in high school were absolutely miserable, just forcing kids through the wringer doing the worst stuff with the expectation that we'd all quit before too long anyway. And some of the managers and older coworkers were downright sadistic about it.
Counterpoint to the "status" argument- in Japan, being a mom/housewife is still considered a good, respectable job. Maybe not "high-status," but not low-status either, and it beats the hell out of working a terrible office job with insane hours. Young women there will unabashedly say "I want to become a housewife." But the birth rate there is still quite low, so apparently something is not working.
I wish I had a source for this, but I remember reading somewhere that the decline in birth rate is mostly coming from a decline in the teen birth rate. Women who wait until they've finished college and started a career to have kids are just not the sort of person to have large families. They'll have 1, 2 at most, and often zero. The younger they start, the more likely they are to have more kids. In part that's just biology (higher fertility), but also psychological, young people are a lot more likely to think "why not just do it" instead of agonizing over the decision for years.
My crazy idea would be to, essentially, abolish high school. Or at least, rework it to be very, very different. I think it's insane that we expect teenagers to learn calculus and biology as if they're all on track to become future scientists, while at the same time forcing them to follow the strict rules and low status of children. I would change it to be more of a "finishing school" experience, where they get taught how to live independantly, give them a job that's subsidized by the government so it's less brutal than most minimum-wage jobs, but still gives them some responsibility and spending money. Give them some freedom and independance from their parents. At that point they'll have time, money, and freedom to interact with the opposite sex, and things will just happen naturally. Then they can decide for themselves whether they want to continue "real school" by going to college, or just keep working and raising a family/dating.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
Sure, but that's different because it's temporary. You wait for a safe chance to pass, gun it, then move back to the normal lane and speed once you're clear. You're not supposed to just continuously barrel along the left lane at twice the speed of the right lane, which is the equivalent of cars vs a bike lane. Of course, people do that anyway...
BahRamYou
2mo ago
Well, the standard argument is that most people grew up in a family that is basically communistic. The children are basically freeloaders. They might do a few light chores, but they're not earning money, they just get everything provided to them for free. And many things, like the furniture and kitchen equipment, are shared jointly by the whole family. It works fine for a small group like a family. I wouldn't try to scale that up to an entire nation, but many things break when you try to scale them up that far.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
They're also a way to put the bikers in a place where drivers are expecting, or can learn to expect, them to be.
Wouldn't you normally expect them to be in the road, like right in front of you in the easiest possible place to see? Not shunted off to the side, into their perepheral vision, in a place where you can 99% ignore them until it's time to make a turn and then "oops, I never saw him." But ok, maybe you're right that drivers are just so phone-addled these days that the periphery is the only place they can actually see. Too bad modern car designs (like you mentioned) make it exceedingly difficult to see the blind spots.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
I don't have much of a stake in German politics, but it would be important for me to understand whether or not AfD are Nazis or Nazis-in-building. I have a very low tolerance for Nazis, but also American politics taught me that about 99% of times when somebody calls somebody else a Nazi it's a lie. There's still 1% where it's true, about the Nazis which do exist, and some of them even wear swastikas (many others wear other outfits and signage) - but one has to be careful there.
This gets a little confusing when you're actually living in Germany. Actual current-day nazis are rare, but pretty much everyone there had a father or grandfather (or grandmother) who worked for them. Maybe not as card-carrying members of the party, but still swept up in the war effort somehow. It wasn't really a choice, the whole country did. So I can see how the endless performative guilt and apologies would get annoying, since it's basically calling out an entire generation of your family.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
I think he's right that, at least some of the time, bike lanes are not really for the benefit of bikers- they're used to force bikers out of the way so that cars can go faster. It seems like we've basically accepted, as a society, that you have a right to drive at whatever is the speed limit on your current street. And anyone who interferes with that is blocking traffic and needs to get out of the way. Which is a little odd, when you think about it- in normal life there's no "right to run" where you can sprint at top speed and just expect people to get out of your way. It might make sense on a freeway dedicated to motor vehicles, but even then, you'll encounter stuff like trucks going at a slower speed and you just have to wait until you can pass them safely.
I've been wondering if this will come up more in the future, as EVs have given a lot more people access to speeds that in the past you'd only see from ultra-expensive supercars. If I pay for 200MPH "plaid speed" from Tesla, why should I be stuck behind some granny going 60 in her 1980s honda civic? Make a "slow car lane" and force her to drive exclusively in that lane so that the rest of us can drive as fast as we want! Oh, and if she accidentally drifts into the "regular" lane, make her pay for the damage to my car. Or at least, that's how it feels like from the perspective of someone who got used to cycling on rural roads and is suddenly told he's not supposed to do that anymore.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
I don't think the problem is being able to find talent. I think they genuinely don't care anymore. Its like how government ambassadorships are usually given to party insiders and weathy donors as a reward, and if they happen to actually be good at the job that's just a happy little accident. These big media franchises have become so big, "too big to fail," that the people in charge can do whatever they want and the fans would still just buy it anyway.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
He did great in the 2016 republican debates. Consistenty entertaining and stole the spotlight, as you'd expect from someone who spent so long working in reality TV. He struggles more with the 1v1 debate format, i think. Maybe because that gives both people too much airtime and the whole thing is just boring.
To be fair... it's not really socially acceptable to say "I wish I didn't have kids, so that I could spend more time drinking/sleeping around." But that might be true! people are complicated.
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