DigitalDetritus
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User ID: 874
DigitalDetritus
1yr ago
So, I'm not exactly sure what point you're trying to make. If it's "Calvinists believe in predestination, hence have no answer for the problem of evil", I have to say that's incorrect, to put it mildly. I mean, the first of the five points of Calvinism is "Total Depravity", essentially that man is so corrupted by original sin that he cannot choose any good apart from the grace of God.
If the point is "Religion claims that if you pray enough, bad things won't happen to you", I don't think that's a mainstream position among any Christian denominations.
DigitalDetritus
1yr ago
Do you mind adding a link to the TRN's statement?
DigitalDetritus
1yr ago
You're forgetting the confounding factor that FtM are often prescribed testosterone. I think the more parsimonious explanation would be "Testosterone produces aggressive and violent behavior"
Which... I think is pretty well established.
DigitalDetritus
1yr ago
Have you ever encountered an educated, successful man who has married a woman without a degree? It's possible, clearly, but I think it's extremely rare.
Assortative mating by socio-economic status is extremely pronounced in the US, and the lack of a degree locks you out of the "educated, successful men" part of the dating pool.
DigitalDetritus
1yr ago
The problem isn't loneliness or lack of romantic relationships, the problem is declining family formation, which those are a prerequisite for.
I think the big problem for both men and women is the opportunity costs involved.
For middle-class women, the prime time to get married and have children overlaps with the critical time for education and launching a career. Additionally, even with access to good child care, there are serious compromises required - you can have kids and raise them well in the early years, but it comes at the cost of someone's career, either theirs or their spouse's. Alternately, you subcontract the raising of your children, and you feel that you're a failure as a mother, because you never have the time or energy for your children.
My wife has a STEM degree. This dynamic hit her hard.
For men, the cost of family formation is adulthood and responsibility. There's a lot of fun stuff that you have to give up or dial back on if you're going to be providing for a family - and as entertainment and hobbies get better, the cost only goes up.
I'm kind of a nerd, and I have (or had) a lot of geeky hobbies. This dynamic hit me hard.
Now, don't get me wrong - the tradeoffs are absolutely worth it in the long run, but they are still tradeoffs.
Here's the real kicker, though: Even if you have a woman who isn't interested in a career and just wants marriage and children, Moloch rears his head and smacks that down. Because, unless she's in an isolated community, this means that she'll need to find a man who can provide for her to dedicate her time and efforts to marriage and children. Which means a man in roughly the upper quartile of earning potential. Which means a man who is educated, interested in settling down, responsible. Which means a man who has a lot of options and wouldn't look twice at a woman without a college education... and so, our aspirational homemaker still needs a college degree, and the attendant expenses in both money and fertile years.
DigitalDetritus
1yr ago
It is very easy to desire things, even good things, that are ultimately detrimental. This isn't a problem with women in particular; it's a problem with humans.
DigitalDetritus
1yr ago
Am I just overthinking this entirely and letting a flippant shitposty meme trigger me into neurotic despair?
Probably. I think "Theatre Kid" is just a broad stereotype, like, say, tech-bros or rainbow-haired SJWs or the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons.
That said, the intersection of Art and right-wing thought is an interesting one. I'd give a couple of possibilities as to why the right tends to be disinterested in art. (mostly just spitballing here)
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Institutional dominance. The creative organs are so overwhelmingly left-wing that it's virtually impossible for anyone on the right to gain traction, and thus most potential creators just don't even try.
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Tied in with the first is that left-wing messaging alienates those on the right, so they tend to consume media that has withstood the test of time (the classics) or is from cultures that are disconnected from the Western zeitgeist (Anime)
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Signaling. There are some hobbies/activities that get closely associated with a political position even if it doesn't necessarily make sense, and fine art has been tied in with the Left, in much the same way that NASCAR is tied in with the Right.
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Survive/thrive mentality. (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/). Art for art's sake is very much a luxury hobby, so it seems somewhat useless to those on the right who just want to work, raise their families, and grill.
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Leftward pull. Humans are social animals, and so a right winger creative will naturally be influenced by the environment around him. If that entire professional environment is left-wing, he will naturally be inclined to moderate his views and output in order to fit in with his peers.
DigitalDetritus
1yr ago
Sub-replacement fertility is a big deal because of a couple of factors that are completely independent of race, religion, or dysgenics:
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In the short term, you have an aging population supported by an ever-shrinking workforce. This is likely to affect you personally when you approach retirement years, or if not you, definitely your one child.
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In the medium term, it's uncharted territory. I'm open to correction, but to the best of my knowledge, there is literally zero historical precedent for societies surviving and reversing extended population decline. Perhaps an extended decline propped up by mass immigration and automation won't cause any issues, but I wouldn't count on it.
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In the long term, anything that cannot continue will not. If the modern, industrialized way of life can't produce enough children to sustain itself, it will eventually be replaced by something that can. Whether it's the Amish or Brave New World or Handmaid's Tale or something else entirely, nobody has any idea. And I find that idea disheartening, because I like the modern way of life.
DigitalDetritus
1yr ago
*The weirdest wasn't even a girl I dated, I had a Nigerian study partner in Econ who, in conversation, starts telling me that she wants to marry a blonde guy with blue eyes so she'll have children with pretty eyes and pretty hair, staring at me the whole time. I got just a hint there of what Asians must feel whenever they meet an anime fan.
Have you noticed that most people don't have a particularly strong grasp of genetics? I'm sorry, Nigerian woman, no matter who you marry, your kids will have brown eyes and dark hair.
Now, grandkids are another story, but nobody is going to be thinking that far in advance.
DigitalDetritus
1yr ago
I think this goes back to the whole tangled mess that is race in the United States.
My personal feeling is that 'race' is an awful lot less significant for most purposes than culture, and typically serves as a loose proxy for it. For your example, if your wife grew up in the upper midwest and spoke only English, she'd probably consider herself 'white', and everyone around her would consider her 'white', even if she had an identical genetic admixture.
However, the State needs to categorize everything, and so you get slotted into the 'White' bucket, and she gets slotted into the 'Hispanic' one. So, to answer your question, it's an interracial marriage if the two partners check different demographic boxes on the standardized forms. :-)
DigitalDetritus
1yr ago
This is one of those areas where anecdotes can help illuminate statistics. My understanding (from a quick search) is that not all interracial couples are the same with regards to marital stability. I've seen lots of contradictory data, but it seems fairly clear that White/Black marriages are less stable than White/White (although possibly more stable than Black/Black), and White/Asian ones are about comparable (although far less stable than Asian/Asian)
If that's accurate, it's not so much that interracial marriages are inherently unstable, and more that they tend to default to the least stable demographic of the pairing... which would intuitively make sense. It takes two to make a marriage work, but only one to end it.
I have some personal experience in the area (as do many on this forum, I suspect). I'm happily interracially married (wife is Asian) for 18 years, with two kids. Interestingly enough, much of the initial opposition from my wife's family revolved around "He's white, and white people will divorce you". The familial opposition to interracial marriages faded pretty quickly after we got married; her brother married a white woman, and she has several female cousins who married white men. All of those marriages have been successful so far, but I'm sure that if any of them fail, the stereotype will return full force.
DigitalDetritus
2yr ago
Yes. I somewhat anticipated a pushback there; what's new is the hyper-focus on emotionalism and safetyism.
Kids may have been taught by women, but the attitude towards it was a lot less coddling, I think.
My view is that the transition from strict rules, enforced by corporeal punishment to the present situation (with a hyper-focus on mental and emotional health) represents a feminization of education, in a way that is independent of the sex of those doing the teaching. Kind of like the sex/gender distinction, I guess, with the worst aspects of femininity taking the lead. So, I guess it would be fair to say that I view early education to be captured by toxic femininity.
DigitalDetritus
2yr ago
My view is that the modern incarnation of Leftism largely is driven by the feminization of society - the modern Left with its concerns about "inclusion" and "representation" - making sure people don't feel bad, basically - may share some concerns with the Communists, but the focus is very different than the muscular, STEM and heavy industry focused Soviets.
This is probably a good thing; it means that it's quite a bit further of a stretch for the modern Left to get into torture, gulags, and mass murder.
DigitalDetritus
2yr ago
I think that at least part of the issue is that pre-school/elementary age education is an overwhelmingly female-dominated field, which makes it far more influenced by emotions rather than reason. Phonics may teach kids how to read, but if it causes them to become anxious or bored or feel bad about themselves, the teachers aren't likely to think the trade-off is worth it - and they tend to empathize with their students, making them feel bad as well.
Basically, the feminization of early education has resulted in coddling at the expense of results.
DigitalDetritus
2yr ago
I read Iron Widow, and it was even worse than you describe.
The protagonist doesn't merely blast aggressive feminism, she engages in outright evil, monstrous actions - she kills her entire family, including a brother who was seemingly innocent. She kills some minor characters who acted against her despite the fact that their sole motivation is that their children were held hostage. And, she kills an antagonist (who, granted, did some pretty terrible things) by personally torturing him to death.
None of these actions trouble her in the least.
The pattern seems to be that outside of the protagonists, the entire world is divided into innocent victims (none of whom, it must be noted, get any real characterization) and evil oppressors, who have no rights and are entitled to no moral consideration. This is the worldview that leads to genocide.
Have I mentioned that this book is in the 'YA' category, so nominally aimed at teenagers?
The troubling thing, in my mind, is how a work with such an abhorrent worldview gets so much approval - it's been nominated for multiple awards, it's on the NYT best-seller list, and highly rated on goodreads. That tells me that either there's a large segment of the public that has no problem with it, or that the tastemakers are actively pushing it. I don't think either possibility is a good sign.
DigitalDetritus
2yr ago
(Hi, lurkers, if you're out there!)
Hi to you, too! I've been lurking since the SSC subreddit days, just never registered because I didn't want to get involved with Reddit.
One thing I've noticed since the move is that there seems to be heavy cross-pollination with /r/drama. This seems odd to me; I wouldn't expect there to be much overlap between the two communities. Is there any reason other than the commonality of Reddit diaspora?
I'm not convinced that Team Left and Team Right do, in fact, get along in person and simply fight online. I suspect that a significant amount of online toxicity bleeds into meat-space interactions, particularly as the unwritten rule of "Leave politics and religion out of your professional interactions" gets more and more abandoned. I think there's some polling data that shows that political differences are increasingly a dealbreaker when it comes to dating; I can't find it at the moment, though.
With regards to the core question, I think there's a few things going on. My personal theory is that with the end of the Cold War, America was no longer faced with an external threat to fight, and so ended up expending its energy on fighting each other. Mix that in with the decline of Protestant Christianity as a unifying factor and the rise of the Internet amplifying differences and killing common culture, and we end up with the situation we're in now.
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