Hieronymus
5d ago
The descriptions of 4B make it sound a lot like MGTOW. I don’t know a ton about either, but I remember Men Going Their Own Way as a neighborhood of the broader manosphere, when the blogosphere was more of a going concern. It was generally made up of men who had been burned hard.
I also don’t know if the causes are similar – men mostly seem to come to MGTOW when they are looking to explain and contextualize bitter personal experiences. Is 4B an actual backlash in the West, or is it just that some journalists want to cultivate a backlash? When women join in South Korea, are they operating from painful personal experiences, or are they reacting to a consensus that tells them that any self-respecting woman in their situation should be bitter?
Hieronymus
9d ago
Maybe it's because I was a teenager, but it sure felt like there was a gray tribe in the '90s. The mores of Slashdot weren't blue tribe mores, but the mores of Reddit now are. The Eich affair and CoCs in open source made it clear a change had taken place.
I'm enough of a red-triber that I don't know how it happened, only that it did. And I think we lost something important.
Hieronymus
11d ago
The political environment isn’t at all conducive to it, but even under a narrow reading of federal powers the feds could prohibit interstate traffic in abortifacients or crossing state lines to obtain an abortion.
Hieronymus
14d ago
I am curious to hear your reasons for this. My state seems to be moving dramatically (and for me, quite disappointingly) in the other direction.
Hieronymus
15d ago
What was uniquely bad about the initiative in Florida that it caused some supporters of legal abortion to vote against it?
I don’t think we can speculate too much without seeing the survey question. 14% is a pretty small number of abortion supporters, so maybe it’s the percentage comfortable with heavy restrictions plus or minus the lizardman’s constant.
Hieronymus
19d ago
1 Corinthians 10:14-22, which Paul is writing to Christians in Corinth:
Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. I speak as to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say. The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread. Consider the people of Israel: are not those who eat the sacrifices participants in the altar? What do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he?
Hieronymus
1mo ago
...instead just try to filter for the intelligent liberals and leftists.
I'd say that the Motte is full of '90s-style intelligent liberals. Old-school economic leftists aren't common but aren't totally unheard of, and social democrats are common enough to be unremarkable. We do lack for woke and woke-adjacent folks.
That said, I am quite conservative by Motte standards, so this is a view from the right.
I don't endorse Richard Hanania but I sympathize strongly with much of his recent writing on this topic.
I don't usually read Hanania, but he is sharp. Is there a post or two of his you would recommend on the issue?
Hieronymus
2mo ago
I think there are a modest but meaningful number of men online, whether they were successful cads or not, who are coming to realize that rejecting Christian sexual ethics has been bad for people of both sexes. I wonder if they'll be the one group of irreligious moderns who will find the natural law persuasive.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
What you're observing is that most people are 'suicidal, law-breaking, moving hazards'.
I don’t think this is true, and let me give an analogy. I have been several times to a sportsmen’s show in a small city, with classes, vendors hawking their wares, guides pitching services, that kind of thing. The level of firearm proficiency among attendees is pretty high, and the level of firearms safety is very high. At an event like this, you could pull random people out of the crowd on a busy show floor and hand them loaded rifles without causing me any concern at all. Obviously there was no reason to do this and no one did it, but the odds of an incident would be low.
One year there was a booth selling stun guns, and people did some pretty irresponsible things with them – things they would never have done with firearms. The people were the same, but their behavior was very different. To everyone there guns were serious and required respect, but to many stun guns were toys, and they treated them like toys.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
You know, as an actual literal tradcon I can say that this guy just shouldn't be dating- the man pays in relationships, that's part and parcel of rejecting modern gender roles.
But society should do its best to make it possible for men to fill those roles. I think OP is right to suggest that the British government is setting out to avoid this responsibility more or less explicitly.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
If the story is true, why is U.S. intelligence leaking the details now?
I think it does increase the likelyhood that the Ukraine did it rather than the United States, but I am taking the story's allocations of personal responsibility with a shakerful of salt.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
Private landowners have many of the same worries, like liability and the condition of the property should they decide to do something with it in the future. But they also have to worry about squatter's rights in the medium term. I don't know if there are jurisdictions where they have to worry about tenant laws, but I would not be surprised.
I think the reference to metaphysics opens your question up a great deal. So I will offer one option unusual in rationalist-adjacent spaces: true religion. I don't just mean religion as a social technology for building group cohesion and teaching pro-social values. I mean religion which offers the truth about God, human nature, and the human condition. (Yes, Romans 1 came up in church today.) When you know what men are and what they are for, you have a workable foundation for wisdom and virtue.
But if you can't swing true religion for whatever reason, your next best bet is the natural law. Among the ancients, it was possible for Christians, pagans, and de facto atheists to discuss it productively. In the modern age it seems to be unique to Christians, so it doesn't have a lot of practical independant value. This may be because the others have rejected metaphysics.
Edit to make the implicit explicit: I doubt that this is the place for me to convince all of you to convert. The folks here who are old enough and interested in that debate have probably had it at a higher level than I can offer anyway. But religion on the Motte is often discussed in instrumental ways, and I want to say that the truth matters. Focus on the verity in eternal verities.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
The post is structured as a politically-flipped parody of an argument from an immigration critic, with some asserted (by the parody) racism. In that way BurdensomeCount opens the discussion by mocking those who disagree with him.
As the post goes on it begins to seem that the poster also asserts the parody's claims as true, which he may indeed believe. This gives him cover (I am expressing my sincere opinion!) and baits his interlocutors into answering the parody they'd have otherwise ignored at the moment they are angriest. As a probably unintended side effect it sucks all the oxygen out of the room, preventing a more patient and interesting subthread from arising.
A frank summary of events and his opinion may have led to an interesting, if somewhat heated, discussion. I don't think that's what BurdensomeCount was looking for.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
I am not a member of either and so cannot speak from experience, but I think that RPGPub aspires to be apolitical and TheRPGSite is more-or-less explicitly unwoke.
Hieronymus
4mo ago
My company’s shiny new ERP system is hosted by our vendor, a large and growing company which sells to many industry verticals. The system is still down.
If our little SMB IT department had been running it on premises, we would never have installed endpoint protection on our servers. We may have had all kinds of other problems we couldn’t hedge against because of our scale, but we have the good sense to weigh the risks ourselves instead of complying with a customer’s backside-covering audit checklist.
Hieronymus
10mo ago
Additionally, parents have many non-violent ways of hurting their children non-violently if they escalate. Domestic violence charges that will stick to their background checks for years while they're looking for their first job, identity theft to ruin their credit, psych ward commitment...
One of the silly and dangerous things about the exchange in Aella's post is that it doesn't distinguish between parental motivations. I suspect, though I can't know, that the parents of authors one and two are disciplining, whether wisely or unwisely, out of love, so those kids really don't have to worry about their parents trying to hurt them this way out of revenge. But kids from worse families who tried their advice could be burned pretty badly.
Hieronymus
10mo ago
A year and a half ago Scott wrote an ACX post about why his writing had changed from the way it was 2013–2016, and it prompted me to think about the kinds of pieces I would rather read from wizened psychiatrist Scott rather than young buck Scott. One of these is his current thoughts on shared environment and the effects of parenting. Another is the state of social science research on spanking; that would give him a chance to apply his thoughts on shared environment, and it’s culture-war-adjacent enough to examine the effects of bias but outside the current focus of the culture war.
Aella’s descriptions of her own childhood make for somber but thought-provoking reading. As an evangelical Christian, though not a parent, I wonder what went wrong to produce the kind of abuse she went through. One possibility: maybe evangelical parenting advice is particularly difficult for parents on the autism spectrum to apply. Aella has described herself and her father (but not her mother) as on the spectrum. Evangelical advice focuses pretty heavily on responding to the child’s heart and will. Young children especially wear their hearts on their sleeves, but if you struggle to notice emotional cues you may miss the point where you have been severe enough to discipline effectively and you may see obstinance where there is none.
It’s also interesting that, in spite of all that, Aella writes positively about her homeschooling experiences and negatively about her brief time in public school.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
… but he’s no Roy Moore.
This is definitely a tangent, but I haven’t kept up with political scandals. What do you mean? My recollection is that Moore was accused of some things that were really serious and some things that were merely weird; then, when some of the weird accusations were proved, people spoke as if the grave ones were too, mostly without evidence. But I am fully prepared to have missed some developments in the mean time.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I happened to read it at that age. Although it's not exactly history, it did put our brief coverage of Hawaii in my US history class to shame.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I want to offer a data point since your example caught my eye. My go-to butter, from a very respectable American dairy brand, is 81% butterfat. Butter isn’t what they’re most known for and I don’t think chefs seek it out, but I prefer it to the well-reviewed European brands I have tried. So it surprises me that the EU forbids it to be called butter.
On the other hand, America’s minimum alcohol content for liquor to be labeled with the obvious categories (whiskey, brandy, gin, etc.) is 80 proof (40% ABV) as opposed to the EU’s 75 proof (37.5% ABV). I don’t know what that says about us, but I am grateful for it.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I read Hawaii in high school, but Michener’s patronizing treatment of Hale is one of the few things I remember now. Whatever the movie’s take, Michener clearly didn’t think Hale’s faith a virtue; in modern terms, it felt like a lot of 1950s literary sneering at the repressed, nerdy missionary.
Is the movie more nuanced in that regard, or does it just feel that way given the evolution of the culture war? Is my memory unfair to the novel?
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I would love to read it.
I appreciate your and @screye's replies on the culture war aspects. As an American I am used to reading western history with the bias of the author in mind. But that's hard to do for parts of the world where I don't have the context; I can sometimes intuit the author's biases, but their implications are not clear to me.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Do you know of any resources that make the history of Hinduism legible to a westerner? I got curious reading about Indo-European languages and then Indo-European religion. The parallels between Germanic mythology and early Vedic religion are fascinating. But the early Vedic religion has clearly been transformed and subsumed. (No cattle sacrifices in modern Hinduism!) I am curious what the different proto-Hinduisms were and how they met and fought and syncretized.
Books I've read on the history of Indo-European religion (admittedly years ago) were light on the Indo-Iranian branch.
I am a “Roe v. Wade Republican” who also opposes Griggs v. Duke. The 2024 RNC publicly diminished pro-lifers’ influence. This is probably a consequence of Dobbs, and while I am annoyed at the squishy middle of America on the issue, I am grateful for the win that inspired the blowback.
It is true that opposition to Roe has a discrete constituency, whereas opposition to Griggs does not. But I think that opposition to affirmative action is almost universal among red- and gray-tribe Republicans. To the extent that the median Republican voter understands disparate impact analysis, he doesn’t like it.
I think your “Griggs Republican” is in a tough spot for two reasons, one shared with “Roe Republicans” and one not. Like pro-lifers, opponents of Griggs have the problem that a lot of elected Republicans are in fact blue tribe and are thus either hostile to the issue or indifferent and unwilling to spend any political or social capital on it. But I think what distinguishes your image of a Griggs Republican is not just opposition to Griggs; it’s also membership in the gray tribe. And it’s true that gray-tribers are a small part of the Republican coalition.
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