RenOS

RenOS something is wrong 1d ago

No offense, but this seems completely unworkable to me. The universities are already simply ignoring existing laws when it suits them, they'll just ignore those, too. They might at most need to find a paper-thin excuse that will allow already sympathetic judges/lawyers to sign it off, but I'm not sure even that is necessary.

A new march is impossible, since the old one was only possible thanks to the conservative old guard allowing it. Which is also the reason they lost to the trumpist new right.

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RenOS something is wrong 1d ago

Thanks, now I feel old. I've never heard this as a slang term, not even online.

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RenOS something is wrong 1d ago

Interesting. Which king, if I may ask? Since there really aren't that many left.

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RenOS something is wrong 1d ago

What is passed off as gender abolitionism tends to merely be a rebellion against perceived male supremacism and heteronormativity.

A point I realized in discussions with my wife (early millenial), her mom (boomer) and her sister (gen X) is that there are two fundamentally opposed kinds of male supremacism: First, the idea that biological men are just better, and second, that male social norms are just better. The first is extremely unpopular and is fought very openly and very hard, the second is ... complicated.

Especially among liberal Gen X and older women, there is a common story of noticing that you're being valued for your school and later career accomplishments, and having to become tough and competitive to make it in, often explicitly called, "the world of men". Meanwhile, the worst that can possibly happen to you, that will make your parents bow their head in shame and your classmates laugh about you, is to become pregnant early. Even later, while your parents might switch to start egging you to have kids, your environment will subtly or not-so-subtly never really stops primarily considering your status through the lens of achievements. Anyone can have kids, after all, so it's much more prestigious to become a high-powered lawyer, a professor, or something else.

All of this is a very straightforward application of norms that formerly only applied to men, now also to women. Formerly female norms, centering on communal decision-making, friendliness and inclusivity, as well as achievements, mostly revolving around motherhood and the household, were de-emphasized in the former case and discarded wholesale in the later. Interestingly, acknowledging this will regularly get you dismissed as a male supremacist, on the logic that of course the virtues/achievements I call "male" here are actually just general virtues/achievements, and implying that women might be less good or even just merely care less about them is akin to claiming that women are lesser.

This lead to an dynamic in which Gen X men who are very stereotypically male, who are dismissive of femininity, nevertheless consider themselves pro-feminist in the sense of thinking that women can and should behave the same as successful men. Several of my (former) profs are like that.

Of course people generally don't really change fundamentally, so this just got bottled up for as long as it was necessary. With women increasingly being a majority in many fields, they can now simply enforce new norms, even if it takes some time to (re-)normalize them. And it's unsurprising that these new norms happen to reflect feminine virtues. And the Gen X men are the ones being blasted the hardest, who additionally feel completely blindsided since it's a fundamentally different kind of feminism than the one they were told is the right kind. Millenial men might also be split on whether they like this development, but they seem much less surprised.

My wife notices this a lot, contrasting what she is told by her mother what she "needs to do" to be successful in the workplace, and how much her mom was kept back and discriminated against (in addition to being an east german in a west german company, who didn't get her advanced degree accepted to boot!), often in fairly overt ways ... and many of those don't really apply anymore, except for the part where you get screwed over hard for having kids and actually wanting to care for them. As long as you're childless and conform to male norms, you are, if anything, getting beneficial treatment.

The woke revolution seems to a substantial degree to be women just re-asserting that their values matter, too. But unfortunately these values can be wildly disadvantageous in the workplace; For example, you can't do without substantial competitiveness that women find deeply unpleasant. So at the end we arrive at a weird androgynous ideal, where men are forced to engage in female norms they dislike, while women are forced to engage in male norms they dislike. The "great feminization theory" is in this way correct about the recent changes, but fails to see the ways in which women also have accepted a, for lack of a better word, internalized masculinization a longer time ago that now sits so deep that calling it into question feels to many like a personal attack on their self-worth.

Dunno how we can fix this. Just talking about the issue usually gets you called names, and average differences are dismissed with single counterexamples. It's understable that women don't want to be forced all the way back into the kitchen, but at the same time, many of them clearly aren't very happy in highly competitive workplaces that don't suit their values. And the men likewise don't want to work in an adult Montessori kindergarten, either.

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RenOS something is wrong 1d ago

"Seen"? From what I've heard, historical accounts of short leaders and kings were often exaggerated; Napoleon, for example, was just short compared to his unusually tall elite soldiers, not in general. Even those that were genuinely short in the below-average-male-aristocrat sense usually were not so short that they got close in height to women, especially since the aristocracy already had an height advantage and could in addition use shoes and clothing to hide the differences somewhat.

Though somewhat in agreement, I remember having seen a paper showing that if a person is attracted to someone, they are more liable to ascribe to them all sorts of qualities beyond their objective merit, which included women claiming an attractive man is tall even when he was merely average. But, well, social studies and replication crisis and all that.

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RenOS something is wrong 2d ago

To be fair to the, uhm, contra-contrarians, there is a noticeable issue here of voting- for-agreement (as opposed to quality of argument) and dogpiling. Even if both are far better than reddit. It's human nature I suppose, I regularly catch myself wanting to downvote only to control myself since the poster is clearly arguing in good faith, I just disagree hard.

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RenOS something is wrong 4d ago

I feel increasingly disillusioned with our ability to fix issues. Elite circles have successfully ideologically homogenized to such a degree that pretty much no smart & capable person would willingly, publicly go against the main tenets. It just fucks up your prospects too much.

It further has result that our systemic problems are increasingly caused specifically by ideological blindspots, because all problems that aren't can be fixed, while these are the only ones left to fester. Racism, for example, in the lower and middle classes can be a serious problem yet be fixable if the elite is clearly & openly against it. Racism in the elite is coup-complete.

So the opposing politicians are all clearly dysfunctional in one way or another, even when they're right on some core issues. You can find smart people arguing against ideological dead angles, but either only in a small scale that doesn't call into question the entire framework, or pseudonymously online.

Modern multiculturalist neoliberalism isn't the worst ideology, certainly better than, say, communism, but this also means again that as a smart person there is less pressure to change the system: You can make your own life good just fine, so why bother?

I expect it to be supplanted in the longterm, but most likely by an ideology I consider significantly worse.

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RenOS something is wrong 5d ago

You can easily square the circle however by realizing that specifically the subgroup of women who currently have difficulty finding a partner are the ones who disproportionally suffer from hypergamy run amok. Most women have a reasonable or at least mostly functional version of hypergamy. Similar to how the subgroup of men who become NEETS are disproportionally struggling with addiction, anti-sociality and motivational problems that are male-typical and which other men also have, but just not to such a dysfunctional degree. Or to the difference between Asperger vs Autism.

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RenOS something is wrong 5d ago

I've noticed this tendency as well. First, progressives claim that changing the law or cultural mores on something will improve this or that, or everything altogether. When their predictions inevitable fail and the changes turn out to be somewhere between less good or outright negative, but everyone already got used to the new norms, the claim becomes that this is what we wanted anyway. Ideally, you start a bunch of tv shows how terrible life as before [X] changed. Didn't chesterton have a quote to that effect?

Ah, found it:

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected."

The implication here being that the progressives of old are now the contemporary conservatives.

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RenOS something is wrong 6d ago

Do you have anything in particular on your mind? Being an European myself, Dase's rant strikes me as substantially worse than anything I've ever read about Europeans on here.

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RenOS something is wrong 7d ago

I'd rather say that without western support, they would have simply lost some time ago already, so you're kind of right but I wouldn't say that this means my causality is reversed. I don't think that they wouldn't have at least tried to fight. It's more a case of reciprocal causality that is hard to entangle; I also wouldn't deny the obvious maidan involvement of the US either, which is itself a precursor of the current conflict. But there as well, it worked because the Ukrainian majority did lose trust in the russia-aligned government, and it did want a realignment towards the west.

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RenOS something is wrong 7d ago

I'm not so knowledgeable for tractors specifically, but there definitely were car bubbles. When people realized that cars have reached a state close to horse-drawn carriages, will predictably become even better in the near future, and probably replace horses altogether, a host of new companies with various variants of car technology cropped up. Of course, as you should know, almost all modern cars have used the same basic style of engine, the internal combustion engine (and in fact, mostly a specific kind of it).

But it wasn't always so. There was a variety of companies with their own engine designs that overwhelmingly failed. And of course various companies experimented with non-engine related designs that also didn't work out. Some companies successfully made the switch early enough, but many just failed. You could do everything right, correctly predict the dominance of cars, invest in a reasonable company, and lose absolutely everything anyway.

The main difference now is that many of the current competitors are already giants so they can write off a lot of losses without going broke, and it's unclear whether governments will even allow them to outright fail. But a bubble popping on several of them (or even all of them - maybe the real breakthrough will come from a smaller competitor, though I consider it very unlikely) and them losing substantial valuation seems like a foregone conclusion, even if I think that eventually AI will be a technology of the future.

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RenOS something is wrong 9d ago

I mostly agree with you in the context of medieval or ancient warfare. Historical societies could rebound fast because they were essentially malthusian-limited: Even if they lose a majority of men, they'd just get them back in a generation or two. Whether you stay at the limit thanks to high infant mortality or dip below for a while thanks to war but recover quickly afterwards doesn't really matter all that much, not even in terms of net-deaths. Arguably, a decent number of the men were more trouble than worth anyway, so it might even be beneficial for the rest to get rid of them. But two can play at game theory, see the Melian Dialogue, so you shouldn't discount the alternative even back then.

Ukraine's behaviour is also beneficial for me, as a cynical european who wants them to bleed russia as much as possible to reduce the chance of them starting a war against us. It's apparently also what Ukraine wants, so they should get our support, and we're in no position to talk them out of it. But for themselves it's basically suicide if you look at the numbers. Lots of dead, mostly men. Lots of emigration, mostly women, and I'd be very surprised if more than a third returns, if even that much. The birth rate is in the gutters as well. There's no coming back from this.

Venezuela becoming a de-facto US vassal seems ... clearly preferential to this? It's true that I prefer the US by far to Russia already so it's hardly a symmetric issue. But to go back to history, there are plenty of independent rulers who swiftly surrendered or even swore fealty to a superior foe when the writing was on the wall, only to bide their time and come out on top eventually.

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RenOS something is wrong 17d ago

Yeah, I'm also really not into that dubai style, but I've now heard from multiple people (some I know in person, some just online) who worked with arabs that they've been impressed with how they at least try to think in a genuine long-term perspective on how to keep their society running in a way that isn't just a complete capitulation to the west. Not that I'd expect that to work well long-term, anyway. For an example, the demographer & pronatalist Lyman Stone has commented on the foresight of the UAE to explore possibilities to keep up the birth rate before even dipping below replacement rate. Most other countries dipped below replacement half a century ago, told themselves it's just delay and will surely fix itself, noticed after ca 20 years lol no it doesn't, then told themselves that surely infinite immigration will surely fix it, and now, well, the results speak for themselves.

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