Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
5hr ago
Yeah, I've already addressed this to our snarky friend. Historically it wasn't really settle or starve, but it was settle or probably have an impoverished and empty life. My issue is, as I said, with modern incels and incel-adjacents who say things like "If a woman won't be led, she won't be fed."
Here on the Motte, some of them have a fondness for saying things like "maybe we should use what worked for 5000 years..." and if you read what they are proposing, it's basically that. Yes, they have a myopic, ahistorical view of the history of sex relations ( even ancient tribal societies did not resemble Tarnsmen of Gor).
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
6hr ago
What you stated, specifically about what I have expressed, was incorrect.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
14hr ago
Too many to count; the issue is that, like face guy's proposals, you'll reject them because they involve some measure of browbeating prescribed to non-men.
Nope, wrong. Don't presume to project sentiments onto me contrary to what I expressed.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
17hr ago
I think of all the modernisms about the history of men and women that breaks my heart the most, this is probably it. Women only did it to not starve.
I don't actually think this was literally the case! Though certainly the situation for an unmarried woman was pretty dire in previous eras. Maybe not quite starvation level, but there is a reason so much Regency and Victorian literature was about women trying to find a husband before they aged out of any hope of doing better than seamstress or nanny.
It's the modern guys who have, I assure you, here on the Motte and elsewhere, been more or less explicit about wishing women had to settle in order to eat. Granted some of them may be ironic or trying to be edgy. I certainly hope most of them don't really want women to choose between dick and starving. But there are a fair number whom I believe are pretty literal.
There's nothing to be done. You can't have a solution that isn't just browbeating men that doesn't involve some level of browbeating non-men. It's impossible.
Okay, but what's your solution that involves browbeating both men and women? As I told @faceh, that's basically been the line taken by most religions, and yet here we are. So do you propose morality laws, taking away all benefits for non-married or childless couples, or what? Some variation of those things has been tried also, with little success.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
Are you spending much time around people who are ages 20-29? They're the ones reporting the most problems
Yeah, actually. Most of my younger coworkers are actively dating and/or getting married.
Maybe I am in a very unusual bubble, but I actually don't think so.
Stop sending so many women to college.
As a practical matter, how do you propose to do this? We don't "send" women to college, they choose to go.
If your solution is "Campaign on social reform that encourages fewer women to go to college and more women to get married young and have children," okay, I don't object to that in principle, but if churches are failing to sell that message, how will you?
If your solution is "Don't let them go to college," well, no, I'm not going to jump on board the "Make women property again" Jimbus.
Do this by making it harder to get student loans in general, going back to before the 1993 Student Loan Reform Act.
Okay, I'll buy that. I doubt it will actually reduce the number of women who want to go to college. It might reduce the number of women who go to college for Afro-Queer Anti-Colonialism Studies.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
Men aren't even offered the choice, to be blunt.
Women are, and they reject it.
You keep saying this. What little you've posted in the way of "data" is not very convincing, and the rest is vibes, which I will simply counter with my own impressions based on the people I see around me dating and getting married.
I am not saying there's no problem or that it isn't rough out there. It's just not the hopeless wasteland you keep presenting. Men and women are both getting a raw deal in a lot of ways, but you keep insisting it's all women's fault and poor <50% men never ever get a chance, which flies in the face of my observations.
We had a system that was workable somewhere around a century ago and it has been on the decline since approximately the 70's..
Comparing 2025 to 1925 has so many conflating factors that trying to reduce men's dating woes to "Women have become too selective" is like saying our modern economic woes are because we moved off the gold standard. There may even be a degree to which that is true, but someone harping about the gold standard as the reason for everything wrong with the economy today is ... probably not seeing things clearly. Yes, women today can be more selective than they were in 1925. What are the reasons for that? I imagine you don't like your position being reduced to "Women should be forced to settle or starve," but how else to interpret "The problem is that women today don't have to get married to a man they don't particularly like"?
Despite being non-religious, I don't entirely disagree that "the Christian standard" had certain advantages, and I give you credit for arguing that we should impose the old rules on men as well as women-- if we force women to settle, we should also force men to stop alleycatting. But I don't really think we can do either without reverting to a level of authoritarianism we didn't have even then. Given that most people are not as religious as they used to be, and without a religious justification, you're basically going to have to impose state-mandated dating controls. Sounds like a cure worse than the disease.
So ONCE AGAIN. The problem is with women.
So you keep saying. Women would argue that the problem is with men. We could go back and forth on to what degree this is self-centered female narcissism (your preferred theory) and to what degree this is men being of genuinely lower quality and women not actually needing to settle to avoid starving. You hate "men need to step up," but some men really do need to step up, and by that I do not mean they need to wife up carousel-riding Cathy at age 35, but I mean I see a hell of a lot of men who don't really bring much to the table at all other than "Penis, not a drug user (unless you count weed), has a job." Why would a woman want to settle for that if she doesn't have to? Why would you settle for that level of pickings?
I honestly do not see men who actually have something going for them unable to find a partner.
Assuming, of course, that their standards are not too high... You don't want fat Sally the checkout clerk or carousel-riding Cathy, fine. You insist on a 20-something slim attractive virgin who is agreeable and submissive? Hmm, good luck if you're not a 6/6/6. (Or a Mormon.)
I don't know what else to tell ya. If the solution to this was to browbeat men, we'd have solved it a long time ago because that's all men get from every angle is constant browbeating.
I don't think the solution is to "browbeat" men, but I think moral disapprobation on both sexes has been implemented, historically. That horse is out of the barn. Give me a solution that doesn't reduce to "Women need to settle or starve." Or just "browbeat women instead."
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
Although we've argued about this in the past, I don't disagree with you, in very broad strokes, about your key points. Women's expectations have gone up, women's desirability has gone down, and a lot of people are finding it hard to find a partner. I think the reasons are actually a lot more complicated and multi-faceted than "Women are unreasonably picky (bitches) and aren't willing to settle," but sure, that's part of it.
I am going to repeat one point that I have brought up before and add another one I haven't:
"I'm actually perfectly fine with marrying a man who is not exceptional in any particular way, as long as he fulfills his role as a man."
This kind of sugarcoats the whole notion of "settling." You're right, most women would not agree to that statement. How many men would agree to that (gender-swapped) statement? Probably more men than women, because yes, there are men who will settle for literally any willing pussy, while there aren't many women whose sole criteria is "penis." But there are not many men who would really be happy about settling for a woman who just checks the "sex, mother" boxes and nothing else.
(Caveat: Obviously I am talking about the West here. We know that in many parts of the world, "vagina and fertile" are indeed the only criteria men have. Are those cultures models we would wish to emulate?)
So how about being likeable as a person, being attractive and pleasant, being smart or at least sensible? (As Mr. Knightly said in the very redpilled era of 1816: "Men of sense do not want silly wives.") Most men don't want to settle either, even if their standards for "settling" are lower than the average woman's. Not to belabor the stereotype about incels thinking their obese cheeto-crumbed-neckbeards are entitled to a hot fit young blowjob enthusiast, but it's hard to avoid the impression that it do be like that from many of the most vocal grievance-mongers. This is somewhat unfair, but it's also somewhat unfair to just write off women as being unreasonably picky bitches who will not settle for less than the "three sixes". Both these stereotypes exist, but you keep bringing up things like the OKCupid survey (from, like, 15 years ago), which given the limited and narrow datasets (the attractiveness surveys, IIRC, mostly ask people to rate based on photographs alone) do not convince me you really have evidence that "50% of men are invisible to all women" and that no women will "settle" for a guy who is just a basically decent, normal man.
My other point:
Reality can't be manipulated to fit their desires, so it seems obvious to me that you gotta at least TRY to make their desires comply with reality.
On the one hand: sure. If it is true (big if) that chubby grocery clerk Sally is waiting for her 6/6/6 chad to marry her and let her live her life as a TikTok-watching SAHM, Sally should really adjust her expectations. But your notion that women should "make their desires comply with reality" really gives me "If you don't find fat/black/trans women attractive, you should work on yourself!" vibes. I know you are not saying that, but you are saying something in that ballpark: that people are responsible for who and what they find attractive and should be willing to change their attraction for the social good. That is going to be a pretty hard lift for anyone.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
Coffee_enjoyer has a rather simplistic view of this stuff, but yours is pure denial.
No.
Epic poetry was born as a means of exploring and understanding violence, not moralizing about it
Yes.
I don't deny we glorify and celebrate war, but as a means, not an end.
It's only with fairly advanced civilization we even get the concept that this violence could be bad in itself, instead of merely situationally unacceptable
That was my point.
Chimps do violence for the sake of violence (and because their instincts tell them to, because there's a lot of evolutionary hardwiring).
We should prefer not to live in a society of chimps. That doesn't mean castrating men. We can still acknowledge the evolutionary hardwiring.
I don't want to "beat down" boys, but anyone who celebrates violence for the sake of violence and revels in pain and suffering and destroying what others have built is a chimp.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
War. Why do you think this is a gotcha?
War is a means to an end and we sing songs about it, but
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
You’re not coming up with any direct or circumstantial evidence to forward your theory, though.
And yours is just "My feels."
I think you have no idea what either the average Swede or the average Somali feels, only just- so stories to flatter your preconceived notions. You just make stuff up, throw it at the wall, and pontificate about "explanatory power" when you're just starting at a desirable conclusion and working backwards to construct a theory.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1d ago
I think you're the one typical-minding. If your mindset is that it's fun to hurt people and take their stuff, I can see why you'd project that onto others and even construct justifications for it under your religious frame, but I do not think that is in fact the natural default psychology of most men. Most men want to be respected, to achieve things, and to defend the people and things they care about. War is a means to an end and we sing songs about it, but it's not the end. It's not our reason for being.
Your philosophy, like KulakRevolt's, is that everything else is all just a veneer over our desire to rape and kill. If that's true we'd never become a species capable of epic poetry, of grand architecture, of space travel. You and Kulak would have us never evolving beyond chimp behavior. Yes, we all have a bit of the chimp in us. That's why we teach boys that you shouldn't hit people because they hurt your feelings, and that fighting should be a last resort, not your first recourse. People like Kulak who say no, violence is the first and only answer, and people like you who say, but violence is fun and everyone wants to do it, cannot be trusted to build and maintain the very societies whose decline you bemoan.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
2d ago
I did not say Christians don't endorse defending themselves against bad actors.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
2d ago
According to the revealed preference of their favorite leisure activity, men really love raiding enemies and aliens.
I already addressed that - yes, men like the idea of fighting and winning glory. You have provided no evidence that this means we all deep down enjoy causing pain and suffering and wrecking what other people have built. Like all your just-so stories, it's just something you spun out with deepity words.
I think if you actually read journals of people fighting in the Napoleonic era who were not Napoleon, you will find that as in most wars, most of the men fighting it did not actually enjoy it, even if they have fond memories of the camaraderie afterwards. They justified it with pride, with self-defense, with national interest, but not "'Cause it's fun to destroy what other people have." Master and Commander is not about guys enjoying destruction and pillage. The whole point of the movie is that they are trying to defend their homeland; Aubrey's rousing speech to his crew is all about preventing the French from taking over England.
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.
Very devout Christians have always enjoyed fraud to get rich and consorting with whores, too. You are still just making up what you want the Bible to endorse.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
2d ago
You called me out by name. I mostly ignore your posts except when they turn up in the mod queue.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
2d ago
Jews are one of the most important political and cultural forces in understanding Culture War in the United States and globe. But because of their political and cultural power, it's taboo to critically analyze their perspective, behavior, and identity. People like you and Aamadan constantly complaining about me talking about Jews is a side-effect of that.
I don't care about Jews per se, and lots of people on this site talk about Jews (negatively) and don't get modded for it.
You are the "Jew guy," the guy who posts nothing but rants about Jews, whose entire identity is hating Jews, whose entire personality is "I hate Jews." If I see a @SecureSignals post, I know that every. single. time. it will be about Jews and nothing but Jews. You start out talking about a TV show? Jews. You bring up a news article which initially has nothing to do with Jews or Israel? It will be about Jews.
That is why the "single-issue posting" rule gets applied to you (as it has been applied to a handful of other tiresome obsessives). Not because it's "taboo" to criticize Jews.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
2d ago
Ahistorical nonsense. "Witches" existed far more often in popular retellings than any actual trials, and yes, they killed Indians with whom they were at war but contrary to the propaganda we're relentlessly bombarded with now, not every white European wanted to exterminate the Indians from the beginning. Many, from the first settlers, were perfectly willing to coexistence (and many of the Indians were too). There were just too many points of collision, too much cultural friction, and too many defectors on both sides.
The philosophy of the first colonists was certainly imperialistic by modern standards, but most of them weren't seeking to genocide the natives as an end in itself (you'd certainly hear people saying that, well into the 19th century, but even generals who breathed fire about pacifying the Indians would generally tone it down in practice if the Indians were pacified), and the early settlers' hostility towards outsiders was the typical hostility of people living in small precarious communities with little room for slack and few resources to spare. Note that they wanted trade and exchange (of news, technology, people) with the network of communities around them, not to gather in warbands and go out and conquer them.
None of this has much to do with Christianity, but your Kulak-like revisionism in which the founding fathers loved violence for its own sake annoys me more than your attempts to "base" Christianity in bloodlust, because I actually care about American history.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
2d ago
No. Young men are aggressive, belligerent, proud and honor-conscious, and seek glory. But not all men are natural despoilers who live for nothing more than to wreck what others have built, to ruin others' works.
This is the philosophy of the ant, mindless raider and reaver who is incapable of seeing anything other than an Other to be killed.
This is the philosophy of the thug, violent, of short-time preference and low impulse control, devoid of vision or higher purpose.
This is the philosophy of the petty and the small, who enjoys the misery of other people more than anyone's happiness or anything ennobling for himself.
This is the philosophy of the sociopath, who sees others as only prey, who cannot see other people as anything other than potential resources to be exploited or rivals to be eliminated.
This is the philosophy of the psychopath, who loves only violence for the sake of violence, and writes alt-historical pseudo-political screeds to justify a desire to pillage, rape, and kill, and reduce all of humanity to war to the knife.
As best, this is the philosophy of an insecure and callow youth who soothes himself with words like "männerbund" to tell himself he is embarking on glorious viking with his warband, and not simply seeking group security to go bully others in a game because he's not brave enough to gangbang.
This "joy" you speak of is a joy that everyone feels from time to time when our monkey-brains trigger, whether it's imagining hunting down a horrible criminal you saw on the news, beating the crap out of the guy who pushed your buttons on the Internet, or running down that motherfucker who cut you off on the highway. It's a joy you might temporarily feel when your fight-or-flight activates "fight" and you win... until the consequences arrive. But there is a reason we regulate and channel and try to restrain violent young men, especially those who seem to have no higher aspirations than to tear down what others have built, to kick sand in the faces of those weaker than them, to wax rhapsodical about the joy of hurting other people and laughing at their pain.
It is not a philosophy for men. At least, not men we want to share a society with. Not men capable of building a society. Certainly not men who speak of shared values and community and building a greater civilization than a mere tribe with spears all pointed outward from their very tight and insular circle.
It's fascinating how you breathe this "joy" of rapine in one post and extoll Christianity in the next. 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.
Though it is amusing to watch KulakRevolt go off on how Christians are cucked puss-pusses who sold out white Europe, and his outraged Christian followers, like you, try to describe a "Based Jesus" who totally says it's good to hate and kill and wallow in the infliction of your enemies' well-deserved suffering.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
2d ago
It's funny, this is a particularly Catholic argument, in that whenever I see a Catholic culture warrior online, they are usually saying basically this ("I mean, the culture wars are basically over, we won" - first saw it during the Clinton administration). Not sure if it's an aggressive and slightly delusional form of conviction or cope, but it's almost charming, for the vast majority of us, especially in the US, who really don't care much about the schism. It's almost like seeing a "papist!" epithet in the wild.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
2d ago
You're posting a number of sarcastic comments in which you fail to speak plainly. Stop it.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
Of all the things for me to be legendary for...
I can't speak for all the other mods, but I pretty much never look at the AAQCs folder. It's all @naraburns AFAIK.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
3d ago
Criticizing people (and their behavior) isn't against the rules, only making personal attacks (which you didn't do).
I appreciate you rereading what I said, because the entire issue is poisoned by bad faith toxic discourse on both sides, and it's very hard to make any kind of proposal for how either men or women should change their behavior, or be pressured to change their behavior, without being mapped to the worst extremists.
"I think men should be responsible for any progeny they create, you can't just dump them on the mother and/or the state and keep fucking around."
"OH SO MEN ARE JUST PAYPIGS FUCK YOU AS LONG AS WOMEN CONTROL REPRODUCTION AND CAN HAVE ABORTIONS MEN ARE SLAVES OF THE STATE!!!!!"
"I think women should be encouraged to have children young instead of giving up their most fertile years seeking a career they probably won't even enjoy."
"OH BAREFOOT AND PREGNANT IN THE KITCHEN IS IT? WHY DON'T WE JUST MAKE IT ILLEGAL FOR WOMEN TO LEARN TO READ LIKE IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS YOU PATRIARCHAL INCEL?!"
Obviously, it's pretty hard to have a dialog like this. Also obviously, the all-caps lines are a bit tongue-in-cheek but not far off from what you see most places online and even to some degree here. So I have definitely taken the first position, for example- if you get a woman pregnant, you did the deed, now you have to feed the kid. No, I don't care how irresponsible and slutty the mother is or if she "baby-trapped" you. No, I don't care that she has the unilateral power to abort or not. You stuck your dick in it, you know how babies are made, so the options are (a) you pay for it, (b) I pay for it, (c) we let the child starve. I choose option (a). Yes, some men get screwed. This is unfair. Tough shit. Use a condom or don't drink and fuck.
"OH SO WE SHOULD ONLY BE UNFAIR TO MEN WE CAN'T BE EVEN A LITTLE BIT MEAN TO WOMEN????"
Sure, we can be "mean" to women. I am not anti-shame. I think slut-shaming is good and we should do more of it.
I think if there was a way to implement welfare reform to ensure children get fed and clothed with as little incentive to the mothers as possible to keep popping them out, we should do it (I admit, I don't really know how this could be done, short of poorhouses or something, which historically have been even worse).
Relatedly, I would be in favor of social messaging to encourage fewer people (but especially fewer women) to go to college, and start families instead. But realistically I don't know how this social engineering would work, especially without the power of a church behind it, and I am not in favor of increasing the power of religion, so, yes, once again you may be right that there is no real solution.
Also, "young people should get married and start families young" and also "young people are totally screwed, the economy is terrible, no one can buy a house" - I read Scott's "vibecession" post and I am still not sure how much to believe about how bad the economy and the future really is but it does seem rather bleak for a young couple starting out without a lot of money.
All of which is to say, I mostly don't disagree with your proposals per se, and I mostly agree they can't really happen.
In the alternative, the proposals I mostly see amount to varying levels of coercion, and mostly this is directed at women. Ranging from "Be more mean to them and make them settle" to "Be really mean to them and make them property."
As much as I dislike the rabid bad faith feminists calling any man who has standards and expectations a sexist incel, you can kind of see why they react like this when you see their opposite numbers. There are quite a few men who hate women and are very clear that they consider women to be inferior beings who should just acknowledge their inferiority and suck it up (literally). We have some of them here on the Motte, and their he-man woman-hating screeds get lots of upvotes. A woman who's had a few encounters with these men (who also make it very clear they want to fuck the women they hate) is understandably going to develop a negative attitude about men and a paranoid attitude about any proposal that smells like "control women."
I dunno, man. But nothing any of the he-man woman-haters say has ever convinced me the solution is to hate/control women, or that I should feel anything but contempt for incels. I am not really averse to a "neotraditional" revival of some kind, but like you, I don't see how it can be done.
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