Of course there were men who wanted to sleep with Alex Cooper, and of course there was a man who wanted to marry her, too
One of the incel or black pill arguments I think has more than a grain of truth goes something like this:
Men are raised around the polite fiction that women (and society) want them to be nice above all else. Nice guys get the girl. And, after all, anyone can be nice. That's part of why this is important social messaging. But of course in the end, the boy must live. And he discovers that, in fact, niceness isn't what gets the girl. Being hot is, having status is. The original statement isn't wrong. In the abstract, all but the most damaged women do want a "nice guy". A good husband and father, someone to grow old with, someone who won't abuse her, someone her friends and family will respect. But that isn't all she wants, and it's certainly not the first thing most people look for. The boy knows this himself - after all, he is no less vain when it comes to an ideal partner. But he must see it to know the polite fiction, and when he sees it, it frustrates him.
Girls receive their own version of this polite fiction. It has a worthy intention and there is truth to it. But it is also fake, and when people argue it against the evidence, they do young women and themselves a disservice. That fiction is something like this, although in more liberal or progressive circles it will be stated far less explicitly (although it is still stated, by peers, by elders, and most significantly by men): Men don't want a slut. The sluts end up humiliated, pathetic, and alone. The chaste get the guy, and the happy ending. In the real world, girls grow up knowing this isn't true.
Andrew Tate once posted that he rejects “women who have slept with more than 3 men. Vile.” And the guys they influence might claim in the group chat that they would marry only a pure, virginal woman. But if a woman who looked like Cooper asked any of those guys out on a date, you best believe they’d jump at the chance—no matter how many notches she had on her bedpost.
Man, here, will say that men (or at least attractive or otherwise high status men) will fuck promiscuous women but never marry them. But that isn't really true. The truth is that some of the highest status men marry sluts. The truth is, as every woman herself realizes as she gets older, that even chauvinist men, slut-shaming men, men who post nasty comments about a woman's purported body count do so; in many cases even knowingly. Most women could give you a half dozen examples in their own lives. The boy most concerned and public about his contempt for 'sluts' at my own high school married, not ten years later, a woman everyone (including him) knew even then had been around. Who are the Miami streamer/Clav/etc influencer types going to end up marrying? It will not be chaste virgins from the imagined heartland.
Girls know that desirable men love (and fall in love with) sluts all the time. Like the fact that hot women do not always go for the 'nice guy', it is is ubiquitous. In the same way that not being neurotic about being nice makes you more confident, and therefore more attractive, not worrying about being a slut makes many more promiscuous young women more confident around men, more willing to make the first move. As the opinion piece says:
When she meets the man she wants as her husband, she’ll go get him. Meanwhile, her chaste peers are often left paralyzed on the sidelines, waiting for a hypothetical Prince Charming who respects their sacred timeline and who ticks all the boxes, only to find themselves in a perpetual state of situationship purgatory.
By the way, I think the evidence is clear that promiscuity is bad for men and women. It's bad for the soul, it's bad for future relationships, it makes it more difficult to form meaningful attachments. I don't think it's bad to have a preference for someone who hasn't slept around, in fact it's almost certainly smart. But it's just not a revealed priority preference for most men to strongly disincentive this behavior in and of itself.
Men have always been into sluts, of course. Men have always married them, or always wanted to. Real, working (well, partially working) chastity, it must be remembered, was largely enforced by the older generation, in large part for young women by older women, on both sides of the equation. It was the elderly establishment, the church elders who prevented the King from marrying Wallis Simpson. Chastity is important for paternity and therefore inheritance. There are good societal as well as personal reasons. But as soon as men were allowed (by society, by their parents, by each other) to marry sluts, they did. You cannot take seriously a threat when its very proponents work so hard to disprove it.
2rafa
7hr ago
Dogs are obviously distinguishable phenotypically. It would be very interesting if every dog breed looked the same but varied hugely in capability.
2rafa
9hr ago
If one was to take 50 Irish Traveller babies and have them raised by, say, Utah Mormons (who are closely genetically related given they are largely British and also a high competence population) with no contact or knowledge of their ancestry, do you believe they would be 20x overrepresented as violent criminals (this would be a large multiple of the oft-repeated 13-52 stat)? I just want to be clear about this assertion. Irish Traveller outmarriage was also historically too rare for this to viably explain this outcome.
Some overrepresentation would be inevitable for immediate hereditary reasons. But 20x? This is what reversion to the population mean would imply.
2rafa
9hr ago
Wikipedia says otherwise: "Genetic analysis has shown Irish Travellers to be of Irish extraction, and that they likely diverged from the settled Irish population in the 1600s, probably during the time of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Centuries of cultural isolation have led Travellers to become genetically distinct from the settled Irish.[13]"
This is unfortunately what I was hoping to avoid a discussion about. Yes, Travellers are “genetically distinct” in the way that every individual and every family is genetically distinct. You can do a DNA test and say “wow, you’re related to a lot of Travellers, you must be a Traveller”. This isn’t evidence of a distinct population.
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Phenotypically Travellers are not distinguishable from comparable white Irish the way that clearly different human populations are. Roma are an ethnicity that is easily identified. Travellers are not.
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Criminal population isn’t really sufficient or even likely, it’s not a plausible origin story. Even if it were, plenty of Anglo populations including Anglo Americans and Anglo Australians have significant criminal / convict ancestry and yet reverted to their population means in time. It’s extremely implausible, even aside from the actual historical record, that Traveller 20x over representation among criminals in Ireland is explained by a founding population of criminals as if this is some kind of fantasy RPG thieves guild enterprise.
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The standards by which some studies claim to show distinct Traveller genetics can also be used to show that every small village was (or was until very recently) its own distinct genetic subpopulation. This isn’t even wrong, it’s just not useful and is a bad Motte and Bailey type argument here.
Granting that yes, 23&Me can tell you’re an Irish Traveller because you’re related to 300 other people who wrote down that they’re Irish Travellers is not sufficient to make this group a separate ethnic tribe.
2rafa
9hr ago
There are two kinds of gypsies in England, Romani and Traveller. Older and less politically correct British call both of them gypsies interchangeably, whether or not they are aware of the distinction.
I gather both have existed here in some form for a long time, but the majority of Roma arrived after the EU accession from Romania and Bulgaria, while the Irish Travelers have moved between Great Britain and Ireland for hundreds of years, since there has pretty much always been free movement except for during the Second World War. For a long time, before the origin of the Romani gypsies was understood as distinctly Indian, there was a widespread belief that the two groups may have been related. Even some Travellers thought or think of themselves as related and, starting in the late 19th century, some travelers actually adopted aesthetic aspects of Romani culture including the brightly painted caravans.
Unless someone is talking about London pickpockets or EU immigration, most British seem to mean traveller when they talk about gypsies, especially if they are rural. The Roma tend to cluster around towns and cities here, even if they are more rural in Eastern Europe proper.
2rafa
9hr ago
I don’t know that Hong Kong is particularly dilapidated. If anything 50s to 80s brutalism kind of works well in a subtropical environment where you have a lot of green with the gray. It’s why it’s less depressing in Latin America (where it really is mostly very rundown) than in northern climes.
That said, I think it’s also important to differentiate depressing and ugly architecture from general cleanliness. There are plenty of extremely ugly brutalist “commieblocks” in Oslo, in Geneva, in Zurich. But these are also very clean cities, the roads are mostly well maintained, there is civic infrastructure. Hong Kong can feel ‘older’ than much of the rest of East Asia ex Japan because the real construction boom began postwar rather than in the late 1980s, it’s been richer for longer. But I don’t know that it’s dilapidated. If anything I’m always sad to go and see when relics of 80s HK are removed. At least my beloved classic 80s mural on the 17th floor of the Hopewell Centre is still there.
The Traveller Question
In rural England, two girls are raped by a group of 13 and 14 year old boys. Eventually arrested and charged, a judge sentences them to community service, because he wants to “avoid criminalizing these children unnecessarily”. An outrage ensues, even the Prime Minister calls the sentence a disgrace. Little reported on: these youths were neither migrants nor the traditional native underclass of Albion. They belong to an unusual population called Irish Travellers with which few non-British or Irish are particularly familiar.
A year or two after I first moved to London, I witnessed a commotion outside Harrods. A large group of white teenagers was arguing with the store’s security. White teenagers are not particularly rare in London, but an entire group that is white and mostly blonde and blue eyed is. They were also dressed in an unusual way, the boys in an exaggerated version of the ‘Deano’ style of the time with some designer accoutrements - Prada caps, Gucci cross body bags; the girls in tight dresses or shorts and push-up bras, full faces of heavy makeup, much costume jewelry. Dressing like this is a working class English pastime, but in most English towns and cities it’s the preserve of college aged adults. These were children, maybe 12, 13, 14. Of interest, too, was that many were couples - 13 year old girls and boys holding hands, that kind of thing. Rare in secular society. There was no parental supervision that I could see, either. These gatherings happen regularly outside Harrods; occasionally someone is stabbed (the last time this happened in that exact location was a few weeks ago).
They were Irish Travellers or Gypsies, a highly clannish, poor and violent population who live itinerant lives across the British Isles, bane of farmers and publicans, fond of suing anyone who crosses them under anti-discrimination laws they lobbied for (in both the Irish republic and United Kingdom) that grant them special status as an ethnic minority. In Ireland, they are 0.7% of the population yet 12-15% of prison inmates, an astonishing level of overrepresentation that even many much-maligned other minority groups on both sides of the Atlantic have failed to match.
But here’s the unusual thing about Irish Travelers: they’re Irish. Genetically, they are indistinguishable from the ethnic Irish population. There is no marker that convincingly separates them from the settled ethnic Irish population. Historically, divergence was at most 300 years ago as a modern Irish state slowly emerged under British rule in the aftermath of the wars of the 17th century, which is too soon for the kind of extreme selection effects that produced some other minority groups to emerge. What genetic studies have been done claim to show difference only in terms of higher levels of inbreeding over the fewer than 12 generations for which they’ve existed (discrediting earlier theories that they had some ancient or Romani ancestry, which they do not).
The Irish Travellers are younger as a people than the Amish, for example. They are younger, depending on how you look at things, than the Ultra Orthodox Jews, who arguably first emerged at a similar or earlier time in the mid-18th century. HBD cannot really explain the Irish Traveller. They also have a very interesting culture. Despite the girls dressing very immodestly, they place a very high emphasis on both sexual purity and very early marriage, for example, sometimes as early as 14-16, for both boys and girls. They have a total fertility rate of somewhere around 3, higher than even many fecund minority groups and perhaps double the (rest of the) native population.
Beyond the occasional London gathering (which at times involves these people racing their horse-drawn buggies - chariots really - through the city) Irish travelers mainly live in the country, where they are widely hated by rural residents for (perceived or real) squatting on their land, theft of property and livestock, domestic burglary, petty crime, and welfare abuse. One of the most famous cases in British criminal law history involved a farmer who had been burgled by some traveller youths, and who then decided to wait for them, lights off, at the top of his staircase with a shotgun. He killed one, with the judge ruling that this was clearly a trap rather than self defense (he had bragged about it, which was unfortunate) and initially went to jail for life before being reduced to 3 years after a public outcry. There was another famous case recently in which a local cop was brutally killed by some Travellers driving away from a crime scene, dragged behind a car for a mile which killed him, they didn’t stop; this resulted in another major outcry, which led to sentences for cop killers being increased. Beyond this, the English state is, as it is in so many cases, broadly incapable of doing anything, forced assimilation is impossible even for settled populations, let alone itinerant ones.
But there is a large slice of the English countryside where the greatest ire is reserved today not for migrants or any other foreign population, but for these Irish Travelers. There is even a (flawed) case sometimes made that much historic prejudice against Irish migrants was more about these people than the rest of the Irish (although, as mentioned, this is wrong at least until very recently). Over time, their birth rates mean they will be an ever larger proportion of the population.
2rafa
1d ago
It’s probably on some level cultural. Overseas Chinese in Singapore and Hong Kong are also strivers who don’t seem happy despite being some of the wealthiest people in the world in the case of the PMC there. Interestingly, Taiwanese seem much more chill, the few times I’m in Taipei it always seems like the locals are eating and drinking outside, relaxing into the evening, but maybe there are cultural or ethnic differences there. The whole thing is interesting in light of Chinese philosophy arguably dwelling far more on the balance of work and play and relaxation than much western philosophy, historically speaking. I suspect it’s a hangover from the republican and later communist reaction to perceived languishing in the 19th century.
2rafa
1d ago
Great post and thank you for the interesting pictures. Rust belts are quite similar everywhere, but I think the ‘best’ are either those that have come through the collapse and now have some new industry (like Detroit itself, or like Manchester here) or those where central governments just pour infinite money into fake jobs for the local middle class which at least sustains some economic activity (like much of East Germany or ). Where neither of these are possible, like parts of Belgium, the decay just seems endless.
2rafa
1d ago
The only useful frame for this is as a 100% willful political decision, though. It’s not a state capacity issue.
2rafa
2d ago
Before that it was “Manpower” which really doesn’t seem too different to “Human Resources”.
2rafa
2d ago
There are tons of ex top pod shop guys who have set up on their own over the last 5 years, often backed by the last place they worked. They usually don’t name the company after themselves, but that’s because this has been in decline since at least the 90s. Functionally they are in charge, they could rename ArcNextGammaWhatever to Miller Patel Sarkisian And Company, what’s the difference?
2rafa
2d ago
I think there are some roles where this is the case, but a lot of these jobs don’t have huge intakes of young people working together because of the structure of the businesses. It’s more like you, someone ten years older, a few people 10-30 years older. Maybe every so often you take a class and meet some other people doing vocational training of a similar kind but it’s not college, you’re all commuting etc. One’s friendship circle also seems to consist primarily of high school classmates, which means they’re not making many new friends.
There are still tons of people who get lucky. There are random people in PR or marketing at nvidia worth millions. I know a lot of midwit at best people who coasted around non-technical startup jobs (copywriting, project management, marketing, social) who ended up at companies like Coinbase and Revolut who are either rich or going to be. There are always new businesses blowing up.
Similarly in American politics, the most common route is still elite upper middle class childhood - HYPS undergrad - HYS law - clerkship - DC. There are exceptions in every field. Even in quant finance there are a handful of people every year who get recruited out of nowhere because despite no real credentials they contribute enough useful research. I’ve met one, a Balkan immigrant with little formal education.
I think people just see this through the lens of hindsight. There were tons of people in the 70s who did the ‘smart thing’, went to a top college, got a grad job (‘management trainee position’) at IBM or PanAm, and never made fortunes.
2rafa
2d ago
Above desk head it was always internal politics. It’s the same in every part of finance, in tech, etc. Some people don’t realize there were plenty of ultra-smart people in the 80s and 90s who also capped out far below the top because they couldn’t play the game. The ones whose names you know today are the survivors. A lot of the real autists with zero social skills who made it to mega billionaire status (Hohn, Rokos, the Two Sigma guys or one of them at least) were helped along because people who had those skills adopted them and essentially exploited them to get rich themselves.
Even in the quant space that means that smart people who seem to have the ability to handle clients, participate in sales (even if only as ‘the smart guy’) and play that role are most likely to make it to the top. It’s the same in every field. If you’re a really smart procedural lawyer who is kind of autistic you will often never make partner because the existing partnership knows you’re (a) unlikely to leave [autists hate change] and (b) probably can’t bullshit your way through the marketing exercise that is every non-technical part of an interview. Outside of the largest partnerships and public corporations where dilution is negligible an equity stake is often far more about being pushy than anything else.
I also think that like @Opt-out says the field is just too saturated with mathematically / spatially super smart IMO winners, who themselves can do a lot more with AI now than they could a few years ago in terms of speeding up implementation / backtesting / whatever. 40 years ago a lot of the white / Jewish top math grads aspired to a career in academia, the younger generation is more diverse and more financially motivated. The rest go to SpaceX. Meanwhile the dumb as bricks bond salespeople I know who would struggle to precisely define carry and roll or how the post libor forward rates curve is computed in a non wishy washy way, or the commodities guys whose market color consists of calling up their clients whenever some OSINT Twitter with a million followers posts a new satellite picture of a missile attack, somehow seem to continue to make tons of money.
College is 4 years to party, chill, smoke weed, play video games and do nothing (delete as appropriate) at the government’s immediate expense. If you’re smart and care about learning you can even go somewhere good and have great discussions with professors and TAs here and there.
There has been much made of the apparent ‘social pressure’ over the last 30 years for teenagers to go to college. But most kids want to go to college because, pay, wages, jobs aside, it looks like a hell of a lot more fun aged 17 than becoming a bricklayer or taking up an apprenticeship as a hairdresser or plumber or carpenter or electrician, or getting a job at a warehouse, or a call center. Even if you do those things eventually, at least you have 4 years before you have to do them. And it’s not like anyone else is going to lend you six figures to chill for 4 years.
And if a 17 year old was asking here or in real life, I’d tell them to go to a big 4 year college and have a great time. We might all be dead from some AI engineered plague in 4 years. We might be dead in WW3. We might be dead from microplastic induced colon cancer because we ate too many processed foodstuffs. May as well have fun for a while instead of spending your youth doing mind-numbing or back-breaking (or both) labor. Be good about 401k contributions or your local pension equivalent when you get a job and forget about it. It’s like these FIRE jokers living off rice and beans despite making 85th percentile incomes in their twenties so they can hypothetically retire at 47 instead of 64.
2rafa
3d ago
Essentially, at various times, political parties face a perceived deficit of certain character archetypes.
On the left, this is most frequently a “tough white guy deficit”.
On the right, this is most frequently a “hot girl deficit” (or really, ‘young woman deficit’).
This is to some extent the product of specific neuroses. Radical socialists have a revolutionary ideology that they know implicitly requires probably at least the threat of violence to implement, which is difficult when everyone’s ’future job on the anarchist commune’ is yoga instructor, poet, or therapist. On the right, there is a sensitivity to the sausage party accusation, the gay / incel accusation, and the fact that it’s hard to get young men to show up to something without hot girls. Say what you will about the DSA students for gaza meetup at your liberal arts college, it really will be mostly (biological) women. Any young conservative or right wing group, by contrast, might be the only organisation on a 70% female campus other than the esports club to have an almost or entirely male membership. The right has also in previous generations done this for ‘based’ black/gay men, although their power has lessened somewhat as the movement genuinely diversifies along with the country.
These deficits allow unscrupulous or enterprising grifters to carve out niches they couldn’t otherwise sustain in their demographic’s “preferred” political faction or indeed in any case in the non-political world. An attractive 30 year old woman probably isn’t going to be some big social media influencer celebrity, and pretty women who support the Democratic Party include almost any famous actress, model, social media personality etc. On the right though, people have succeeded in this grift.
Similarly, there are a million big muscular tattooed white veterans on the right shilling their own supplement brand, drop shipped gear, podcast, black rifle coffee-esque operation. They span the spectrum from evangelical neocons to dissident rightists, the market is saturated regardless. On the left, though, the buff big man hustle is limited to an effete Turk and some gay men, neither of which really satisfies the demand.
2rafa
4d ago
In finance there is no real QOL difference between NYC and London and even some reasons to prefer the latter. Sure, Texas is much lower tax, but finance is pretty small in Texas. Singapore and Hong Kong increasingly prioritize locals / Chinese.
All in pay for my job is maybe 30% higher in NYC. Once you factor in state and local taxes the tax burden is pretty similar. Groceries, restaurants, rent are 50-70% more expensive in NYC. Consumer goods are the same, but one can only buy so many iPhones and big TVs. High end fashion and luxury goods are subject to import and luxury taxes that make them ~30% more expensive than they are in London. Vacation time is half of what it is here. Property is about the same although NYC prices are steady while London’s are falling. The weather is a mixed bag, NYC is sunnier but London has a far better climate. A ski vacation in the Alps is half of what it is in Aspen at the same tier.
The main jobs where it seems to make sense to move to the US are in tech and medicine, although the latter is very difficult. In finance, though? Compare what $6000 rent gets you in lower Manhattan vs the pound equivalent in London. My parents’ local Italian restaurant in NYC (once you factor in taxes and tip) costs the same as Cipriani here. (Cipriani in NYC is at least double). And when you factor in much higher crime, crazy homeless psychos, far more dangerous and dirty subways, tropical swamp summers and freezing winters, worse storms etc etc it really is no contest for me - London wins, at least for now.
The best option is to have a class-based pass/fail, and then leave actual ‘class rank’ as a provided metric that exists solely for dean’s list stuff and a student’s own reference / pride.
If you want to put on your Goldman Sachs internship application that you were first in whatever linear algebra class, or in political science 101 out of 200 students, then you can, but it’s up to you.
Employers are free to ask for it if they want (I think for law they do this pretty often). But it’s not grade. It’s provided as a rank, 27/31 style, you can compute the percentile if you’d like.
There is an extreme dearth of studies because (a) everybody knows what they’ll find - there was a major UK study about 20 years ago on juries that found the exact result you’d expect - and (b) even for the right it’s not worth the political fallout.
In the long term, jury trials are not viable in a multiracial society with additional sectarian tensions. Lee Kuan Yew knew this when he decided Singapore wouldn’t have jury trials despite its legal system based on common law. The Indians knew this when they decided to abolish jury trials in India, where the same was true. The Malaysians knew this when they abolished them after years of cases decided along racial lines in 1995, where again the same was and is true. Interestingly Hong Kong still has them, although that’s arguably because the population is relatively homogenous ~90% Cantonese speakers.
I think jury trials will be abolished in the UK before long. The left hates them in rape trials (and tried to abolish them for rape cases in Scotland recently) and the right increasingly dislike them because several juries in left wing British cities nullified verdicts in BLM and eco-warrior related vandalism cases even when the judge essentially instructed the jury to vote guilty. There was also a case where a leftist trade unionist called for slitting the throats of his political enemies and was cleared by a jury last year.
But in the US? I think the system is too ingrained. Maybe there will be attempts to alter jury composition, but I can’t see them being abolished.
2rafa
4d ago
Punitive damages for public sector organizations should be paid for by the organization and go to a generalized scaled tax rebate depending on jurisdiction. So ever tax payer in the municipality gets a few dollars in tax rebates and the department pays.
2rafa
5d ago
Here’s my read of this:
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Dollar amounts aren’t really a good indicator here. If someone paid Hunter Biden $2m it doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have paid him $20m. Maybe Hunter felt that the former figure was the most he was willing to accept without embarrassing his father. It doesn’t really say anything about the services provided or resources available.
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The really big money is kind of arbitrary. Kushner is unlikely to lose much more than many comparable managers the Saudis do business with, who also charge under a broadly comparable fee structure. Unlike a fully fake job or classic bribery / facilitation payment, there isn’t necessarily an absolute or even guaranteed relative loss on the actual capital spent.
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Most people who think they can get something out of Trump lose. This is a truth through his entire career. Say what you will about him, he has screwed the screwers every single time. Countless well-educated, conniving types have tried to play him and they’ve all lost, throughout his business and political career. The man has a combination of natural instincts, zero loyalty and zero honor. The concept of a favor owed (by him) is anathema to his identity. Those who try to do business with him almost never win, whether the enterprise is a success or failure.
2rafa
5d ago
There are establishment Republicans who always hated Trump, some of whom held their nose and voted for him in the general. To the extent that these people are still registered Republicans, they will vote against Trump-endorsed candidates in Republican primaries.
This is too general. Think of a classic neocon-type voter who thinks McCain is the greatest president we never had. He doesn’t vote for Massie because he’s an isolationist / libertarian. Think of an Evangelical who thinks Trump is vulgar and would prefer a Romney type (even if he has a dim view of Mormonism) but dislikes Massie’s stance against Israel. These are all relevant in this election.
To be fair the Daily Mail did report it, as you might expect.
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