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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27717 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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Because my nitpick topic is the intersection between politics and gender/sex, in the last months since 7 October I began a very unscientific analysis of the social media content, especially on Instagram, of my friends, acquaintances and other people I follow. (Context as always, European middle-upper class, intra-national environment, very EU-based)

I cannot emphatise enough how much the driven behind pro-Palestinian content is driven exclusively by women. Between the thousands of people I follow, there is a core of around 50 people, all women apart one anarchist guy, who are hard Palestinian-posters (And remember, there is a lot of interests in politics in my environment, it is normal to see all these people interested in stuff like this). And I am not talking about random posting, I am talking of months and months of posting, all inserted in a moral framework of "do not touch the children" or "Israelis are racists". Having followed the process since the beginning, it was fun to see how it took at least one month until the start of the pro-Palestinian posting, as if they were checking where it was the consensus in their group before beginning to post.

The question I ask the community here, why a topic that is so far from our location and interests (again, we are no Columbia University or Middle East, we are far away both ideologically and physically) is so interesting for women, that makes them post about id dozens of times every week, for months straight? And I am talking about a very intense interest, is not rare to see online meltdown of suffering, death menaces or simply histrionics directed towards obscure metaphysical forces.

Again, my observation are reinforced from what I saw in the US and Europe about the universities and campus protests; the protestors are overwhelmingly women, and the most desperate are women.

For me the question rotates around two different forces;

  • The maternal ethics of women, that makes them take always the side of the one that looks weaker or more oppressed.
  • The ideological force behind social networks, that make them taking the side of the part with more social consensus in their social circles.

Thinking about the past, it makes me smile how much it was common to hear, until twenty years ago, that women are very uninterested in politics, unlike men. For my generation, this idea looks absurd. Men do not care about politics at all.

Women have always been the social sinews that held together relatively atomized men; they've always been heavily politically engaged, even during the brief period where men had the vote and they did not. From prohibition to the Satanic ritual abuse panic to 1970s bussing opposition to the defeat of the ERA, they provided the nexus around which politics was organized. Note that these weren't uniformly or even mostly left-coded movements: if you want a movement of any kind, you need women.

Thinking about the past, it makes me smile how much it was common to hear, until twenty years ago, that women are very uninterested in politics, unlike men. For my generation, this idea looks absurd. Men do not care about politics at all.

I'm not sure what culture you're from/what tropes you're dealing with, but the idea that "women don't care about politics" hasn't been a significant part of anglosphere culture for at least the last 200 years, as far as I can tell. Instead, women have been at the forefront of just about every moralistic movement that I can think of in the anglosphere, from religious awakenings, the abolition of slavery, progressive uplift of the lower-classes, anti-alcoholism, anti-drugs, etc. A certain species of feminine moral busybodying over far-away causes actually gets lampooned from time to time in mainstream anglosphere literature.

Thinking about the past, it makes me smile how much it was common to hear, until twenty years ago, that women are very uninterested in politics, unlike men. For my generation, this idea looks absurd. Men do not care about politics at all.

Yeah, well, look how it's working out for 'The West'.

Absolute shambles. In the 'Great Game' of global hegemony, the 'West' is the drunk guy who thinks he's playing checkers, but he's so drunk he doesn't understand he's actually playing chess, against a guy who's perfectly sober.

Meanwhile, in China, you're only supposed to care about politics if it's literally your job. Any random civilian caring about politics is viewed (rightly) with suspicion, perhaps partly genetic due to the millenia of rebels getting executed.

So, you had an absolutely typically female hysterical reaction to Ukraine war, with sanctions that resulted in exports to Russia crashing, and exports to Russian neighbors booming. Russia is still chugging along with the war, meanwhile European economy doesn't look too hot.

But a less well known example: 1 million 244: The 40 year long rare earth mineral boondoggle.

TL;DW:

  • rare earths are crucial for renewables (wind turbine magnets etc) and nice for electric cars.

  • processing them is very hard, harder than uranium enrichment actually to be cost-effective at it. It's a whole bunch of chemically very similar elements that occur together.

  • China having little energy has a strategic interest in energy production and e-cars that actually makes sense. They went into this in early 1980s

  • 'The West' gimped rare earth processing companies in 1980s with a nonsensical rule change that put 'thorium', byproduct of RE processing on par with uranium. I'd love to know whether this preceded the Chinese strategic decision to aim for e-cars and so on.

  • all the processing was outsourced to China. China stole and improved upon all the IP. They also subsidize RE processing and control the market. RE processing, thanks to their subsidies, is unprofitable everywhere. IF you try to set up your own industry, they'll tank prices just to make every startup go bankrupt.

This is all very funny because:

  • rest of the world doesn't really need most RE. Renewables are a scam. Chinese mandate electric cars ( you won't even get a car plate) unless the car is electric, in preparation for WW3 and the naval blockades.

  • e-cars don't really need them, but it's apparently mildly easier to make them good if you have ample RE.

The participants depicted in the pictures and videos here look pretty gender-balanced to me, and my FB feed seems to have one person each being virulently pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, both male and getting maybe 2-3 likes per post. Are you sure your view doesn't just reflect the demographics of college activists?

As a somewhat related observation, I moved to Europe with my SO from the US a few years ago, and the single biggest culture shock experience for her was when we ran across a massive anti-COVID-measures protest and the participants were mostly women. I remember at the time this forum would also have periodic posts that it is only natural that women are the ones pushing for masks and vaccines because of conformism, risk aversion, valuing care over freedom and being for social pressure; however, it turns out that almost always random contingencies override grand theories of how and why the genders believe what, usually formed deep in the bowels of a single cultural bubble.

The anti-Covid protests in Europe drew hugely from the related altmed and new age spheres, which are/were populated chiefly by women. This has had interesting sociological effects, for instance I've personally noted that shortly after this there was a new influx to churches (like my local Orthodox church) of women (and some men) from new age circles, and while I don't know if it's directly related to Covid stuff, one might guess it's at least partly related.

The maternal instinct for the children is mixed with adoration for murderous, rapey barbarians. Personally, I suspect the second to be stronger than the first, but the first to be more what they talk about. Women love a killer, but which killer they love is a function of their social class and politics.

In the '70's, rich white girls used to form terrorist cells, break black felons out of prison, serve as a harem and follow him into battle against the evil white people, by which they meant assassinating black people.

adoration for murderous, rapey barbarians

Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat. Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.

Women love a killer

Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible.

This post is actually a pretty clean example of exactly what we don't want people posting, here. I am familiar with the evidence I would expect you to provide in support of each of your claims, but you didn't actually do so. And even if you had, your rhetoric simply comes in too sweeping and too hot. The tone is all wrong; you're not discussing a culture war topic, you're waging culture war.

You've stacked some AAQCs which have somewhat shielded you, but the number of warnings for low effort booing on your account is getting cumbersome. This time it's a three day ban.

“I am familiar with the evidence”

As am I and a fully fleshed out argument would probably start with the raping of the Sabine then cite historical examples elsewhere (Tribes in Brazilian rain forest, probably Aztecs), cite serial killers getting young hot wives in prison, a little 50 Shades of Grey plus polling on women sexual fantasies and porn watching habits.

Is the goal to write comments that a thorough blue triber who mostly hangs out in places like neoliberal Reddit stumbles into this place and gets the full arguments (leader to long comments) or that 80-90% of the people know the references for the frame a person is citing?

Long form and relitigating every frame hinders the ability to develop models to apply to new situations. My support for your position in this specific comment would basically come down to I haven’t seen anyone argue about female attraction to violence lately. The only incident lately I believe Ymeskhout linked to a Scott Alexander post talking about a client who constantly goes to jail for beating his wives and constantly has a new wife or the wife he previously went to jail for beating is sleeping with him again.

Long form and relitigating every frame hinders the ability to develop models to apply to new situations.

Inflammatory comments and shorthand integration-by-reference hinder the ability to create a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases.

That's the goal--it's right there at the top of the page! Of course, the community is what it is; personalities and culture and such are bound to develop and play a part. The goal of moderation is to do what we can to preserve the foundation in the face of that.

Absolutely! Ban everyone (other than the Nazi-hobbyists with the time on their hands to couch their points in interminable gish-gallops) and you will not have anymore inflammatory comments to deal with! (tappinghead.gif)

Keep up the good work guys.

The mods were just following orders. Is it really anybody's fault that no one but Nazis can seem to follow pretty simple rules?

Do you think @JTarrou should not have been banned?

If you think the modding was correct, then what is your complaint?

If you think the modding was incorrect, then explain why.

I think that @JTarrou's comment made a valid well articulated point relevant to the discussion -- my point to you is that if you continue nannying people's speech patterns you will soon enough be moderating a forum mainly consisting of polite and long-winded Nazis, because (for whatever reason) they seem to be the only ones currently willing to put in the effort to self-police their speech to the extent that they aren't catching regular bans.

If this is what you and @naraburns feel 'the foundation' of the place is (and Zorba presumably agrees) then so be it -- but it seems to me that things have drifted very far from what it was, and I think it has accelerated lately in large part due to an increase in the specific form of moderation that you are engaging in at the moment.

I don't think our moderation has changed, I know our rules haven't, and clearly it is not just Nazis who are able to write effortful posts without catching bans.

We've been hearing "You guys are ruining this place with your nannying speech patterns" since before we left reddit.

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Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.

But, as I've argued before, there is no neutral definition of what constitutes an "inflammatory" claim. The claims that count as inflammatory for you depend on the particular ideological viewpoint you've adopted. So it would at least be good to specify the viewpoint from which you're judging a particular claim as inflammatory.

I personally don't think there's anything inflammatory at all about "women love a killer". Regardless of whether the claim is true or false, I don't view it as a slight against women, or a failing on their part. Plausibly it could be taken as a relatively natural corollary of a Darwinian/Hobbesian view of life.

I'm aware that my view on this particular question may be unusual, and in the framing of say, polite upper middle class Western society, most people would view this as an inflammatory claim. But if "polite upper middle class Western society" is going to be the frame of reference that we use for judging claims as inflammatory on TheMotte, shouldn't we be modding a lot more posts than we already are? Every time HBD comes up for example, a number of posters write under the assumption that HBD is true. But HBD would be considered to be an extremely inflammatory complex of claims by most people in the West today. Is no one allowed to post under the assumption that HBD is true unless they include a link to a list of HBD 101 resources laying out the supporting evidence?

So it would at least be good to specify the viewpoint from which you're judging a particular claim as inflammatory.

As with all rules, it's the viewpoint of the best judgment of the moderators.

I personally don't think there's anything inflammatory at all about "women love a killer".

That's why I referenced the specific/general rule there, rather than the inflammatory one.

Is no one allowed to post under the assumption that HBD is true unless they include a link to a list of HBD 101 resources laying out the supporting evidence?

That depends largely on the tone of the post. A factual and charitable but non-inflammatory post that leads a person toward uncomfortable conclusions is a very different thing than a meticulously-researched-and-linked post that paints whole groups of people in demeaning or derogatory ways using needlessly hostile language.

In this particular case, I would point out for example that while drawing comparisons between urban crime today and literally barbaric behavior in the ancient world is different in tone than straight up referring to a group as "barbarians." The objection might be--"well yeah, but if it quacks like a duck..." and I am totally sympathetic to wanting to resist the pejorative treadmill. Fortunately, the rules are not self-enforcing, and the mod team is comprised of reasonable individuals doing their best to prevent this from becoming a community where one particular sort of person just comes to vent their spleen.

The most we can do is our best.

This Patti Hearst-type phenomenon surely can't pattern onto all females? I agree a certain type of woman likes the brute (I went to high school with some of these girls) but I wouldn't by any means say this applies to all women. You seem like a very smart guy, so what makes you confident to make such a big generalization?

This Patti Hearst-type phenomenon surely can't pattern onto all females?

Aside from the fact that it would be bad, why not?

Aside from the fact that it appeals to the doomers, why?

It reminds me of women who say all men are rapists waiting to be rapey. Now sure maybe in the right circumstances, Mr Gittes, men are capable of anything, that doesn't mean the same thing. Taking an observed behavioral phenomenon and applying it wholesale as typical is shoddier than even the usual shoddy social science.

It reminds me of women who say all men are rapists waiting to be rapey.

So you've got nothing but analogy to your headcanon?

Not enough effort, please be more charitable than this.

I'm not sure what you mean by that, to be honest.

I'm not sure this makes sense. Many men admire murderous, rapey barbarians too. Right-wing Twitter is full of odes to romanticized Indo-European chariot riders replacing the original populations of Europe and India.

Allegedly, a lot of statue-posters are actually women (I don't remember where I read/saw this, though). If true, this only reinforces JTarrou's point, only with the political valence flipped.

The neo-pagan revival niche within the DR is also heavily female.

Bearded blond guys with deer horns on their heads must be cleaning up... Hang on, I could be that guy!

Pity the deer around here have even more pitiful racks than the women do. Might have to go on a hunting trip out east.

Yup, that's the idea. The men involved are thinking strategically, the women involved connect with it on a totally different level. It really does come down to the Apollonian/Dionysian duality described by Nietzsche. It's why Rationalism is doomed, except to the extent it taps into the Dionysian while pretending it has a basis in rationality...

Imagine EA without the polycules, orgies, or the women. Rationalists cannot escape the Dionysian Force either.

I think that most of the men who admire brutal chariot-riding conquerors are not thinking strategically, they just valorize virile amoral masculine strength for emotional reasons, in many cases I would guess because they feel inadequate as men and feel disconnected from modernity and so they are attracted to an archetype of brutal masculinity that has the extra advantage of pissing off politically mainstream people.

No, it's mostly due to the belief that a renaissance of European identity would require a European religion of some form to replace Christianity. So they look towards the old European gods for inspiration. I have my own criticisms, I think their premise is correct but a "replacement European religion" will be some AI-generated cult rather than a pagan revival (maybe such a cult would borrow a lot of pagan aesthetics). But there is more substance there, they are obviously thinking with more sophistication than you realize. The glorification of the Indo-European chariot riders is not at all far removed from glorification of Greco-Roman civilization, as the latter pantheon was likewise, in essence, a glorification of the Indo-European chariot riders conquering and colonizing the world, imposing civilization onto humanity.

Richard Spencer hit the nail on the head. Women in particular are drawn to these sort of cult-movements, and have been for all of recorded history. It's not just about being progressive, that is only incidental because progressivism has been the popular cult-religion challenging prevailing Order. There are also accounts of conversion to Christianity being motivated by zealous women demanding it as a condition of marriage for more religiously apathetic pagan men.

The cause is the Dionysian Force. The Richard Hananias who try to discredit the protests because they are all women don't understand how that is how all cults proliferate. These cults challenging prevailing order become powerful precisely because they are led by women.

I think this is cherry-picking. Revolutions against established Order have not, historically, been dominated by women more than by men. The rise of Islam and of Protestantism, as far as I know, were not mainly driven by women. There was nothing female-dominated about the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution. The 1960s social revolution in the US was not female-dominated either.

At this point, I don't think Wokeism is a revolution against the established order, certainly not to young people and definitely not college students. Wokeism IS the established Order. They're conforming to the social context around them.

The 1960s social revolution was driven by sex, making it ipso-facto female-dominated. Not because they were intellectual or political leaders in a revolutionary movement, but because they became entranced by Sex, Drugs, Rock n' Roll. The 1960s social revolution would have gone nowhere without women.

I would also make a distinction between religious cults and revolutionary movements. The "Dionysian Force" Richard is talking about falls more on the former than the latter. Women are more susceptible to cults, but then they kind of become kingmakers for the cults that blossom into political/social movements.

"She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy."

This problem with modern politics was identified at least as far back as 1948. It has yet to be solved.

But in that particular case, Winston was wrong!

But Julia was an outlier, and only avoids repercussions by putting on a tremendously convincing performance of the type of woman Winston thinks she is.

Young women are materially more likely to identify as liberal or progressive than young men. Palestine is a huge liberal issue.

I noticed the same thing during BLM, it was almost exclusively women posting about it.

Agree, I think this is less to do with misplaced maternal feelings and more to do with fads and trends and following them.

To what extent do you think the few men who post about it are doing so for the approval of those women as opposed to out of any genuine sentiment?

I think that most men who engage in progressive activist politics ultimately do it to simp to women. Or just to fit in with their social circle which includes activist women, to be less uncharitable.

I base this on a guy who reconfigured his entire personality to be a gay black communist in 2017, because that was maximally appealing to college-educated white women. Even changed his Tinder bio to "Queer."

Edit: I should be less-totalizing. Yes, there's genuine sentiment among men, but it's still motivated thinking enforced by the context that leftist women create.

Vice had an article about it.

I remember years ago as an undergrad one guy that had his phone confiscated by the other guys and had his startup screen changed to 'Fake Gay to Get Chicks!'

Because that was what he was doing.

Was he already black before he reconfigured it?

Yes, he just didn't constantly bring up his Blackness.

Did it work? Did he get laid?

Women are generally revolted by simps.

I don't think they realized he was simping. He was just presenting them with everything it was trendy for them to want. Yes, lots. During COVID. While privately being a complete piece of shit. It made me hate the world.

It made me hate the world.

Why would it make you hate the world? Men lying to get laid, is as old as the hills. Hating that behavior (and perhaps the people who use it) seems the more accurate response?

Because every time I tried meeting anyone, I ran into the full Covid gauntlet of Bubbles and Taking It Seriously, stuff that women mysteriously stopped caring about once it stood in the way of fucking him.

And because he had become a hollow skinsuit of upward-mobility who spoke entirely in progressive talking points, to the point where it reminded me of the guy from Nightcrawler. And had a pathetic fucking meltdown where he tried to hold his girlfriend hostage by locking his door with her keys in his room, plus all the emotional abuse before. And he tried to steal the lease out from under his roommates. And he'd poison people against his roomates by calling us racist. And he collaborated with the landlords (to steal the lease), and simped for them massively despite them calling him racial slurs behind his back, which we informed him about in our bid to convince him that they were bad people whom he should not make deals with, especially with him valuing his Blackness so much. So he was a Queer (straight but wants to fuck leftist chicks who hate straight men) Black (ish,) Feminist (who abused women) Communist (who sold out his prole roommates). Eventually he had some sort of psychotic break and attacked me with a fire axe, I maced him and got a restraining order to get him removed from the place. And to this day I have former mutual friends who won't talk to me, because he's Black and Leftist and I'm a straight white male who called the cops on a Person of Color. And wherever he is now, he's undoubtedly balls-deep in some chick he met at a pro-palestine protest, while I still can't get anyone to fucking turn up for fucking coffee after getting my heart mutilated in 2019. Because people are so fucking retarded that they misinterpret me as some kind of monster, while he's the Jesus of their new religion.

That is why I hate the world.

Again the vast majority of that is about him manipulating other people, weaponizing their beliefs to his own advantage. Cult leaders do the same with religious beliefs. It just seems odd to hate his victims. Like it would be odd to hate the world because some people fell for Jim Jones. I can understand hating your former friend or indeed Jim Jones but the fact that people fall for a presumably at least superficially charming person doesn't still seem like a great reason to hate the world, rather than hating the people who manipulate the world. The people who went to bat for him, presumably did so because they believed he was a sympathetic victim not a monster.

I've encountered people like him (minus the fire axe, substituting a broken pint glass) and many people did believe he was a lovely person and he took advantage of that over and over. But it didn't make me hate the world so much as hate him. People generally assume other people are operating in good faith in personal relationships and that allows people who are willing to cheat and lie to take advantage of it. You are a victim of him, but so are the people that believed his lies and manipulations. They didn't side with him because they hated you, they sided with him because he knew exactly what to say and how to say it.

You and the world are both victims of people like him. Hating your fellow victims is I think missing the point. Having said that it seems like a terrible experience and I am sorry you were dragged into his machinations.

More comments

To what extent do you think the few men who post about it are doing so for the approval of those women as opposed to out of any genuine sentiment?

I find young men gain status from having somewhat, but not overly disagreeable opinions. The goldilocks zone is on the fringes of the overton window; you'll get shunned for throwing a roman salute, but merely tut-tutted and quietly respected for shrugging off the dotted-i's and crossed-t's of political correctness.

Doubtless some young men will go crying and waving every bloody progressive-cause shirt to simp, but they are making a mistake.

I find young men gain status from having somewhat, but not overly disagreeable opinions. The goldilocks zone is on the fringes of the overton window; you'll get shunned for throwing a roman salute, but merely tut-tutted and quietly respected for shrugging off the dotted-i's and crossed-t's of political correctness.

Absolutely. If you're not a "Fiscal Conservative, Social Liberal" or "I think it's men's responsibility to be providers", then how can she try to civilize you? Note the usefulness of underlying attractive traits (financial ambition, provider mindset etc.) whereas whining about something is never a good way to seduce a woman.

Even my ultra-socialist students tolerate "I'm pro-markets" and it doesn't affect my evaluations. If anything, it makes my approval of their coursework (which tends to be relatively good, compared at least to the median deeply apathetic and relativist student) more meaningful to them.

young men will go crying and waving every bloody progressive-cause shirt to simp, but they are making a mistake.

My misspent youth, alas. Note to readers: reading Judith Butler and bell hooks does not, in fact, make women any more likely to date you. (Someone here will doubtlessly point out this is obvious, but when the women around you all suggest that the solution to dating woes is to Be More Feminist and Read Woman Authors, it's easy for a naive kid to get confused.)

Having a Bell Hook$ book on your shelf might help you get laid. Actually reading it will not. Reading it and then trying to discuss it with your date is a major libido killer.

Because nobody actually reads that stuff. Shattering the polite fiction that she reads and cares about literature is an autist move.

You: "What's your favorite part of the book?"

Her: "Um... I guess I just like um.. um... "

You: "Oh, I thought you said you liked this author".

System: Emily has unmatched you.

I can't speak to women, but I can say one particular woman has been driving me fucking insane with her news coverage of Palestine.

I'm a long time fan of Breaking Points, but Krystal Ball has resorted to the most ghoulish, amoral dead baby calculus to justify literally anything Palestine has done, is doing, or will do. It's all "If Hamas killed 50 babies on 10/7, what does it say about Israel that has killed hundred of babies in their operations in Gaza?" She literally starts crying on air, choking up over "all the little babies starving to death in Gaza." Her entire argument is just babies and tears, and she beats that dead baby horse for hours a day.

I've taken to skipping all her coverage of Palestine. Ryan Grim, the other progressive host on their network, generally does a more informative, dispassionate job when he assumes his duties on Wednesdays.

Krystal Ball

Her name always makes my mouth curl into a slight smile whenever I see it. I mean, the memetic potential of it is next level and were I her I'd be leaning into it a lot more e.g.:

The Virgin Cassandra vs the Chad KRYSTAL BALL...

Her entire argument is just babies and tears

Funny - you could say this about both the left and the right regarding abortion today and not be wrong in either direction.

Politics is often silly.

Basing politics on emotions isn't exclusive to any one group.

This is the exact person that came to mind.

These Crossfire shows seem to lean towards the female leftist in general (The Hill show Ball used to be on is now dominated by a Bernie Bro with a browbeaten libertarian in a corner). But it's been incredibly noticeable how utterly emotional Ball is on this and how that impacts the show.

It makes it hard for anything to be discussed because the co-host is not enough of an asshole to really push it. Ironically, this is why progressives used to complain about "white women's tears" ; it stops everything.

Her equally leftist spouse Kyle Kulinski seem to share the exact same (bad imo) opinions without the unseemly weeping in public.

I suspect this is the result of coordination. Male pro-Palestinian protestors -- especially if they're obviously Muslim looking -- will read as scary. So it is women who are recruited to front the cause.

Men and women are both interested in politics if you ask about the actual issues in my opinion. But I’d concede that women are much more susceptible to “it’s called being a GOOD PERSON, GET IT?” reasoning. Women don’t want to be left out of the tribe, women are more willing to show fealty to high status ideas (a man will become a sycophant, will bow to his betters, but internally he is more likely to chafe at this; he won’t do it unless he is certain it’s absolutely necessary).

That’s not surprising since it tracks with extensive research about men much more frequently engaging in almost all riskier behavior. Heterodox politics are part of that.

If the prophesied end of men ever comes, the leaders will have to maintain a small population of autists and disagreeable assholes as a final sanity check against good ideas. Like the oracles of yore.

Leaders have no real interest in doing that, though.

The male failure role is probably the risk of taking a boutique contrarian opinion simply to "stick one's head out of the herd" or whatever.

Or they're sticking their head out because they're failures (or on the verge).

Is Elon Musk a failure?

Men stick their necks out because it's in their nature to do so.

If we're going to go full armchair evolutionary biologist, risk-taking makes sense when most men don't reproduce and a few lucky ones have dozens of children. That was our ancestral environment. The risk-taking genes have been tempered from thousands of years of civilization. But they're still there.

I don't think that Musk is particularly a contrarian figure. He has drifted to a certain viewpoint and crowd - 'alt-lite', for the lack of a better word - and rarely seems to take an opinion that doesn't fit to that mold. (Indeed, he's already a meme for not taking a firm opinion on stuff where he seems to be doing so at all - "Interesting", "Looking into this" and so on.)

An actual contrarian in the sense that I'd mean would be someone like Michael Tracey, who has a tendency to drift into a certain crowd and instantly start taking viewpoints contrary to the ideas of that crowd, just to challenge them. Ie. when Tracey seems too close to the right he starts shitting on them, when Tracey got too appreciated by pro-Russians he started saying Russia is not right about everything, so on.

I think you're right that it's natural but I don't think Elon Musk is Elon Musk because he took "boutique contrarian opinions" to stand out. He is an asshole but, AFAICT, his crazy stances are driven by passion, an apparently justified belief in a hole in the market and a concern for outsized (even by his standards) rewards.

After he got one success like Paypal he no longer needed to make himself notable.

The sort of guy who takes a stance purely to distinguish themselves (to the point where they risk a real failure) seems like a more desperate thing, same with other such bold and risky moves (like the Hock)

I think this is why bare contrarianism is considered off-putting.

Women don’t want to be left out of the tribe, women are more willing to show fealty to high status ideas

This is one of the more important points that indicates to me that the causality identified above re redirected maternal instincts is slightly inaccurate. Save for muslims, the vocal women (invariably childless and usually 'queer' feminist allies) who advocate loudly and repeatedly for Palestine are also virulent progressives who support LGBT+ and anti-men behaviors. These women are always progressive in outlook, and the progressive orthodoxy is oppositional to extant western (white male) power dynamics. Support for Palestine maps cleanly into opposition against western govts/institutions that clearly do not support the palestinian cause, mainly because the Palestinians themselves keep saying they want Hamas. Not that this point ever registers for western progressive women: ask them what the Palestinians want and its always some basic 'they just want peace' with insipid talking points interspersed. At no point will they ever listen to what the Palestinians themselves say they want, and they will engage in DAVRO to spin it around to the fault of the jews. Justification of Arab violence, if it is even acknowledged to occur, is always rationalized by reversing the causality: the cause must be made even more pure hearted to justify all resistance against those that deny it. All of this of course stands in full denial of the well documented atrocities that Palestinians proudly published themselves and the ownself stated desires of the Palestinians. I showed footage of Palestinians spitting on Shani Louks body to progressive female friends and they immediately said it was fake because Palestinians would never do something that bad, and they keep saying that Israel lied about 40 beheaded babies so clearly Palestinians have never committed any crimes.

I am generally agree with the many posters above (below?) that misplaced maternal instinct is the reason for most of the extant female support for Palestine, but specific to the nutters blasting off on social media the support is 'enemy of my enemy' rather than 'kindred spirit'.

I am generally agree with the many posters above (below?) that misplaced maternal instinct is the reason for most of the extant female support for Palestine,

I think the coverage of the war by the liberal media/NGO complex plays at least as much of a role as maternal extinct. If the NYT, CNN etc started actually showing clips of Hamas stealing aid and shooting at their own emaciated civilians you'd probably see fewer women attributing the images of starving Gazan children to supposed Israeli malevolence.

The media is itself the culprit in this case. Barely a frame of the videos uploaded by Hamas themselves where they executed teenage girls and slaughtered children and whole families in between whoops of joy, but unlimited rehashes of crowded hospitals filmed by Hamas themselves. I still find it disgusting that the media does not give any coverage to the Darfur massacres, Perhaps it is because Hamas is a 'legitimate authority' so attribution can be satisfied, even though Hamas lies more than North Korea does.

I still find it disgusting that the media does not give any coverage to the Darfur massacres, Perhaps it is because Hamas is a 'legitimate authority' so attribution can be satisfied, even though Hamas lies more than North Korea does.

Arabs and blacks seem to occupy equal positions on the progressive stack, so most journalists aren't particularly animated by the former massacring the latter.

Support for Palestine maps cleanly into opposition against western govts/institutions that clearly do not support the palestinian cause, mainly because the Palestinians themselves keep saying they want Hamas.

We don't see the same people being against the Western-institution-led Ukraine war, for example. If anything, Ukraine skepticism is male coded.

Also, as a minor point, Hamas was allegedly unpopular even in Gaza before October 7. Presumably they remain so today, except in an enemy-of-my-enemy way. On the other hand, support for killing Jews is widespread, though how much sounds hard to measure. For a while it was a common sophistry on NPR, that because Gazans don't much like Hamas they condemn O7. But there are a lot of folks who oppose Hamas, and think attacking Israel was the best thing they ever did. I don't know when or why this story became less popular.

The fact that being anti-Ukraine is male/right coded is itself the reason for the lack of female objection to Ukraine. While it is still icky white people dying, Trump hates Ukraine while Biden loves it, so theres no clear father figure to rebel against. Meanwhile, Trump would glass Gaza and so would Biden (at least in the progressive imagination). Every potential manifestation of western patriarchy is opposed to Palestine, so it animates these women.

In their mind, the progressives believe (still) that Islam is just evil out of opposition to the same forces the progressives fight against. Once the evil white oppressor is destroyed a righteous and clean Islam will emerge, letting all these oppressed minorities cuddle under the guising bosom of the morally righteous progressive.

Being really really pro-Ukraine (ie. above the usually required level in Western societies) is pretty male-coded too, though, in my experience. Most NAFOids don't seem to be female.

True, men are largely more aware of what a real threat Russia poses. Women really seem to not give a shit about icky white people dying, and I maintain that progressives broadly hate Ukraine because it focuses support onto white people instead of blacks or gays: Jayapal pushing for Biden to force Ukraine to the negotiating table in Oct 2022 strikes me as what the social justice wing thinks of white people (even slavs): a distraction from the true cause. The only thing making progressives give a slight shit in favor of Ukraine is the fact that trump hates Ukraine, but the progressives hold their nose when decrying Russia because the beneficiary is white.

It seems like ‘progressives’ are not a unified group on this question.

Eh, fair. Progs tend to hate Russia rightly for it being a socially regressive dictatorship, but tankies love Russia because it still opposes the evil west. I till now cannot understand the intersection of tankies, trannies and racial inferiorization (this is specific to whites who are the only group were a subset - white liberals- display out-group preference), and I honestly find tankie and tranny discords more baffling than nazi ones... which is quite the achievement.

(sidenote: why are there so many femboys and furries, non overlapping, on right wing spheres? its nuts)

Say whatever one will about the very online right, the Longhouse is a useful lens on politics.

I've come across the term "Longhouse" a lot. Could someone please explain it to me in a straightforward way.

Comes from this peice https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/02/what-is-the-longhouse

Coincidentally, the author was just doxxed by The Guardian which has been a bit of a news thing for the past few days.

That piece is explicitly talking about it as a pre-existing term that was already in use.

Men and women are both interested in politics if you ask about the actual issues in my opinion. But I’d concede that women are much more susceptible to “it’s called being a GOOD PERSON, GET IT?” reasoning. Women don’t want to be left out of the tribe, women are more willing to show fealty to high status ideas (a man will become a sycophant, will bow to his betters, but internally he is more likely to chafe at this; he won’t do it unless he is certain it’s absolutely necessary).

I have noticed that older women are sometimes extremely skilled at exploiting this tendency to try and fulfil expectations in younger women. I recently talked with someone doing her second PhD (an obvious masochist) and she said that, while her first supervisor (an older woman) had been able to run rings around her emotionally, she now found that female academics were less able to "emotionally manipulate" (her words) her.

The most terrifying chief I ever met was a woman who was mommy, sister, and mentor all at the same time to her direct subordinates and the ladies in other departments. The other would take all their cues from her, and if she ever flexed she could tilt the power dynamic in any direction she wanted. She was fucking shitty at her actual job but she could get anyone to do anything for her and honestly it was kind of inspiring, in that 'I see what you are doing and I cannot replicate it' way. The Mother Hen at full evolution reaches something cult-like in its power and it is kind of impressive to see.

One on occasion encounters women who have at various stages been jezebel (less successfully ‘maiden’), mother and matriarch and it is indeed very impressive, a unique social role because it requires a series of experiences that are (cumulatively) very rare among women.

Would you say that is because the physical presentation of the three archetypes are distinctly different? Physical presenteeism maps pretty cleanly into each archetype, moreso than behavior, and to pull off all three in the same body requires a sort of amorphous age presenteeism. The chief I mentioned and a few other women I know who pull that off all have a sort of 'maybe 20 maybe 40' look to them, mainly due to excellent skincare regimes (which was difficult enough). Matriarch seems to ironically be the easiest to pull off regardless of age, bossy women can be big sister or grandmother to her juniors. I've seen a tiny thai woman boss around girls older than them simply by force of will.

Yes, I think so. To be all three requires a lot of genetic luck, being born beautiful likely into a wealthy family, being intelligent, having the right education, and being both confident and self-aware / humble enough to know when to pivot to the next role or to change your personality. You need to be a very lucky and socially adroit sociopath.

I've experienced much the same, most of the really active Palestine posters are women. Maybe a part of the explanation is this poem from the 70s that the local ones like to quote (translated by me from Finnish):

When someone has been born a mother

Who has once been born as a mother,

is a mother to all children,

and all the children of the world

she has held to her chest.

And the cry of the children of the world,

she has started to hear in her ears,

as all the children of the world,

speak with her own child's mouth.

This particular war has really featured a lot of pictures of dead or seriously hurt Palestinian children and babies. If you're even vaguely affliated to lefty people on social media you'll be bombarded with dozens of them every week unless you start hiding or blocking. I'm not particularly emotional (well, duh, I post here), but some of them really get to me, too. They must be playing a particularly merry havoc on maternal instincts, even with women who don't have kids themselves.

One reason why it might have taken a bit of time for this effect to start working was that during the first month or so there were equivalent pics of Israeli kids being killed or having been kidnapped, but that petered out since it was related to one dramatic one-time event, not a continuous supply of new examples.

It's compounded by social network effects, of course.

Do you mind posting the poem in Finnish

Jos on kerran äidiksi syntynyt

Joka kerran on äidiksi syntynyt,

hän äiti on kaikkien lasten,

ja kaikkia maailman lapsia

hän on painanut rintaansa vasten,

ja maailman lasten itkua

hän on korvissaan alkanut kuulla,

sillä maailman lapset puhuvat

hänen omien lastensa suulla.

-Anne-Mari Kaskinen –

The pictures of dead jewish kids and rapes being circulated in Arab telegram don't seem to have inspired any maternal or feminine sympathy in progressive women. Mothers (I lead a baking workshop so I deal with women quite often) generally have mutual sympathy for dead kids, with more professional mothers understanding Palestines less than innocent role in fomenting violence. It is only childless women who are Extremely Online that spout pro-palestine platitudes mindlessly, and from there comes the simps who pretend to care about Palestine just in the hope of getting into some young naive girls pants.

...do you think those women are in those Telegrams?

Like /u/Armin said, it took some time for the actual pro-Palestine mill to start really functioning after Oct 7, and the reason for this was probably that there was a large amount of grisly material from those attacks circulating. The amount of new material on that front eventually tapered out, but the "grisly Palestine material" keeps chugging on and on.

Also, anecdotally, the most insistent pro-Palestine social media activists I know are mothers with exactly one child, though this just might reflect my age class.

True, progressives would not have looked for evidence of their pet palestinians having done any wrong. However some of my proggy friends did ask me if the Palestine stuff was true, and I shared with them the shit gazanow and (weird arabic script) was sharing gleefully till the admins realized it was a bad look and nuked the chats. Your point about mothers on social media being virulently progressive is an interesting one and I wonder if it is the 'social media' rather than the 'mother' bit that is the determining variable. My maternal circles largely abandoned social media, so I am lost here.

My wife (who has cut back on her social media quite radically recently) said that especially mothers with young children are suspectible to social media, since they are so attached to their children 24/7 that when they get a little break they have little time or energy to do anything else than browse a bit of Instagram.

I guess thats the difference. It is better for young mothers to get onto live shopping. Not nearly as inane and more gratifying, if potentially financially onerous.

One reason why it might have taken a bit of time for this effect to start working was that during the first month or so there were equivalent pics of Israeli kids being killed or having been kidnapped, but that petered out since it was related to one dramatic one-time event, not a continuous supply of new examples.

And because the most determined pro-Palestine activists made sure to tear down all the posters of abducted Israeli children, in an effort to quell the associated cognitive dissonance.

Even if they hadn't done it, a bleeding or otherwise clearly shellshocked kid would still be emotionally more directly affecting than a wanted poster. And, again, there's a lot of bleeding Palestinian kids.

Thanks for the poem and the translation.

Yes, it looks like something that we as civilization have not yet understood, and maybe we knew but we have forgotten, is the different moral framework of women in comparison to men. We notice it now way more because women has enormous political power, and this translates to a change in ethics in our political and cultural class.

From a political perspective, it makes very hard to dislodsge young women and the left, because, by nature, the modern left is based on the oppressor/oppressed moral framework. The only thing you can use it to introduce another oppressor/oppressed moral framework that is stronger.

It also make me think how the liberal civilization will fare in the future if we adopt women's moral framework, especially on foreign policy. And I think here there is a case of "wokes more correct than the mainstream" when they say that Imperialism is born from the Patriarchy.

The thing is, though, as I will not tire of mentioning, is that "left votes for women" is a very recent concept. In most European countries, until the 80s, the left voted for conservative parties more than the left-wing ones - there might have been a fair few more countries within the Eastern sphere if it hadn't been for women's suffrage! - and in UK the women voted more for Tories until 2017.

Most oppressor/oppressed frameworks that we have had already been introduced to politics before the 80s, of course, and a huge amount of men sympathized with the one that has had the most political strength by far - "we are workers, the bosses are taking from us, let's get ours". What really changed was the loss of strength of Christianity as the main, or one of the main, political frameworks behind conservative thought, particularly with its pro-maternal themes.

I wonder if declining fertility/maternity among women have a role to play here. Sure, being a mother kicks maternal instinct into overdrive, but it also channels and focuses it on your offspring. By contrast, if you're 35 and childless, you don't have a proximal locus for it. Instead, it might be channeled into forms of high-visibility compassion-driven benevolence (no! not like that!) of the kind that progressivism strongly seeks to identify itself with.

There's something to this. Most unmarried men, married men and married women vote Republican. Most unmarried women vote Democrat.

Every woman I know who was a bleeding heart hippie turned into Phyllis Schafer once they had kids. A really fun thing to do at playdates is to let slip that 'boys play so differently from girls' and see how long the waters warm up before the hatred of trans shit pops up. Race takes longer to bring up, but it comes up quickly if the topic of school choice occurs.

turned into Phyllis Schafer

Did you mean Phyllis Schlafly here? Because googling "Phyllis Schafer" gives me a landscape painter.

Thanks for the clarification. I didn't really pay attention of the specific spelling. Good catch!

I agree - similar to men, who seek an outlet for their competitive and violent drives, women seek an outlet for their maternal and social drives. The problem is that while society is appropriately - sometimes overly - wary of toxic masculinity that results from not channeling these drives into something non-destructive or even constructive, society is completely in denial about the entire concept of toxic femininity; You can't reign in something you deny exists. The only remotely close concept I've heard in the mainstream was the "Karen", and even there it AFAIK only took off because a woman misjudged her position in the progressive stack, and it is generally not used by the mainstream in a way that fundamentally calls into question the feminine worldview.

Sure, being a mother kicks maternal instinct into overdrive, but it also channels and focuses it on your offspring.

Anecdote: my mother was a hippie liberal commie until she had children, then she has gradually drifted right, but she apparently became very conservative on law-and-order issues more or less as soon as she had her first child. Lifestyle wise, she ended up going 75% tradwife and 100% Christian, having been a classic careerist feminist. Talk about a "transformative experience."

I completely agree with you.

What i was saying is that indeed there have been a replacement of the moral framework, and in order to change ideas, you need to change the moral framework of women again, making the "persuade them on the market of ideas" less useful.

And I am talking from a country where, still last election at least, women still vote right as the men.

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