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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33895 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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This is a very unfortunate state of affairs for everyone, but I’d flag that the left needs to be careful here, more so than the right. In the event of a collapse of the existing social and political order, young men play an outsize role in both committing and defending against acts of violence. To the extent that the left can’t call on this constituency in a time of crisis, it may be disastrous for them.

Is it an unfortunate state of affairs though? Or is it just normal? My dad was more conservative than my mum, way back in time. They've been married 60 years. How much of our civilization is built between the different preferences of men and women pulling at each other? That men work to deliver what women want so that they can have women is as old as building a shack and a fire.

Just because there are differences doesn't mean its a problem after all. In fact the differences could be what drives our societies to improve. Signalling and status are huge motivators.

There’s no equivalence. It’s one thing when men and women compromise on an individual basis in the context of marriage despite differences in points of view. It’s entirely different to have social conditions of increasing atomization and an overall decline of social engagement where young men and women are, relatively speaking, getting politically radicalized in opposite directions, which appears to be a phenomenon without historical precedent.

politically radicalized in opposite directions, which appears to be a phenomenon without historical precedent?

And? Lots of things are without historical precedent. It doesn't mean they are actually problems. It's a self correcting issue. Either through assortative mating, or in people who won't reach out across the aisle simply not having relationships while others will find their desires for companionship overcome their political biases, or they don't and simply don't pass on their genetics. There is nothing that needs to be done, a new balance will be found.

By definition, society is only able to adapt to, and withstand the effects of, events with precedent, as it obviously lacks experience in dealing with events without. It’s the same thing as armies preparing to fight the last war, which is understandably the butt of jokes, but unfortunately nobody can prepare for the next war, as nobody has seen it yet. Every event without precedent has the potential to result in an enormous crisis.

Also, the social radicalization in question is mostly happening in one direction only, which is not something that is discussed to a larger extent here, as far as I can see. In the past decade or so, it’s leftists, and leftist single women in this particular case, that are mainly radicalizing in Western societies, not rightists. This is mostly resulting from intentional, systematic and choreographed propaganda campaigns directed at them. Thus I find it rather rich on your part to declare that “there is nothing that needs to be done, a new balance will be found”. I’m sure you’re aware that any social concern of the liberal Left can simply be dismissed out of hand according to the same line of reasoning, aren’t you?

Anyway, frankly I find your attitude regarding this rather conceited, so I don’t have anything else to add.

If society could only deal with things with precedent it could never have developed in the first place as early societies would constantly be encountering things for the first time. So i think your first point is demonstrably in error.

I think you're also getting mixed up between the meta and object levels. If you think society is going to be better with lots of kids then you can and arguably should campaign for and have lots of kids yourself. No issues there! But my point is that regardless of what you do, or what we do individually societies are exceptionally resilient and adaptive. Societies survive civil wars, coups, nuclear bombs, plagues, ice ages, famines. Civilizational collapse and more.

My point is not that you shouldn't try to change something. Its that at a societal scale adaptions will happen regardless as situations change. Because pressures will emerge whether anyone is planning them or not.

Even the leftist stuff you decry is an example, the pressures that created that movement exist outside of the movement itself.

You need to think at a much more macro level when looking at societies. Big changes are the result of cascades. Leftism could not have got to this point without the relevant circumstances having been created by prior societal choices and outcomes which created a favorable environment for those leftist ideas to be successful. And in turn the outcomes of this wave, will create the conditions for the next, which might be a more conservative swing, or something else we won't predict.

People are just the vector at this scale. Individual choices are socially mediated as a gestalt that no-one has control of.

If you want to shape a wave thats fine. Everybody does, just be aware the ocean will exist whether your wave breaks or not. That is my point.

If society could only deal with things with precedent it could never have developed in the first place as early societies would constantly be encountering things for the first time.

Well, yes, societies have the potential to undergo development/refinement in such conditions, that much is certainly true. But they can also degenerate and collapse, which is what a demographic implosion is likely to result in, or at least contribute to.

I don't think women in a healthy society would, say, be greatly invested in making it more socially acceptable to kill their children, for example.

Entirely depends. What is healthy for a society can be very different than what is healthy for specific individuals. In any case it will resolve itself as the population rises or falls.

Why would a woman in a healthy society not want to retain control over whose children she'll carry and invest into, and when? Robust systems have failsafes.

You could justify a whole lot of things by explaining their benefit to some party involved and calling it a failsafe. I don't see how that's a compelling pro-infanticide argument.

What's your criteria of a healthy society, then?

The gaps seems larger than in that generation, and we have a highly plausible locus of the difference: Modern education. Girls are opting in, boys are opting out. Its clear why, modern schools are almost cartoonishly designed to be anti-boy. More girls are going to college now. That's a 60/40 gap, despite boys actually out-competing girls in the top 10/20% of educational accomplishment.

Old schools were designed to be "anti-boy." My dad was a headmaster in one, who do you think most of their discipline was aimed at? How many boys did he literally beat obedience into with a belt and paddle?

The problem does not appear to be that modern schools are anti-boy, more than they are not policing boyish behaviour enough.

Your theory is there is increased levels of unpoliced physical play in schools in 2024 compared to 1990?

Yes. In that teachers are not allowed to actually discipline or police children effectively nowadays.

So all activity is non-policed.

Perhaps at the degenerate schools. At the schools where most mid-high achieving students will attend there is vigorous policing. Anti-bullying investigations by schools are expansive and go off campus. Recreation is heavily policed with things like dodgeball, football, etc banned during recess and PE.

At the schools where most mid-high achieving students will attend there is vigorous policing

No there is not, that is my point. There is little to no actual punishment for students. Suspension and expulsion and investigations are not real punishments that channel male aggressive behaviors constructively. Unless either the teachers or parents are giving actual punishments that kids care about, then that is not policing. Teachers are not allowed to, and most parents do not seem to want to.

Then because you cannot actually correct behaviour, you ban the things that might lead to it. That isn't policing. it is ducking the problem entirely.

And yet there is no football and dodgeball, there are no dweebs in lockers and no fights at the bike rack. So the deterrence of masculine activity is effective against boys with even moderate levels of respect for authority. That hypothetically if you put some corner boys from Baltimore in said school they would be allowed to smoke crack in class while stomping on their desk doesn't mean anything. We dont care about the corner boys on the side of the bell curve we are talking about.

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When women’s suffrage was first passed, and for several decades after, women voted, on average, more conservatively than men. I don’t think anyone knows for sure why women are now much more liberal, but some have speculated that it has a lot to do with the rising number of unmarried, childless women. Women (and men) who are married with children tend to be much more conservative than their single, childless counterparts.

In fact the differences could be what drives our societies to improve.

Looking at the last decade, does it seem to you that society is improving?

Absolutely. There are always ups and downs of course, and the last decade perhaps hasn't improved as fast as previous, but a better question to look at is is, has society improved from say the 70's. And the answer I think is (to me!) clearly yes. And part of that is due to progressive influences. Those influences in turn may push too far and alienate people and cause a reaction (just how the progressive movement itself was welded together), some changes are rolled back, some stick, but all in all, humanities story is onwards and upwards.

My kids have it better than I did by a significant margin. This world is significantly less violent and much wealthier than the one I was born into. My kids have and had opportunities I could never have dreamed of. There are still wars and atrocities of course, and there always will be.

My perspective as an outsider in the US, is that things are not nearly as bad as being made out to be by either side. And that stepping away from media and social media, it is quite possible for a middle class Brit to live among both Red tribe rural Trump voters while married to a black urban liberal woman with no problems whatsoever, and also for the same middle class white Brit to be in the middle of the ghetto fixing a fence in a straw hat and khakis and attract nothing but curiosity.

My wife's cousin brought her kids around last weekend, and I was teaching them cricket and showing them my video game collection and I invited my white Republican neighbor over for the bbq, and he was teaching them about hunting. Overall this country is doing just fine in my opinion.

Now many parts do have real problems, rural Rust belt white communities and urban black ones are very similar in many ways (both my wife and J.D. Vance were raised by their grandmothers, in and around poverty and drug use). But overall, yeah I am pretty optimistic about both the world and the USA itself. You're a positive resilient nation with an exuberance and enthusiasm that is somewhat enchanting to this cynical Brit at least. You have problems, but you are great problem solvers and both Red and Blue Tribers can get along, with the moderate middle of each pushing back against the excesses of either side.

This world is significantly less violent and much wealthier than the one I was born into. My kids have and had opportunities I could never have dreamed of.

This happens to be precisely the thing that is no longer true.

That men work to deliver what women want so that they can have women is as old as building a shack and a fire.

I think the distopian view would go something like

  1. Men, fundamentally, no longer care what women want and don't care to have a long term mate. So they just take care of their basic needs and then use any extra income they generate for substance abuse, mindless hobbies, and ...

  2. The consumption of commoditized sex. Even if we never get to fully legal prostitution, AI girlfriends and hyperabundant porn might get to the point where it is satiating enough for a plurality of men. Which leads to...

  3. A drastic imbalance between the number of women looking for an eligible long term partner and the number of available and looking eligible men. If you look at the numbers after WW2 in places like Belorussia and Ukraine, anything past 55/45 female-to-male is HUGE. If we got to something "even" at 60-40 (for my above criteria) things would get weird. Harems, polyamory (shit, that's already on the menu), hyper-sociopath-players, spousal surveilance and, for a minority, a drastic RETVRN to harsh conservative religious models of gender roles.

You can see how this would put society into a very fragile state of affairs. I don't personally think it will get this bad, but I do believe the cost of avoiding it will be some amount of younger Millenial and Gen-Z men growing up, living, and dying alone (and often early) to shock society back into working to restore generative relations between the sexes.

You can see how this would put society into a very fragile state of affairs.

Not really, you yourself pointed out a whole bunch of ways society has of dealing with those issues. That society would change is a given, but looking at history you can have stable societies with all kinds of social norms. The men that don't care about getting a woman won't procreate, those that will or can, will. Society will go on.

Society can't work to restore relations between men and women, society is the emergent outcome of millions of individual decisions of men and women. It will change as those decisions change. It might bounce back and forth between different models, and that is ok.

Society can't work to restore relations between men and women

Can it work to restore relations between blacks and whites though? Heterosexuals and homosexuals?

So far society doesn't seem to be shocked by this at all and in fact seems perfectly willing to make that happen so far as those men are not angry enough to cause problems. I've seen people here positively argue for mollifying the male masses with video games and pornography.

There are some people, even important people, giving a concerned look at the birth rates; but nobody is seriously considering any solution to the problem because that would require abandoning some individual freedoms that have now become a sacred given, on both sides.

Can you really imagine a politician successfully selling a ban on onlyfans and no-fault divorce? Let alone on abortion and pornography? These things were already hard to maintain when people were religious, asking people to give those away without a spiritual revival seems far fetched, and such a revival seems impossible without fire and brimstone raining down on us for at least a little bit.

Male misery isn't going to cut it, we're not sympathetic enough. I've watched enough MRAs try in vain to know this by now. All it's going to take is all we have.

In the medium term, how likely are young men to take to the streets, instead of wasting their lives watching porn and playing whatever the modern equivalent of WoW is?

We are a long way from the point where there's a domestic civil war. I think the left should pay a lot more attention to the needs of men, but it doesn't seem plausible to me that it loses anything if it doesn't. Men are just withdrawing from society and stagnating, not rioting. Even vote wise, each male vote lost is more than compensated by an additional female vote won.

Civil wars are for motivated people, but unmotivated people still have an effect. 4chan NEETs may be a bit pathetic in their tongue in cheek glorification of a miserable hikki life, but you can't run a society if most men refuse to participate.

So you'll get rot and ruin, nothing getting maintained, rampant banditry, people screaming for help with nobody answering. Low trust society all around. No bangs now, only whimpers.

I expect things to get back to organization and positive action once a small cadre of competent men realize that this unmaintained society is ripe for conquest. But "there is a lot of ruin in a nation".

but you can't run a society if most men refuse to participate.

Why not? Sure, you couldn't in the past, but we were less technologically advanced then. Many of the things that you needed men to do have been automated to the degree they're done by machines, and others can now be done by women instead. Add in that immigrant men are still willing to participate, because it beats the alternative back in the old country.

Who's going to maintain all that technology? If your answer is immigrants, why should they want to stay here once you're no longer competitive? And what's left then?

And this is all without the elephant in the room of who's going to prevent your nice technological society from just falling into the hands of it's enemies. For all the meme posts about wine aunt air support throwing JDAMs around, it's still the good old AK holding young adult man that's moving the Ukrainian front in either direction.

I have seen the world of machines, and it isn't operated by women, whatever the propaganda posters say. Women mostly work safe email jobs that aren't "essential workers".

You’ll basically end up with a society that looks like Atlas Shrugged, minus the fantasy mountain retreat of the hypercompetent.

Nonsense, me and my fellow Principled Libertarians saw this coming and are rushing through every part of the tech tree that might lead to Galt's Gultch. If it is physically possible we will have it. We possibly already do.

You may have to buy some expensive NFT or proclaim some weird religious beliefs to get in, though I suppose that was also the case of the fantasy one.

Galt's Gulch in the novel required violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It's not physically possible. And anyway state capacity is too great for it even ignoring the physical impossibilities.

You can't seriously be arguing that state capacity is increasing at the moment.

Why not? State capacity is absolutely enormous at the moment, and it's certainly not getting smaller. Yes, a lot of people are getting away with a lot of crimes, but that's only because those in charge see no advantage to turning the state on them. A Galt's Gulch would disappear faster than you could say "David Koresh".

I'm just going to point at that infamous case of the San Francisco bridge where the suicide nets cost more than the bridge itself. You can't be arguing that state capacity is high when great projects, even ones the elite actually wants are no longer even possible. They really want to produce artillery shells right about now and are completely failing to do so.

Your next move is probably to argue that corruption and embezzlement is what the elite's revealed preference, but that's stretching the concept of state capacity to its limits.

Ask yourself really, if tomorrow China entered a total war with the US, could the elites turn the civilization they have corrupted and enshittified to the max back into a winning industrial powerhouse in a reasonable amount of time? That's what state capacity would be, and I don't think they have what it takes to even convince people to fight that war.

The corrupt bureaucrats in the Ayn Rand novel were an example of low state capacity, not high. That we are closer to them is not a mark of the power of the State, but of its weakness. Joe Biden is not FDR.

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Why not? Or perhaps just holding steady? Or, at the very least, if decreasing, then decreasing very slowly, even as the "capacities" of private individuals are also shrinking, perhaps even faster.

Something something 'there's a lot of ruin in a nation.'

Seems like the bet is that they can stave off a sharp collapse for a while and even if there is one as long as they control the narrative then most men won't be inspired to suddenly turn to violence to either attack the existing order or to defend a competing one.

It is really hard to imagine a group of capable young men organizing into something resembling a warband without being infiltrated by six different federal agencies, vilified to hell and back by every media company, and possibly debanked and deplatformed as well.

Which is just to say, they'd probably have to push things REALLLLLLLLY far before this became a real concern. Which is not me saying that it won't get there.

In and of itself, it probably isn’t. But we are in the midst of a poly-crisis, and this is another unstable element in an already rickety Jenga tower.

Yeah, that's perhaps my take on it.

We're in prime 'Black Swan' territory where the interaction of several different crises at once can lead to sharp and SUDDEN downturns from angles we weren't looking at directly.

My position is that Covid sufficed to pull a LOT of slack out of the system. Putin started strumming on the taut strings. China (or any number of other actors) might just go ahead and take a wire cutter to the strained order and let things fall where they may.

Generally agree with this.

The slow motion catastrophe is already self-evident; Women are competing for a shrinking pool of eligible long term partners and subgroups of men are either (a) opting out of mating altogether or (b) sociopathically exploiting the inherent ambiguity of courtship for their own benefit. You have more divorce, more single parenthood (mostly single motherhood), and constant household instability.

The primary society wide result will be that the next generation grows up developing a lot of maladaptive traits.

Then, we get the warbands.

Interesting observation there.

You get a cohort of males raised without discipline from father figures, and eventually realizing that the only thing restraining their bad behavior is physical force, and maybe noticing that there's a shortage of people who are capable of using physical force to stop them.

If these men are likewise convinced that their lives will not improve by following along with the roles society suggests, then yeah, what else COULD happen?

You get a cohort of females raised without discipline from father figures, and eventually realizing that the only thing restraining their bad behavior is nothing, and maybe noticing that there's a shortage of people who are capable of using physical force to stop them.

Which describes the state of '80s and '90s particularly well. If the nastiness in gender relations is cyclical (and relative equality should suggest that it is), then you'll get the men doing it next.

It’s also a problem in the event of any great power foreign conflict that requires a draft.

It has also already toppled one nation, though whether one considers Afghanistan a nation is up for debate.

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