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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29372 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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Apparently Labor is going to treat Incel ideology similarly to political Islam in the UK (BBC, Guardian).

It will also "identify any gaps in existing policy which need to be addressed to crack down on those pushing harmful and hateful beliefs and violence", she said.

As a freedom of speech apologist, I don't think that this is a good development, but just the response to the latest moral panic and about as justified as the response to 'D&D satanism'.

What should be illegal is incitement to crimes. I am sure that this is already illegal in the UK. "Blow up Parliament for Allah", "Rape some bitches to protest against wokism", "Kill a cop to bring forth the dictatorship of the proletariat" are not protected speech, if anyone posts them on their facebook they would quickly be removed and the poster charged.

Of course, even here, technically enforcing this on more obscure pages is basically impossible without cracking down on the free internet as much as the CCP does (and possibly not even then). Punish what you can find and don't lose too much sleep over some .onion board which you can't police, or infiltrate them if it looks like they are planning concrete crimes in the physical world.

To make broader pieces of ideology illegal, such as "people should live according to Sharia law" or "Capitalism is just a development stage to be overcome" or "Women should have less/more power" would curtail freedom of speech too much for my taste.

I also don't think it will succeed on the object level much. Given that the punishments for simply reading the wrong ideology is hopefully going to be light (CSAM being the only content where merely intentionally viewing it should be a crime), that prohibition will do little to dissuade people from consuming Incel ideology. The main reason why an edgy teenager would not read something widely considered bad is not because the government forbids it, which is to admit 'this is so dangerous that we can't allow people to read it', but that it is generally considered lame in his circles. If Mrs. Cooper bans Incel ideology, that will make Incel ideology less lame, not more lame, because established politicians are invariably lame. (My vocabulary is probably half a century out of date, my point stands.)

For reference, we have had only one incident that could be tied to incel ideology in the past few years. The incident itself was notable for a reason not often discussed, namely that it could have been prevented if a public servant had done their job correctly.

I think it's apparent that the existence of incels scares the shit out of centre-left/left aligned women, particularly those in the public sector. Potential threats of violence aside, the incel memeplex provides powerful competition to the worldview put forward by the predominantly liberal society, which encourages meekness, reassigns social failings concerning men to individual ones and denies their lived reality. Shutting down this memeplex and ensuring the young man conforms to the expected view (even if the young man in question refuses to deny the evidence of their eyes and ears) is of paramount importance, as the young man is only in school for about 6 hours a day but is exposed to online and offline belief systems for the rest of his time.

This suggested policy is stupid. We already have Prevent, which by itself does nothing and is a glorified list of potential terrormen that is written to but apparent never read, given that every news article I read about a lone wolf attacker he is almost always "known to authorities." I have written on this subject before, and in that time I see that absolutely nothing has changed. Educators, politicians and journalists will continue to misdiagnose the problem and suggest nonsensical solutions.

done their job correctly

In hindsight, the correct decision was keeping this nutjob from his gun. But was that obvious at the time?

"The FEO report reads: 'When L applied in 2017 I advised refusal, given he had a matrix score of 12 out of 16, PNC markers for violence, assault on police and drugs, but on consideration by the FLM, given that four years had passed since he last offended and he had not come to notice, and was now living with a lady with children, it was hoped that he had now matured and certificate was granted with a warning letter'

It’s not that he was rubber-stamped or that he bribed his way in. It’s that someone extended a second chance.

Ironically, if that’s accurate, he would not have been allowed to buy a gun in the US- assaulting an officer is a felony from which firearms rights are virtually never restored.

Drawing the line at "incitement of crimes" only serves to reward people smart enough to know how to incite crimes with sufficient plausible deniability as to make it not worth any prosecutor's while to go after them.

This is a fully general counterargument against anything. Take fraud. There are clear-cut cases: someone paints a rock yellow and sells it as a gold to some fool. There are also transactions which are not fraudulent, and neither party ends up feeling cheated.

And then there is a large grey area of transactions where one party really gets a raw deal and ends up regretting the transaction, but intentional deception by the other party is arguable.

Does this mean that we should throw up our hands in despair and strike fraud from the books as it only rewards people who are smart enough to stop just short of outright fraud? Few people seem to think so. Instead, most are happy to see obvious scammers punished, honest merchants go free and the people in between getting lengthy boring trials.

I will grant you that 'incitement of crimes' is not carving reality perfectly at the joints, because reality is not a bimodal distribution separated neatly by that line. But most of the offenses in criminal law work that way. Fraud. Rape. Murder. DUI. Either we pass arbitrary rules (blood alcohol has to be x for DUI) or we have general rules and leave the rest to the courts (such as manslaughter vs murder II vs murder I).

They have no other option.

They have created a society in which people have less sex than ever, have fewer children than ever and can only dream of getting the housing their parents had at the same age. They have no idea how to fix it so the result is to find ways to make the people who point out the problems seem illegitimate.

There were large riots due to the problems immigration has caused. Nobody in government has a serious and realistic plan for fixing the massive issues so instead of acknowledging them they simply have to blame a handful of Russian accounts. It can't have anything to do with crime, lack of social cohesion, rampant housing shortages or any other issue that the politicians simply can't fix.

If someone is living with their parents at the same age that their parents owned a house the problem has to be their micropenis. They are loser incels and therefore not worth engaging with. There is no political option to create affordable housing as it would completely crash the financial system to bring down housing prices to 3x an average annual salary. Therefore, what is left is repression and arguments that are insults.

Incels are a real threat to the system. The system has failed to create a society in which people can find housing, start a family. People are angry and politicians have no solutions. Lots of young men with nothing to lose and no prospects are the greatest threat to any regime.

The birth rate makes the UK pension system completely unsustainable. Filling the gap with third world labour is going to cause major issues for which nobody has any answers. So if you ask how this is going to be solved your dick is small, you are ugly, your momma is fat and you are a Russian bot so you have no legitimacy.

They have created a society in which people have less sex than ever, have fewer children than ever and can only dream of getting the housing their parents had at the same age. They have no idea how to fix it so the result is to find ways to make the people who point out the problems seem illegitimate.

Nonsense - as you imply, the problem is downstream of housing supply, and we know how to legalise housing - the laws banning it are visible on the books, have short titles, long titles, chapter numbers etc. and the process for repealing them is well-understood. Keir Starmer's people know this too - before the election he repeatedly talked (example) about the need to build more housing, including specifically his plans to relax planning laws and allow building on Greenbelt. One of the incoming government's first announcements was a consultation on a new planning policy framework.

There is an ongoing argument about whether the consultation has bottled it by reducing the housing target for London, but there is an offsetting increase in housing targets for the commuter belt around London, and in any case the previous target was not being met, and the new framework makes it a lot harder for local authorities to deliberately miss targets.

Do I think we are going to see the houses built? Probably not - the political logic of bottling it hasn't changed. But building 1.5 million houses in places where people want to live is almost certainly sufficient to unfuck the UK.

Nonsense - as you imply, the problem is downstream of housing supply

That's the idea that's nonsense. My parent's generation wasn't swimming in housing supply. I grew up in a flat that today can only pass for a studio apartment, my wife grew up in a bigger one, but with her grandparents, her aunt, uncle, and their children in the same flat. If you go back in history the conditions were often even worse than that.

The issues with housing in countries like America are a sign of it's visible decline, but that's not why they're not having sex and children. The insistence on neat systemic or material explanations for social phenomena is one of the terribly bad habits we inherited from the Rat community.

The insistence on neat systemic or material explanations for social phenomena is one of the terribly bad habits we inherited from the Rat community.

Because Scott put it best: society is fixed, biology is mutable. Dump $chemical into the water to improve things? Quite feasible! Contemplate modifying the human genome to improve humans in the womb? This isn't the 90's anymore, this isn't science-fiction! Create the Miracle Pill? Well, nowadays it feels like there's more candidates for the title than there were a decade ago!

Budge society into a healthier memeplex? You might as well ask for the sun to not rise.

I don't buy that, we've seen societies switch memeplexes, and you're describing all the miracle bio-hacks as "feasible" not "tried and proven effective and desirable".

Aside from that, none of it explains how housing is supposed to be the reason people don't start families, when they used to in worse housing conditions.

Good analysis.

The ultimate irony is that if the Bonglander government was REALLY interested in bringing the hammer down on misogynists, it would be siding with Britain’s recent “””far-right””” anti-immigration rioters rather than against them. A Rwandan migrant knife-attacks a girl’s dance school and the party line is that people subsequently protesting against immigrants and mosques hate women? Clownworld.

Oi you got a loicense for that Noticin' you did there, guvna?

Labour is effectively pot committed to the strategy of bringing in unlimited third world ineffectives. Labour first fucked up by letting EU migration flood the UK economy and distort the local labour supply and demand curves, then the Tories shit the bed with handling Brexit and failed to contain MENA immigration. Labour, being held hostage to its progressive and islamist wings under Corbyn did not even pretend at objecting to the floodgates and in fact covered up the negative consequences of Muslim crime even before Corbyn came into power, suggesting that Labour was aware of the negative effect of muslim flooding following Brexit.

This is the reason for two-tier policing coming to the forefront. The tories shit the bed as they are incompetent brainlets huffing copium about Singapore-On-The-Thames and other fanciful platitudes, but the UK is in a genuinely tough spot because of its internal incentive structures. All Labour can do not is play with statistics to dampen the flames and hope that a lucky roll with give a magic opportunity to change the social dynamics soon enough.

I would like to think even the most staunch Momentum progressive knows that it is better for migrants to adapt to British culture, no matter how loathsome they may find the Britisher, as opposed to British people changing to be more like the migrants, but I don't really have faith in that. Progressive brainrot generates plenty of thinkpieces about how the west has no culture and that the multiculturalism of pedophiliac welfare jihadists is a good thing for a country. If Starmer doesn't get ahead of this rot in the larty, his only chance for survival will be the continued cuckcaging of the Britisher, and I'm not sure how long it will take before the Britisher realizes the cage isn't actually locked.

From an outsider's perspective I think that there's a lot of mask off going on with the political response to the current situation. The panic is telling because they've ostensibly overreacted, but this doesn't leave them anywhere else to escalate to unless they want to go down the 'V for Vendetta' path.

The migrant to GDP path has failed. There needs to be a correction back to sanity, but how and when that happens is really up in the air.

The effect isn't primarily through direct government suppression. Maybe one or two people with nasty rhetoric will be punished, but it's about generating a news story "look at how evil incels are," not any real likelihood that they'll act. You'll probably have a government unit dedicated to convincing young, stupid men to say they'll commit outrageous violence, just for the sake of making sure that story percolates through media on a regular basis.

Its effect will primarily be to reenforce among women that men complaining about, well, anything are icky and low status (note that "dangerous" is not one of those adjectives). A guy complaining about his inability to pay for dates is really just an entitled incel, so he deserves to be excluded from society. And he certainly doesn't deserve to have his complaints treated as a systemic issue, because we live in a perfect utopian world where anything bad that happens is men's own fault.

Men will then self-censor and retreat from a losing battlefield, at best working until they become a good cog in the system or (more likely) turning in on themselves and self-soothing with video games and porn, until eventually hanging themselves.

Incels won't be a threat to the system, because men who are plausible leaders will never be actual incels, and no one will take the massive status hit that comes with taking up any incel-adjacent positions. Instead, incels will just end up being a drag on the system, supported by the dole and their parents' retirement funds. It's also a self-correcting problem: the more men that drop out, the easier it is for the remaining men. The negative feedback loop ensures the system is stable.

Incels won't be a threat to the system

While I agree with much of the rest of your analysis, this part is wrong.

It is not, however, a direct threat to the system. No incel army is going to rise up to start executing the girls who rejected them or handmaid's tail-ing them.

Think about this from an incentives and game theoretic perspective. Your modal incel is conformist and meek. They generally act however the "median basic guy" is supposed to act (until they hit their incel-dom initiation or whatever). If that group of males is dropping out of the social system, then the only males you have remaining are either the Andrew Tate types or the totally progressive bought-in types. I've seen the latter referred to as "cuttlefish." The problem is that both of these groups of males are anti-social and net-negatives to women. The Andrew Tates for pretty obvious reasons, but the progressive "men" too because they contribute to more unstable family structures.

A stable society has a large amount of men - perhaps most - who live very stable and predictable lives. Nothing glamorous, not a lot of risk taking. But they are dependable and reliable. A rational society would valorize that kind of behavior. You see some efforts towards this with the Grill Pill set, but it used to be far more front and center. Think Jimmy Stewart movies. This also presents an uncomfortable reality - a lot of the "good men" of yesteryear would probably be lumped in with the incels of today.

The danger that's emerging now is that incel-dom is moving up the chain. I had a post recently on an observation I've started to make on objectively successful, impressive, and highly competent men choosing effective celibacy (even if they don't term it that themselves nor do it for a religious reason). Now you've got a situation in which women are seeking mates in the dating pool and finding only trash goblins who hack the relationship game for their short term benefit. These guys aren't Chad Playboys with amazing jet set lives who bed starlets and then move on - they're losery semi-sociopaths who have mastered the first 72 hours of dating and are utterly substanceless thereafter.

It's been said on this forum a thousand times, but the primary victims of third wave to present feminism are women.

If that group of males is dropping out of the social system, then the only males you have remaining are either the Andrew Tate types or the totally progressive bought-in types.

Most guys do get laid and have relationships, without being Tate-types/Chads or simps. There are lot of normal dudes with normal romantic lives out there.

This might just be small sample bias on my part, but most of the stable reliable guys I know are getting laid, usually in long-term relationships. And it is usually with attractive women.

I think the underlying problem might be not so much that women find stable reliable guys unattractive, it's that largely because of economic changes, it's become harder to become a stable reliable guy than it used to be. It is hard to be stable and reliable if you are struggling just to get a decent job and pay the rent. These days you can't just go to the factory and shake the foreman's hand, now you kind of have to either become a white collar guy or really succeed in the trades. In my experience of observing incel forums, it seems to me that being an incel is highly correlated with also having economic problems. The two share some common underlying causes, like mental illness and shyness. Hence the stereotype of the incel who lives in his parents' basement. Of course, physically attractive people also find it easier to get good jobs, which does not help the truly physically unattractive subset of the incel population.

Our society obviously values stable reliable guys less than it did several decades ago, but stable reliable guys still do get pretty consistently valorized in pop culture. Most commercials target stereotypical suburban family units, just more racially and sexually diverse than the ones of decades ago. Of course they do this mainly because those people have money to spend, but still. And the movie industry still churns out plenty of movies that have conventional nice guy heroes who do what they do not because they are adrenaline junkies, but because they decide to put aside their self-interest for what they consider to be a higher cause.

think the underlying problem might be not so much that women find stable reliable guys unattractive, it's that largely because of economic changes, it's become harder to become a stable reliable guy than it used to be. It is hard to be stable and reliable if you are struggling just to get a decent job and pay the rent. These days you can't just go to the factory and shake the foreman's hand, now you kind of have to either become a white collar guy or really succeed in the trades. In my experience of observing incel forums, it seems to me that being an incel is highly correlated with also having economic problems. The two share some common underlying causes, like mental illness and shyness. Hence the stereotype of the incel who lives in his parents' basement. Of course, physically attractive people also find it easier to get good jobs, which does not help the truly physically unattractive subset of the incel population.

I'm skeptical there's much of a correlation between economic stability and sexual success (at least at the levels of wealth that account for more than 99% of us i.e. not a millionaire). There's a reason the stereotype of the broke, loser man who cheats on his wife/has children with multiple women he owes child support to exists and it suggests that for all their problems, getting laid isn't the main problem for this kind of figure.

The reality is that most guys, reliable or not, are getting laid (at least during some periods of their lives). Genuine incels are a small group and people talk about them as if they have much more impact than they do (case in point, the suggested UK policies that this whole thread is discussing).

now you kind of have to either become a white collar guy or really succeed in the trades.

I don't think you even have to "really succeed" in the trades. You can get a very solid job, and most places are even willing to train you on their dime, without being anyone amazing. Now, if you wanted to say that the trades are culturally looked down on by a lot of people regardless of the stability/income they provide, that's a different matter.

This might just be small sample bias on my part, but most of the stable reliable guys I know are getting laid, usually in long-term relationships. And it is usually with attractive women.

This is almost definitely not due to a small sample bias, but rather selection bias. How many stable reliable guys who have such small social presence that they're literally invisible to you do you know? Given that "being noticeable" is correlated with (some, including myself, would argue causally) "being attractive," whatever observations of people you notice are observations about a population that's more attractive than average.

I figure that most stable, reliable guys at least participate in the workforce. The fraction of them who are independently wealthy or have joined a monastic order is very small. So if there is a large number of stable, reliable guys who are incels I figure that I would be encountering more of them in the workforce, at least in Zoom calls, and in the work-tangential world like at the kind of upscale-ish or trendy bars where people tend to go after work. I could be wrong, though.

If an otherwise stable, reliable guy is introverted, has little social skills and has no girlfriend/wife, he's unlikely to be embedded into your social circle to the extent that you have a mental awareness of him even existing. You'll "know" him but you won't know him.

in the work-tangential world like at the kind of upscale-ish or trendy bars where people tend to go after work.

Zoom calls and in the workforce, perhaps, but this seems like a leap. The group of guys with such small social presence being talked about would be the ones to disproportionately not go to these work-tangential events and/or spend minimal time in those. And even in those settings, the ones you actually are able to talk to enough to say that you actually "know" these people would likely be disproportionately not from that group. Same would go for other social spaces and clubs and such.

Yeah, the idea that one can judge the fraction of the workforce that’s single and lonely based on who goes to trendy bars after work is ludicrous. Like determining what fraction of the population is religious based on a D&D campaign. (But jokes on all of us, my friends who play D&D — I don’t — are Baptists.)

I don't understand your post's relevance to the topics I raised.

I am just questioning the idea that there are a lot of stable, reliable guys out there today who are incels. To be fair, what is an incel? The term is poorly defined. Are you an incel if you have not had sex ever? If you have not had sex in the last year? Pretty obviously some Chad who got laid yesterday but went out tonight and didn't get laid, and is frustrated about it, is not an incel by any reasonable sense of the term even if he is technically speaking involuntarily celibate today. I think that probably most stable, reliable guys at least get laid occasionally in random hookups, or they are in long-term relationships, even if they are not getting laid all the time with new women when they go out. Like I said on the other post, I could be wrong, though.

Appreciate the clarification.

"Incel" is, at this point, only a term of self-identification. These are very online guys who have little or no romantic luck and are so embittered by it that they adopt the online moniker (incel) and launch jeremiads against women as an entire class of people. I truly think they are very, very few in number but have been signal boosted by internet echo chambers. There are more men who may say something online that "sounds" "incel like." They are often pilloried for it. It's much the same function that led to shunning of some of the HBD'ers and even mainstream academics - Murray chief among them.

Beyond that tiny subgroup, however, somewhere between 1 in 4 and 1 in 3 men in America will go sexless this year. Of those, I think there's a certain percentage that are effectively celibate, meaning they've chosen to deprioritize sex and dating altogether. I don't have a grand unified theory for why. My original post was about how this state of affairs will negatively impact women.

So, how many Men am I talking about? Eh, all in, call it 4 -8 %. It may not seem like a lot, but when you have country level gender imbalances past 5% weird things start happening. If America effectively has 4 - 8 % less men in the dating pool than assumed, that's a problem. If a not insignificant % of that group also happen to be in possession of lots of pro-social and industrious character traits, I think it could create a demographic snowball effect that puts the country at large into a risky spot.

" Now you've got a situation in which women are seeking mates in the dating pool and finding only trash goblins who hack the relationship game for their short term benefit. These guys aren't Chad Playboys with amazing jet set lives who bed starlets and then move on - they're losery semi-sociopaths who have mastered the first 72 hours of dating and are utterly substanceless thereafter."

What is the difference? They got "tricked" into "sub-par" mating with someone they aren't having kids with anyway? That would dump them the same way?

progressive "men" too because they contribute to more unstable family structures.

Care to elaborate?

A cadre of men capable of mimicking the dominant ideology sure sounds stable and predictable. At least, I assume that’s what “cuttlefish” is supposed to imply. It sounds like someone is fishing for ways in which the successful thing is actually cringe problematic.

More generally, I’m not seeing evidence that stability and reliability are out of fashion. We live in a post-Rhett Butler, post-Don Draper narrative.

More generally, I’m not seeing evidence that stability and reliability are out of fashion.

A > 50% divorce rate. The majority of Black American children being born out of wedlock. All time highs of dissatisfaction with mating and courtship. Do you want me to go out and cite the sources?

A cadre of men capable of mimicking the dominant ideology sure sounds stable and predictable.

Not if that dominant ideology is both a) counter to family formation and community support and b) actively hostile to most / all male interests.

It sounds like someone is fishing for ways in which the successful thing is actually cringe problematic.

It sounds like we have different rubrics for success.

Going by your other responses, I’ve misunderstood what you meant by “cuttlefish.” I suspect you’re conflating several very different groups on the basis that they all vote Democrat.

Did you know that the states with the lowest divorce rates tend to swing blue?

Did you know that the states with the lowest divorce rates tend to swing blue?

And those red states tend to have really high crime rates and welfare usage, despite supposed conservative advocacy for law, order and self-reliance! Do you think there could be any confounding factors being left out of your analysis?

Agreed. In this case, the giant confounder is probably marriage rates. Can’t get divorced if you’re only ever living in sin!

I mentioned the gap to point out how “>50% divorce rate” isn’t measuring what he says it is. I think it’s a mistake to describe the extremely online population (which generates most of what could be called “incels,” as well as most of the "cuttlefish") with statistics from the disproportionately black, urban poor.

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I feel like I might be being baited, but, if I recall correctly, you're a mod, so that seems less than likely.

I suspect you’re conflating several very different groups on the basis that they all vote Democrat.

Let me be specific so as to relieve your suspicions. The primary demographic I'm referring to are PMC Males who have pride flags next to their twitter handle, a COEXIST bumps sticker on their subaru, and have never been part of an organized sport in their lives. These are men who gain sexual access to women by hyper flattering their cultural and social biases. They often get friend zoned. They make awful husbands and say things like, "My wife's boyfriend drives a truck life that!"

Men have always lied in order to convince women to sleep with them. A lot of it is hamfisted bragging and exaggeration. Women have fantastic bullshit detectors and so, mostly, avoid those goofballs. The specific problem for the cuttelfish-dudes (aka White Dudes for Harris) are they they're exploiting all of the worst parts of third wave feminism to inject themselves as, wait for it, "good guys." And that's why I have a problem with them more so than the typical dude-at-a-bar talking about how he's "pretty good friends with an NFL player, actually. Can't say his name in public, tho." Convincing a woman you share her deeply held beliefs only as far as carnal knowledge lasts is a particularly cowardly and dirty tactic.

Did you know that the states with the lowest divorce rates tend to swing blue?

I've read your comments on here many times. They're almost always high quality. You and I disagree on things, but I have respect for your intellectual rigor and honesty. Do better here. It's not about the artificial boundaries of states, it's about demographics. The divorce rate follows a lot of other anti-social outcomes - it's higher among the less educated, the earlier pregnant, the socioeconomically lower class. That California, New York, and Illinois have a huge amount of Rich White People who stay married out of stubbornness and a fear of divorce attorney fees doesn't mean that "blue states" have some sort of amazing marriage magic contained within their borders.

Thanks. I swear I'm not baiting.

I tossed out that trite red/blue divorce fact to ask: if you're taking aim at woke, white techbros, why use those divorce stats? Which parts are supposed to reflect on PMC culture?

If "cuttlefish" were causing instability, unreliability, etc., I would expect the places where they're most represented and most influential to show more of those trends. But divorce trends are driven to other regions. They're worst where people are poorer, less educated, even just older, since we're talking about cumulative numbers.

That suggests cuttlefish aren't doing what you think they're doing. Hell, I don't think many exist, not in the form you describe. It's easy to find men who lie, especially for sex. It's harder to find ones who play that game poorly enough to get friendzoned, cucked, and divorced, possibly simultaneously. And it's really hard to point at such a group and claim they pose a credible threat to women's class interest.

I think you've excluded another category. Men neither exciting enough to be chads, psychopathic enough to be Tates, repulsive enough to be incels, nor passive enough to be soyboys. The good men of yesteryear still outnumber them all. Even though they're building wealth, getting married, having kids, they're not spicy enough to trend on social media or feature in a thinkpiece. A real silent majority.

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The primary demographic I'm referring to are PMC Males who have pride flags next to their twitter handle, a COEXIST bumps sticker on their subaru, and have never been part of an organized sport in their lives. These are men who gain sexual access to women by hyper flattering their cultural and social biases. They often get friend zoned. They make awful husbands and say things like, "My wife's boyfriend drives a truck life that!"

We agree about a lot of things, even on this issue, but this is just intense boo outgroup without any useful content. "The men who disagree with me are liars, cheaters, and weaklings who women hate, they have to play pretend to get laid, they make awful husbands and they're cucks," is barely distinct from "The men who disagree with me are liars, cheaters, and weaklings who women hate, they have to play pretend to get laid, they make awful husbands and they're misogynists," which is precisely the way that the left talks about incels.

I don't disagree that there are some lefty men who dissemble or exaggerate their progressive opinions to appeal to progressive women. But there are, of course, righty men who dissemble or exaggerate their religiosity to appeal to devout women. That was particularly true when religion was more important in society, as wokeness is now.

Playing the game of "find new and creative ways to call the opposition sexually-revolting losers" is particularly ironic when the topic of discussion is the demonization of lonely men, as it is with the incel policies.

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Now you've got a situation in which women are seeking mates in the dating pool and finding only trash goblins who hack the relationship game for their short term benefit. These guys aren't Chad Playboys with amazing jet set lives who bed starlets and then move on - they're losery semi-sociopaths who have mastered the first 72 hours of dating and are utterly substanceless thereafter.

If they dump her on the third day, she'll never find that out, since the actual Chads often do the same thing.

Nothing glamorous, not a lot of risk taking. But they are dependable and reliable. A rational society would valorize that kind of behavior.

But did young women ever do so? I suspect mostly they did not, they only settled for that type of guy. Who turned out to be what they wanted... AFTER they settled down and had kids.

Good point.

The reframing of "this partner will make me happy in a relationship" to "in this relationship, I can make myself happy with this partner" would be powerful. What is required is a heck of a lot of social normative pressure. I doubt we're every going back to an abolition of no fault divorce, however. I think that's a good thing. It would stand to reason, then, that marriages are going to continue to be more temporary and more rare.

The big question is how this effects children and child rearing. The sociological bete-noire is that single-parent households have worse outcomes on most life success and satisfaction ratings across the board. Sure, with divorced households where both parents are still involved, the results are far more mixed. Still, I see danger ahead.

The part about these "cuttlefish" is foreign to me - can you explain why they are called that, and what they do that's contributing to relationship instability?

I’m reminded of a video I saw of an abortion protest one time- there were a bunch of women, and a greasy looking dude staring at one of them’s ass.

A guy who pretends to be super duper progressive to get laid(and I’m not convinced there’s just tons and tons of them) is probably a bad partner.

Literal cuttlefish males "take on female coloration, hide their masculine fourth arms, and hold the rest of their arms in the posture of an egg-laying female, in a bid to sidle up to a guarded female." Source

This is used in rough analogy to human males who pretend to be passionately interested in the social / cultural causes of women in order to present themselves as "worthy" dates. In reality, even if they aren't actually antagonistic to those beliefs and causes, they aren't at all genuinely invested. Obviously, this would create a lot of trust issue in a relationship but the deeper problem is that a male who is willing to compromise and deceive like this is probably also a poor performer from a provider perspective. Women end up with a guy who's sort of a milquetoast loser who says all of the right things but isn't able to perform in the relationship, in his career, etc. You can see how that would end in a tense marriage at best and more likely divorce.

because men who are plausible leaders will never be actual incels

I suppose what you meant to say was that no group of men accepts an incel as their leader?

and no one will take the massive status hit that comes with taking up any incel-adjacent positions.

In a patriarchal society where early marriage and monogamy are the norm, this would be generally the case indeed.

I suppose what you meant to say was that no group of men accepts an incel as their leader?

A man leading a large group of men will be automatically be attractive to women and will either go fuck them or be a volcel. Albeit a larger count of incel followers than average men would be needed.

I suppose what you meant to say was that no group of men accepts an incel as their leader?

If a man is sufficiently attractive / outgoing / interesting / popular enough to be a leader of men, he is also sufficiently attractive / outgoing / interesting / popular enough to be a fucker of women.

You're aware that the male attributes that gain the respect of other men and those that sexually attract women are normally rather different, aren't you?

They actually aren’t, though.

For one, there’s the halo effect: i.e. it’s natural for humans of both genders to assume that a person successful in one field is also successful in another. So ‘success as a leader of men’ will prejudice women positively towards such a man on other axes, and ‘success as a c(h)ad’ will prejudice men positively towards such a man on other axes, symmetrically. I’ve been reading a history of Italy lately, and this is pretty much Berlusconi’s entire (winning) strategy both in politics and in Bunga Bunga.

But we don’t even require such a Fully General Argument as the halo effect to demonstrate the thesis - assessing it in detail also makes it seem like there’ll be general “popularity” skills rather than gender-audience specific ones. Being a good conversationalist, being extroverted, openness to new experiences, gregariousness - all traits which will improve one’s success both as a leader and as a lover.

I don’t dispute that some traits like “Autistic knowledge of Gundam anime” is male leadership material in specific (one might say contrived) situations, like choosing a team captain when entering a Gundam trivia quiz, but in the vast majority of cases, Chad gets both the girl and the crown because both genders want the same thing.

‘success as a c(h)ad’ will prejudice men positively towards such a man on other axes, symmetrically.

That's probably true - although I'm not sure about the 'symmetrically' part - but that's a different matter. Yes, the observable results of one's attractiveness to women will likely prejudice men in such ways. That doesn't mean that the traits that sexually attract women in the first place will socially attract men as followers as well.

I'm not sure where the snark related to Gundam comes from, but anyway, that's very obviously not what I had in mind. I'd say the traits that gain the respect of other men and attract them as followers are roughly:

  • the ability to coordinate the efforts of a group of men for a common cause
  • having executive function
  • being virtuous (keeping your word, honoring your vows, being strict but fair)
  • bravery
  • holding your followers to the same standards

Why are leaders of men disproportionately physically attractive and tall (relative to the general male population, adjusting for age etc) then? This is true even when these men are selected overwhelmingly by other men, as with male CEOs of companies where a large majority of board seats are occupied by men.

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I'd turn the whole thing around and say the act of leading men is in itself enough to make one attractive to women.

Russia's most known "incel", Alexei Podnebesny had multiple women (probably will get jail time for something)

and no one will take the massive status hit that comes with taking up any oppressed-adjacent positions

I think that's what they said about Caesar back in the day. "Can't get a date, can't buy land, economic crisis forced a ton of people in the countryside into the cities, but a military career can not only make you rich but the State is obligated to give you land if you survive" is why you join the army in the first place.

Of course, Caesar had Gaul to campaign in before turning that personal military loyalty against the rest of the Roman state. The grandchildren of those soldiers (though importantly, not their children, and certainly not Caesar) would make out relatively well by comparison.

A guy complaining about his inability to pay for dates is really just an entitled incel, so he deserves to be excluded from society

You know, as an actual literal tradcon I can say that this guy just shouldn't be dating- the man pays in relationships, that's part and parcel of rejecting modern gender roles.

I more or less agree with your point. Incels are by definition men who are thoroughly cowed by the system- obviously not the chads that are natural leaders, but not the lumpenproles that take drastic action at the drop of a hat either.

the man pays in relationships, that's part and parcel of rejecting modern gender roles.

Does your tradcon ideology include any prescriptions at all that constitute the rejection of modern gender roles but at the same time do not disadvantage men, or at least do disadvantage men and women to the same degree?

Yes. We simply do not have very many doctrinaire feminists on the motte for me to argue with.

Ok, so "yes". Such as, what?

I don’t think women and girls should be encouraged to have jobs or seek higher education. I probably wouldn’t vote to reauthorize the 19th if it came up. I think rape laws should have differing burdens of proof for lack of consent depending on the victim’s sexual history, similar to old-style seduction laws. Should I go on?

These topics don’t come up on the motte often, because I A) don’t make that many top level posts and B) there are few other motteizeans that support old school patriarchy(which contrary to popular beliefs does not seem to generally advantage young men- it’s the rule of fathers not men in general, and might be more accurately painted as the rule of the old over the young rather than men over women).

I’ve posted before that there seems to be a sex-negative feminist/sex-positive feminist/tradcon/frat boy four way division, not a feminist/red pill one. I don’t inherently sympathize with frat boys over sex negative feminists- I don’t agree with either, and there’s no reason for me to pick one as my ingroup versus the other. That I don’t sympathize much with the young male desire for casual sex doesn’t mean I sympathize with feminism.

I think rape laws should have differing burdens of proof for lack of consent depending on the victim’s sexual history, similar to old-style seduction laws.

I guess what you mean is that so-called rape shield laws should be repealed?

You know, as an actual literal tradcon I can say that this guy just shouldn't be dating- the man pays in relationships, that's part and parcel of rejecting modern gender roles.

But society should do its best to make it possible for men to fill those roles. I think OP is right to suggest that the British government is setting out to avoid this responsibility more or less explicitly.

Descriptively, I agree that a man who can't pay for dates would be much better served by getting to the point where he can pay for dates than by other areas to put effort in.

As to what should be, I'm neutral. A point I would make is that trad and modern male gender roles aren't a rejection of each other: they're largely the same, at least in terms of what women find attractive for a suitable partner. Here, it's the man pays. Even feminists have taken to justifying the norm with references to the pay gap/cost of makeup/dating risk.

What incels see is that the male gender role has the same responsibilities put on it as before, but with a weakened social basis for men to fulfill it. The hollowing out of the middle class, the fetishization of bureaucratic over productive roles, various cultural norms.

And, without the ability to achieve enough masculinity to attract a mate, they give up altogether and turn into passive, pathetic creatures. Who won't be leading a revolution or even stochastic violence higher than noise level.

A point I would make is that trad and modern male gender roles aren't a rejection of each other: they're largely the same, at least in terms of what women find attractive for a suitable partner. Here, it's the man pays. Even feminists have taken to justifying the norm with references to the pay gap/cost of makeup/dating risk.

Certainly there are many women who insist on men paying for dates using this formula, but I believe the sort of women who make references to the pay gap/cost of makeup/dating risk as reasons for men to pay for everything on dates are too self-oriented and men who have self-respect should not date them. I say the same for men who complain about paying for dates, excepting situtations in which the sorts of dates women are expecting are genuinely excessive -- particularly when it's excessive for their social class. Worthwhile women do not whine about men not paying for dates, and worthwhile men do not whine about paying for them.

Men and women who care about each other should each pay a portion towards their dates in accordance with their ability to pay and interest in a particular subject. Going to a woman's favorite restaurant on her birthday? Maybe treat her to it. Going to see Cheesy Romantic Comedy 8? Maybe she should buy his ticket. Watching Action Sci-Fi 11? He should buy. But ultimately if you're breaking your relationship down into a list of debts that must be transactionally repaid, your relationship is worth shit, and you should either make it worth more than that or end it. Love pays debts, owing nothing; forgives debts, losing nothing.

As a more moderate socialcon, I'm a strong proponent of partnership-based relationships, where the people in them view each other as fundamentally teammates in facing the highs and the lows of life -- you know, "for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer." @ProfQuirrell had a wonderful description of how such a partnership should operate. (And I hope his marriage is better than his namesake's partnership with his, um, other half.)

My view would be that men and women need to contribute towards their relationship in meaningful ways. That can be they both pitch in monetarily, that can be one tends to pay and the other tends to the garden, that can be one cooks and the other sweeps the floor, that can be one works a 9-5 and the other watches the kids. It depends on the couple, their strengths and their needs.

Obviously this is a bit of conservatism being liberalism driving the speed limit. But we're at a point where even the normal and healthy give-and-take that characterizes healthy human relationships is missing from people's expectations. And that's wrong, terribly wrong, horrifically wrong, daemonically wrong. We crossed a line that isn't just non-traditional, it's actively destructive.

Find someone who doesn't see you as a piggy bank or a cum depository. If you can't do that, you're either dating too 'high' or dating in the wrong place. Kind, caring, warm people exist. But the unfortunate thing for people dating later in life is this group is usually taken early, because their standards are realistic and their approach to relationships invites commitment.

I liked your reply and the link to @ProfQuirrell's post.

The key truth in both, I think, can be distilled to "prioritize the collective success of the marriage above your own day-to-day wants." Excellent and actionable advice.

My concern is that society is now insanely hyper-individualized with focus on direct personal success. It's one of those things that so endemic it's almost hard to notice (fish in water sort of thing) and then, once one does notice, its ubiquity is mind boggling.

Corporations are boiled down to a single CEO making everything happen. Political candidates are portrayed as singularly responsible not only for their own success but for driving the success of their party. Forget celebrities and sports starts - not even worth it.

I think the sad fact of the matter is that in the majority of western marriages, a rocky patch is seen by one or both partners as the other person becoming an albatross to individual success and/or happiness in life. It isn't "we're messing up our marriage," it's "Bob/Alice is now an adversary to my happy life journey." Once that thinking tanks root, divorce is just a timestamp away.

My concern is that society is now insanely hyper-individualized with focus on direct personal success. It's one of those things that so endemic it's almost hard to notice (fish in water sort of thing) and then, once one does notice, its ubiquity is mind boggling.

This is my biggest problem with anglosphere society, and I believe it's rooted in the broader sense of individualism and freedom that people often praise in America. I wonder very frequently whether these are actually the factors that have made America wealthy, or if it's actually just the privileged economic and military position of the country due to the World Wars. Individualism and freedom are destructive to community and purpose. Say what you will about the socialist realists, but at least they had an ethos!

There was a scene in The Crown where they dramatized what they thought might have been the conversation between Queen Elizabeth and (then the) Duke of Edinburgh Philip. This conversation took place after some alleged infidelity on the part of Philip, which the dramatization was incredibly coy about. Not sure what the reality looked like, but I'm specifically talking about the dramatization and would make the same point even if the story were entirely fictional. It went like this:

Eliz. I think we both agree, it can't go on like this. So I thought we might take this opportunity, without children, without distraction, to lay our cards on the table, and talk frankly, for once, about what needs to change to make this marriage work. I realize this marriage has turned out to be something quite different to what we both imagined.

Phil. Understatement.

Eliz. And that we find ourselves in a...

Phil. Prison.

Eliz. A situation. Which is unique. The exit route which is open to everyone else...

Phil. Divorce.

Eliz. Yes, divorce. It's not an option for us. Ever. So, what would make it easier on you? To be in, not out. What will it take?

Phil. You're asking my price?

Eliz. I'm asking, what will it take?

Without endorsing (fictionalized) Philip's misconduct that got them into this situation, I'd say there's a real kernel of value in this -- if you see your marriage as indissoluble, you begin to see fixing your marriage as a task you must collaborate on and compromise in order to accomplish. Obviously this requires that both parties are actually discussing in good faith, want to fix the marraige, and anyone who has done wrong is willing to make amends; in situations where there is no remorse, no respect, and no resolution, there must be dissolution. If the ring won't fit, you two must split. If they're both out to plunder, let it be torn asunder.

But I firmly believe there are far fewer of those than most people, in our "divorce is adult breakup" age, believe. And the reasons for ending such a significant long-term relationship, on the part of both men and women, are often incredibly petty. Marital therapy often serves not to let both partners release their goblins and find a path forward, but for one partner to ally with a sympathetic authority figure in order to bully the other into submission. And that's not a marriage, it's a sublimated cuck(old)(queen) fantasy.

Obviously this is a bit of conservatism being liberalism driving the speed limit.

I think this is just conservatism flat out being liberalism, as in "secure personalities that will insist upon their own idiosyncrasies, but in the context of any given relationship spend their time more interested in the other's well-being than themselves".

Which in turn leads to "driving the speed limit" phenomenon, because these people also tend to take time to investigate corruption rather than have a fast-path moral stance that rejects it on its face. Because that's what they'd do for anyone else. (Of course, that ability to have a moral stance also creates corruption on its own, so you get one or the other- which is why we notice that the further from 'secure human being' we get, the faster they are to moralize... which is not generally meaningfully distinct from just looking out for number one in the way they do this).

if you're breaking your relationship down into a list of debts that must be transactionally repaid, your relationship is worth shit

The more I think about this, the more I think transactionality of this type is optimistically cargo-culting the want to worry you're not contributing enough, or more cynically going through the motions. I also think that this is one of those things that people who already do this as second nature (i.e. making sure I'm not pulling too hard on the relationship's finances) probably shouldn't talk about openly, since if you describe doing this to someone who doesn't have love backing it up/informing their choices it's likely going to damage [what little of] the relationship they had by implementing this.

It depends on the couple, their strengths and their needs.

And some people are going to be more attentive to this than others, because that's just the way they are (this is what I hear in the "Paul bemoans men getting married because they'll be more focused on pleasing their wives than pleasing God" [if I'm remembering that correctly]- I figure he must be talking about these kinds of people since traditionalist men don't truly prioritize what will please their wife [as an end] to begin with, and vice versa for progressive women), and conversely some people are going to be more interested/invested in what society says about that than reality. What's worse is that it's going to generally be incumbent on the partner that society currently privileges to countermand that messaging, so currently it's going to be harder on the woman when it comes to developing the man and his sons [pressure enforced by peers] than vice versa.

We crossed a line that isn't just non-traditional, it's actively destructive.

We used to be richer. When some non-secure personalities are given financial stability it tends to make them into better people, or rather, allow their better traits to be expressed. (This can also happen if you give them a goal.)

We're poorer now, so we can't afford that, hence we get more pathological/corrupt behavior. The power imbalance favors women this time, which is why "see men as piggy banks" dominates "see women as cum depositories" in popular messaging.

Apparently Labor is going to treat Incel ideology similarly to political Islam in the UK

Pander to them and prosecute anyone who doesn't like them? /sarcasm

I think that women in UK have legitimate reasons to feel unsafe due to mass immigration and Labour wants those feelings to be abstracted and redirected to all men in general.

What should be illegal is incitement to crimes.

Given the details of Trump's felony convictions, I'm no longer sure of even this. To recap (to the best of my recollection):

  1. It's a misdemeanor in New York to falsify financial records
  2. This is upgraded to a felony if one does so knowingly in furtherance of a crime
  3. The crime can be someone else's crime, and "knowingly" applies even if one is unaware the thing they're furthering is actually a crime
  4. "Knowingly" can seemingly be fudged more than that, too; they don't have to prove you actually knew you were falsifying the records
  5. The crime itself doesn't actually have to be proven at all. Jurors do not even have to agree about what the crime is.

Putting aside whether we should ban "incitement to crimes" which I think we obviously should not, should we even ban "incitement to violence"? Say you say "[Political candidate] must be stopped" and some wacko quotes you in his manifesto before attempting to assassinate the candidate. Given a motivated enough prosecutor and an unfavorable enough jurisdiction, you will certainly be convicted of incitement to violence for speech which certainly should not be illegal.

The first amendment is important and protected speech should even protect most advocacy for violence. The current rule that speech is protected unless advocating for "imminent lawless action" is good enough, probably, at least until people decide the constitution says otherwise.

What should be illegal is incitement to crimes. I am sure that this is already illegal in the UK. "Blow up Parliament for Allah", "Rape some bitches to protest against wokism", "Kill a cop to bring forth the dictatorship of the proletariat" are not protected speech, if anyone posts them on their facebook they would quickly be removed and the poster charged.

While this may be legally true (IANAL), in reality this is very dependent on the person making the incitement. Muslims and other minorities effectively have legal privileges that include making exactly the sorts of statements you give with no repercussions.

Its usually true, but there are often specific requirements that the incitement is actually likely to lead to 'imminent unlawful action' or similar. That is, someone will hear it and immediately take an illegal action. "Beat up that guy!" while pointing at some person in the crowd would be a classic example.

Kind of like how yelling "I'm going to kick your ass!" isn't an unlawful threat/assault if the person doing the yelling does not have the capacity to carry out the proposed action due to distance or some other factor.

Not in the UK. "Inciting racial hatred" requires no direct call to violence whatsoever, you can be booked for any blasphemy pretty much so long as someone somewhere thinks it's over the line. To say nothing of "malicious communication" where you can be booked for anything anybody anywhere is willing to testify they find "grossly offensive" or "indecent".

Yeah, and the broadness of that seems to allow them to both attack speech that is genuinely causing no harm AND to be selective in how they interpret the standard to allow the whole "two tier" thing to occur.

Apparently Labor is going to treat Incel ideology similarly to political Islam in the UK

So with a wink and a nod while blaming its enemies for anything bad?

So you can still service your dakimakura five times a day, right?

I’m having a hard time finding what is currently done about “political Islam.” Obviously, one can still practice the religion. And I assume that incitement to crimes is illegal. Where’s the line drawn?

I’m having a hard time finding what is currently done about “political Islam.”

My understanding is that authorities tend to try and build relationships with relatively moderate figures in Muslim communities, to try and encourage/help them redirect younger members away from particularly radical (i.e. ISIS-level) influences.

So you can still service your dakimakura five times a day, right?

While facing Akihabara, as is tradition

The Wikipedia page on "misogynist terrorism" (which considers worrying about "problems men face in the modern world" to be misogynistic, to show its slant) lists 12 incidents total. This hardly seems worth breaking out as an issue of its own.

I don't think that's a fair representation of what it says on the wikipedia page.

The following are specifically misogynist motivations that have been given as primary reasons for indiscriminate mass killings.

Problems which men face in the modern world

It seems especially humorous to me that the section titled "Problems which men face in the modern world" is exclusively filled with quotes from women.

This particular phenomenon was noticed in the Manosphere at least as early as 2011:

I wont say that I don’t admire Mona for having the courage to write a less than favorable critique; particularly one that points the blame back on a feminization that enthusiastically looks to reinvent it’s own social conventions in order to rationalize away the post-Wall dire straits women like Bolick are finding themselves in. However, is anyone really surprised that it’s now women receiving public recognition for acknowledging psychological and sociological principles and dynamics that the manosphere has covered for over a decade now?

I’m glad to see it getting the publicity, but ONLY a woman could write this without suffering fem-screech backlash accusations of misogyny. This is the environment we’re in today. I have no doubt that Ms. Charen will receive her share of frothing hate from ego invested Jezebels, but at least her critique will register for them. No man could write this critique and be taken seriously, and therein lies the danger in women co-opting the message the manosphere has been compiling for 12 years now. The environment is such that anything remotely critical a man might offer is instantly suspect of misogyny or personal (‘he’s bitter”) bias, however, couch that message in a female perspective, play Mrs. Doubtfire, and you’ll at least reach the audience beginning with something like validity.

https://therationalmale.com/2011/11/08/could-a-man-have-written-this/

I don't think teenagers are inherently rebellious against authority. In fact, what passes for "rebellion" is quite easily controlled by authority figures.

Think about the Hitler Youth. Or think about the Cultural Revolution, in which rebellious youth were mobilized to eliminate enemies of Mao's regime. Or think about all those protests in which high school students walk out of school over left wing causes (applauded by their teachers) but never right-wing causes (certain to earn them actual punishment).

Youth rebellion exists in the space that is allowed for it to exist and no more.

As the UK slouches towards totalitarianism, it is the youth who are most likely to cheer this development.

Well i mean true, but the political outsiders have often tried to harness such people to get power for themselves. A speaker who can capture the imagination of young incels can use them quite effectively to destroy the old system. This has happened before, more than once. And it will eventually happen again.

The Cultural Revolution was a bit more complicated. Mao had been powerful in the 1950s, but the disaster of the Great Leap Forward had led to him being sidelined, in favor of leaders (Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi) who were focused on nonrevolutionary governance like making sure that people had food to eat and that there was a functioning military, which he felt was inappropriate. He was more of a figurehead than someone anyone trusted with real responsibilities or power.

Still an authority figure, but it was more of a revolutionary coup than a consolidation of existing power.

Teenagers are inherently “rebellious” in the sense that they pursue sex and fun even if an old man tells them not to. I suppose this is rebellious, but really it’s that the old man lacks any authority of significance: control over sex and fun. Terror organizations like ISIL were able to recruit young men precisely because they offered them sex and fun, even though this entailed a swap from one authority (being some Muslim kid in UK with an overworked Dad and a principal you never see) to a far stricter authority (literally a violent extremist religious cult which micromanaged daily routine). The sex came in the way of slaves, and the fun was multifaceted: brotherhood (highly instinctually appealing), war (instinctually fun), explosives (you already know)… but these are the more obvious funs. There’s also the aesthetic and fantastical pleasure associated with the apocalypse. There’s also the ingrained potency of religious language which, in a peculiar sense, places you in the center of the universe by totalizing the importance of your feelings, actions, and identity. All of those are quite seriously fun.

Incel ideology is inherently unsexy and non-fun. I don’t see anything coming from it, pun unintended. The dangerous incels are more likely to become Muslims and the smart incels are more likely to learn how to manipulate women (thus solving the problem) or visiting Southeast Asia. The Hitler Youth sprung out of a hippie-ish hiking and trekking brotherhood by the way, so its origin were very fun. And it took that fun and placed more fun on it, a quasi-religious identity package that is fun to dwell on.

Indeed the social reality is that access to sex and fun is directly and indirectly controlled by old men wherever patriarchal norms are still in effect, such as Mesopotamia.

To be fair, I'm sure the majority of Hitler Youth and Red Guard members did earnestly feel that they were rebelling against an authority i.e. the existing patriarchal order that was constraining their lives up until that point. It was, of course, ironic to rebel against it in service of a new supreme leader who demanded total obedience, but I guess it wasn't something that went completely unnoticed by them.

You are missing one key detail, and it is that those previous examples of totalitarianism offered young men a path to virtue and status by obeying the regime. The current example does no such thing. All it offers is misery today, misery tomorrow, misery forever.

In such a position rebellion is a natural occurence.

In such a position rebellion is a natural occurence.

Rebellions only really occur when conditions improve. In the US, this wasn't a violent process (and doesn't tend to be- after all, the US is a far richer country); but if you were a man coming of age from 1945 to 1973 you enjoyed an utterly massive expansion in your civil rights [especially relative to women]- and that's because, socioeconomically, men were in such demand that women were completely unable to say no to whatever men wanted.

So you got a regulatory state [of society, not necessarily of government; remember, the 1920s were so woke that not only does the 18th Amendment exist, it was enacted without universal sufferage] that was much weaker than in the 1920s and 30s- free love isn't possible without conditions like this. Freedom only increases so long as society has a deficit of men; when it has a deficit of women, in the 1920s as now, oppression increases.

(And it is important to note that men naturally prosper in free conditions in the same way women prosper in oppressive conditions- it simply aligns with their biological interests. The distaff counterpart of catcalling men is quite literally "hello, human resources". It's also important to note that, while I call that 'oppressive', that is the male perspective of it; so if you truly want to be neutral it's not 'oppression' so much as 'privileging women above men', where freedom is the opposite. Oppressive societies are no less fragile than free ones.)

The problem with bust times is that men (and women who are good enough to be men) are in oversupply, so as a result their socioeconomic wages go down and conditions get continually worse for them. And the de-liberalization of the 1990s through today is part and parcel of that, and the entire point of mass immigration is to consolidate that (just like it was in 1920, for that matter!)- the men of that age were all too busy making money to see that failure to treat the communists/immigrationists to free helicopter rides was going to end badly for their children, but any man would do the same in that position. And after all, what's the harm of allowing enemy speech? It's not like it's ever going to take over.

Rebellions only really occur when conditions improve.

You're thinking of revolutions. That's what Tocqueville's paradox is about.

There's plenty of rebellions under worsening conditions. People who are getting fucked over never overthrow their ruling elite on their own, but they do often tend to be unruly and use the only real language of the masses: widespread ineffectual violence and vandalism.

Plenty of riots to go around, plenty more nihilistic terror to come.

Any aspiring dictator knows wanton violence is the siren song of the crowd lusting for better leadership. But the crowd never seizes power for herself.

Oppressive societies are no less fragile than free ones.

This is not true, oppressive societies are a lot more fragile. You only need to take out the elite. And you have no shortage of potential allies. Ask Cuauhtémoc. Ask Saddam. Ask Mussolini.

The history of the world is full of god emperors whose rule is unquestionable until the day someone with a bigger stick comes about and the locals cheer the new management.

A tyrant inspires no loyalty. And they need the boys to die in their wars.

I'll happily give up my seat. No Chinaman ever called me an incel.

And they need the boys to die in their wars.

My number one domestic policy goal is to make sure they have no willing soldiers.

You only need to take out the elite.

I'm not as convinced, but I'm also thinking about oppressive societies that emerge from the people rather than being imposed top-down.

Top-down oppression is fragile (especially because it tends to be obviously self-enriching, or rather, it becomes fragile when it can be reasonably perceived as self-enriching), but bottom-up oppression isn't, to the point that it's very hard to call it out. For instance, safetyism in the West is very much oppression, but everyone who perpetrates it does so with the approval of its own conscience. There's no Czar of Safety and therefore the problem is much more difficult to root out because it exists within every man, woman, and child; the senate and people of the US can't just send the 101st Airborne to topple racism for the same reason they can't send them to remove BLM rioters.

The only way to deal with bottom-up oppression is for an opposing nation (or reality) to throw so many bags of money at the people that they can start clearing the self-enriching parts of themselves away, while ensuring that no top-down version of that oppression arises. Contrast post-WW2 Axis nations with modern MENA; the US can blow up a good chunk of it in the name of feminism but the people remain in opposition to that.

How many of those young men actually believe this? Like pretty clearly feminist dating advice is bullshit- but pretty clearly to adults, which these are not.

This is surely not an isolated example of progressive ideas supposedly benefitting young men by following them.

but pretty clearly to adults, which these are not.

The younger generations spend a massive amount of time on the internet and information spreads extremely quickly. "Incel ideology", if you broaden it to include general red-pill concepts, isn't just an accepted fact of life among the zoomers but such a noticeable piece of their vocabulary that terms like "Mewing", "Sigma" and "Alpha" are frequently thought of as zoomer slang.

Talk to young men and you'll see. They know they're getting a raw deal and nobody cares. I was even surprised at how much more unhinged zoomers are than myself. I still have some internalized ideas of civility even if I know intellectually it doesn't mean anything. They don't.

Now that's not to say that they're all right wing, but there is a very consistent rejection of progressive dogma. Which isn't surprising given it has absolutely no place for men in it.

I was even surprised at how much more unhinged zoomers are than myself. I still have some internalized ideas of civility even if I know intellectually it doesn't mean anything. They don't.

I’m intrigued! Can you provide some anecdotes?

Are you actually surprised? Where were Zoomers even supposed to learn civility?

I will clarify that I didn't mean that exactly. They are not more right wing in my experience. They're just a lot more cynical that I've ever seen even Xers pretend to be.

In particular they don't give the slightest thought to the holy cows that are foundational to the boomer mythology of the Post War Consensus. The millenial reflexively shudders at criticisms of Israel that he knows are dangerous. The zoomer doesn't even know why he should.

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I wouldn’t say I’m surprised, exactly, just morbidly curious to hear examples of unhinged Zoomer incivility.

Yeah, good point. I suppose that's why the Hippies rebelled. Serving the regime as a foot soldier in Vietnam didn't give young men a status bump, so why risk your life? And of course the benefits to free love were obvious. Nevertheless, the Hippies did have substantial institutional support which enabled their rebellion. 1960s counterculture was always a movement by and for the elites, which is why it eventually won.

I supposed today's young men might rebel, but since their rebellion will not be allowed or encouraged by the regime, it will come to nothing. These would-be rebels have no way to coordinate, and their rebellion will confer no status gain.

Today's rebels simply "lie flat", contributing nothing to a society that can't reward them, but not explicitly challenging the power structure.

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