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I recently saw a provocative bit of 4chan greentext concerning politics and gender. I'll reproduce it here as follow -
As far as analysis goes, this is obviously not especially sophisticated or historically grounded. However, it does pose an interesting problem, which is perhaps better framed in more general terms, since it applies as much to Red Tribe and Blue Tribe as it does men and women.
Imagine that the electorate of a democratic country (call it Exemplavania) comprises two political groups, A and B, constituting 40% and 60% of the electorate respectively. As a result, Exemplavania's government is run largely in accordance with the interests of group B. However, group A is significantly more powerful than group B in terms of its capacity for violence. Under what circumstances is this arrangement sustainable?
It seems to me that it's not trivial that it's unsustainable. In particular, a sustainable model might involve the following: (i) the ongoing costs to Group A of Exemplavania being run by Group B are low. (ii) the one-off costs of Group A enacting a violent revolution to enfranchise their own power are high. (iii) all members of the polity do some form of temporal discounting. In this case, members of Group A might rationally conclude that it's not worth the hassle of an uprising.
Nonetheless, I do worry a bit that political polarisation along gender lines is unsustainable. Notably, women's suffrage in most Western countries was not the result of women using violence to coerce men into accepting them as political equals. Rather, it was the result of successful ideological persuasion of male franchise-holders, achieved in no small part via the critical contributions of women to the collective industrial efforts in World War 1. Insofar as women's political tendencies remained broadly aligned with a large proportion of men (or powerful enough men), as they have done more or less until now, this arrangement seems pretty stable. However, if we see continued political polarisation along gender lines, as we've seen in South Korea for example, and this leads to political outcomes that are strongly disfavoured by a large majority of men, then at some point the decision to enfranchise women may be in jeopardy.
Curious what others think!
I mean the obvious one here is that the vast majority of people in group A are loyally partnered with people in group B above and beyond abstract political commitments, though it's funny that "people care about their spouses" is an observation that has somehow failed to enter into the calculus here.
If you follow the political science lit and consider political cohesion and group conciousness as downstream of linked fate, it's going to take something drastic for an individual to see their fate as linked more to their sex or political party than their family unit.
According to Morgan Stanley 41% women aged 25-44 were single and childless in 2018 and the number increases around 0.4% a year. Also according to Pew the married women are voting more conservative, it's the strongest predictor of conservative leaning women, 26 points difference compared to never married women.
There is something happening to political coalition making, it is novel and I agree also dangerous.
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I think this explanation discounts a number of other critical aspects that ultimately resulted in suffrage.
One notable one is that the political foundation of the United States (consent of the governed, no taxation without representation) lends itself straightforwardly to universal suffrage. It is possible, temporary, to sustain contradictions in those foundations (consent of the male property holder) but, like putting epicycles onto the orbits, it eventually collapses.
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This seems like an oddly idealistic narrative of the origins of female franchise. I'd understood that early votes-for-women initiatives in the US were aimed at preserving the political power of the (gender-balanced) elite classes in the face of growing (mostly male) immigrant populations? I'm less familiar with the history of the vote in the UK, but given that many landholding women had local suffrage long before, which was removed with the expansion of male suffrage at the start of the 19th century, I presume most of those developments were similarly driven by cynical power-consolidation politics rather than by honest persuasion changing hearts.
Power is power. There is no interesting scenario "oooh what if Group A was more violent but Group B had more members, and they realized their interests were opposed, who would win" because both numbers and capacity for effective violence are just forms of power, and by definition the most powerful group has already won-- is, in fact, the group orchestrating the conflict, defining the teams and making it permissible to think about the opposition of interests in the first place.
As regards the gender gap in political affiliation, the actual power-holders are clearly not the anxious Millennial women who dutifully parrot the ACAB memes that turn up on their Instagram feeds; they're the mixed-gender, likely majority-male Instagram board and leadership, plus all the others of their class, who decided for obscure reasons of their own that those memes were fine and dandy to boost in feeds in the first place, then to bake into the rest of our tech-driven reality. Those are the folks to watch, and if 4chan ever does go to real-life war against the Emilies, it'll be when those people decide it would be a convenient development, not a moment before. But I tend to agree with the person upthread who said that this line of thinking is mostly an excuse to fantasize impotently about punishing the people who won't sleep with them.
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What's wrong here is the particular equivocation of politics and war. Politics is not equal with war, politics are meant to avert war, but they are equal in that both are about the transferral of power. If we were to assign a sex polarity to the practices, politics would indeed be the feminine method to the masculine method of war.
Beyond that, I can tell you where this divide ends. We'll pass the core of this turmoil, enough to stabilize us as we move into the approach for the singularity.
Around 2030 we'll see the first examples of convincing human simulacra. These will be proofs of the concept but they won't be largely available until later in the decade. Boston Dynamics maintaining their exact rate of advancement will have robots with convincingly human articulation by the mid-30s, especially with AI improving at helping research.
In the 2040s, simulacra will be able to replace a great deal of labor and production of simulacra will become the national industry of whatever country that perfects them. My bias is Japan: they're most poised with the combination of established acumen, workforce and key socioeconomic factors, namely their inverted population pyramid. Low TFR will be neatly solved by simulacra taking over labor. As so-ordered a nation and people as the Japanese, they will implement the necessary policies to begin the country's move toward quasi-post-scarcity. Those few other similarly ordered nations will likewise swiftly adopt simulacra, and as tens of millions are produced by the year, and only increasing, simulacra will quickly become a reasonable household expenditure. I expect by the end of the '40s they will be ubiquitous in every country where they are legal.
For the price of a mid-range car, households will be able to purchase a lifetime of service from a chef-maid-assistant. So average households will acquire simulacra, further increasing demand, and lonely men will also buy them for all obvious reasons. That motivation for purchase will not end with lonely men. "She's a 10 (she's a hotter-version-of-pick-your-hottest-celebrity), but she's a robot" won't last. One of your friends will get one, and you'll interact with it, and even if you're obstinate about "it," eventually it will be her to your mind, because she talks, she laughs, she appears to think, she in all ways seems the part. You'll only know because you know, that won't be enough. It won't matter how they aren't "real" because they will be real enough. All but indistinguishable for the existential question of soul in the machine, and it won't be long before you're not so sure about that, either.
At ubiquity they will end dating. The bottom third of men who can afford them for a start, to half, to I'd expect a Pareto 80%. The man is accustomed to not having children, it's our evolutionary history, it may bother them, it won't stop them. What women say won't matter, a guy might want what only they can offer, but not at the cost, especially not if they've never had that success, and that already increasing population will represent an even greater percentage of the next generation. To put in such effort to settle for someone less attractive, less responsive, more burdensome, more risky, to settle for something human when he can have something machine-perfect. Work, go home, play games until she has dinner ready, watch a movie, fuck, maybe play more games, go to bed. His friends can and will talk shit, his base urges are satisfied, he won't care enough about what they say. His true needs will go unsatisfied and it will be a lifestyle harmful to his soul, but it will be so much easier.
Some women will have them, not many. I'd rather not invoke inceldom, I find the specific slant to their ideas irrelevant here, but it's true men pursue while women are pursued and that imbalance defines dating. The asymmetric effort of dating as a man versus dating as a woman, again the man pursues, he works, he pays; the woman is pursued, she is worked for, she is cared for. The simulacra will thus be unnatural as a thing women acquire as a relational prosthesis; why would she pay for what, for good reason, she gets free? The simulacra will have no being (or so we'll reassure ourselves), can father no children, can offer no increase, can offer no status. Women will have them as the chef-maid-assistant models, maybe even more sometimes, but they won't replace, not in the way they will replace relationships for men.
Harems will re-emerge, they will be the only option for most women, so they will be easier. Between simulacra and harems, female sociopolitical power will collapse. They will lose too much leverage with too many low-status men, while high-status men will each become a little king with his court of concubines who will certainly have no power.
The 2050s will see human gestation in synthetic environments, so clinic-based artificial wombs. Here I don't think that it will take that long for the breakthroughs in tech, instead it will be the economics and social impacts of simulacra that will give incentive to developing the tech. Again I expect Japan to widely adopt, as their already low TFR falls off a cliff from their herbivore men taking to simulacra. They will have a reduced need for a new generation from so much of their labor being automated but I expect there still to be decades between the ubiquity of simulacra and those simulacra reaching the capacity to automate >90% of all labor. This will also be the first sight of the real benefit to the age of simulacra, the offer of stability in overseeing the drastic reduction in human population.
Starting in the 50s or 60s we'll see government regulation on reproduction. It won't be severe because it won't need to be, so anyone who really wants a big family will be able to have one with minimal structural hindrance. It will be simple incentive-based, I've referred to the policy as the "Half-Right to Reproduction." Systemically its purpose will be to halve the population with each generation, it'll work faster than that. Every person will be bestowed with one half-right they can exercise at age of majority. Would-be parents can combine to a whole-right and exchange it for their child's addition to the government dole, UBI, which will also exist. As AI and simulacra come from almost all labor, the newly jobless will need placation else promiseless young men become bored and at-risk for chaos. AI-managed industry, so all goods, pharmaceuticals, medical care, farming, and also advances in 3D printing, will see the cost of goods plummet while their quality peaks. It will become progressively harder for the government to not adopt major socialist practices as capitalism finally begins to "win" in competing itself out of existence. The population can't keep growing in such a system, at least not until we have FTL and a thousand shipyards in Sol. Assuming FTL is possible, which I don't, but I sure hope it is.
Simulacra will play a critical part in stability in keeping men satisfied. Advancements in entertainment, so another 20-30 years of development in video games, the arrival of UBI and the removal of needing to work to live. The population will need to be distracted until most can die childless but "happy enough." Half-rights help this goal, because people can sell their half-rights or buy other's half-rights, all at government exchanges. The exchanges will always buy half-rights, subject to reversible sterilization. A guy will go to a clinic next door to the exchange, maybe incorporated into the exchange, get whatever implant that stops sperm from working, get the cash to order a simulacra, sail into the sunset. Easy.
I don't expect western nations to swiftly automate labor like Japan. We'll need to acclimatize to the idea, begin the inculcation of no-work-to-live in successive generations so that when they're older, or their kids are older, they'll be prepared for not having jobs. With that and the shrinking population, by the turn of the century Western nations will be ready for post-scarcity life. New generations will still be needed in the interim, artificial gestation is pivotal here for the other paradigmatic social change.
As relationships and childbirth are "solved," as countries most adopting simulacra and bespoke children grown in vats enjoy golden ages while their men break productivity records, why would a country not produce as many sons as possible and as few daughters as necessary? There will be outgroups, so the Amish and the like, potentially a new movement of tech-circa-1999, but they will be small, none meaningful political factions, or where meaningful, supportive of the new power structure. I'd also expect a "reserve" population for practical concerns of catastrophe and ovum stocks, but most women will belong to the elite population. This above all is why we will see minimal and then no opposition to sharp sex-demo disparity with the great decline in the population of the human female: with so few, being a naturally born woman will be a position of immense status, inherently aristocratic. They will necessarily be the best of the best. Those chosen, those expressly wanted few. A new nobility, and it will indeed be so easy.
Women will "benefit" first, eventually men will, as again the purpose will be to shrink the entire population. So each generation will more-than-halve itself until the population is at an "acceptable" – at least stable – level. The sex distribution will once again be at parity, and those naturally born biological males will also be inherently aristocratic, as all civilized humans belong to the new nobility.
And all of this will just work. What I describe will happen because it isn't fighting back, it isn't trying to undo anything, it doesn't require conquest over more than a century of culture, it doesn't require recovery from war or calamity. It will work according to slopes and entropy, it will work in congruence with human nature. It will be the easiest path through, so it will just work.
If it's physically possible we'll break the tyranny of the rocket equation and achieve FTL travel. We'll begin spacefaring regardless and when, in however long, man reaches frontier planets to settle and dominate, they'll return to lifestyles us today find familiar. Those humans will begin the real work, of understanding and healing the light scarring on our gestalt soul from the depravity of human civilization, culminating in what was necessary to pass through the 20th and 21st century – with what was necessary to pass the Great Filter.
It didn't have to be this way, now it has to be this way. Or else we're all fucking dead.
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The main two issues with women politically are:
A) Feminism. Enough women as a block converge politically and feel entitled to preferential treatment. Additionally, they prioritise careerism over motherhood, and sympathize with the general liberal and progressive framework. Women like other demographics, including non female liberals, have become entitled and dogmatic.
I believe it isn't all in biology but there is an effect directly related to the way liberals (and supposed right wingers who in practice compromised with progressive liberalism) pander to a group and then that group becoming receptive of this pandering. That ideology and way it frames things about how "we women" (and blacks, Jews, etc) need to fight for women rights and against misogyny, creates a radicalized entited mentality. But this isn't just a woman problem, but also a problem of other identities pandered, and of the ideologues who buy into this. These people are never going to compromise, but deny and deflect the unreasonable privilidges and society destroying aspects of the dogma, and play up the weakman/strawman of any alternatives.
It is a good thing to be hostile to people biased in a feminist and anti male direction.
An aspect of this is going to be persecution of dissent, which in Britain might include imprisoning people for non feminist speech.
What we need on such issues is to abandon these dogmas and seek for workable complimentary and wise ways to sort relations between groups. Which is impossible to do under the liberal paradigm.
And also prosecution for treason totalitarian progressive extremists in power (which includes powerful Non Govermant Organizations who play a role in this) imprisoning, or generally cancelling people for not sharing this dogma, and suppressing this faction in general, in favor of what I mentioned.
People trying to solve the problems that come from the general questions and from the feminist and general progressive supremacist paradigm specifically in both inter group relations, and in a specific society. Like birth rates, or dating rate, or whether the system works well for families, or whether it is unfair towards men and/or women.
Suffice to say people like Dread Jim represent the opposite extreme in my book. So I am not suggesting that female interests are treated as of no consideration. Just not prioritized above male interests and above common good, like what kind of societal arrangement leads to successful families and strong societies, nations, even stable international order and additionally, no reason to treat female interests and the way they are framed in the feminist perspective where careerism, abortion, are prioritized.
All this requires a break from liberal/progressive orthodoxy and even from those who claim to be in opposition of it, but actually are dogmatists for it. Authoritarianism, fanaticism, support of unreasonable and false aspects and unwillingness of compromise are the pervasive aspects of not a few kids of college, but of a broad liberal faction and of feminists in general.
B) What I call "Gullible Conformism". Women are more willing to unquestionably buy into unreasonable politics that are framed under the "I am a nice person" perspective. There is also the fact that women know less facts than men as shown in various studies.
To blame only women voters will neglect the influence of a network of activists who captured power in media, corporations, goverment, control powerful activist NGOs. We now have a female voter problem too, but historically the timing was more of these types of elites coordinating first and trying to influence women. Without them, the issue with women would had been lesser. And to be fair, women had played a role in this by taking part in the feminist movement.
But in the current situation it does exist. However with different ideology being promoted a decent % of women would distance themselves from feminism.
In regards to voting, I have entertained the idea of limiting the vote to people who pass a test that examines both their knowledge and capability to prioritize the common good. Obviously if implemented today in countries run by the far left, it would result in banning all non far leftists from voting. But in an ideal way, it would mean selecting people who understand key facts, and share some key important moral principles and demonstrate wisdom.
Which isn't apolitical but goes directly against cultural marxism/ modern far left, which is mainstream liberalism. For example there would be a question about whether "Do our people have a right to continue existing by restricting the right of foreigners to immigrate and settle on our lands, or we shouldn't have that right, because it should be considered racist and prioritised above it". Same in regards to feminism and affirmative action were the concept of excessive women rights should be put under consideration with the common good. Include some edgier questions that put in the recepient the threat of being thought as not being nice, or associating with extreme movement, but the correct position would be to do just that.
Another issue that goes beyond voting, is that a democratic regime as any textbook claims, should be about more things than majority decides. The far left conveniently either supports or tolerates far left extremism, and opposes people opposing it, but either opposes or tolerates opposing as unconstitutional the implementation of even reasonable politics which they consider to go against the red lines of the left, and associate with far right extremism.
People implementing the agenda is to disenfranchise, and treat as second class citizens or vilify, the groups progressive dislike, should be treated as people engaging in illegal and unconstitutional activity. And all organisations of this agenda should be banned. People who have done this, should be prosecuted for the crime of stripping groups from their rights, and in various cases for treason.
For example, if leftist ideologues in the police, goverment, start discriminating against the native people, you can and should imprison them. Or if they imprison people for not real crimes. There needs to be an overton window that closes and doesn't tolerate agendas that is sufficiently far to the left, including the cultural left.
Ideally, countries should not be run by oikophobes, who act as foreign occupation goverment in their mistreatment of their native people and their disallowance of existence as a community. Amd neither by extreme nationalists, not in the way the liberal/far left/"conservatives" who compromise with it define it, but those who are acting in a very parasitical and destructive manner to other nations. Same applies to other identity politics.
So the solution to this is to treat mainstream liberal ideology as an illegitimate extreme ideology, and try to promote something both more moderate, and therefore more conservative, and directly seek to solve social problems that will remain denied, treated as conspiracies, or treated as non problems, under the liberal dogma. Obviously if you aren't sufficiently conservative you can never be a moderate.
While simultaneously, pressuring groups like women to not be feminist, and stop putting women above men, in addition to promoting this ideology in the broader society. The ideology that progressive supremacy is an extreme destructive ideology, is the way forward to stop both the problems caused of it, but also the problem it cause of inter group conflict by stirring an entitled tribalist hateful attitute from pandered groups, and from people who become extreme tribalists for groups that aren't their own, and disrespectful of legitimate rights of other groups.
Of course, another problem of this ideology that we would benefit when it is suppressed, and it appears in this discussion by people indulging in this behavior, is the huge levels of bulverism and vilification and reality denial. People on the right can't have legitimate problems and oppose things, but must be nazis, incels, and all sort of boogie labels whose grievances are wholly illegitimate. This behavior, not only very dangerously leads to tyranny, and allows lies to foster, and has been key element to some of worst atrocities by far leftists in 20th century, but makes it impossible to rationally examine any issue.
Frankly, even among those ideological groups on the right which I have differences and find too extreme (referring to groups that are large enough to have some influence), who are fewer than those who claim to be on the right and compromise with far left, I very rarely if ever find any of them who have mostly illegitimate grievances against the left and leftist outgroups. It is just ridiculous propaganda. The typical type who I would say go to far, has legitimate complaints about legitimately bad behavior against the left and tribal groups associated with the left, but what they want as an end point, goes too far in a cruel and sectarian tribalist direction for my taste. That's it really. The leftist propaganda of insane far right extremist is it self promoting an insanity, and doing it often strategically maliciously so that the right can be losers, by treating their whole grievances as illegitimate.
The underlying message being that to prove you are not incel/nazi/far right be self destructive and betray your causes for the lefts. People who buy into this, will compromise with a subservient position for men and other demographics, and a subservient relationship, promising to be more subservient towards the far left.
So yeah, this type of perspective being absent from our discourse, would allow us to actually implement better gender relations that under the feminist paradigm and the bullying tactics of go along or you are a misogynist incel red piller man rights activst blah blah.
I think an important point of deradicalizing society, and I would expect with the right people in charge of the media the majority to pass the tests I entertained as an idea, would be for people to develop an active thick skin against these manipulation tactics. To become wise to this movement. Where they and the magic words no longer work anymore, and where people turn against those who will implement such tactics.
Intense argument but well thought out and said. AAQC'ed
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You could have said "we gotta stop open leftists from voting" in much fewer words.
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To me, the bigger issue is the question of productivity. Men are orders of magnitude more likely to be in the important and well paid jobs simply because of the way that men think about work. Men think of work and political power in terms of getting things done. For a man, the point of working is money, power and prestige. To a woman, it’s more often decided on the basis of pleasing work environment, good hours, fun, friendly coworkers etc. if you took everything on that list away, men will still want the job if it pays enough. And in politics, it think it’s the same sort of idea. Men will take an uncomfortable civilization where hard work is rewarded because they want the rewards to come to them when they earn them. They aren’t worried about whether a policy seems mean or if it makes poverty more uncomfortable. It’s not mean, they just want a practical result of most people doing productive work even if the jobs are dirty.
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I mean the whole thing is built on several flimsy houses of cards, but one I’d like to highlight specifically is a latent assumption that you can have a violent uprising with no other ill effects, perhaps comparable to an election. This could not be more false. The way the modern world currently works is that massive violent campaigns are quite often strongly net-negative for everyone. They have a long lasting negative impact on not just stability (tautological as it may be) but also economic prosperity and the medium term ability to self-govern effectively. And probably more. And no one is actually (so far) actually doing so poorly that this would be a good trade. Instead, the social contract and notion of a nation of rules and laws is a mutually beneficial one in a classic political science sense as well as a literal and practical sense.
Um, he did address that.
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I've never in my life made love to a woman who was significantly to my Right politically. Perhaps some who were unconsciously so, but never intellectually, I've never been in bed who was going to talk about the Flat Tax. There was one girl I dated senior year of high school who absolutely swore up and down that she had voted for John McCain, no matter how many times I told her that we were both 16 in 2008, but even her reflexes were well to the left of her verbal commitments. I suspect this is true for many, perhaps even the vast majority, of men outside of James Carville or the Conways. It's perfectly possible for all men being to the right of all women to have relatively little impact, provided that the gaps between individual men and individual women aren't unbridgeable. This is why this seems like such a big deal to online Rightists, they do find an unbridgeable gap between themselves and most women, they must either lie about their political beliefs or seek out a tradwife type who will still be to their left, it feels to them like there are no women near them. But for a normie Republican, or even a relatively normie guy who think the Jews Control Everything but mostly doesn't think about it too much, there's a woman who is to his left but sympatico enough that they get along. And as noted below by @Gillitrut, the gap isn't really between conservative men and liberal women, it's between very liberal young women and normie Democrat young men. So the "political polarization" question only matters inasmuch as one thinks the Incel Question is important, donc on bouge...
I categorically reject the tired masturbatory fantasy of Incel Revolution because, in the vast majority of cases, sexuality is a meritocracy. A degenerate, and in many ways unfair, meritocracy; but nonetheless a meritocracy. "Women want 6-6-6 in a man" is the incel rallying cry, and I feel for their suffering and maybe those are unfair standards; but realize that only leaves their team with the short, the poor, those lacking in rizz. There is never going to be a significant threat from Incels to society, for the simple reason that if they manage to get their shit together long enough to set up a serious terrorist organization, they'll probably start getting laid. The traits that women choose, and that society values to provide the social and economic proofs of value that women choose, aren't perfect proxies for how I would rank male virtue and talent, but they're not completely orthogonal either. The best men might not be the ones drowning the in pussy, and the the men drowning in pussy might not be the best men; but the best men are at least gettin' some, and the men drowning in pussy generally have some measure of the classic heroic virtues. To be totally left out, there's something kinda wrong with you. Fight Club was prescient in this, the entire book hinges ((Spoilers old enough to rent a car ahead)) on the moment when the protagonist is attracted to Marla but can't bring himself to ask her out, and that conflict is what splits out the awesome part of his personality into Tyler Durden. And then he gets fucks Marla silly, while the sad incel part of him watches. There's a lot of questions about the nature of the self in there, but at core that's the worm in the apple for the Incel Revolution: to be capable of revolution, the men involved would have to improve themselves to the point where they'd be getting laid, leaving only the truly insane terrorists. And even if there were enough of those to cause problems, we must remember...
"War is the continuation of politics with the addition of other means." (DRINK!) Your original Greentext is the reversal of Clausewitz, politics is war by other means. Both formulations have some truth to them! There is an element of substituting Jaw Jaw for War War. At the same time, consider that as the situation deteriorates, moves can be made. Accommodations can be reached. #Feminism might be out over its skis right now, but it can and will pull back if the system is threatened. Adaptations would be made. Women, and the men who are already benefitting from the current system, have too many levers to pull, too much to offer the men who are exiled from the system currently, to go down without a deal being struck.
Lovely insights all round! Very well said.
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Regarding your second point: You’re never going to see an incel terrorist or revolutionary movement actually consciously identifying itself as such. That’s correct. The problem is that you’re creating a pool of potential labor and mindshare for a wide variety of extremist ideological groups. If you look at the actual foot soldiers for ISIS (not the high level leadership), most of them joined because it meant they would get a wife. Not 72 heavenly virgins, one terrestrial wife. If you look at Black September, the vast majority of those guys were permanently single too. In fact, when the PLO decided to disband Black September, they specifically did it by getting all the members hitched and in families. I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m guessing most Brownshirts and communist guerrillas probably weren’t married men with families either.
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I don't think the side that is theoretically less capable of violence at full mobilization would actually be less capable of violence in practice. Civil unrest very rarely results in full mobilization. The vast majority of the people involved in the conflict would not be directly involved in the fighting. Having more money to arm and pay your paramilitaries would be enough to secure victory in most cases, even if your pool of potential combatants is a little bit smaller.
Men and women are basically fungible as long as they're equally committed. A woman willing to donate $X is worth just as much to the cause as a man willing to fight for Y days, for some value of X and Y.
In the Byzantine Empire men who refused to serve in the army had to pay a fine. As time went on, more and more men chose to just pay the fine to get out of service. The Empire didn't mind this because they could use the revenue from the fines to hire Armenian mercenaries, who made better soldiers than the conscripted peasant farmers would have anyway. Even thousands of years ago, being unable to mobilize your supporters to actually fight for you wasn't a death blow as long as they were willing to contribute in other ways.
Remember that the Western Roman Empire did the same thing with the Franks and the Goths, and that directly led to the Fall of Rome because the Franks and the Goths eventually decided to cut out the middleman.
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The Byzantines were dealing in solidi, easy to collect gold in fines and then use it for paying mercenaries. A hiring-mercenaries-level-conflict in the States would mean the dollar and economy collapsed. There'd be dealing again in precious metals, and bartering. Weapons, food, medicine, and those soldiers could well be offered another certain kind of good: women. If a faction pays in women, those women have no power.
This would require a faction to decide to bring back slavery, either de jure or de facto.
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Contra some of the other comments, I do think democracies are a proxy for civil unrest, even if that wasn’t the express purpose of democracy originally (cf etymology fallacy). Democracy is an outlet for political rage and catharsis. Radicals become political influencers and their danger to civil order is diminished as a result. Corrupt people who love power don’t raise armies but lobby politicians. Everything becomes a little safer and more prosocial with the democratic spectacle. I think there’s actually an interesting principle, “subversion subversion”, that’s at play in different antifragile social organizations — you subvert the subversive’s tendencies back toward the social order, like Ted K’s writings on the System’s Neatest Trick. Democracy does this by having political radicals work through the political process but it also does this through the mythology of voter equality, voter knowledge, and votes mattering; there’s an implied value scheme you don’t realize you are signing on to, that your political power is identical to someone else regardless of qualities. Chinese “communism” does this by calling itself true communism, giving actual communist rebels difficulty gaining support (but we have communism at home!). Christianity does this by venerating a figure of religious radicalism and innovation, capturing rebels toward the cause while also delegitimizing the attraction to antisocial rebels (we already have that figure, he is the head our hierarchical church).
Exactly. This is why what Trump did with the 2020 election is so dangerous and corrosive. January 6 was a natural outpouring of what he set in motion, even if he didn't literally tell his supporters to breach the Capitol building. We should expect to see more serious civil unrest if he loses the 2024 election, since he will very likely claim it was rigged no matter what.
Maybe don't blatantly steal the election if you don't want contested results.
Given that all social security numbers were stolen less than a month ago, I'm expecting unprecedented fraud this November.
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Which was more dangerous: claiming the election was rigged or rigging the election?
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I think the degree of gender polarization in the United States is quite overstated. According to Pew, from April 2024, there's a 5-8 percentage point gap between men and women in terms of party identification (men are 46D-52R compared to women's 51D-44R). Compare this to the 20 point gap in your example. The Pew article also provides a historical graph of this identification going back to 1994. It's hard to look at the graph and see a consistent trend of gender polarization. Instead it seems to me the electorate as a whole tends to move as one, men and women becoming more Democrat or more Republican in tandem. There are also periods where voters have been even more polarized by gender than they are today. That 5-8 point gap today was 10 points in 1994, mostly due to men being even more Republican then.
ETA:
Lest people think this is a young-person phenomenon the data Pew has shows precisely the opposite. Men and women under 50 are united in being majority Democrats, while men and women over 50 are the ones polarized by gender.
Here ya go:
https://www.axios.com/2024/02/16/gen-z-gender-gap-political-left-women
Limit it to 18-29 year olds (the ones who will be defining politics over the next couple decades) and there is in fact a sizeable gap that emerged in the last decade.
Here's the data source:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/609914/women-become-liberal-men-mostly-stable.aspx
It gets worse if you selected out unmarried women from the Pew study you cite.
WSJ did an article on it.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/men-women-vote-republican-democrat-election-7f5f726c
We discussed the whole issue about a month ago.
https://www.themotte.org/post/1100/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/235167?context=8#context
THERE'S your gender polarization.
Notice that fewer people are getting married.
Notice that the median age of first marriage is rising
There's a couple different ways to interpret all this, but I doubt this supports your argument that things aren't getting more polarized, and it surely suggests that this gets worse in the next 10 years.
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This is basically the thread ended right? The imagined scenario doesn't even exist as the gender politics gap hasn't changed and has deceased if anything, age is apparently where the big gap is actually.
Admittedly, the stated scenario of:
seems to apply about as well to a country divided politically along age lines as along gender lines. And if the US continues to have an aging population with declining fertility, the %s might not be that far off, either.
Interestingly partisan stratification by age is also (according to Pew's data) a pretty recent phenomenon. According to their partisanship of generational cohorts it basically didn't matter what age range you were in during the 90's, the distribution of Democrats and Republicans was very close. By 2009 the 20-29 cohort was significantly more Democrat but the others were still pretty even. Then by 2023 the 24-33 cohort was even more Democrat and all the 54+ demographics were significantly more Republican (proportional with age).
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I mean if that's the case then the age thing applies as much as the gender thing as far as being a proxy for war goes. A 63+ year-old American man is not going to be any more useful in a war than the average woman.
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Wrong. The numbers are only that even because of old people. 80 percent of Gen Z women are liberal and 70 percent of Gen-Z men are conservative.
Do you have a citation for that? According to Gallup men in the 18-29 age range as of 2023 (not quite entirely GenZ) break down their identification as 29/44/25 between Conservative/Moderate/Liberal. This is compared to women's 21/37/40 split of the same. A PRRI report purporting to be specifically of GenZ also has GenZ men as quite liberal (38% identify as liberal compared to 31% who identify as conservative) though not as liberal as GenZ women (47% liberal to 24% conservative).
I will point out that self-identification is not an amazing barometer of political division, because "what counts as moderate" is highly subjective.
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A bunch of people confuse "The vast majority of young conservatives are male" with "the vast majority of young men are conservatives."
It’s also probably true that a significant majority of loud young conservatives are men, and loud young liberals are women, but groups analogous to the “silent majority” are silent for a reason.
I am reminded for example of a recent poll on X/Twitter about presidential preference Elon posted which Trump won handily. This tells you quite a lot about Twitter users that follow and engage with Elon’s posts and not much about the United States’ actual voting population, which people in the comments crowing about “sample size” seem to have completely missed.
As I've said before, a lot of of the overreaction about young men turning right is from two sources -
1.) Right-leaning people hoping that they're not doomed in the long run 2.) Left-leaning people shocked there are still young right-wing people.
The other thing is 14-17 year old boys are pretty terrible for somewhat sympathetic reasons (ie. they're horny with no real outlet), and the vast majority of them that get girlfriends (which most still do) calm down the first time their girlfriend makes fun of them.
Also, I think a lot of 'redpill' content is being consumed by non-American male audiences, which also shift things.
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Exactly, polling is hard. Random sampling is hard.
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Why would all these arguments not equally predict that our current situation of equal franchise for poor and isolated and rich and well-connected is unsustainable? Unless you believe that any political conflict gone violent would be resolved by an individual contest of BRUTE STRENGTH, wouldn't the decision by landowners to enfranchise paycheck-to-paycheck workers be equally in jeopardy after one YIMBY bill too many?
I think it does though. I mean the interests of those who have a stake in the preservation of society and those whose interests lie in voting themselves ever larger benefits packages from the state. I think there’s a balance to be struck, and I think eventually those who have a stake in society will absolutely turn on people who do nothing especially when they do nothing and are proud of it.
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The rich are better at war than the poor. It's not all about manpower.
Women's deficit in raw physical strength isn't their only disadvantage when it comes to war (in particular insurgency). So the comparison doesn't really apply.
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This was actually considered a reverse problem during the decades when women voted more conservative than men, i.e. until the 70s, roughly. One argument against women's suffrage presented in France was that women might vote in a monarchy and the army, stacked with more republican-leaning men, might step in to prevent it.
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This might be uncharitable of me, but after extensive experience with 4chan I suspect that the greentext, at bottom, is just the common 4chan theme of "I wish I could just use force to get women to have sex with me", but dressed up in an intellectual argument.
Notice that the author jumps immediately to the idea of war and never thinks about a much less violent way in which men could potentially persuade women to shift their politics. Which would be to simply deny women male assistance unless they have shown that their politics are friendly to men. No giving or selling of goods or services to women if they seem to have anti-male politics. Of course, in the US that would be illegal for a business to do due to various laws and how those laws are interpreted in practice. My understanding is that it is technically legal for a business to refuse service due to a political disagreement, but in practice it is hard to imagine such a decision being ruled legal if it overwhelmingly affected women. But it is much easier for me to imagine men flouting those laws in mass than it is to imagine men literally going to war against the woman-coded side.
I doubt either would happen, though. I think that it is hard for most men outside of a small group of true misogynists to really truly and deeply hate a woman for her politics unless she directly screws you over in some way. If she is your family member, it is hard because she is family. If she is a lover, it is hard because she is a lover. If she is just some random woman, it is hard because women are not as intimidating as men and so they don't push the deep-seated buttons that make a man want to deeply resist the other side.
It is a strange situation because it is true that many women vote for policies that are objectively bad for me, even to the point of endangering my life. Such as soft-on-crime policies. And that is very bad. Yet despite the fact that I know several women who very much are hard-core Democratic supporters, it is hard for me to really feel personally angry at them for it. Instead I generally just feel that they are being naive or stupid, or that they are letting their views about things like abortion override other factors, and I feel that I want to persuade them, not coerce them, into looking at things differently.
I guess in some ways that is a good thing for the same reason as why it is a good thing to not rage at your family and friends over political disagreements. I don't know. Maybe I should be angry at them for voting for policies that I consider total shit. Not sure what that would help, though. Some man being openly angry at them would do the very opposite of moving them closer to my politics. And in any case, while in some cases these women are quite vehement at disagreeing with my politics, I would not say that they have ever done it in an angry way. Just in a vehement way. I have had a few women actually get openly angry at my politics in the past, but their number is relatively small compared to the number of all the women that I have disagreed with about politics. And I have had men get openly angry at my politics in the past too, as I myself also have with others.
This all reminds me of the famous quote, "Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy."
Don't get me wrong, I probably do have a breaking point. If like 90% of all women voted to literally open up all the prisons and then put a reparations tax on men for centuries of patriarchy, at that point I am pretty sure that I would just pull a reverse Lysistrata and stop fraternizing with the vast majority of them. There is such a thing as too much. I am not there at the moment though. And I am lucky enough that at least the women I am close with are either politically moderate like me or are hard-core Democrats but are capable of having a conversation with me about politics without yelling.
I am reminded a bit of that one Spike Lee movie where Chicago women said they’d strike from having sex with men until they stopped killing each other with guns. Never actually watched the movie and have no idea what a 4channer would think about it but did want to mention that yeah, the idea of gender relations and withholding crossing with politics isn’t exclusively a right wing thing.
That's a hilarious premise. It'd be as if a bunch of men decided to strike from sex (or marriage, perhaps) until the women stopped using makeup, working out, and dieting. Since the actions they're trying to prevent are the very same things that make striking more costly, you could expect the defections from the strike to happen immediately and overwhelmingly.
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Spike Lee wrote Lysistrata? Huh, so he did.
The Lee version doesn't work because too many women find violent criminals sexy. I expect the Ancient Greek version wouldn't work for similar reasons; the married women may not like war but the unmarried ones like warriors.
Ancient Greek women did not choose their sexual partners and the Ancient Greek mind literally could not comprehend the possibility; that’s why lysistrata was a satire.
Humm.....perhaps the high born didn't choose their husbands but a lot of women in the greek world certainly chose who they slept with. Divorce was also an accepted remedy for a bad marriage in athens. There is little known about romance and marriages in the lower classes of the time.
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I think you're close but it's not quite that far. To be sure, a lot of 4channers definitely hold that sentiment, but most probably hold a sentiment more like "I wish women would have sex with me, they won't, and as a result I think they deserve to suffer as punishment". They don't typically have a desire to rape anyone, but they feel a general bitterness and vengefulness.
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I think so. I would not say "I wish I could just use force to get women to have sex with me" is a common theme on 4chan. "Show tits or gtfo" or "women are stupid and/or weak and/or gay" are common themes. I have not visited /r9k/ enough, but extreme incel-ery was mocked on the more normie hobbyist boards.
You would think striking would be a logical step before more serious conflict. Yet, we see plenty of civil wars and domestic strife go hot without general strikes. It's not a necessary precursor to violence or coups.
I'm of two minds. I agree with you that violent conflict seems unlikely. If men have enough collective grievance and mass to try to strip power from the Women's Party, they probably can do so without violence. If they develop collective grievances and identity, but not enough mass, then that's just your average rebellion. Men kill other men over power and all is right with the world.
On the flipside, we're in uncharted waters. If universal suffrage in two-party systems universally approaches a 50/50 gender divide I'm not sure how that's supposed to work or remain stable. There is a limit to what policies people can vote for at the detriment to their spouses, such as reparations tax on men, and those without children/spouses don't create long-lasting dynasties. But of the culture war stuff where the divide is becoming most prevalent?
On the topic of war, what about a foreign war? If the Women's Party decides war is in the nation's interest they are sending the Men's Party to fight it. If the Men's Party doesn't want to fight it, then I don't see how that doesn't negate the legitimacy of the state. If the Women's Party identifies this problem, and thus never responds to conflict without the Men's Party approval, that similarly seems to call into question their legitimacy to rule.
Same.
It's an interesting trend. A gender divided party system seems unstable and people should probably worry about it. I guess one possibility is powerful women rule over men backed by T-3000 terminators and a matriarchy that provides women with government sponsored AI husbandos.
I don't see that happening without a large number of tech savvy simps making them, there simply isn't a high enough quantity of women with the capabilities (software engineering, hardware/weapons engineering, and manufacturing) to ever make that a reality.
Plenty of 'women' engineers with said capabilities. once the Chinese make AI waifus it'll be a short step before AI husbandos. And outside of reproduction women dont actually need a husband for anything other than carrying heavy stuff and being socially inclined to act first in dangerous scenarios. If the T1000 skeleton does all the actual mechanical work, why can't I just shove that in a Christina Henricks suit instead of Arnold? Just swap the genital unit on demand.
they said Colt made
peoplemen equal. There were some mass shootings by women, and usually they go with less victims and lower killed/wounded ratio (e.g. this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_headquarters_shooting ) even despite women being very competetive with men in sport shootingi have impression that they are too heavy on hedonism (e.g. videogames)
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In my experience, those 'women' are some of the most misogynistic people I've ever encountered.
please elaborate
Many MtF trans have a deep seated hatred of biological women, and many even see themselves as superior to actual women
The MtF I know are either self-loathing autogynephiliacs transposing a woman are wonderful effect back onto themselves and thus both desire and loathe natal women INTENSELY, or they are mentally injured (usually raped) self loathing depressives whose bodily mutilation are an attempt at deautonomizing their body.
Healthy autogynephiliac men shave and diet to become femboys, healthy gender fluid people just become transvestites. MtF is plain fetishism and narcissism wrapped in a +50 to Oppression skin.
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Hmm I'm skeptical that there's some sort of hard-coded difference that makes it hard to hate women. I have plenty of anger at women, in fact find it much easier to be angry at them than men, and I'm not a "hardcore misogynist."
Different people have different ways of being in the world and relating to emotions. I'm convinced that proportionally, the current rising generation of men will be much more predisposed to hating women, given how anti-male our society currently is.
That might mean that on some level, you actually respect women on average more than I do. If I prefer to think that women are stupid and naive when they disagree with me, and I find it hard to get angry at them for their politics, perhaps that means I am looking at them as if they were children.
To be fair, I also intellectually do not respect the overwhelming majority of men, and there is a small handful of women whose intelligence I actually do respect.
Still, food for thought.
There’s certainly something to this.
I’m certain some percentage of people on the acquaintance level with me assume I’m a bit misogynist, but no one who knows me even modestly well thinks that.
Although it depends on your perspective, I’ve always been “successful” with women; at this point I’ve been in a good marriage with children for several years and before I was married my had a string of long and generally healthy relationships which generally ended due to outside life circumstances. I have a very satisfying and active sex life and I have since I was a teenager.
I’m not handsome at all, just somewhat tall and very strong and muscular.
I also have a lot of women in my family which I have strong and loving relationships, having many sisters, aunts, cousins, grandmothers, etc…
my parents are still alive, still married, and still in love. I grew up seeing them be kind and loving to each other despite sometimes trying circumstances and very different personalities.
Why do I bring all this up? What does this have to do with anything?
Because despite all that I wrote above, to the women (and men) that occupy maybe the furthest 20-25% of the Feminist memeplex, I’m still “incel-coded” and always will be.
It’s not my politics, I’ve long mastered “hiding my power level” in public as it’s basically mandatory in my line of work and community.
It’s likely 100% how I talk to women, especially in the workplace as my coworkers are often 50% or more female.
I talk to them like they are normal human beings; not men, mind you, as I’m very aware of the differences, but just normal fallible people. The “women are wonderful” effect is simply not active in my brain. I’m incredibly familiar with women and their experiences, and familiarity breeds contempt. I have exactly zero issue criticizing women for poor choices or behaviors, even in public. I’m not intimidated in the least by women or femininity, and that can easily read as misogyny for those who either are motivated to default to that view or lack the intuition to understand what makes me tick.
In my career I’ve actually mentored a lot of women who have gone on to do well for themselves. Part of the process is frank criticism of their work, which many are not used to before they meet me. Most women realize quickly I’m trying to help them and not shit all over them, and that I am actually very fond of women in general. The exceptions tend to be, almost without fail, deep feminist types who are primed to hear any criticism as woman hatred.
The most notable exception was a very privileged young black woman who was clearly very intelligent but intensely arrogant. I think she thought because we shared a skin tone and roughly the same level of verbal intelligence she could avoid criticism, and she was wrong. She blew up at me in narcissistic rage one day, and I mostly avoided her from then on and went back to cultivating talent elsewhere until she transferred to another job and then quit.
She works in publishing in Brooklyn now.
I’m not sure who said it but I’ve always found this amusing; “A misogynist is just a person who hates women as much as women do.”
I've generally seen it attributed to H. L. Mencken:
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Elections aren’t proxies for war. They’re a way to pick a government. Maybe they’re the best way, maybe they aren’t, but they are a way to pick a government and not a replacement for war, although some people argue that they sometimes substitute for civil wars.
Perhaps 'war' overstates it, but they're certainly a replacement for intra-tribal squabbles were two members of the tribe and their retainers battle for the leadership position.
Like how chimps do it.
You can make a case that elections replace a certain amount of civil wars and clan feuding, but I’m unconvinced- more likely, countries which are capable of coordinating elections are capable of suppressing clan feuding and not having civil wars.
What’s simply not true is that the main replacement for elections would be to have a civil war/clan feud every time we need a new government. Monarchies mostly manage, theocracies do too, dictatorships get by. And some sort of monarchy-theocracy with dictatorial characteristics is the historical norm for large-state government. You can run that without elections, there are entirely separate possible coordination mechanisms for elite consensus.
One could argue that absolute monarchy-theocracy was also historically a “proxy for war”, precisely because the masses lacked the capacity to commit large-scale violence at the time.
The ownership of weapons and the skill of warfighting was restricted to a warrior-elite class, so a simple count of ballots from the masses would be useless as a measure for each side’s strength. Instead, war was avoided (sometimes) by each member of the warrior-elite taking whatever territory he could hold by himself, through force of arms or cunning diplomacy. The franchise didn’t have to exist as a proxy conflict to prevent a war of all against all, because hardly any were capable of waging it. Instead, the elite wrangled amongst themselves to signal their strength and deter invaders—often unsuccessfully, in which case, vae victis.
This system became unsustainable once fielding giant armies of commoners via peasant levies became the norm. Suddenly, the capacity for waging war was proportional to the number of men one could conscript. Thus was the power of the old warrior-elite undone, and thus did democracy become war by other means.
Or so some people say.
I am no expert in this period but that is my understanding as well. The stereotypical Middle Ages nobility with its kings, lords, and knights basically grew out of various warlord-led tribes that roamed around Europe fighting each other during and after the collapse of the Roman Empire. I do not know how much actual genetic descent the average noble of, say, 1200 AD, would have had from a successful warrior of 600 AD, but in any case it was the same sort of principle across the connecting centuries. Feudalism was partly based on the fact that almost no number of peasants could realistically consistently defeat a even a small army of nobles and their retinue. Partly this was caused by the limited military technology of the time and how expensive it was to obtain the good stuff. Partly it was caused by the fact that the nobles and their retinues could spend a lot of their time practicing war-related skills.
Despite ostensible connections of blood, culture, and religion between noble and peasant, if push came to shove the reality was that each group of nobles was basically a warlord gang camped in the middle of and exploiting a certain territory filled with productive peasants. Like Sparta, but probably a bit less brutal I would imagine. Of course it was not all fun and games for the lords. Much as during certain periods in ancient Greece and Rome, the flip side of the benefits that the nobles had was that the very core essence of their lives underneath everything else was that potentially, at any moment, they would need to go risk those lives fighting either against other bands of nobles or against a peasant rebellion. In that they were significantly different from modern elites, who virtually never have to personally risk battle.
The fact that modern elites can convince large groups of commoners to fight on their behalf probably would not have shocked a feudal lord. Similar things sometimes happened back then, too. But the fact that modern elites can do it without ever risking battle themselves may have been a bit surprising to feudal lords, even if it probably would not have been surprising to some of the Roman Empire's leaders (though far from all, since a very large number of Roman Emperors personally commanded armies).
Roman law didn't allow anyone to run for any political office without spending ten years in the army, which in practice would mean actually seeing combat. And even after that, the higher offices were generally considered successful when they involved winning battles; consuls and praetors seemed to see their roles as elected generals even if there's other responsibilities.
By the imperial period the principle of 'legitimacy comes from controlling the troops' was well established; that's how the republic ended. Roman emperors who didn't personally command troops had short reigns and lives.
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The 'solution' to keeping your more-capable-of-violence group A under control is to keep them incapable of coordinating violence. And if possible the Group B's should keep a smallish sub-population of Group A that are loyal to Group B for whatever reason.
Thus if Group A is capable of immense violence, but they can't coordinate around shared goals or under a unified leader who can direct them against the most high-value targets, then they'll probably retain the status quo, especially if the conditions aren't too intolerable, even if it becomes increasingly obvious that Group B is incapable of preventing a violent incursion if one were to occur.
Especially with technological advances, where 3 guys in a tank are more powerful than 50 guys with rifles. Just make sure that the Group A guys in the tank are loyal to Group B!
So yeah, Group B can dominate so long as they can keep a large-scale physical confrontation off the table.
Now think about how atomized young men have become, with most of their 'friendships' being online.
Also think about how ANY male-oriented group or activity (Boy Scouts, anyone?) gets infiltrated and forced to allow in females, or crippled to a shadow of its former self.
Same for any sort of right-wing group that might actually be able to form a formidable enough front to enact serious violence if they wanted (Proud Boys?)
It COULD be interpreted as PRECISELY what the current society does. Keeps males from organizing around their capacity for violence by giving them endless distractions and disrupting any person who might be able to rally a significant number of disaffected-but-physically-capable men to his cause.
In which case, the only outlet these males would have is individual acts of semi-random violence against random members of the population. Can we say we're seeing more of that, these days?
See my thoughts here.
My basic thesis:
Unmarried women are a potent political force, but an incompetent military/martial one. If your political coalition is dependent on tons of addled females voting for them to maintain its support, it is ALSO dependent on NEVER allowing the other side to bring organized violence against them since those same females would fold instantly.
So expect a LOT of political capital to be expended on efforts to keep males from coordinating enough to actually fight back in any meaningful way.
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It's a poor analysis, as you say, because elections are not "proxies for war." Democracy wasn't invented as an alternative to war, and obviously democracies have not resulted in the end of war. Minorities having disproportionate electoral power is a problem in a lot of electoral systems; we've debated this here quite a lot. But the 4chan argument is just another iteration of the very unsophisticated premise we see repeated here all the time: "Women are weaker than men, therefore men should control women."
The increasing hostility between the sexes is certainly a problem, but to believe that the solution is for women to accept a subordinate role without political autonomy requires believing either (a) that women could be persuaded to accept this or (b) persuading men to revert to treating women as property. If we had an apocalypse or something it would undoubtedly be a pretty rough time for women (which is why @KulakRevolt is so popular with certain types of people), but short of that, you aren't going to persuade most men, and certainly not most women, that giving women rights was a mistake.
I don't foresee the South Korean government deciding that the solution to plummeting birth rates is to take away women's voting rights or institute some sort of YA dystopian regime. It's certainly not going to happen here. I think all the trads and redpillers predicting some sort of End of Feminism are wishcasting, and they are just as ridiculous as the feminists gloomcasting in the other direction by calling every pushback against feminism an attempt to implement the Handmaid's Tale.
It's generally true though that whenever civil wars are terminated through compromise and mutual agreement, it always entails armed groups disarming themselves, renouncing political violence and transforming into political parties, under the strict understanding that the other side will not try dissolving these parties through other means. So I think the analysis does have some legs to stand on in that respect.
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Uh, the premise I usually see is pointing out the EVOLUTIONARY reasons women are weaker than men, and how that has massive implications about things like the ability to engage in abstract reasoning, to commit to true beliefs vs socially popular beliefs, and to make self-sacrificing decisions rather than those that provide short term personal benefits.
Which is more sophisticated than the idea that because Cave MEN could overpower Cave WOMEN that's why men should be in control.
Where are you seeing that argument promulgated around here?
My friend, Afghanistan is literally doing option (b) as we speak. All it took was the removal of the U.S. military to reassert the general status quo that women can't do much to unseat.
To think that it requires an apocalypse is a bit hyperbolic.
Afghani women were never liberated enough for it to matter, no matter what the US-backed government liked to pretend. They’re just taking the mask off.
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I don't actually see "Evolutionary psychology says women are irrational and neurotic and conformist and maybe not even actually sentient* so they shouldn't have rights" as being a lot more sophisticated than "Cave men stronger than cave women, therefore they shouldn't have rights."
Afghanistan has been Islamist for a long time, so the reversion under Taliban rule is not much of a change. Also, notably, this is not happening because men were feeling increasingly dissatisfied with the cultural domination of women or a more general hostility between the sexes.
Yes, I do think it would take something like an apocalypse (or perhaps an Islamist or Christian Dominionist revolution, which is maybe only a little less likely) for that to happen here.
* Yes, an argument that has been made here
Its certainly more valid when examined critically.
Especially when the best science and studies we can muster on the topic indicate that yeah, women are more neurotic, much more conformist, and have less overall awareness of or acceptance of opinions other than their own. This isn't a claim about any specific women, but its the sort of thing we'd look at when determining what sort of factors make the sexes different.
So if the reasons for that AREN'T evolutionary to some large degree, from whence do they come?
The argument also has to account for the fact that men have been the primary political and military leaders for literal millennia, and almost NO societies anywhere in history were governed by females.
And how that might impact our culture and social norms.
The U.S. didn't recognize the right of women to vote for the majority of its history. Most of the pro-female policy changes in this country were enacted post-WWII, and mostly since the '60's.
Surely it would only take like 1 generation at most to revert back, if there were an organized movement for it?
I've said before that I think evpsych is broadly, generally correct about a lot of things, but I also think it's frequently overfitted to a particular answer that someone wants (e.g., "Why women shouldn't be allowed to vote"). Even if we accept that women are farther on the bell curve towards the neurotic and conformist axes, that's not enough to convince me they are unfit to make political decisions or have personal autonomy.
Sure, but also not really a convincing argument. We didn't have democracy for literal millennia, therefore democracy is bad! (Insert all the yeschad.jpgs you like.) More seriously, political power today is not the same as political power in an era of tyrants and might makes right being the only governing philosophy.
This is not to say I believe in "government by females." But you have to do more than spin some evpsych arguments to convince me that Dread Jim or Islam is Right About Women.
Perhaps, but as we've seen, it's a lot harder to remove a right than to grant one. I don't see any movement that doesn't involve what would essentially be some sort of coup or radical (probably violent) transformation of our political system stripping away anyone's voting rights. So "Could we undergo a Cultural Revolution" or the equivalent? Yes, but that seems much worse to me than women being allowed to vote.
I’ll steelman this.
When you’re talking about large classes of people, you have to make generalizations to draw an arbitrary line somewhere. We already do this, uncontroversially, about voting- you can, if you want to, go out and find a sixteen year old with 18+ levels of maturity. It’ll take you maybe a couple of days.
The law doesn’t care because regulating the rights and duties of different classes of people is a task for which it is of necessity a blunt instrument.
So you have the propositions 1) women are much more neurotic and conformist than men(I’ll add risk aversion because no one disputes that) 2) very neurotic, conformist, and risk averse people should not be allowed to vote 3) women should not be allowed to vote.
The disconnect isn’t actually at 2->3. It’s at 1->2. And if we do agree that sufficiently neurotic, conformist, and risk averse people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, then the most obvious question becomes ‘where is the threshold and how far is the median woman from it’. If the median woman is on the other side such that only a minority would be able to vote in the presence of an objective test for neuroticism, conformity, and risk aversion, then it is no more unjust to categorically deny women the vote than it is to categorically deny teenagers the vote- our hypothetical objective test doesn’t exist, can’t exist, and would probably be cost prohibitive if it did exist.
Steelman over- to be clear, I think at that point you’re arguing for the average woman being mentally ill, at least if you consider this a strong enough argument to stand on its own. At that point you’re arguing for women’s independence to be rolled back in toto, with things like guardianship laws. To be clear, my opposition to women’s suffrage stems from old-school views on gender roles and family in society, similar to the original anti-suffragettes. But I would sign on to a much weaker form of the above as a minor supporting argument; making decisions about groups as a class is a normal way to govern society, and it’s not normally seen as unjust.
I like the thought you’ve started but I don’t think you’ve really thought it through - or else have a deeply skewed and inaccurate view of where women are on the scale and the underlying distribution.
What you describe has an entire math background. For example, it’s highly related to logistic regression and analysis of classification/cutoff rules. Basically any time you make a cutoff, you produce a square with false positives, false negatives, etc. Analysis of whether this array of outcomes, mathematically fixed based on the underlying distribution as well as the cutoff point itself (you can also slide the cutoff point around a little bit in numerical contexts but gender spectrum stuff aside we can’t here) relies on some sort of subjective judgement about if the trade off is acceptable or not (or, considering alternative trade offs). In this context, a false positive might be “we took away the vote when really it would have been fine”, you get the idea. When your only choice of cutoff is “you are a man or woman” the numbers don’t produce anything other than a horror story for accuracy. That’s just the math of the situation. When your cutoff is numeric like age, you can actually produce a set of outcomes that are morally acceptable and practically feasible.
All this to say that again, unless you have some deeply disturbed and unrealistic idea about the actual distribution of eg female neuroticism, or simply don’t care about unnecessarily disenfranchising half the population, this idea is completely untenable. Especially if we consider the right to some degree of say in governance to be a human right of thinking people, which I do.
Well yeah, that's what the second to last paragraph was about. I understand algebra and statistics on a basic level but I lack the ability to truly model this, so I didn't try. Is the difference between the average(adult) man and woman similar to the difference between the average 16 year old and the average adult? It probably isn't that big- women don't on the whole seem to be as bad at managing their own lives as teenagers are. As I got to, arguing that the average woman is incapable of voting isn't actually an argument for American gender roles in 1910; that wasn't the argument in use against women's suffrage at the time, and American law and gender roles at the time gave women more independence than that attitude would suggest(which would be norms more similar to Saudi Arabia before the recent liberalization). Factually Iran gives women's suffrage while maintaining guardianship laws(don't know much about how they work out in practice).
Instead a western argument against women's suffrage has, of necessity, to be rooted in arguments about how individuals should interface with society- either as members of a household or on their own. And enfranchising landless males seems like it set the anti-suffragette position up for defeat on the grounds of household voting being good, except possibly for heavy reliance on gender roles. Which is what we lost on.
Being genuinely reactionary, the issue with expansion of the franchise dates back to the introduction of universal male suffrage, which made truly universal suffrage inevitable.
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Yet not the argument made by your interlocutor. Isn’t charity something that is in the rules here?
Try harder.
I was not claiming either @faceh or @doglatine made that argument. I was referring to the "4chan greentext" @doglatine originally cited, and the arguments @faceh referred to, when @faceh asked me what arguments I have seen.
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Broadly agree with all of the above, but I think it's a bit simplistic to suggest that the only way for Group A types to utilise their advantage in violence is to take over the government and then push for the wholesale disenfranchisement of Group B. Consider the massive and disproportionate amount of power wielded by Islamists in the West over things like blasphemy because of the willingness of a small percentage of their number to commit acts of violence when they perceive their religion to be insulted (I'm sure other similar groups come to mind). Willingness and ability to commit violence can be a political superpower when wielded in the right ways, such as in contexts that allow governments to save face by symbolically punishing the most violent elements while cutting deals with non-violent 'moderates'.
I don't think the same dynamics would work wrt to men and women, though. IMO, a lot of the strategy of placating Muslim extremists originates not from fear of violence (if the authorities really wanted to crush violent Islamists, they could) but fear of offending modern liberal sensibilities and being called racist. The equivalent would be men launching violent attacks on feminists and the government deciding they have to cut deals with the less violent elements of the manosphere. How would that work? When an incel occasionally murders a bunch of women, they are universally reviled (and every other anti-feminist is implied to be an existential threat because of them). There is nothing the government's going to offer "men" as a group to try to keep a lid on anti-women violence. I think an actual violent redpill movement would be utterly crushed and the "moderate" faction would receive zero sympathy.
Also, no group of men is actually going to embark on an organized and widespread campaign of political violence because they think women have too much power.
I think the special status of Islam in the West is only partially explained by concerns of cultural sensitivity. No other religion or faith group has the same degree of coddling, and I find it hard to see any explanation other than the fact that Islamists are willing to commit violence if they feel their religion has been besmirched (see relevant Onion image.). Similarly, when it comes to racial issues, the groups that get the greatest degree of toleration and indulgence from the state are those that are most willing and able to take to the streets and engage in civil disorder.
This is not because Western governments are supportive or tolerant of civil disorder - quite the opposite. There is a keen (if sometimes sublimated) awareness in Western governments of their weakness when it comes to combating internal disorder. Simply put, we no longer have the state capacity to engage in large scale reprisal violence against citizens, even disobedient ones. The only reason this hasn't led to the collapse of governments is that this same decline in state capacity for violence has been mirrored by a reluctance among the wider population to engage in large-scale civil disobedience. In this regard, I disagree with your claim that Western states could really crush even the violent minority of Islamists if they wanted to; policies like collective punishment, reprisal violence, mass deportation, and so on are utterly anathema to the liberal sensibilities of both the modern state and its officers. Even if it were in the interests of the state and its officers to enact such measures, we are incapable of doing so. Consequently, minority groups that have the persistent ability to commit violence against the state must be bought off by any means necessary, while more widespread currents of disorder must be preemptively quashed, because their manifestation would be fatal to the collective game of make-believe that underwrites state power.
I should also clarify that I think the real risks of a persistent gender imbalance in politics don't take the form of violence directed specifically against women or aimed against women's influence in politics. The more plausible scenario of concern is one in which a large majority of men, especially young men, feel alienated by political outcomes and take matters into their own hands - a politics of gender, but not about gender. In such circumstances, the underlying gender gap in political outlook would be an implicit rather than explicit consideration, motivating young men to violently pursue political ends that on an object-level have nothing to do with masculinity or femininity.
At risk of going off topic, I think the treatment of Islam has more to do with projection than fear or enforced groupthink. While I’m not really a “right side of history” person and I think the idea is dumb, I do think that Islam is on a similar trajectory as Christianity in the sense that for a while similar images would produce violence - but that was a few hundred years ago perhaps. So eventually there will be more tolerance and less radical extremism, but a lot of people in the West think they are already there or have somehow hoped it into existence.
I’m not totally confident however because there are some quirks of Islam that make it unique. Not only the Sunni-Shia split but also the nature of religious thought and organization as well as things like a ban on artistic representation. It still shocks me that Islamic countries basically didn’t even have theatre which most every other culture does have in some form!
Christian religious violence in the modern and early modern era was mostly state sanctioned. There really is a big difference between Christianity and Islam in terms of proclivity towards non-state violence.
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Okay, good clarification. I largely agree with this. However, I think the unwillingness to deal with violent Islamists has gone hand in hand with an unwillingness to be "racist." Muslims quickly figured out that they could get away with things that normal citizens could not.
As for a movement of seething, dissatisfied young men becoming radicalized - possible, I guess. Discontented young men are always a recipe for instability, but for all the raging about feminism from the manosphere, I don't actually think Western men are that disadvantaged or that hard up.
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