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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32403 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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But why are the "basement dwelling gamur incels" among the most reviled subgroups in the culture war? Is it simply because they spew the most bile against every 'vulnerable' demographic (women, minorities, LGBTs) online?

The single oldest work of Western Literature is The Epic of Gilgamesh, "He Who Surpassed All Other Kings," "He Who Looked into the Abyss." Spoiler Alert! The wild man Enkidu is sent by the gods to chasten Gilgamesh for his overbearing ways, a fellow great hero to limit Gilgamesh and to be his companion. But Enkidu is wild and uncivilized after his creation, he uproots traps and robs farms. The Priestess Shamtat goes to Enkidu, and they make love for seven days and seven nights, and after that Enkidu is ready for civilization, he is alienated from his old friends among the beasts and the birds and must become a civilized man and go into town. Or it might take two weeks, depending on the tablets translated from

In a nutshell, the differences between the two episodes reflect different stages of Enkidu's transition from an animal to a human being. The discovery allows us to study this transition in more detail: What does it mean to become human? What steps lead from a life among the animals to a full human consciousness? What did humanity entail for the ancient Babylonians?

The first time Shamhat invites Enkidu to come to Uruk she describes Gilgamesh as superb in strength and horned like a bull. Enkidu readily accepts her invitation, saying that he will come to Uruk – but only to challenge Gilgamesh and usurp his power. “I shall change the order of things”, he declares. “The one born in the wild is mighty, he has strength.” Though Enkidu has learned to plan and speak like a human being, his way of thinking is still very much that of a wild animal: he immediately sees Gilgamesh as an alpha male, a rival bull to be defeated. The only thing that matters to him at this point is strength and domination.

But the second time Shamhat invites him to Uruk, after they have had sex for yet another week, he sees things differently. Shamhat says that she will lead him to the temple, home of Anu, the god of heaven. Rather than change the order of things, Enkidu is to find a place for himself in society: “Where men are engaged in labours of skill, you, too, like a true man, will make a place for yourself.” Enkidu, now wiser after a second bout of civilizing sex, is ready to accept this invitation. “He heard her words, he consented to what she said: a woman's counsel struck home in his heart.” He has understood the value of urban life, accepting the fact that human society is not all about domination and strength, but also about cooperation and skill. Each human being is part of a larger social fabric, where everyone must find their own place.

The incel is both threat and symbol of society's failure to civilize its men. Without a Shamtat, a sacred prostitute, to civilize them, men will run wild, they will remain with the wild playmates of their youth. Shamtat, of course, is ordered to take on this task, while she is typically portrayed as doing so voluntarily she does not do so of her own agency. Of course, other than the hair and the dirt, the reader also probably pictures Enkidu as being pretty hot, a muscled wild-man of the mountains, does the sacrificial task of Shamtat take on a different erotic charge if Enkidu is pasty and obese? It's a strange contradiction in terms, caused by a confusion in the discourse around incels which is the natural result of the terminology being unclear.

Cribbed from my own prior Reddit comment:

Taking the plain meaning "involuntarily celibate" is more like "unemployed" than it is like "disabled." Unemployed is defined as "someone who doesn't have a job but is seeking one," while disabled is defined (per social security) as "a person with a disability must have a severe disability (or combination of disabilities) that has lasted, or is expected to last, at least 12 months or result in death, and which prevents working at a substantial gainful activity." Many/most people are unemployed at some periods in their lives, few people are disabled at some point in their lives (leaving aside childhood and old age, when everyone is disabled from getting a job and no one can/should get laid).

We could distinguish there, between the "unemployed" incel and the "disabled" incel. Almost every man goes through periods when he is looking for sex and can't get it, very few young men are permanently physically incapable of getting laid. We could further distinguish among the unemployed incels the three general types of unemployment in Econ 101: Frictional, Cyclical, Structural. Virtually every man has periods of Frictional celibacy, between girlfriends or hook ups or busy at work or on a long term sojourn somewhere not amenable to casual sex. Obviously there's not a "business cycle" to sex, but we could substitute that for the lifecycle of the man himself, almost all men are ready and willing to have sex long before they are able to obtain it, and most are willing to have sex long after they are too old to interest most women. Those two categories are unimportant to us, they may participate in incel discourse for a time but ultimately they'll get their "fair share" of sex over a lifetime. It's the third group, Structural Incels, we should worry about. The Structurally Unemployed are those whose skills have been made redundant by industrial changes and reorganizations. Your coal miners or carriage makers. People who will never get laid with the skills they have. The solution to that is always training and help changing careers. Some people don't want to train and they don't want to change careers, well tough luck then. Sitting around whining you should have a bigger paycheck because you are the best carriage maker in ten counties, and failing to acknowledge that no one buys carriages!, is a bridge to nowhere.

I think we tend to conflate a bunch of different phenomena under the same incel heading. Some of this is rhetorical, politically active incels themselves conflate themselves with the disabled constantly when we'd probably label a lot of them somewhere in the unemployed category. But we all know somebody who can't get laid, and it is easy to be scared that they are or aren't on the slide into inceldom, permanent exile from civilization.

very few young men are permanently physically incapable of getting laid.

Well, possibly up to 10-20% of the population, but really impossible to find out.. Quality of the research being done is abysmal.

And sure, it's not 'permanent' only theoretically permanent, yet..

Is the hyperlink of something you claim "Impossible to find out" a 404 on purpose as some meta-joke about knowledge? Or is the link just fucked up?

Unintentional but apt meta-joke. The quality of research on porn addiction is abysmal, for something that potentionally affects tens of millions of people, there's like 20 people working primarily on it.

On my TODO list one of the items is writing an email to a bunch of researchers who flubbed their paper on it in what they did wrong and what they need to do to truly detect abstinence symptoms.

Sitting around whining you should have a bigger paycheck because you are the best carriage maker in ten counties, and failing to acknowledge that no one buys carriages!, is a bridge to nowhere.

Or a bridge to getting state subsidies. One could argue that carriage making is a traditional industry in which tourists may be interested in, so the government wanting to attract tourists, pays you to make carriages, and your unemployed friends to be carriage drivers. Tourists can see old-timey woodworkers, then take a ride in the previously finished product.

Your enire post is set in some Freemarketistan, in which the market with its pure economic logic, detemines winners and losers. But in actually existing capitalism, the state intervenes in various ways that help those who are unable or unwilling to provide what society values.

Sure, the state intervenes, but not easily. There's thousands of lawyers around the country who work at getting Social Security Disability Benefits for their clients. I've worked on those kinds of cases before. It is not as easy as you think to just reach out your hand and get a handout. There's a whole corpus of law and expertise devoted to determining what jobs a person is able to hold, and whether those jobs can make the necessary adjustments to allow the individual to work there, and if those jobs are available. Can this individual carry 50lbs? 15lbs? 5lbs? Can they walk a mile, a thousand yards, a hundred yards? How long can they sit/stand/walk before needing a break? How many days a week would they be unable to work? The government can dig into every aspect of your life at a hearing to determine if you'll get anything out of them, and half the time a lawsuit results. If there is any job you can do, you aren't getting disability benefits. If you lose your arm and can't work as a welder, you don't get money, you get told to go get a job manning the booth at a parking garage.

Which brings us back to our friends the incels. This is the debate we have over Incel vs Volcel, whether most incels could get laid if they wanted to fuck ugly women, or if they washed their hair, or whatever. The government, or society, has every right to interrogate if you are doing enough before giving you help.

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