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True. Luckily for them it's an evolutionarily novel environment and the most frustrated men are basically poisoned by fast food and the internet.
Those men are disappearing into video games and porn and, even if they weren't, simply don't have the psychological and physical profile for rebellion (incels are well overrepresented in traits like depression and low internal locus of control).
There ARE roving bands of men (or close enough) but that just seems to be due to lax law enforcement (and, tbh, I doubt low-IQ criminals are as sexually frustrated. From what I know it's the opposite; they tend to have higher partner counts).
Louise Perry, who has also written a book attacking liberal feminism and the sexual revolution. In my head women like her and Emba are of a class.
All of this is true. And yet dissent is not manifesting in any sort of constructive alternative. Young men are unhappy, they either buy into the prog line in some way or dig into a variety of reactionary content creators playing whack-a-mole with the censors. Women are unhappy, they either get increasingly desperate talks on how misogyny is still the problem or maybe they read works like Emba's and Perry's that offer critique but no solution. Anything that even looks vaguely constructive is written off as misogynist or unviable.
It's a form of "feminist realism": complaining about capitalism means nothing if no one can actually conceive of or execute a replacement vision. Socialists can talk all they want about the system being this close to collapse, it clings on.
"Incels" existed in every generation and always have, but they're not really who I'm talking about. There are a lot of more average men who are now falling through the cracks and failing to start, who now often get clumped in with the actual incels (I don't pay much attention to incel vocabulary, but I suppose the actual incels I'm talking about would be what they call "trucels"). They're distinctly aware that something is wrong, and there's a lot of anger motivating them too. They're already a significant political force in Korea and were widely considered to have played a key role in their recent elections, for instance. Furthermore, they don't actually need to have the ability or inclination to rebel - their existence as a large group means that the individuals who actually do rebel or work against the system can count on them as allies in exchange for giving them some of what they want. The "incels" in Korea didn't rebel - but they (supposedly) won the election for the candidate who promised to give them some of what they want.
On the other hand, I agree that the roving bands of men are distinct from this phenomenon - in my view those are the nascent warbands that show up on the periphery of dying empires very consistently throughout history.
She doesn't seem like she has a particularly interesting perspective from what I've seen here, but if you have an actual good article I can read without giving her money I'd be interested.
"It's true that the warning lights are on and weird noises are coming from the engine, but the engine hasn't actually stopped so there's no problem." These are the early warning signs of impending trouble, and those constructive alternatives are largely crushed in their formative stages because of the threat they represent to the current elite and social order. While a bunch of dudes noticing that the official messaging in their culture regarding women is all completely false and makes you less successful if you listen to and internalise it isn't really a big problem by itself, there's an idea floating around rationalist circles that makes the issue a bit clearer - that lies are contagious. Once the ostensibly prosocial illusions regarding women evaporate, the people who notice this are going to start seeing all the other little lies and deceptions that modern industrial western societies rely on, and when those lies are gone we're going to be in for some very interesting times. We're now seeing reports from school teachers that they have to stage special interventions because boys are sharing Andrew Tate content - https://www.newsweek.com/andrew-tate-teacher-school-misogyny-1783709 Boys are increasingly failing to respect or respond to conventional messaging, and political polarisation between them and girls is increasing.
Why include the "looks" qualifier? Any constructive or positive response to the system is labelled as misogynist and squashed by the arms of the Cathedral, and this will continue until well after the point at which people stop letting "misogynist" as a slur have any impact on them or their behaviour. The system may be clinging on, but at the same time my contention is not that it is close to collapse - it is collapsing around us as we speak, right now.
That sounds like a description of modern incels (obviously we don't care that much about the floor of men who'd just never reproduce, we care that the number seems to be growing....)
But let's say we mean some people who haven't totally blackpilled themselves. Sure. It's a more viable demographic. But I wonder to what degree they aren't subject to similar problems like obesity. After all, what did they fail to start? School sports and all those other physical virtues?
I read her book, and I more or less agree tbh
No, I think you're thinking of the late USSR or Impeprial China and I'm thinking about a random awful African country.
Like, both have problems. But one collapsed and was replaced by a new, perhaps more viable model. The other just continues to dwell (or spiral) in a low-level equilibrium with no end in sight.
That's how I see it. Bad regimes and systems can persist for a long time without a real counter. When we're talking about some of the richest and most mature democracies with ever increasing government-corporate control of the digital infrastructure and their visible testing of means of curbing revolt (e.g. the attack against the bank accounts of trucker protestors)...
The public is way too divided and been trained to both hate each other and feel fatalist about a lot of this. They've already proven that plenty of them are for authoritarian tactics so long as it's framed correctly.
This is without even getting into more speculative (though unfortunately less speculative every day) uses of autonomous tech to put down prole revolts without even depending on the usual "class traitors" that make up the thin blue line.
The psychological fragility and neuroticism of the average leftist activist or booster doesn't mean the system is won't strike back. Quite the opposite
The system has its problems yes, but it uses panics like Andrew Tate to justify more control.
You point out that they're holding interventions with teenage boys. I'd note that they moved to curtail his influence online and he's literally on trial right now... In the meantime sixty different "experts" are probably calling for increased intervention against "misinformation" and "radicalism" and the social media sites are probably tuning their systems (we now know they have a lot of coordination with the government) to make sure it never happens again.
To emphasize the totality and...arbitrariness? A better word is escaping me, but the image that comes to mind is a scared cop shooting anything that moves
Correct. That the percentage is increasing is a cause for concern due to what it augurs for the future.
It's my contention that the structures and mores of society in the past allowed for a not-insignificant portion of men to flourish and otherwise achieve when they would not in the absence of those structures. We've destroyed those structures and actively stamp out any effort to replace them, which means that a bunch of men who could have grown and developed into productive, useful members of society simply have not.
The modern west is far closer to the USSR or Imperial China than a random awful African country. When your society is an empire there is a qualitative difference between it and smaller, less complex states. The same government that you see putting down prole revolts is increasingly fragile and failing, and I do not think that it will maintain that grip forever. What cannot be sustained will not be - and western imperial governments are currently unsustainable.
That has never been my contention - the system will actually strike back and with less subtlety and more force as it begins to fail. That's another one of those reliable indicators of imperial decline.
I agree that the government is going to crack down on things like this, but I don't think they're actually going to succeed at it. The actors in the system don't understand the position they're in and repeatedly act in ways that strengthen and bolster their opposition. A strong, secure government doesn't need to do this - but that's not what we have. Your metaphor for a scared cop is actually pretty good in my opinion, and I think that's an accurate perception... but at the same time this scared cop has a legitimate reason to be scared, even if he can't quite understand why.
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