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My understanding is that it can sometimes be dicey to cross-compare happiness rates across countries due to different cultural understandings of happiness.
There are also...some important differences between European and American culture and geography. Just as a couple examples: my understanding is that part of the criticism of the Sexual Revolution (in the US) is that it expanded the sexual marketplace considerably in distortionary ways. But one would expect that this would be less of a factor in Europe due to national and language barriers that don't exist to nearly the same degree in the States. One would also expect Americans to be much better at committing suicide – it is worth asking if the decrease in European suicide rates is due to better lifesaving technology, just as the decrease in US shooting deaths is partially due to better medical practices. Of course, it's much harder to save someone who has OD'd than it is to save someone who has shot themselves in the brainstem, so suicidal Americans are, all else being equal, probably going to be more successful.
Setting all that aside, though, my superficial understanding is that Europe has always been further along the slippery slope than the United States (at least for certain metrics valued by the RETVRN crowd). I remember reading about a conversation between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Dickens where the latter said that most British men weren't virgins on their wedding night (prostitution being widespread in England, or at least in major cities at the time). Poor Ralph (a transcendentalist who had had Puritan ethics hammered indelibly into his psyche) was shocked and appalled. It seems entirely plausible that
This hypothesis is entirely consistent with sexual liberation being bad or with it being good or with it being a null value - it simply suggests that major cultural changes would 1) cause distress, and 2) that society would adjust to them over time. I think that both of those seem intuitively true.
I think you're right. Part of it is that Europe is both less religious and much more dense than most of the US. So there's just a lot more nightclubs, discotechs, etc in Europe that make it suited for that sort of sexually libertine lifestyle. In rural or exurban US, you often have to drive a long distance just to get to one really shitty dive bar that closes early.
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As I mentioned in the post, I don't really put that much stock in self-reported happiness rates either. But they are routinely used to demonstrate the failure of feminism/liberalism/whatever, so it's worth checking whether they support that argument, even at face value. With regards to the possibility that the European suicide rate is distorted by Europeans being worse at killing themselves and advancing medical technology saving overdoses but not gunshot suicide victims, it seems to add an extra wrinkle. "Americans report being unhappier + they kill themselves more often" and "Europeans report being happier + they kill themselves increasingly less" is suggestive.
What 'do' you put your stock in then? You ask me how I rate my life satisfaction in the country I live and I give you an answer, you're telling me I'm an unreliable source on my own happiness?
I wouldn't use 'happiness' alone as the appropriate barometer for gauging the health and well-being of society at large, but that's a bit of a different question. Whether or not feminism/liberalism brings happiness to a large number of women is ultimately irrelevant if it comes at the expense of some other part of society. Declining demographics, lack of family formation, dysfunctional men being raised by single mothers, sending women off to war, bending other important norms to reduce everything to a woman's private advantage, etc.; none of these are worth the cost that has to be paid, for women's fickle and relative sense of short-term happiness. It leaves 'everybody' worse off.
Everything's a success by sufficiently low standards, and a failure by sufficiently high standards. If running through and enumerating the long list of problems doesn't suffice in convincing you there's something rotten about the way we practice and act out the lifestyles that bring us happiness, then the only thing left at that point is to dispute the standards you bring to bear. But my reflexive reaction is to evoke Jiddu Krishnamurti's axiom on this:
"It isn't a measure of health how well-adjusted someone can be to a profoundly sick society."
"More women than men have surviving descendants" is not necessarily the same thing as "more men than women reproduced." This doesn't really matter though, what matters is there's no good evidence in the modern, post-sexual revolution west for a minority of men monopolizing a majority of the women.
What's the evidence for it? As extensively discussed in the link I provided, it's not backed up by partner counts, it's not backed up by virginity rates, it's not backed up by STD rates.
For five years in a handful of big cities, sure.
Iran has a TFR of 1.7, is regularly roiled by massive anti-regime protests, and religious affiliation is sharply declining among the nation's youth. Not much of a start.
Even if you take this statistics at face value, the conclusion isn't borne out, which is the point.
Will be rendered a non-issue by the end of the century at the absolute latest, almost certainly sooner.
What is the argument for this being a bad thing that doesn't begin with the premise, "family formation is good."
Is there good evidence for the causal impact of single motherhood on male dysfunction?
This is a non-issue. Why should I or anyone else care?
I don't know what you have in mind here, so I can't answer.
So much conservative critique of modernity boils down to waving one's hands and shouting, "look how horrible everything is!" with the listener left to draw the conclusion that things would be less horrible if we were more conservative. When I try to quantify things I usually find that the horrible things are A) much less bad than they're painted to be B) have no causal relation to conservativeness or C) are only horrible if you assume the conclusion that conservatism is good.
Eh, I'm not sure you read that correctly.
Per the link I provided, historically it's been backed up by reproductive rates. Seems to me to be quite clear.
A documented case is a documented case. It's one of the things you're asking for, right? There you go... seems like you're trying to now move the goalpost.
Okay. And? That's unrelated to what you originally asked for. I don't know what this response is supposed to make me think in light of what I quoted.
And your ultimate conclusion is what? We have 'zero' data that's worth absolutely 'anything'? A hard sell if you ask me.
It's most certainly not a non-issue to those women who value their freedom and emancipation getting sent off to die for a narrow set of political interests. It's also quite hilarious that feminism's best argument for 'not' sending women off to war in bulk is the anti-feminist argument.
And so what should they be concerned 'with' in your view? The entire project of politics is about competing visions of society and the group trying to impose their way of life on the community. I think you're being quite disingenuous here, if you're actually suggesting that conservatives writ large should be able to look out the window and say to themselves "there's nothing else left that's worth improving, onto the next unspecified problem that has no tangible impact on the world in which we live." Because that's my takeaway from what you're saying right here:
Says you and only you. And tell me. Just how 'bad' does it have to get before you start paying attention to it? Because this kind of attitude only has you constantly putting out fires all over the place and never actually addressing the issue 'before it becomes' a problem. Society requires maintenance and upkeep, just like everything else. Civilization isn't spontaneously kicked up by mother nature every few hundred years.
I have no idea what this even means, or why "conservatives" should care.
And likewise, my previous riposte is applicable:
"It isn't a measure of health how well-adjusted someone can be to a profoundly sick society."
If, of the human population 8000 years ago, only 1 man has surviving descendants today for every 17 women, that doesn’t actually mean that 8000 years ago, only one man had children for every 17 women.
Sexual libertinism did not cause the collapse of the USSR. Nor did it cause the famines, the mass executions, or any of the other bad things that happened in Soviet Russia.
It means Iran’s reactionary dictatorship has completely failed to arrest the demographic decline or general secularization of the country.
The conclusion is that the data doesn’t support the thesis that the sexual Revolution was a bad thing.
We don’t have conscription in the west so anyone, male or female, who doesn’t want to die for a narrow set of political interests can just stay home.
Conservatives are entirely justified on rejecting the sexual Revolution based on their own conservative premises, but they have no real argument to convince anyone who doesn’t buy into those premises.
To simplify, the things conservatives hate about modern societ are either good or aren’t the fault of modernity/the sexual Revolution/liberalism/whatever.
I'm honestly scratching my head here and am wondering how you strangely seem to admit the point I'm making with simultaneously denying it's significance. I think there's some profound illogic going on here.
No single factor explanation was ever the cause for anything out there. What you do in any responsible analysis is to examine what it's contribution to the problem was. I'm granting that you're arguing in good faith here, but if it's a body of historical research that you're looking for, the work has been done. And sexual libertinism continues to haunt Russian demographics today. It wasn't responsible for the casualty rate of the Eastern Front. What it 'is' responsible for on January 5th, 2023, is privileging an independent and selfish lifestyle over the continued survival of the community you live in.
And so you'll suggest in one breath SR played no role in weakening the USSR, but (conservative) Islamic theocracy is singularly to blame because they haven't reversed their demographic trend? Seems to not be the case in Afghanistan, which certainly isn't a bastion of liberalism in the Middle East. Wasn't the case with General Franco in Spain, certainly not the bastion of liberalism in Europe. I don't get what this is supposed to prove in your view.
The only way I see that someone can conclude that is that they haven't read the data or are indifferent to it. I think this is a good place to leave this conversation.
That wasn't the point I was making.
This is exactly the attitude many conservatives have taken. It's also the same reason why religious factions like Conservative and Reform Judaism will be looked at as a historical footnote in upcoming generations. Precisely because it's the ultra-conservative ones that are reproducing themselves. It definitely isn't the alternative. Even the most cynical conservatives I've known here have told me it's a mistake to insist that their liberal/progressive political opponents be concerned with their own reproductive fall off. They'd prefer they all die off in a generation or two. I'm not saying 'every' conservative solution to the problem will be guaranteed to work. I'm saying that 'only' a conservative solution in nature will be guaranteed to work.
If you require no further examination of data, I can see why you would support this conclusion. I see little value in continuing it. Be well.
There are 100 men and 100 women. A a thousand years later, 50 of those women have living descendants, while only 10 of the men do. This does not mean only 10 of those men ever reproduced, it means only 10 of those men established lineages that persisted for 1000 years and were not wiped out at some point over the centuries. It does not mean that, of those 100 original men, 95 died childless.
Having never read the book, what kind of historical data does Unwin work with to establish the sexual continence or lack thereof of pre-modern civilizations?
I have no point except that theocracy in Iran manifestly does not keep fertility above replacement, and I only brought it up because you suggested Iranian adultery laws as a model.
I spent my whole OP discussing data.
What point was it?
If life was going to continue pretty much as it is today for the next century, then the “Haredim and Amish will inherit the earth” people might be right, but it almost certainly isn’t.
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This response is supposed to make you grasp that the most thorough effort in current times to force tradition and religion at gun point failed as thoroughly as it could fail.
Where did ayatollahs go wrong? Were they too soft, were they too concerned about human rights, should they imprison, torture and kill more?
This isn't true. In western society that remark is hyperbole and we all know it, because nobody here is forcing tradition and religion down people's throats at gunpoint. Do you know what kind of societies 'are' doing that? Afghanistan. Somalia. Not even Russia or China are doing what you're suggesting, and it's the latter that are facing these problems most intensely.
He asked what a more traditional solution sounded like. Well, I gave him one. Current trends and demographics seem to be making the case that the latter is the more attractive long-term option. The only problem with my solution isn't the content of the policy, it's that it's too piecemeal and unfortunately lacks the strength and extremism that seems necessary to reverse current trends.
This is why I've repeatedly said in this community, when nation's get caught in a death spiral like this, there's 'zero' historical evidence to suggest that they reform their way out of it. The more severe the problem becomes, the more extreme the solutions become. The more extreme the solutions become, the more unacceptable they become to the population, etc., and you end up stuck in this self-reinforcing negative feedback loop. What history suggests happens is that these nation's die off or get conquered.
This subthread is not about Western society, it is about Iran.
Iran - society with all drawbacks of modernity and none of its benefits - is not attractive at all.
If your solution is Iranian one, it is unsatisfactory.
Is Iran forcing women to have sex at gunpoint? They've done that no more than Japan, Russia, China or the west has.
And all to its own activities in the world, I'm sure. Not the fact that there's an economic war being waged against the country. Which absent wealth, what else does modernity have to give?
Iran may be down in the 4th quarter, but they know they're on the field and can at least find the ball. Other nations are living on borrowed time and unless they get their head on straight, they'll be in an even more precarious position than Iran is.
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IIRC this is as much about switching to smaller bullets(the ones progressives ostentatiously hate are actually less lethal than what they replaced, old timey criminals used sawn off shotguns, magnum revolvers and .45s. Today they use 9 mm handguns and ar-15s, which shoot smaller less lethal bullets) as it is improving emergency room medicine.
Interesting, although I am skeptical that the .223 is less lethal than a .45, and if the ".45 more dangerous than 9mm" debate had finally been concluded, I must have missed it. I definitely do not think that bullet diameter is the be-all end-all of firearm lethality (for instance, the 5.7mm proved very lethal during the Fort Hood shooting, but the perp survived 4 9mm rounds.)
I also would have thought the old timey criminals (at least in the cities, maybe not moonshiners and the like) would have been more likely to use a lower-powered cartridge like a .32 or a .380, say, 40 years ago, before the rise of the 9mm.
However I suppose it's possible that at the ranges most shootings happen, the 9mm and .223 tend to over-penetrate compared to the .45 or a magnum revolver.
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ARs are actually quite a bit more lethal than their most common size of projectile otherwise suggests due to the cheapest rounds being inherently able to fragment. Those who criticize ownership of them are directionally correct they're more powerful but for exactly none of the reasons they claim.
It's not a great choice for hunting for that reason (well, that and those rounds are generally illegal to use for hunting, but for a completely different reason), since the entire goal is to preserve the body and one jagged hole is easy to cut out of meat.
For defensive applications that obviously isn't a concern, so you want a bunch of holes rather than one big hole since that increases the chance you hit something important. Machines, including biological ones, don't meaningfully malfunction until you sever an electrical connection (parts downstream stop working), a hydraulic connection (parts downstream stop working; other parts lose functionality due to lack of working fluid), or physically destroy the CPU (but only if you destroy the specific parts responsible for executing either the main program or the other two); fragmentation increases the number of holes, thus increasing the chances of those things happening. There are also vital components that run off that fluid- damaging parts closer to its source, the main pump for example, tends to break the machine faster.
Another way to increase the number of holes if you're using a thing designed to punch holes is to use a punch that can make more holes faster; if I have 17 chances to punch a 0.36" hole and 0.25s to re-point the punch vs. 7 chances to punch a 0.45" hole and it takes me 0.5s to re-point the punch (or in the AR's case, 30 chances to punch 1x 0.2" hole with 0.1s to re-point vs. 20 chances to punch 1x 0.3" hole with 1.5s to re-point), obviously more chances are better provided the hole is punched sufficiently hard to break the stuff in the target (which .32/.25 guns from 1900 are not quite powerful enough to do consistently unless you're using the "I can punch more holes" trick- shotguns with 00 Buck are ballistically identical to 10 .32s taped together so they fire all at once; #4 buckshot is identical to taping 25 .22LR rifles together in the same way- or shooting the CPU).
Modern trauma medicine is really good at patching holes in machines so long as there aren't too many of them, the machine still has hydraulic fluid in it and the CPU isn't shot out (it's not great at fixing electrical connections, but the top half will probably remain fully functional). If a criminal is focused on body count they tend to only put one or two holes in the machines' center mass (for pragmatic reasons)- which is why doctrine for dealing with those criminals is "kill it as soon as possible" and not "wait for the hydraulic fluid of the casualties to run out" or "give the criminal time to consider shooting CPUs".
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Comparing a .45 to an AR-15 (assuming standard 5.56mm chambering) isn't straightforward. The 5.56 cartridge weighs much less, but has about 3 times the muzzle velocity, resulting in cavitation of wounds. Both deliver enough force to induce shock even if they strike bone and don't destroy essential organs. Other features of the relevant weapons (e.g. carbines vs. revolvers) are much more salient than the ammunition.
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The archetypal "Saturday Night Special" was a shittyass .32 (or even .25!) revolver for a hundred years -- magnum revolvers were expensive and thus a good choice for Dirty Harry but not for somebody who probably needs to throw the thing in the river every so often.
True, but being limited to card-table guns (in a 400-dollar budget) impose 3 important limitations on the average gangoon:
The fact that it's always the Tec-9 specifically being targetted by "assault weapon" legislation isn't entirely out to lunch, because it was the first gun ever to hit the market that solved all of those issues at once for the average criminal- 200 dollars, 32 rounds, concealable enough, was completely impractical unless it was held properly, and in a caliber of sufficient power to actually take advantage of modern hollow-point projectiles (note also that the vast majority of legislation targeting this pistol came a few years before one of the most famous crimes would be committed with them, though that gun didn't really enable that crime in the same sense it did the average late-80s criminal).
Technically speaking, since the average affordable crime gun is currently either a shitty Taurus or Kel-Tec semi-auto (if you actually care about concealment) or a Hi-Point (if you don't; this is the famous "Glock 40") these restrictions did actually set the average affordable crime gun back quite a ways. The modern service handguns are generally more effective than these, but they're also twice the price on the legal market; likely more on the black market. And when you don't have 1000 dollars to your name to afford one it's essentially unattainable.
(The counterargument is that "average affordable crime gun" is also necessarily "the best self-defense option available for the poor", but reducing firepower for both criminal and poor alike is... politely, something about which bipartisan consensus can generally be achieved. More charitably, if criminals have less then the poor, who are overwhelmingly the target of criminal activity in the first place, "need" less to be on equal footing.)
The point being that swapping some five shot Webley knockoff for a Hi-Point or a Tec-9 as a common crime weapon is unlikely to have been responsible for a decrease in shooting deaths -- I think that we agree?
My point is that the two are not quite the same class of weapon- I think the criminal stock of the latter ramping up may have added a confounding increase at the time it was prevalent, so a decrease after that (when the common weapons for criminals downgraded to Hi-Points instead- if you consider that a downgrade I guess, heh) might not be as completely due to modern medicine.
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I'm skeptical. I doubt shotgun use has varied all that much, and I'm pretty sure the average crime gun has been a non-magnum handgun for the last hundred years at least. Handgun lethality has definately increased over that time, but I am pretty sure most of that lethal advantage (high-performance hollowpoint/frangible ammo, mainly) has actually seen general adoption by criminals.
I would bet that massive improvements in trauma medicine heavily outweigh shifts in weapon preference among criminals.
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Tangential: It's no longer about caliber, but about shot placement.
Stay strapped or get clapped. Don't skimp on range day. Sight picture and trigger control.
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