domain:alexepstein.substack.com
Glassnoser
5m ago
As a white man who's used OkCupid's passport feature to match with people around the world, I've noticed it's really easy to get matches in certain parts of the world. Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, is incredibly easy. The vast majority of my likes are from there. It feels like I could date the entire country if I wanted to. The next is South America, particularly Brazil. It's easy to match with very beautiful women there. The last is East Africa.
Locally, I've noticed I tend to do well Indian women and Latinas, and to a lesser extent, Middle Eastern women.
2rafa
8m ago
UK left under Starmer already dropped the extreme pro-trans position before the election. Keir Starmer literally said he wanted to protect female-only spaces and that he would make sure “gender ideology” wasn’t taught in schools.
In general, positions adopted over the past 10 years in relation to trans issues and bail reform can be dropped pretty quickly. Positions that are 50+ years old on immigration (etc) are much harder to deal with and reverse.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11m ago
Right, obviously I’m not going to do that! I didn’t say it was easy, or even feasible.
In fact when questions like “when will woke end?” or “what can we do to stop wokeness?” get raised on this forum, I’m usually in the position of being the bearer of bad news: wokeness might last for a very long time, and there’s probably nothing you can do as an individual in the near-term to hasten its downfall. There was probably nothing that any one individual could have done to hasten the end of communism in the USSR. If someone did speak out publicly, we might admire it as an individual act of heroism, but ultimately it would have accomplished nothing in historical terms. Deciding to arbitrarily burn all your social credit one day is pointless if it doesn’t accomplish anything. Probably you could make a bigger difference by staying under the radar and putting your talents to use elsewhere.
But nonetheless. The biggest historical changes still have to start as individual, isolated thoughts. Just letting someone know that they have permission to think heterodox thoughts, privately, to themselves, can be very powerful. If it wasn’t, then TPTB wouldn’t be so obsessed with censorship and deplatforming. Tiny messages communicated from one individual to another can go on to have ripple effects. Or so we have to hope, anyway.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
12m ago
My understanding on the basis of social media messages is that pronouns in bio have been on their way out in the American corporate world for months now.
2rafa
14m ago
As an aside, in the post-SFFA world, the number of students interested in the Federalist Society doubled at my law school
What happened was that the mainstream and legal press published a bunch of snarky articles saying that the Federalist society was easy mode because 80%+ of students are libs, so when it comes to clerking for federal judges FedSoc membership + clerking for conservative justices was much easier than trying to be Kagan or Sotomayor’s clerk (or their circuit peers). This was not even false, really.
The consequence was that a bunch of striving students, including many Indians and Chinese but of course also ambitious whites, who had no connection to conservatism and don’t really care about ideology, are now joining fedsocs for the career boost.
jericho
17m ago
The left only has as much power as they do because people are deathly afraid of their accusations.
Also very much recognized by the left.
A perennial question in online spaces is "Why do leftists spend so much time critiquing people who agree with them on 90% of issues when they could instead focus on people who disagree with them on 90% of issues?" and the answer, beyond standard narcissism of small differences, is that the people who disagree with them on 90% of issues usually aren't going to give a shit about their critiques or outrage.
2rafa
24m ago
I work with many competent British-born Indians on a regular basis and find them friendly, hardworking, trustworthy and generally good coworkers. I think accusations of particular nepotism are unwarranted.
Increasingly I think every tribe is clearly nepotistic. Tribe, not race. White British or white Americans nepotistic aren’t nepotistic on an ethnic-group-wide level because if you’re in-group nepotistic at 70% of the population then nepotism isn’t really a filter at all. Go to Hong Kong or Singapore, though, and you’ll certainly find networks where Englishmen and so on will network and hire each other no differently to Indians in San Francisco or Chinese in London.
Indeed anyone in finance in London will have encountered, for example, the terrifyingly effective Italian and Turkish nepotistic networks, not to mention the ex (British military) officers corps network, which is of course almost 100% comprised of upper and upper-middle class native men. These things are everywhere. The only reason why some (ahem) are more effective than others is because their baseline intelligence is higher.
Glassnoser
25m ago
What's frustrating about Indians is their ubiquity combined with poor English skills. Tech forums are full of Indians answering questions with broken English that is painful to read and decipher. Call centres are staffed with Indians, many of whom mumble with thick accents and bad grammar.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
26m ago
I’m honestly not surprised other than that it’s taken this long for schools to make it official that only right-thinking people will be granted access to the prestige of high end universities. I suspect it’s been there informally for a while and gleaned from student essays (don’t talk too much about traditional Christianity, and certainly don’t ever mention working for a GOP campaign). It’s just too easy for schools to use that influence culture and to weaken their enemies by making support for them a career limiting choice. I’m not even sure it’s safe to be openly GOP in “polite” PMC type jobs.
TitaniumButterfly
28m ago
Okay! You go first.
Well, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez removed her pronouns from her twitter bio. Does this represent Democrats coming to see the extremes of gender ideology as a political liability? In addition to her we have a representative from Massachusetts, Seth Moulton facing criticism over expressing sympathy with the anti-trans in women's sports position, and in part blaming the election loss on some of the demands of ideological purity on this issue in particular.
Even Reddit seems to be sensing this shift and top comments are reflecting unease with trans orthodoxy. Even the comments from many Democrat supporters on Reddit seem to be avoiding a full-throated defense of trans orthodoxy and instead blaming Republicans for making an issue out of something that hardly affects anyone.
Is this a sign of things to come? Will they actually move against gender orthodoxy or just make it slightly less visible while pursuing the same policy goals behind the scenes?
Edit: Just wanted to share this clip as well as it seems germane
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
32m ago
What is there even left to be said at this point? You really just have to put your foot down and tell these people (the men, in this case) that they're not welcome. And when they inevitably respond with accusations that you're being sexist, transphobic, and exclusionary, you say: "yes I am sexist, yes I am transphobic, yes I am exclusionary, yes yes yes, it's all true; now please, the door is that way, if you don't mind."
The left only has as much power as they do because people are deathly afraid of their accusations. If people would just affirm being racist, sexist, and transphobic as positive things then so much of their power would evaporate.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
34m ago
I don’t like either one. If we’re to have an open and honest conversation on any political topic, basic facts are key to the discussion. Knowing where Ukraine is, why it matters, its key economic outputs, population, etc matters. For that matter knowing what Russia wants Ukraine for and why Crimea is so important to it’s perceived national security interests, or why having Ukraine potentially join EU and NATO is such a risk is vitally important here. But if you have no idea where Ukraine is, or the history of Russia being invaded because it has no natural features on its borders, or that Crimea was one of the Soviet Union’s main warm water ports to Europe, it’s hard to make sense out of the issue.
Likewise on anything science. If you don’t understand the basics of how the science in question works, or if it’s a legal question, what the law in question actually says, there’s no real point. It’s just vibes based conversation. I lean left you lean right, whatever.
My main beef with modern university education (outside of some job-skills based training) is that it’s not creating people capable of learning and understanding for themselves so much as people who simply believe the consensus views and have large doses of credential-based smugness. They don’t bother to look up the facts before deciding that their side is right. They don’t read books, or bother to find out what the other side of the issue actually thinks. We spend more time and energy on critical thinking and higher education than any generation in human history only to produce a society of people who are the least curious about the world, least interested in finding out the facts before making a decision, least able or willing to think logically than previous generations who had less schooling. My grandfather who didn’t even graduate from college was pretty well educated because he was constantly reading nonfiction books about whatever topics interested him. He was a pretty careful and logical thinker as well and able to make good decisions in business because of that.
TitaniumButterfly
36m ago
This is why we can't have nice things.
2rafa
38m ago
How imbalanced are the demographics of recent Indian immigrants to the UK? The statistics are presumably available.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
40m ago
I’ve never opened Pride & Prejudice, but I did attempt Sense & Sensibility and my impression was similarly unfavorable. Austen was indeed a keen observer of human psychology, but her elliptical prose style left me cold. (And I say this as someone whose writing style is not exactly a paragon of Hemingway-esque brevity itself.)
mrvanillasky
45m ago
You create clusters of smart capable people and eek out better outliers than you normally would.
Also because people always want to marry their own.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
46m ago
In at least a few non-Ivy schools I keep tabs on, student-led BDS efforts last year got forcibly pushed aside by non-student university leadership, presumably concerned more about federal law regarding national origin discrimination (and maybe also in response to major benefactors grumbling). Generally this took the form of "student elected leadership may not even debate this motion" and while there was (and probably remains) some grumbling from some students, it seemed that the university won.
I was saddened this morning to read of the resignation of one of the founders of La Leche League from that organization.
La Leche League was founded in 1956 to improve breastfeeding rates in the United States. Many people are unaware, or do not fully grasp the implications of, the fact that the mid-20th century was an era of hyper-medicalization and scientific interventionism. Probably most college students today know how to make the proper noises concerning the historic exclusion of women (or racial minorities) from medical studies, but few could tell you why in 1965 Robert Bradley made waves by arguing that childbirth shouldn't be such a medicalized process. It would be a good half century before skyrocketing c-section rates persuaded the AMA (etc.) to take seriously the idea that medicalization was harming mothers at least as frequently as it was helping them.
Breastfeeding has not received quite as much cultural attention as childbirth, for reasons I can only guess at. One is probably just that breastfeeding does not typically present quite the same "life-or-death" questions that childbirth sometimes can. Another is that, historically, not all mothers have been successful breast-feeders, whether by chance or by choice; relying on other mothers to feed one's own infant, at least for a time, is attested cross-culturally. Breastfeeding has well-established health benefits for babies and mothers both (in particular, nothing else is more decidedly protective against breast cancer), but between the availability of adequate (if not really optimal) substitutes, psychological difficulty some have treating breasts in non-sexualized ways, and a sometimes steep learning curve, many mothers find the whole proposition... unpalatable.
La Leche League's most visible influence (at least in my experience) has been their gratis lactation consultants. Some mothers, and some babies, take to breastfeeding like the proverbial ducks to water, but many, maybe most women have at least a little difficulty. Will the baby latch, will the latch hold, how to avoid painful latching, how to deal with chafing, what if I don't produce enough milk, are there foods I need to avoid, etc. are things women once shared with their daughters, or learned from their midwife, and aren't necessarily things your average OB/GYN has any grasp on. (It's not unusual for full-fledged OB/GYNs to spend 6-8 weeks (or less!) in their entire training learning about normal pregnancy and childbirth; their job, after all, is to fix such problems as may arise.) For women who are willing to accept input (and, I suppose, for women who capitulate to the sometimes, er, zealous lactation consultants), La Leche League has filled the gap left by the steamrolling of familial bonds by cultural "progress."
So why, as a 94-year-old woman, would Marian Tompson denounce decades of work brought about, in large measure, by her own efforts? Here is what she wrote:
From an organisation with the specific mission of supporting biological women who want to give their babies the best start in life by breastfeeding them, LLL’s focus has subtly shifted to include men who, for whatever reason, want to have the experience of breastfeeding, despite no careful long-term research on male lactation and how that may affect the baby.
This shift from following the norms of nature, which is the core of mothering through breastfeeding, to indulging the fantasies of adults, is destroying our organisation.
Helen Joyce of British women’s rights charity Sex Matters commented:
By including men who want to breastfeed in its services, LLL is destroying its founding mission to support breastfeeding mothers.
It also goes against the wishes of many mothers, group leaders and trustees around the world, who have been fighting to convince LLL International to hold fast to its woman-focused mission...
Conquest's Laws win again. La Leche League has been profoundly nonpartisan, but it was not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing, and so "another previously innocent activity" heads toward "World War I style trench warfare."
Glassnoser
53m ago
There is a reason why people kept this place heterogeneous for thousands of years.
What reason is that?
5434a
56m ago
Finished Pride & Prejudice yesterday. I was expecting crisp and refined writing but what I got, which certainly was not parallel to, indeed not sharing many aspects with, a style one could generously, or as befits opinion parsimoniously, describe using a range of terms, carefully chusen from the refracted, diffuse spectrum of all potential lexical motifs, as one of focus, indeed moreso not an under abundance of sidewards steps and circumlocution.
Better than Madame Bovary though.
hydroacetylene
58m ago
No. Bezos’ wife number one was a key part of him being able to build Amazon; she has a legitimate partial claim on the fortune and it’s not like she divorced him because she felt like it.
But how does adding yet another pro-Harris post to a sub-reddit that is already 100% full of pro-Harris posts drive turnout? It makes no sense.
It's like a guy adding a 17th Harris/Walz yard sign to a yard that already has 16. It doesn't make his neighbors want to go vote for Harris. It just makes him look like a crazy person.
It's the same mistake that mass media outlets like ABC make. You can make a choice to burn a small amount of credibility in exchange for partisan politics. But at some point, the credibility is gone and then your endorsements actually hurt the candidate.
Democrats who look at the front page of Reddit will say "holy shit, what a bunch of crazy people" and think "maybe I'll stay home on Tuesday".
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