> Although the method’s success rate was about 3.5%, experts in the field are calling the study a “stunning achievement” that could potentially “eradicate infertility” if it can be applied in humans. The ability to make artificial eggs from any cell in the body could allow women who lack viable eggs or male-male couples to have genetic children of their own. “Reproductive age” may become obsolete.
Oh great, let’s just take the breaks off of the Quiverfull problem completely.
I am not sure why you think this is a big issue?
In the short run: the set “has ten kids” selects really hard for smart, highly religious, nonconformist people who take ideas seriously. With the exception of the second thing, I’m not sure why anyone in this community would object. It doesn’t seem like desire-to-be-Quiverfull is genetic: the religions in which people have ten kids don’t seem to have particularly high retention rates, particularly given that they’re willing to e.g. not educate their children to get them to stay.
If you’re like “eventually the world will be full of people who have evolved to want lots of kids because the others don’t reproduce, and then overpopulation”, yes, but an allele reaching fixation takes long enough that I’d be surprised if we were still meat by the time it happened, and if we’re not meat this is irrelevant. And I’m honestly uncertain which way the sign of this particular technology goes: sure, very enthusiastic people could use it to have a twentieth kid, but women who don’t want kids that strongly and thus didn’t have a kid until they were fifty could also use it.
Worst case scenario: what will probably end up happening, if anything happens, is that you get a world where a million mutually exclusive cults try to outbreed each other. Which is to say, the world isn’t going to look very much different from this current version of it. The only difference is that everyone is able to have more kids without their own age becoming a factor.
Today’s meme magic phenomena will continue apace regardless of this technology being freely available or not.
I was focusing more on the genetic aspect of this + overpopulation in general rather than the memetic part, though I can see why people didn’t interpret it that way. Basically, I don’t want to live in a world crammed full of as many humans as possible. I want everyone to be able to have their own huge tract of land and live densely only when they prefer to.
Solution here, it seems to me, is to buy your track of land while it’s plentiful and not let new people move in. Then you only have to fear eminent domain, but I think that getting the government to stop stealing people’s land is probably actually less of a hard problem than getting people to stop undoing infertility.
I find it just as likely that we’ll manage to convince everyone to accept forced-infertility-by-default after forty as that we’ll get everyone to accept forced-death-by-default after 80 once anti-aging is a thing. Besides, in both case, the worlds in which people actually manage to be banned from editing themselves are dystopian hellscapes anyway.
That’s not a real solution. The political will under such conditions would shift, and democracy means you’ll be eminent domain’d for sure, even if it were realistic for most non-millionaires to attempt this in the first place.
Life extension would actually help here, however, since it keeps non-baby-obsessed people around and politically relevant longer. Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.
Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.
Seen here: The single most horrify thing I have ever seen a transhumanist unironically recommend, out of a vast number of horrifying futury things.
[Catholic screaming]
If $Deity prohibits the use of birth control under Catholicism, then surely altering one’s genome to live past the normal maximum age of 120 years would be an even greater violation of the divine will?
I would expect the Catholic church to come out against human genetic augmentation, and thus life extension, even though I don’t expect them to come out against, for example, curing blindness.
> Although the method’s success rate was about 3.5%, experts in the field are calling the study a “stunning achievement” that could potentially “eradicate infertility” if it can be applied in humans. The ability to make artificial eggs from any cell in the body could allow women who lack viable eggs or male-male couples to have genetic children of their own. “Reproductive age” may become obsolete.
Oh great, let’s just take the breaks off of the Quiverfull problem completely.
I am not sure why you think this is a big issue?
In the short run: the set “has ten kids” selects really hard for smart, highly religious, nonconformist people who take ideas seriously. With the exception of the second thing, I’m not sure why anyone in this community would object. It doesn’t seem like desire-to-be-Quiverfull is genetic: the religions in which people have ten kids don’t seem to have particularly high retention rates, particularly given that they’re willing to e.g. not educate their children to get them to stay.
If you’re like “eventually the world will be full of people who have evolved to want lots of kids because the others don’t reproduce, and then overpopulation”, yes, but an allele reaching fixation takes long enough that I’d be surprised if we were still meat by the time it happened, and if we’re not meat this is irrelevant. And I’m honestly uncertain which way the sign of this particular technology goes: sure, very enthusiastic people could use it to have a twentieth kid, but women who don’t want kids that strongly and thus didn’t have a kid until they were fifty could also use it.
Worst case scenario: what will probably end up happening, if anything happens, is that you get a world where a million mutually exclusive cults try to outbreed each other. Which is to say, the world isn’t going to look very much different from this current version of it. The only difference is that everyone is able to have more kids without their own age becoming a factor.
Today’s meme magic phenomena will continue apace regardless of this technology being freely available or not.
I was focusing more on the genetic aspect of this + overpopulation in general rather than the memetic part, though I can see why people didn’t interpret it that way. Basically, I don’t want to live in a world crammed full of as many humans as possible. I want everyone to be able to have their own huge tract of land and live densely only when they prefer to.
Solution here, it seems to me, is to buy your track of land while it’s plentiful and not let new people move in. Then you only have to fear eminent domain, but I think that getting the government to stop stealing people’s land is probably actually less of a hard problem than getting people to stop undoing infertility.
I find it just as likely that we’ll manage to convince everyone to accept forced-infertility-by-default after forty as that we’ll get everyone to accept forced-death-by-default after 80 once anti-aging is a thing. Besides, in both case, the worlds in which people actually manage to be banned from editing themselves are dystopian hellscapes anyway.
That’s not a real solution. The political will under such conditions would shift, and democracy means you’ll be eminent domain’d for sure, even if it were realistic for most non-millionaires to attempt this in the first place.
Life extension would actually help here, however, since it keeps non-baby-obsessed people around and politically relevant longer. Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.
Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.
Seen here: The single most horrify thing I have ever seen a transhumanist unironically recommend, out of a vast number of horrifying futury things.
Note: Continued discussion of this topic.
The entire point was to avoid shooting, starving, or forcibly sterilizing people. And, if it turns out to be unnecessary, it decays to “everyone who asks gets more baby tickets than they can even use.”
It seemed a better choice than allocating a set pool of resources which is based on one’s ancestors from the time that life extension hits. (ie, each person gets X resources which are split by their descendants, recursively) Maybe you would prefer that instead, but I felt it punished the descendants unfairly.
Lightsabers are stupid period. Even if they make you unbeatable against normal blasters, I can just make blasters with three muzzles in an equilateral triangle (that fire at the same time). Impossible to block all three shots. Or for shorter distances, anything with spray. Swords just aren't a good weapon and an even worse defense, even magic space swords.
What if I told you that they don’t use lightsabers because they’re good.
The argument “if you like taxes then simply go donate money to the government. You don’t? Then stop being a hypocrite and talking about how taxes are good” seems a bit silly to me. Sure, if you believe that any centralized taxation and spending is bad, then there’s no reason to support taxation. But if you do think that centralized spending can in certain situations outperform a free market, then you see taxes as a prisoner’s dilemma. If everyone cooperates, and voluntarily donates to the government, then everyone would be better off, but this is not a stable equilibrium, and every individual agent can benefit from defecting, and then everyone is much worse off, but trying to unilaterally start cooperating and donating money would make you even worse off. So you employ a very common way to resolve prisoner’s dilemmas: elect a guy with a gun who shoots at defectors. In this situation you end up being better off than without this guy, but your incentive structure changes only by the amount of shooting, and it’s still rational to not cooperate by any amount higher than what is being enforced. It is rational to want to resolve prisoner’s dilemmas this way, and it’s also rational to not be a cooperate-bot in dilemmas that aren’t being resolved.
> Although the method’s success rate was about 3.5%, experts in the field are calling the study a “stunning achievement” that could potentially “eradicate infertility” if it can be applied in humans. The ability to make artificial eggs from any cell in the body could allow women who lack viable eggs or male-male couples to have genetic children of their own. “Reproductive age” may become obsolete.
Oh great, let’s just take the breaks off of the Quiverfull problem completely.
I am not sure why you think this is a big issue?
In the short run: the set “has ten kids” selects really hard for smart, highly religious, nonconformist people who take ideas seriously. With the exception of the second thing, I’m not sure why anyone in this community would object. It doesn’t seem like desire-to-be-Quiverfull is genetic: the religions in which people have ten kids don’t seem to have particularly high retention rates, particularly given that they’re willing to e.g. not educate their children to get them to stay.
If you’re like “eventually the world will be full of people who have evolved to want lots of kids because the others don’t reproduce, and then overpopulation”, yes, but an allele reaching fixation takes long enough that I’d be surprised if we were still meat by the time it happened, and if we’re not meat this is irrelevant. And I’m honestly uncertain which way the sign of this particular technology goes: sure, very enthusiastic people could use it to have a twentieth kid, but women who don’t want kids that strongly and thus didn’t have a kid until they were fifty could also use it.
Worst case scenario: what will probably end up happening, if anything happens, is that you get a world where a million mutually exclusive cults try to outbreed each other. Which is to say, the world isn’t going to look very much different from this current version of it. The only difference is that everyone is able to have more kids without their own age becoming a factor.
Today’s meme magic phenomena will continue apace regardless of this technology being freely available or not.
I was focusing more on the genetic aspect of this + overpopulation in general rather than the memetic part, though I can see why people didn’t interpret it that way. Basically, I don’t want to live in a world crammed full of as many humans as possible. I want everyone to be able to have their own huge tract of land and live densely only when they prefer to.
Solution here, it seems to me, is to buy your track of land while it’s plentiful and not let new people move in. Then you only have to fear eminent domain, but I think that getting the government to stop stealing people’s land is probably actually less of a hard problem than getting people to stop undoing infertility.
I find it just as likely that we’ll manage to convince everyone to accept forced-infertility-by-default after forty as that we’ll get everyone to accept forced-death-by-default after 80 once anti-aging is a thing. Besides, in both case, the worlds in which people actually manage to be banned from editing themselves are dystopian hellscapes anyway.
That’s not a real solution. The political will under such conditions would shift, and democracy means you’ll be eminent domain’d for sure, even if it were realistic for most non-millionaires to attempt this in the first place.
Life extension would actually help here, however, since it keeps non-baby-obsessed people around and politically relevant longer. Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, it’s basically a theoritical end of the world, in which self aware AI happens in a paperclip factory. The machine, without hard coded ethics, hits on a runaway recursive-self improvement loop, transforms the planet into the most efficient paperclip factory in history, exterminating humanity in the process - to use the iron in our blood for more paperclips.
And I can’t help but think that we’ve already created a self-aware machine without hard coded ethics that’s optimizing for a fundamentally anti-human goal: and it’s capitalism.
Capitalism is the software running on industrial hardware, and it is maintained by wetware (humans). The only goal of it is maximizing profit, for which it needs constant growth. Everything else is a marginal benefit of it - say, innovation. And the problems are increasingly acknowledged as not bugs but features of the system: that it can produce well enough, but it doesn’t care about distributing well enough, because loss is acceptably within the margins (or it’s calculated as not-yet-realized profit).
And it’s fascinating how the AI skepticism / doomsday scenarios come so close to self-awareness, but by some perverted twist of thought we’re not collectively realizing that we’re already there. Time has stopped, we’re in an endless loop of self-destruction, and the wetware is screaming in horror, unable to articulate properly its unfreedom, as the machine has stomped out the thoughts and language and power necessary to do so.
Until now.
people rediscover the capitalism was the paperclip maximizer all along! idea every couple of months, then life goes on
I mean, wasn’t that essentially what the Communists were thinking, before they went and got millions of people killed trying to replace it?
I believe a fair chunk of the alienation that concerns you isn’t just a result of competitive economic systems, but also urban planning.
When in a city, you have significantly less personal connection to, and knowledge of, the people around you. This makes it harder not only to judge their intentions, but also to punish them. Thus, you are at increased risk when interacting with them (as I think slavojzyzzek mentioned).
Part of the way to combat this may be to turn cities into collections of ten thousand villages. Build each block of the city as a mixed-use unit, with internal green space and, critically, controlled access beyond the shops at the perimeter. That could be as simple as just making people check in when they enter and refusing anyone not approved by a specific resident. Have the block owned or managed by a sort of cooperative responsible for creating cultural festivals and whatnot to encourage social interaction and a sense of community. Specific police officers could be assigned to each block (as the population is high enough) and get to know the residents.
With increased trust and more limited populations, the residents can get to know their neighbors more on the scale of a small town than a big city, reducing the social distance by one or two orders of magnitude. If you’re Communitarian enough, you can also have police/healthcare/etc units focus on specific high-risk people within the block to prevent situations from spiraling out of control.
This seems like treating a symptom of the real problem, which is needing to know and get along with the people you happen to live near, and is the opposite of “high-trust.”
Low-trust vs high-trust is about how you have to deal with strangers. If tight-knit communities are required to form connections or even so much as not expected to get attacked or ripped off, then that is a failure of civil society and a damage-control motivated return to the tribalism and provincialism that modernity is an effort to solve/depends on already being solved.
And we certainly have at out disposal far greater tools for creating shared context and trust between unrelated strangers than has perhaps ever existed, if there existed the will to use them. (And certainly, if you’re entertaining a scenario where the pursuit of your goals can affect the direction of urban planning, then you’re already imagining the use of a lot of political will!)
I consider that much of what gets called “alienation” is a feature. It would be worth fighting for as a goal rather than fought as a problem, even absent its economic benefits.
I would consider that in high-crime areas, civil society has in fact failed to some degree and that a return to a more structured form of community as a method of preventing it from getting even further off the rails can be considered justified. Preventing and policing crime and misbehavior are both quite challenging tasks on their own.
What I have proposed does not undermine modernity any more than the existence of suburban towns does. (Though, perhaps you wish to abolish suburban towns as well for some reason.) Specifically, it’s also primarily for residential areas. It isn’t as though you can’t just walk right off the block and be back in the rest of the city.
As for political willpower, something not so different from what I have proposed already appears to exist in Singapore. I once thought that cop cameras, while a good idea, weren’t politically tractable, but that situation changed and they began to emerge in various cities. I wouldn’t expect this idea to take off for another 20 years, anyway.
I probably have different values from you, since I believe that human beings are social creatures and function best if they have at least some social context and support network, people that they know they can depend on (which, absent some pretty powerful culture, is not something that can be counted on from strangers).
What are these methods that people lack the political will to use, that are only as difficult as urban planning?
I believe a fair chunk of the alienation that concerns you isn’t just a result of competitive economic systems, but also urban planning.
When in a city, you have significantly less personal connection to, and knowledge of, the people around you. This makes it harder not only to judge their intentions, but also to punish them. Thus, you are at increased risk when interacting with them (as I think slavojzyzzek mentioned).
Part of the way to combat this may be to turn cities into collections of ten thousand villages. Build each block of the city as a mixed-use unit, with internal green space and, critically, controlled access beyond the shops at the perimeter. That could be as simple as just making people check in when they enter and refusing anyone not approved by a specific resident. Have the block owned or managed by a sort of cooperative responsible for creating cultural festivals and whatnot to encourage social interaction and a sense of community. Specific police officers could be assigned to each block (as the population is high enough) and get to know the residents.
With increased trust and more limited populations, the residents can get to know their neighbors more on the scale of a small town than a big city, reducing the social distance by one or two orders of magnitude. If you’re Communitarian enough, you can also have police/healthcare/etc units focus on specific high-risk people within the block to prevent situations from spiraling out of control.
“if Trump won then that means anyone more to the left of the Democratic establishment is unelectable” is the stupidest argument ever bc if you pull your head out of your ass you’d notice that if you wanted to be consistent with that logic then it shouldve been impossible for Trump to win considering that he’s further to the right than McCain and Romney
“democrats lost because they are too far left and therefore need to swing right on stuff like lgbt rights and environment” is a sentiment that’s hilariously false but also convincing enough for certain bubbles that it can do a lot of damage
In case one of those bubbles happens to be reading this:
It’s worth noting that Trump didn’t do much complaining about LGBT rights himself, even if he’s let the Republican party adopt a harder stance than he has. He wasn’t elected to Crush the Gays. And the Environment does need its protection.
The real questions are things like Nationalism vs Globalism, concerns about terrorism, immigration, culture war speech-policing, and the people left behind by Globalization.
If the Left didn’t shift an inch on LGBT rights, but started saying “you know, maybe we should impose tariffs proportional to our trade deficits with other countries so we don’t have net capital outflow” or “you know, maybe keeping high-risk refugees from active war zones outside of our country and just sending them heaps of supplies instead isn’t diabolical racism” and stopped saying “lol dey tuk er jerbs” when someone complained about it… then they could grab some of these people that the Democrats lost.
Of course, that won’t actually happen. Instead they’ll keep stubbornly exposing people to the same stimulus that has shocked the far right back from the dead in Europe.
I mean Donald Trump has married a succession of models, just sayin’.
So either he’s not a true asshole or “assholes don’t get dates” has a ton of mitigating factors, as assholes are well aware.
wasn’t it more like “assholes get all the dates”?
The people who use shaming for people who don’t get dates don’t believe that. They frequently denounce anyone who does.
This is the problem with applying moral weight to whether someone is dateable. Even Adolf managed to have dates, but the average dateless slob that is complained about is multiple orders of magnitude less evil.
This is because attraction is nearly orthogonal to whether someone is a good person.
I feel like the Marxist left points out a lot of real problems in society relating to alienation, dehumanization, the lack of meaning, etc. But they get the cause of these things all wrong. The cause is not capitalism and private property, but living in a mass society where you coexist with thousands of people living and working together in one town or city neighborhood, and hundreds of thousands to millions in a single midsized metro area. We are built to coexist with a few dozen to a few hundred friends and relatives for life, and mass modern societies cannot provide that. This is why real world attempts to abolish private property and capitalism arguably worsened, rather than improved, the problems Marxists worry about in those societies.
Interestingly, I think certain kinds of social conservatives see the same problems, but also misread the cause.
For both Marxists and social conservatives, the cure is worse than the disease.
The only hope, in my view, is some kind of liberal communitarianism, but I’m not sure such a thing is possible.
If large corporations had to carry insurance which paid out in the event of a security breach exposing users’ data, they might take it more seriously. It converts the small annual risk of such a breach, which managers can gamble on, into a measurable monthly or annual cost which can be lowered through preventative measures.
You wake up on the morning on the 20th of January to find that your mind is in Donald Trump, on the day of your inauguration as president. You are guaranteed that it is impossible to undo this change. As president, what do you do with the powers available to you? How do Congress, the media, and the public respond? How do you respond back?
Oh wow.
I want to be clear that I think I’d be a pretty bad president. I wouldn’t be worse than Donald Trump, admittedly, but I think being president is legitimately a really hard job which you can kill billions of people by screwing up badly enough and kill millions of people just by not thinking to ask the right questions or appoint the right people. And I don’t know the right questions or the right people. I don’t even necessarily know how to find them, it’s not like ‘interviewing people and determining whether they are competent at federal policy’ is a skillset I have.
I think like @ozymandias271 I probably call Obama and explain what has happened and ask him for suggestions and take them unless they involve bombing people, which I am not going to do even though becoming president seems to mysteriously make people conclude it’s a good idea. And instead of spending our foreign aid bribing people we should probably spend it stamping out malaria and neglected tropical diseases. And maybe I could try to wiggle Trump’s position on immigration around to the stance that we should have an arrangement like Canada’s where communities can raise money to sponsor a refugee and help their integration.
And of course throwing a whole lot more resources at ending animal agriculture and developing carbon sequestration and so on and so forth (how much power does the President actually have to do this?) and bringing in people to have debates over things like the minimum wage and healthcare where the end result of the debates will not be ‘I know what to do’ but just ‘I remain horribly uncertain what to do, and I feel terrible about myself for not being smart enough to have it figured out’. Meanwhile I desperately try to replace the VP with someone who will be a good president. As soon as this person is secured I step down.
- to, uh, be a seventy year old man? The rest of my life sounds super unpleasant tbh. I will feel uncomfortable around all of my friends who have made cracks about how ugly Donald Trump is (moral: you shouldn’t body-shame people because what if a random blogger is bodyswapped with the sitting president and feels bad about themself as a result?), and most people I interact with will think I have a long history of sexual assault and this will be, like, incredibly unpleasant and terrifying and make me feel constantly disgusting. And I’ll have a ten year old who thinks I’m his dad, though maybe improving on Trump’s parenting would be as easy as improving on his presidency.
I feel like the Marxist left points out a lot of real problems in society relating to alienation, dehumanization, the lack of meaning, etc. But they get the cause of these things all wrong. The cause is not capitalism and private property, but living in a mass society where you coexist with thousands of people living and working together in one town or city neighborhood, and hundreds of thousands to millions in a single midsized metro area. We are built to coexist with a few dozen to a few hundred friends and relatives for life, and mass modern societies cannot provide that. This is why real world attempts to abolish private property and capitalism arguably worsened, rather than improved, the problems Marxists worry about in those societies.
Interestingly, I think certain kinds of social conservatives see the same problems, but also misread the cause.
For both Marxists and social conservatives, the cure is worse than the disease.
The only hope, in my view, is some kind of liberal communitarianism, but I’m not sure such a thing is possible.
Endorsed
This is why one third of my online thought is devoted to a blog trying to figure out how tribalism works and whether it can be used to good ends. Either we can make a society with Universal Justice that does not have systematic problems that turn person against person… Or we can’t.
If we can’t, we should find the second best alternatives, and investigate them even when they perpetuate some injustice (since in such a case, it’s impossible not to.) I think there’s a good chance such a “second best” resembles tribalism more than liberalism, and at least this question needs to explored seriously.
nationalism. the concept you are looking for is nationalism
this is confused by the fact that people use ‘nationalism’ to refer to nationalism, the thing one meta level up from zionism, ethnopolitics in any form including merely engineering an ethnicity-specific culture, debates over immigration policy, and whatever dumbass shit jasbir puar tortured the word into
imo the important question that falls out of this is roman empire ‘civic nationalism’ vs the thing i’d call metazionism except back when moldbug’s comments section was relevant handle went and called it multizionism instead – if civic nationalism (which in the US would require a lot of engineering, both in the style of the ‘60s ‘black nationalists’ – or for that matter the finnish nationalists who went out and made the kalevala a thing – and in the form of redrawing the flows of information and people that give rise to shared context) is viable it’s obviously preferable, but what if it’s not
happy christmas adam to all men’s rights activists
Please stop pestering us with things like this. This has nothing to do with men fighting for their rights. Eve is short for ‘evening’. Please don’t turn activism into a joke. Thanks.
Someone isn’t having a good christmas adam
Christmas Adam: December 23rd. Comes before Christmas Eve and is generally unsatisfying.
Christmas Adam is like so many other jokes and “jokes” - it’s only funny when someone you know isn’t saying it as an attack is saying it. Otherwise it’s no better than… honestly I can’t think of a good gender-flipped example right now.
Same thing with 95% of X Tears memes. If it’s a demographic being targetted and not something like “Console Peasant Tears”, then it isn’t really “ironic”, it’s just a flat-out attack against which they are permitted to defend themselves.
in order for the media to actively marginalise white supremacist groups they need to adopt a classically liberal posture, eg. that there are universal values, that ethnoracial solidarity is bad and cosmopolitanism good, and that some cultures deserve to be squashed because they suck.
a reminder that the reason nuclear power has not grown in the US is not overzealous safety fears, but because building a plant is an extremely capital-intensive investment with a large tail risk of extremely high costs. (quotes you see about the cheapness of nuclear power are about the *marginal* cost of the power, not including the fixed costs like the plant.)
no one wants to insure that. so, the government has to subsidize nuclear power with below-rate insurance. which is akin to the government insuring major investment firms - usually they won’t have to pay out, but the one time they do, it will be ugly.
the states with a flourishing nuclear power industry (such as France) are characterized by more government involvement because that’s what it takes to subsidize such risks. nuclear power does not flourish in a free market.
It isn’t the insurance. The US government would cover it if the price of the power were right. The issue is very cheap natural gas combined with uncertainty about the future price of renewables.
A carbon price could make a big difference in the first.
As for the second, there currently seems to be a saturation point on renewables before it starts needing too much backup power generation, and the real question is battery technology. That will remain uncertain.
Francois and David are what you could loosely characterize as “libertarian” in their world view, and we often argue about the role of government in society. One particular “clash” stands out in my mind, because it helped me crystalize my thinking on this matter. So we were talking while eating lunch at the Taco Bell in downtown Monterey of all places. Suddenly David, a man in his sixties, excused himself, got up, and ran outside. What had happened was that he had seen several young men bullying and roughing up another young man, and David had gone to intervene.
In thinking about what David had done, I finally understood how he and other libertarians could see their vision of limited government as a viable means of running a society. Such a society would be entirely workable if most people behaved like David!
It’s always a pleasant surprise when, instead of saying “libertarians are libertarian because they don’t care if other people suffer”, an opponent of libertarianism says “libertarians are libertarian because they think other people care about helping others as much as they do”.
Isn’t this true of nearly all ideologies? That if they were practiced by good people in good faith, they’d work an awful lot better?
Francois and David are what you could loosely characterize as “libertarian” in their world view, and we often argue about the role of government in society. One particular “clash” stands out in my mind, because it helped me crystalize my thinking on this matter. So we were talking while eating lunch at the Taco Bell in downtown Monterey of all places. Suddenly David, a man in his sixties, excused himself, got up, and ran outside. What had happened was that he had seen several young men bullying and roughing up another young man, and David had gone to intervene.
In thinking about what David had done, I finally understood how he and other libertarians could see their vision of limited government as a viable means of running a society. Such a society would be entirely workable if most people behaved like David!
It’s always a pleasant surprise when, instead of saying “libertarians are libertarian because they don’t care if other people suffer”, an opponent of libertarianism says “libertarians are libertarian because they think other people care about helping others as much as they do”.
Isn’t this true of nearly all ideologies? That if they were practiced by good people in good faith, they’d work an awful lot better?
Do you ever prescribe Ritalin/Adderall for excessive daytime sleepiness? Just curious how common a practice it is, because before my psychiatrist prescribed it for me I didn't know that was a legitimate reason to give stimulants.
I’ve never done it, and I’d be reluctant to unless I’d done a really good job trying to find the source of the sleepiness (did someone screen you for sleep apnea?)
Even if I had to do something like this, I would probably try Wellbutrin or modafinil, on general “don’t prescribe Adderall if you can avoid it” principles, which I admit are not very scientifically backed.
Okay, I think this needs to be clarified, since apparently people have sort of overlooked it:
It does not matter whether someone’s reasons for not wanting to have sex with you are good enough. They get to say no. Period. No exceptions. You don’t get to attack them or shame them for it. They just get to say “no”. It doesn’t matter whether they’re being transphobic, or racist, or sexist, or whatever else you think is wrong with their reasons. It doesn’t matter whether they’re crass and shallow and materialistic, or holding the world to unreasonable standards, or anything else.
If someone doesn’t want to have sex with you, you do not get to harass them for being wrong.
if they don’t consent, that is the end of it!
Caveat: you never get to harass someone for the act of saying no, but you can certainly call out any hurtful actions they take in the process of saying no. If someone says “of course I’d never fuck you, you [slur]”, it’s not wrong to say “I respect your ‘no’, but that was nasty and uncalled for.”
She would probably tell you you’re insane and there’s no way she would do that.
This is because, if she acts like this, she will have a harder time finding a mate. She’s been told all her life that men want a certain kind of woman, and if she is not that woman, she will die alone.
Whenever you see someone in a culture with a strong aversion to breaking their gender role - “I can’t have sex with a lot of men or I’ll be a slut!” then that is a sign that they are undergoing external pressure to behave that way in order to attract a mate - a reaction to “men want to have sex with younger, relatively inexperienced women”
So I don’t understand all of the comments about “fragile masculinity.”
If masculinity is fragile, then it’s because men have been told their whole lives that women want a certain kind of man, and if he is not that man, then he will die alone.
I don’t understand the mockery. It should be replaced with sympathy. If you wouldn’t mock a young conservative girl for having fragile femininity, then you shouldn’t mock a young man who’s scared of wearing a skirt. He’s not just afraid that wearing a skirt will make him look silly, he’s afraid that if he wears a skirt, women will ridicule him and never be attracted to him again. And sadly, a lot of the, time he’s not wrong.
If you still don’t feel sympathy for this, imagine being asked to do something that you believe will render you unattractive to your desired gender. “Come on, what’s so bad about a face full of rampant acne?” “Hey, why are you scared of 250 extra pounds? Is your body image really so fragile?”
It’s also interesting to note that women seem less afraid, in general, of violating their gender role than men are - which is why the concept of “fragile masculinity” is way more popular than “fragile femininity.” I also suspect that 100 years ago, this would not have been the case - that women’s gender roles would have been equally as strict as men’s (as evidenced by all those etiquette books on how to be a ‘proper woman’).
This seems to imply that more progress has been made into loosening women’s strict gender roles than has been made for men.
Why do you think this is?
It’s easier to loosen gender roles for women than for men because masculinity also circumscribes within it the span of all heroically admirable traits. Inner strength, ambition, risk-taking, decisiveness, independence, and command are all strongly coded masculine, and are also the traits that you see most often in the protagonists of any narrative.
The heroic feminine is far more limited- I can only right now think of empathy and emotional resilience (which differs from inner strength in that it is displayed primarily to loved ones rather than to outgroup). These heroic traits tend to be assigned to beloved, but auxiliary characters, which necessarily draw less admiration. Some might argue wisdom to be an example of heroic feminine, but I think wisdom isn’t strongly gendered either way- while the wise woman is an acceptable expression of femininity, there are still more wise men represented.
Moving from the conceptual to the practical, skills that are coded masculine are universally more respected than skills coded feminine. The oldest example of this is physical combat versus childcare. While you could argue that motherhood and childcare is well-venerated, it’s tiers below the glory found in violence. Even in the modern day, the humanities have become less valued as more women have moved into them, and STEM and entrepreneurship (which retain majority male population) are most respected. While being a doctor is respectable in the US, nations with majority female doctors respect and pay their doctors far less.
This extends even into personal interests- masculine-coded interests like sports and cars are treated as universal, or at least understandable and immune to critique in the mainstream. Meanwhile, feminine-coded interests such as fashion and makeup are seen as frivolous and vain.
I feel the relationship between disrespect towards women themselves and disrespect towards feminine-coded skills, traits, and interests is, like most such things, a feedback loop with no clearly identifiable start or end. But I do hold that misogyny is at the root of women being able to buck their gender roles more easily than men.
The trouble for a man staying in a female-dominated, or even gender-equal-population field, is that he cannot use it to demonstrate his masculinity. If something is done 90% by women, then it cannot be used to prove manliness to women - after all, how can it separate him from them when they could do the exact same thing themselves! (It might be the case that various LGBTQ women, don’t count for this psychologically/socially.)
My fear, not full-on belief, but fear, is that the reason things are this way is that a sufficiently large chunk of cis heterosexual women don’t actually want the situation to change, because their selection criteria are different from mens’.
My hope is that it’s going to collapse by women realizing that they can be attracted to men that break the traditional pattern, and eventually this will reach sufficient critical mass to collapse the culture’s self-reinforcing effect. A lot of the conditions that created the current culture’s norms aren’t holding anymore.
But since the level of nature vs nurture is unknown, I don’t see that as guaranteed. Transhumanism may ultimately render it irrelevant by the time it would normally take effect.
Five years ago a young man went down into the haunted mines, promising to clear it of evil. Today he emerged, covered in ancient armour stained with the blood of unimaginable horrors, glowing of magic. He demands we dig deeper.
“Finally, you’re back!”
Karlof stepped into the wooden mining shack. The ancient metal of his armor, meant for a war forgotten by time, clanked as he walked inside. The green patina of the armor was stained with the black blood of countless horrors.
Karlof looked over at the woman who welcomed him. She sat in a wooden chair, gray hair coming down to her shoulders. Her simple outfit looked worn from years of use.
“You can’t stay here,” Karlof said. “We need to warn the village. We must dig deeper into-” After a moment, he looked at the woman again.
“Mom?” He asked.
“We’ve been waiting for you for so long,” the woman said. “They said you would come back soon. Listen, Karl, a lot of things have changed since you were gone. The government-”
But Karl didn’t wait. If his mother was still alive, perhaps some of the others from the village might still be, too. He opened the door, still expecting the charred remnants he had seen in the vision far below.
He was startled by the loud “FWEEEEEEEE” of a whistle. The head of the whistleblower turned and faced him. Two fiery orange eyes with pupils slitted like a cat’s drew his attention. Above them, rising from the new woman’s head, rose two horns, curling backwards. A pair of fangs pushed downwards from bored lips. She was wearing a sturdy outfit of cloth and leather.
The horned woman looked back at him for a moment, before turning her head and shouting. “Alright, ‘e’s out! You can get back to digging!” In the corner of his eye, Karlof saw the mass of some huge brass contraption move.
“What’s the meaning of this?!” he said, looking first at the horned woman and then at his mother.
“The government was taken over by these Otokyaryi, oh, several winters ago now.” Said Karlof’s mother.
“We lost the war?” Karl said the words, but after years of fighting in the dark recesses of the Underworld itself, he had almost entirely forgotten the fighting on the surface.
“No,” objected the horned woman. “We bought this territory fair and square.” She gestured in a “come here” motion with her hand. “Now step on out of there. We’re two million pounds overbudget and three months behind schedule.”
Karlof just stared back in disbelief.
“Well don’t just stand there looking at me,” said the horned woman. “If this energy well isn’t finished and converting nightmares into crystal rock in the next three months, I’m going to get fired. You didn’t think magic carpets fueled themselves, did you?”
The road to ending “slut shaming” of women probably goes through the town of “destroy the norm of giving men status for being sexually successful, and of treating male virgins as disgusting losers”.
I say this because I think some of the desire to enforce sex norms on women relates to the nature of sexual access as a status good for men.
If a low-partner man gets into a relationship with a high-partner woman, he is considered lower status for it, under multiple frameworks. Under a “promiscuous women are low-value” framework, it lowers his value by suggesting he had to ‘settle’ for a woman other men could extract sex from but didn’t consider worthy of commitment. Under a “anyone having a high partner count means they are high-value” framework, it suggests that the woman is higher value than he is (which is risky if men are judged more on status than women are), and that the way for him to raise his value is to have lots of meaningless sex with lots of people.
If a low-partner man and a high-partner man are in the same community, the low-partner man is lower status than the high-partner man is, since masculinity is contingent on success, and success with women is counted as one category of success. (In fact, one of the socially damaging aspects of virginity / lower partner count is that it is considered “unmasculine”.)
This creates a strong motivation for status war. If low-partner men can attack promiscuity in women, they can create a situation where women have partner counts closer to their own. Failing that, they can lower the status of such women so that they’re at least not higher status than themselves.
Unless their sexual success is decoupled from their social status, men will always have a motivation to wage status war through “slut shaming”.
The way to alter the status of high-partner men is not through straight men themselves, since their value in this respect is conferred by women. (Low-partner men are already low status, so they have less social power to alter these very norms.) It’s through the actions of women.
One way to do this is for women to start treating promiscuous men the way promiscuous women were treated in the past. If women started treating high-partner men like hot potatoes that are disgusting, low-status (like male virgins are now), and aren’t worthy of sex (not just commitment, as getting a woman to commit isn’t considered special), it would radically alter the status dynamic in male communities.
Another possibility is if commitment from women somehow became more difficult to get, and thus was considered special and more valuable than sex, but it’s unclear under what conditions this would emerge as a stable equilibrium. Current conditions don’t favor it or any obvious paths to it. The traditional norm is the opposite - women trade sex to get commitment. If this could be changed, it would increase the status of a man the woman finally ‘settled’ for. (It appears to be true in the opposite direction currently.)
Another way to do it is to treat low-partner and high-partner men the same in a very noticeable way so that men will start internalizing that being high-partner isn’t the same as getting the “approval from women” they need to prove their masculinity and raise their status. This doesn’t mean in fields unrelated to sex. The status comes from sex, so they have to be treated as equally sexually desirable, perhaps even the virgins.
All of these courses of action have their own problems. Depending on the balance of nature vs nurture, some or all of them may not even be feasible. They may do secondary damage. They may just not be enjoyable to a lot of people.
It was the year feminists agreed that “dick is abundant and low value”
In short, gymtw is centered around the idea that women deserve to be directly compensated by men for the emotional labor they provide.
Misandry has gone mainstream, and unfortunately the irony seems to be lost on men.
women are using performative misandry as both comedy and coping mechanism; a way to bond with each other and commiserate about the seeming inevitability of their oppression. In a way, it’s the logical alternative to the real violence we might have enacted if we had decided to actually revolt.
Even if feminists sincerely did want to kill all men, ban all men, or bathe in male tears, it would be a logistically difficult and absurd proposition.
And I won’t lie: Making you uncomfortable — not afraid or hurt, but just a little bit discomfited — is part of the point.
Feminist misandry is an act of reclamation. It’s a way to defang the accusations that at worst get women killed and at best get them ostracized. It is an extended exercise in harmless trolling.
[K]ill all men’ — even in jest — is a reminder of the historical role white women play in white masculine violence against men of color.
The world is actively hostile to women in a way that it isn’t to men.
The rising prominence of feminism in mainstream discourse does mean that fewer men will automatically have access to unearned privilege.
That is, after all, the goal: To convert our society into the meritocracy we have long claimed already existed.
I don’t really have anything to say about these quotes, but I find them interesting to read, like elaborate permutations of a discourse rubik’s cube.
I recognize about half of the quotes and could tell you the authors and outlets where they appeared. Hate-sharing and clickbait seem to work better on me than I’d like to admit.
“When you say ‘I hate you’, do you mean hate me?”
“I don’t hate just you personally, I hate every single person in a group you belong to and find that this seething hatred a great way to bond”
A lot of ace people are LGBTQ. I typically go with the standard definition of “if you experience any significant same-sex attraction, you’re LGBTQ,” and just being asexual or aromantic doesn’t disqualify you from that. I would also consider people who experience no attraction at all (asexual and aromantic) as LGBTQ too, but that’s just me personally. But people who are asexual and heteroromantic or aromantic and heterosexual are not LGBTQ.
What I really objected to in that post was the idea of categorizing an HIV activism blog as “aphobic”
My mother didn’t allow me to have fake guns as a child. At the time, it was a choice to reject glorification of violence. These days, it would be a choice to ensure one’s child does not get shot.
I had an idea. What if we just stop gendering toys?
I had LEGOs and they came in boy colors, but I didn’t know, I was five years old and I thought they were fun to play with! What if we gave kids functional toys and imaginative toys and anything in between, and just ignored gender?
Less profitable.
Lego started selling girl Legos and got such a massive surge in profits you would think three new Star wars movies came out. Not that Legos were boy only in the first place.
This is actually the reason they started the whole “Girl LEGOs” thing in the first place. The LEGO sets for girls are the result of a lot of focus group testing in addition to market research, if I remember correctly. It isn’t actually arbitrary. The things make bank, and the previous ones just didn’t sell as many kits to girls.
so I’ve been blogging fairly consistently on here for the past two years now but I haven’t received my first check yet, do I have to contact @staff myself or
You need a sponsor like Blacktower IFG or General Atomics. Private sponsors pay a bit better than state sponsors usually, but they’re harder to get.
If you’re willing to go for lower bids, you can always get cash from the Middle Kingdom, but you might have to swallow a bit more of your pride than you would for one of the Western nations.
I’d tell you some of mine, but my contract prohibits disclosure. (That’s par for the course for most sponsors that aren’t political campaigns.)
