1. I get punched in the face as my main hobby. Yet I do find dealing with my wife, when she gets some crazy bullshit in her head, to be more stressful. (She very well may say the same to me.)
2. I loved reading. I was good at academics. And I fuckin' hated school. Just saying that it happens.
3. Maybe it's just me, but I kind of think part of the beginning of this is that some of us believed feminism. Or at least the 80's /90's version of it. I hear about second wave and third wave. I dunno what that crud means, but I'll call it "Agent Scully Feminism". Or perhaps "Elaine Benes Feminism". To wit: Women were more or less boys with different genitals. They more or less thought the same and more or less functioned the same as adults. Maybe slightly softer all the way around. Frillier outfits and a little nicer.
But otherwise we were basically the same. Various sides have had an interest in pushing this at various times. But it is utterly and completely false. You mention in the article about back when nerds were on the girls side. As a nerd I say, yes! That is correct! But it's because we thought you WERE us. You were just the slightly nicer boys. Then it turned out you were not that. You were something else entirely. I am not moaning and groaning about this. Im old and married and my hormones are declining. So all this is just mildly amusing abstract chit chat. But nevertheless I think thats the source of it. It confused the hell outta me for a few decades until I realized it was false.
Totally*. I just assumed that kind of thing was a common occurrence! Hence my confusion 🤣
* With the mild qualifier that nobody on Seinfeld was really "cool". But that's not specific to Elaine. It was just part of the aesthetic, intentional or not, of the show. I mean, their hippest music reference was like Trini Lopez or Don Ho, lol. It's hip to be square.
As a girl (nerd) who was raised through the 80s and 90s and believed every bit of that specific flavor of feminism, I have had the hardest time reconciling that with the fact that my learned background in medicine and (a little) psychology has to insist that it's just not true. I still believe women (and men) as individuals can do anything and be anything they want, yet I can't help but acknowledge that enough and women (in aggregate) are not the same and want different things from our shared society. All of this also makes conversations about gender identity/trans very problematic at every point for me.
Overlapping distributions. Masculinity and femininity are real, but there are masculine women and feminine men. Think of the graphs for height: men are taller than women on average, but some women are taller than some men, and some women are even taller than most men.
If you're a woman and you want to do man stuff, that's not abnormal or unnatural, it's just not being at the mean for your sex. Nothing wrong with that. Same with being a man for wanting to do woman stuff, though the other guys will pick on you more.
I'd add real life is very frequently problematic. The other side says 'fallen'.
People already forgot about tomboys? They were basically the ones who were just like us. Then puberty hit and things started rolling. Most of them still remained cool though, but they were female all along.
I think missing those times are like not wanting to grow up and remain a child/youngster forever. It is certainly an issue with millenials.
Well, I can't speak for anyone else but me. But I'd say what I'm talking about is more like the assumption that the natural state of girls WAS tomboy-ness (or something like it). That the girly-girl type was the aberration or the result of societal brainwashing that women were now waking up from.
(Edit: for the record I am absolutely an immature manchild. No doubt about it. Although thankfully i just missed being a millenial.)
Oh I understand it this way. It is ironic though that the tomboys never became the feminist types. Obviously I can only speak about my experiences too.
It's perfectly fine to be a manchild if you do it between the four walls and it's alright with your missus.
You lucked out on the millenial part though. Things are not looking good over here.
I agree with your points. Especially #3. I felt kind of betrayed too in what I'm guessing was the late 90s when they started talking about how sexist us geeks were. I'm sure they were inspired by something; I wasn't really involved in gaming culture so I may have missed the worst of it.
Elaine was added because the execs were worried about a show with just three men, so she is, realistically, written as the sort of woman who would hang around with a bunch of guys all the time. I think we can all agree she added a lot to the show.
Scully, well, that's every nerd's fantasy, right? A girl into geek stuff and she looks like Gillian Anderson. There was a funny book that came out in the 90s with 'geek ratings' for famous geeks and the Scully character was the second highest. (The highest was Bill Gates, with 256.)
The ancient Romans refused to take women seriously and treated them as adult-sized children.
From what we know today, they were largely correct.
After a half a century of feminism and unleashing women's true nature, our societies have a crashed birthrate beyond the level at which civilizations fall.
No war or plague ever wrought such destruction as listening to women.
Over thousands of years men built civilizations on limiting women's behavior and putting in place strict taboos and shaming on their most destructive tendencies. And then we liberated them.
Women immediately showed why those limitations were placed on them in the first place.
You can bemoan that women aren’t like men (whatever that means) and therefore feminism is fake, but you’re missing the main point of the article which is that in the halcyon past when sex differences were understood and respected men faced constant low level violence precisely so that they would act more like women.
Have you ever thought that maybe the reason why it bothers so many people is that society found a way to rule out the worst aspects of boys behavior but not the ones from girls behavior. A boy will face consequences for being aggressive or restless, but a girl will face no consequences for being too bitchy, manipulative, overly dramatic or gossipy.
This is a really obvious point, and it's shocking kryptogal doesn't bring it up. I agree with her that currently, the norm is that we can beat nobody up, but it seems her desired end goal is just to let women get away with things that nerdy men wouldn't, for mostly-unclear reasons. Maybe if she ever faced violence herself, she wouldn't be so cavalier about endorsing its return.
How are my reasons not clear?? It's so they stop blaming women for everything all the time, no matter how unrelated I never blame men for anything. That's why I do not need to be hit, I don't complain or whine about my life, ever. You see?
Mostly I complain about other people complaining too much. 😊
You really missed the point. Boys and girls, men and women, are different. So, no, men punching women is a completely different thing. Did you think you were on Reddit?
The exoteric, rational point is if I think if you get more of one you get more of the other. There's evidence police officers (and military personnel, though not Kryptogal's sweetie) have higher rates of domestic violence and so on; that's been stated elsewhere.
The esoteric, gut point is, 'See how you like it when people suggest doing unpleasant things to *you*'.
We appear to be at a cultural moment where each gender wants to argue: "Men and women are just different. And sometimes YOUR gender has to suffer inequality because of that. Don't shoot the messenger, it's just a fact of life!"
This is a question that has bedeviled our best scientists and politicians for two to three years now, and you're telling me that you, random internet person, have figured it out all on your own?
What degrees do you hold? From which universities? Where was your research published and how many times has it been cited?
It must be blatantly obvious by now why men used to reply to women's screaming irrationality with a hard slap across the face with the back of the hand.
Does her no permanent damage but gets her attention and calms her down.
Moreover there is the delicious *frisson* of pleasure at being disciplined by the man she respects. She crossed a line and she knows it, and the fact that he put her back in her place lets her know he really cares about her and wants what's best for her.
"Society found a way to rule out the worst aspects of boys behavior." Then why do most rapes go unreported and why do 1/3 of women get beaten by their partners? Doesn't sound very ruled out to me. Fuck that ridiculous horseshit.
I don’t know what the numbers are, but many men would be willing to execute rapists. On the other hand, you have the spectacle of many women defending the “innocence” of actual rapists (e.g., the Central Park 5) or other horrible men/boys.
Most men? I don’t know any of these men/rapists, afaik. Again, many men would support executing rapists. Yes, the CP5 convictions were vacated but they were likely guilty. As I said, women will defend rapists when they are victims of PC dogma.
Socially harmful men get isolated from society and punished by being confined with other men just like them. We get along just fine with this system.
Meanwhile our birthrate has crashed to catastrophic levels the likes of which civilizations do not historically recover from.
Which is more socially destructive? Miguel whose hobby is cornering people in dark alleys with a knife, or Karen who did her part turning society into a winner-takes all market and maximizing incel production.
Women face no consequences for being bitchy and manipulative? Are you serious right now? There are huge social consequences if you’re discovered to be doing either of these things.
Yes it’s a bit harder to prove than outright aggression, but it’s also because in comparison you could lose all your friends and family vs. a man just being sent to therapy for being aggressive. Like look at what happened to Winona ryder for shop lifting. Vs Johnny depp for whatever he did (I don’t even want to get into it).
A man could even go to jail and still retain the love of his family and friends while a woman loses everything at even a hint of being proven as bitchy or manipulative.
Bring dramatic or gossipy is the same as being bad at reading social cues. It’s irritating or annoying at best and unless you’re really hot you’re gonna end up with a small social circle than if you were agreeable.
On the internet, being bitchy and manipulative gets rewarded with engagement and followers.
I've said before that in my experience, "women IRL" and "women on the internet" (or perhaps: "women who argue about gender on the internet") might as well be two separate genders. I like the first gender far better.
“On the internet, being bitchy and manipulative gets rewarded with engagement and followers.”
True of both men and women. The repulsive part of the internet is watching guys being bitchy and manipulative in ways so calculated that no woman could match.
Men bullying each other to death and coming up with sick terms like chad, rating all human beings in a number scale, talking about looksmaxing and looksmatching were taught these things by women.
I much prefer the thing men do, where they "bully" each other as a form of bonding, over the thing women do, where they self-righteously attempt to exclude or censor others.
Anyways, if women have a genuine preference for female-style aggression, and men have a genuine preference for male-style aggression, maybe we'd just be better off with more gender segregation?
Yeah, the internet tends to reward the worst behaviours in both men and women. I wouldn't spend much time on what's rewarded online.
My point is that socially, boys' worst traits are much more frowned upon and punished than girls'. The consequences you pointed out are very small when compared to the ones a boy would face. A woman who shows the traits I mentioned will maybe have a smaller social circle, but it will probably still be larger than most men's (but that's because women have larger social circles by default). Btw, Johnny Depp only got away with that because he's a hugely famous actor and incredibly charismatic. A normal guy would have been crushed under those accusations (no matter what he did or not). Johnny Depp's case doesn't reflect what happens in the large majority of cases.
In most IRL cases I know abusive men have gotten away with things mainly because their social circles let them.
Good men get away with nothing because their social circles hold them to better standards. Would you rather have social circles that let you get away with stuff?
As for women having bigger friends group than men even with antisocial behaviours because women tend to have more friends - that’s also because women can have huge fights, call each other out and then accept their mistakes, work on fixing the behaviors and become friends again.
Johny depp got away with much worse things because he’s handsome charismatic and rich but Winona didn’t have a career for two decades because she’s more beautiful , rich and charismatic than the typical woman? Make it make sense. I specifically chose them both because they dated and were of the same star power. Johnny has probably been behaving like an asshole for a long time but has gotten away with it (no one becomes an asshole overnight). It’s just that he finally met a woman who’s as much of an asshole and decided to make him pay.
But Winona paid the price socially and professionally for one wrong thing she did all those years ago. Same with Lindsay Lohan, Britney- the number of women who paid horrific prices for things that were mild in comparison.
I don’t even know if Johnny should be taken to court for what he did, but there is literally no social punishment for fantasising about killing your girlfriend with Paul bettany on text - is there? His friends - no one cared to hold him accountable and just say hey, cut it out. And that’s true of men usually.
Either you are in a circle where anything goes or nothing. And with women it’s almost always a “nothing goes” circle. Men usually let things slide. Unless there are other women involved. It’s like how men who live together live like pigs until one of them starts dating and all of them start picking up the slack.
Men who resolve interpersonal conflict with other men with violence also solve interpersonal conflict with women with violence. That said, Sean Connery was onto something
I'd like to hope that people, even nerd boys, have within them the capacity to be decent without having to suffer the fear of violence, but also I've raise two boys (and a daughter) who are in their 20s now. I married a soft-hearted, sweet nerd boy who literally cried about having to enforce bedtime. One of us had to be the man, so discipline came from me and while my children love me, they do also fear me. I think they turned out better for it.
I think discipline and consequence-awareness are crucial to becoming a real person with real opinions that can contribute to society. I don't think that has to come about through actual violence, but if nothing else will work violence is kind of a shortcut to understanding cause and effect. Sort of like smacking a TV to fix picture quality. It doesn't make you an electrical engineer (or a good parent) but it did fix the picture.
Mixed review. For an angry tirade, you get a solid 9/10 (could be angrier). For an article offering helpful advice to solve problems, however, I'm gonna have to go like 6/10. But if nerds were afraid of getting punched they would probably spend less time hating women, so it does fix the picture.
Maybe someday we will have equality that is actually equality, instead of being either put on a pedestal or made a pariah for making everything terrible.
Yeah I’ve met plenty of women-haters who have been punched. They probably needed better male figures in their lives but lack of violence was definitely not the problem.
I'm talking about people who were punished or bullied.
You shouldn't hit children, it's wrong and in many places illegal. I get that this is not entirely serious and that the larger point is that these manchildren needed discipline meted out by a male authority figure when they were younger. True. We don't need to return to corporeal punishment though, we really don't.
I don't really have a strong opinion on corporal punishment of children, but certainly would not favor it being anything but very mild and more of the scare them not hurt them variety, if it happens. However, I do get annoyed when so many people talk as if schools have suddenly become very mean to boys and that's why some are doing badly. When that is clearly not the case and we are nicer to them then ever before in the history of the world. If someone can get them to behave without hitting them, great, that would be wonderful. But I also don't think it's okay to just let them do some of the things they do nowadays and that any teacher will tell you about. Honestly, some of this seems like it should be so obvious I'm confused how schools are doing it so badly. Like how about granting privileges to the boys who consistently behave...like real privileges representing something they all actually strongly want and that the other boys would be jealous of and motivated to get for themselves?
Honest question: who do you mean by these people who say that schools have become very mean to boys and that's why some are doing badly? For instance Richard Reeves argues that many boys learn differently and that schools might be more geared to girls in some ways, and potentially making adjustments for the different rates that boys and girls develop at would be a good thing. Is it that kind of thing you mean? I get the sense it's something else?
Just the mass of commenters over on the NYT (there was on article on the boys/school topic three days ago, or here). Just seems like a common thread that school isn't suited for boys bc they need to run around more, they don't want to sit still, they want to do not learn passively or read. Which is all I true but doesn't explain why they used to perform better on school and now they don't (for what look to me like obvious reasons).
It's a good point. A lot of domestic abusers were often subjected to violence themselves in their use. Nerdy guys who might benefit from a few fights in school are mostly a different group.
Same here, the biggest misogynist I've known got in a lot of schoolyard fights as a kid.
The corporal punishment era that Kate waxes lyrically about was also an era of reduced women's rights relative to today. Perhaps those facts are related in more ways than one.
It seems like not only beating up but any direct confrontation between men is now unacceptable because of this.
During a recent family gathering, my brother-in-law insulted my wife: he yelled at her in public, on the street of her small town (where everyone knows each other). He had no reason to do this, and he refused to apologize. She was literally devastated after this.
As he hasn't apologized by evening, I confronted him and told him that what he did was wrong and he should apologize. Instead of talking it out, he complained to his wife, who complained to my wife, who got worked up about me "messing with their personal relationships".
In the past men were like "If you don't like something about me, come and say it, right in my face". Also, men were obliged to stand up for their wives if someone insulted them. Sadly, it seems like both are a thing of the past now.
How exactly would 'beating him up' help that situation? You seriously want to risk brain damage, becoming a criminal, or (god forbid) potentially killing someone over some words?
Yeah, men of the past probably beat each other up more. They were also beating and raping their wives more as well. None of this is properly in the past and if you would prefer those social circumstances there are plenty of places for you to live in
Squaring up to obnoxious dickheads does the exact opposite of mittigating violence - it's an invitation for them to initiatie it. Making these situations more permissable would just escalate petty squabbles into someone potentially getting killed.
This is wrong and Piotr is right. The deterrence factor and threat of violence reduces acts of aggression quite a bit. This is well shown among animals and humans, idk why solely in America and Europe everyone has forgotten this or believes otherwise. You seem to think that violence is out of control or happens frequently rather than rarely precisely bc people want to avoid it. I think maybe part of the reason you think this is bc now that we have made such things illegal, the only people stupid enough to do that are the truly dumb people with zero ability to control their own impulses anyway. So you now associate such things with morons with no impulse control, however, there is no reason it has to be like that. Look at something like BJJ or other martial arts. Those are all highly controlled and disciplined forms of violence.
I agree that the threat of violence is a detterence factor, such as from the state, but your post and most of these comments aren't talking about that. School-aged nerdy males getting assaulted, or being threatened with assault, by other unaccountable males as a roundabout way of solving a particular strain of misogyny is such an obviously stupid and frankly weird idea.
People in Europe and America haven't fogotten this, they're just aware of the obvious risks posed by extrajudicial violence against kids which can easily be life-threatening and have rightfully made the decision to not allow it. I personally think this because my family is from a part of the world where this behaviour is normal amongst men and the outcomes of it are terrifying, not least the high levels of violence against women. We don't need to risk this because of autistic incels on Substack.
I think you can disentangle the two things here. One is:
- If we have a disagreement, we should communicate about it directly, resolve it directly, and if I have something negative to say to you, I'm not afraid to have own what I said and you're not afraid to hear it.
- The other is "we can resolve our dispute by punching."
The punching requires direct communication, but direct communication does not require punching.
I agree with this spiritually though not literally. I suspect many of the more toxic chuds who complain about a feminized culture wouldn’t last a day in a truly masculine one, where their behaviors simply wouldn’t be tolerated.
Shakespeare would agree with you on this one. The cuckold plays are a brilliant analysis of the type of man you’re describing. Merry Wives of Windsor comes to mind.
As a man, I’ve said in previous comments that I somewhat sympathize with these guys, in the sense that sometimes you’re just that frustrated with the opposite sex, but these guys also take it too far. They intellectualize too much and imagination takes over and soon enough it’s delusion. I’ve always followed a principle as a writer. If I’m writing something that in any way could be interpreted as the grand unifying theory of [fill in the blank], it means I’m projecting, and I’m not ready to write the piece. A lot of our male writers on Substack know how to think and argue but are not very introspective. They externalize everything (frequently onto women, as you noted).
Lastly, I do train Brazilian jiu jitsu. I don’t get punched in the face often but does getting choked out count? Haha. Nah, I took a few licks in my youth. Walked away totally fine. Actually, if there’s one thing you maybe forgot. Many of these guys, if they find themselves in a fight, they actually either fawn or pretend to be injured. They aren’t just afraid of other men, they’re afraid to use their bodies at all. They’ve never really learned about them and find it emasculating to go through the process of learning how to fight. They prefer the male version of female passive aggression/gossiping—writing long essays that often read like a cry for help.
Look, I wasn't joking, I seriously had a list in my head of all the male readers that I know have engaged in some type of physical fighting with other men, and ZERO of them are the ones who engage in elaborate woman-blaming. It's actually quite notable to me. So my theory about why could be wrong...but idk, it seems like a very strong correlation.
I probably should have noted that I have no beef whatsoever with nice non-violent men who have never been hit or fought, so long as they don't also regularly blame women for all of their grievances in life. It's only the blamer-boys I'm mad at. But that would've watered it down. 😊
I just did a rundown in my head and the same is true for me - 100%.
In my experience,
The physical men (especially ones who have been in the military or operate big machinery) who’ve punched and been punched have been the best of friends, once you make clear you are not interested in them sexually. They accept it no questions, no pressure — unlike the emo 🖤 assholes.
(But I was the tomboy girl who still loves hard scifi, video games and climbing a mountain just because it’s really hard.)
You know, we use 'tomboy' for both jock women and nerd women (and people like yourself who are a mix of both). I wonder how the experience is different for each of those.
I’m not disagreeing with you but men like the ones you describe live in a state of total objectification of women. (IMO, a porn issue is never the cause but usually the accelerant). I meant to draw some distinction between hatred of women and total ignorance on the subject of women. When women are totally objectified to non-existence in the male psyche, as misogynist as that may be to observe as a woman, it’s almost always insecurity in the masculine social order for the subject. By which I mean, just because the subject is blaming women doesn’t mean talking about women with him will lead to any improvement whatsoever. He’s turned women into a monster and a placeholder for insecurity he can’t own inside of himself. That release valve is so critical to his ego that facts/logic/etc, nothing will matter.
A punch in the face can actually be an acknowledgment. Being seen that much can be stepping up the ladder. Also it works because a punch in the face, or being shoved to the ground, or grappling, doesn’t hurt physically but it will force your dissociated emotional pain into your body where you can feel/process it naturally. Fighting amongst men is healthy to a certain extent because the insecure man learns how to fight and gains acceptance in the social hierarchy. What many men who feel rejected by the hierarchy don’t realize is that it’s them who are rejecting us. They are alone because they are too afraid to own the psychological construct of lies and delusions preventing them from maturing and setting aside these insecurities. A punch in the face, as literal as it is, can have immense metaphorical significance in male development.
I don't know, I'm pretty sure I was one of the ones she was describing and I don't see women as objects. More like the monsters of the Cthulhu Mythos--you can never really understand them, they have powers you can't access and can't understand, and they mean you ill. Or medieval nobility--you have to pay them deference, they can take your money, and they can hurt you and you can't hurt them back.
I agree with the criticism of that former culture. Most men Do. Not. Like. being told to shut up and sit still for hours a day.
Having said that, while I get that you're using hyperbole to make a point, I don't think being beaten up really does much to shape a nerdy kid's character in any kind of meaningful way. I was that autistic kid who got beaten up several times in my youth and it did nothing to build my character or confidence. What did help was play fighting with friends or playing football with my brothers. Boys need physical play but it needs to be in a positive, formational context.
And truth be told, there are cultures today which manage to root out the bullies and yet remain relatively patriarchal, mostly in east Asia. Singapore, Japan, China will literally execute violent males and enforce very tough disciplinary standards in schools yet also reward intellectual achievement and general nerdiness in the wider culture, whilst upholding a somewhat more traditional/patriarchal culture. Albeit in an unhealthy, extremely workaholic form which disrupts healthy family formation and drives very low birthrates.
I have no idea where I'm going with this but thank you for stimulating these thoughts. I think you're right that things are generally better for nerdy guys today than ever. If a guy wants to improve himself there are plenty of resources out there to help him do so. Taking up a martial art or joining a gym just for starters. I'm as anti-woke as the next guy but let's not pretend we don't live in a culture of limitless opportunity. You just have to try.
I also find it a shame that people don't get their asses kicked for things like shoplifting.
In some places in the U.S., mostly out west, it has essentially become legal to simply walk into a store and take whatever you want. I mean, there literally are not consequences anymore.
It is quite clear that this is not a net benefit for society.
Society would run better if people, upon being caught shoplifting, were immediately helped to several broken bones. It would make people think twice before shoplifting, and it would therefore remove the utterly absurd need for ordinary consumer staples to be locked behind gates and cages. Shopping in these areas has become cartoonishly ridiculous and laborious.
Yes, society works better when men are allowed to kick each other's asses. It's such a simple yet effective preventative social mechanism.
Hell, if we allowed ass kickings again, we wouldn't need as many police officers either. Every single thing about society would be better. We're too civilized for our own good.
The real irony is that many men would PREFER just taking a beat down to something like six months of court-ordered therapy or whatever. It would be less painful, or at least over sooner. So in a sense it would be both cheaper, more effective, and actually more humane. But see, this is not something that could possibly seem true to women. We would all rather the lengthy mandated therapy to getting hit. I don't think any of us will ever truly understand why hitting can be effective for men sometimes...I don't try to understand it anymore, I just accept it based on what I see and clear evidence of things like guys getting into a fist fight and then ending up as close friends shortly thereafter.
I believe Singapore uses this approach for a number of offenses. Can't speak overall as to its efficacy, but the place doesn't seem to have imploded yet, at least.
I think IRL you'd run into racial issues; ass-kickings would rapidly break along racial lines. (Amplify it and you're talking about a lynching.) This was at least part of the reason the 1950s order fell, after all.
It's hard to pick cause and effect with large social changes like that, I agree.
But a big part of the moral impetus behind the cultural revolution of the Sixties was reaction against Jim Crow; it wasn't just hippies smoking weed and having free love. The Establishment wasn't just in favor of marriage before sex and women wearing dresses; it also supported segregation, at least officially. (If you're into conspiracies they secretly wanted to get rid of it because it was making them look bad in the Cold War.)
One of the big problems with allowing random ass-kickings is that the minute the parties are of different races, it's going to hit the Internet and go viral among people of the appropriate political polarity. Note in Singapore the police do all the ass-kickings.
No reason this wouldn't apply to your suggestions about violence being allowed among (male) minors as well.
"They’re not afraid of their moms, because why would they be?"
I speak on behalf of all nebbish Jewish men when I say that we have an existential fear of our mothers which exceeds any Lovecraftian horror which you are capable of comprehending. A curse, but also a blessing that creates great self-deprecating comedy.
Getting punched in the face in real life is actually life threatening. It also carries risk of brain bleeds and permanent disability. It is not like in the movies. It is not a good idea for anyone to be punched in the face. That’s why it is a crime to do it.
The article and comments are filled with people who have never been in an actual fight. Real fight leave cripples and dead behind them, that's why society decided to police them.
We used to have legal dueling, it also left cripples and dead behind them, and that's the same reason it was banned.
This is so funny because I happen to agree with both of you while also disagreeing with the reasons presented by both of you.
I don’t agree with him that women control the world - no they don’t. Powerful men still control the world- but the British belief in fair play has permeated the world making it a fair world for both women and nerds.
I also don’t agree with you that men need to be beaten up more. Men just need to learn to exist in a world with fair play. And great men, powerful men - already understand that. Weak men don’t.
I agree that it’s horrible to be diagnosed with autism on the fly by people just because they dislike you. Like it’s a parlour trick. But is it any worse than a woman being asked - are you on your periods? You just suck it up and go on.
This is the reason in my replies to him I spoke of an annoying nerd friend of mine who literally has no fucks to give about what people think of him. Vicious mole sadly cares too much what people think of him.
My final comment - rude people have a right to exist exactly as they are. But your social circles will shrink and you have to accept that. My rude friend lives in the countryside and has like 1 friend who he meets once a year. You have to be okay with that kind of situation. Rude people are disliked by most people. You can’t force them to like you. Modern society and fair play only means they’ll let you exist just as you are.
Well, I think Vicious Mole was just going off on a little ragey rant, because he talked about Rico Suave as if he had resentment there, but also he has other pieces explaining that he played the Rico Suave role to quite successful effect for many years. And also he's perfectly capable of being charming, as he notes. So I just saw this as him going off, and decided to do the same. Because it did make me mad when he blamed women for all of it, especially when I've had "normie" men react with similar disgust and anger when they deemed me too spergy and to be behaving the way they expected me to. And there are plenty of guys who wear their autism label like a badge of honor.
I agree with you. Everyone hates people who get a little ranty and don’t have the social graces to pick up the clues. It’s not just women. But most men don’t care to be accepted by the men who would mock /judge them. They care about women judging them because they want to be accepted by them. In his case I found it interesting that the first example he gave was of a girlfriend’s mom. Why did he care what she thought? Anymore than he would care what say Trump would think? Because he wanted her to like him and he wanted in on her social circle. But didn’t want to pay the price for it. And that is the main problem with nerds or incels. They don’t care that hot, successful men won’t let them into their social circles they care that women won’t.
I have often had a "one of us" vibe from you, but didn't want to mention it because I didn't want it to sound like some type of fawning come on. But now that you mention it here, it clicks into place.
Perhaps getting punched in the face would make nerds more empathetic to women. But then we'd still have to live in the world where the biggest bullies get to bully. And realistically, once those kids hit puberty, no schoolmarm with a ruler is going to keep them in line. Neither will their father with a belt, because they're bigger than dad now. That's another reason we have moved away from physical discipline. Not just because it isn't nice, but because there's a point where it isn't effective and then backfires.
Well then I guess we should just take the bullies out entirely, since they're causing the problems, but no one seems to have the stomach for that either. 😉
I'm not sure it's true about being bigger than your parents one day. I think when someone has been raised and trained through childhood so their brain is wired to view their father as an authority figure, it's not something one can just snap out of just because one day they're bigger. My husband is about twice the size of his dad who is several inches shorter than him, yet I guarantee he has never so much as said a cross word in his presence, and you probably couldn't pay him to be disrespectful, because it's so wired in not to be.
It's kind of like how my dog thinks I'm in charge just bc once upon a time he was a small puppy and I was a much bigger and more powerful entity. So even though now that my dog is full grown and I only outweigh him by 30 lbs or so, and he could easily murder me if he wanted to bc he's got the big teeth and the four-leg drive power...he doesn't in fact he does everything I say. Because he doesn't realize that I'm no longer a more powerful entity, the relationship has already been wired in. Not saying a man is like a dog (well, not exactly lol), just that however one is wired to relate to their parents tends to just stick around, even though eventually you get bigger and they get more frail.
My oldest son is 39. If I told him to, he would drop what he was doing and come help me. Now, with older grandkids, my wife and I have an army at our command. I run a small construction business, all the boys do an internship, and 4 of them still work for me. I'm sure one of them will take over if and when I ever retire. I'm hoping they'll let me stay on, schmooze with the customers, and bid jobs.
"I'm not sure it's true about being bigger than your parents one day. I think when someone has been raised and trained through childhood so their brain is wired to view their father as an authority figure, it's not something one can just snap out of just because one day they're bigger."
I think this lives or dies on 'authority figure' - see Terry Real (who was severely physically abused by his father) in "I don't want to talk about it" describing the day he realized as a teenager that he was big enough that his father couldn't be unilaterally violent to him anymore.
Probably a lot of the tension revolves around the fact that "peak manhood coupled with peak societal capability" is probably around the Victorian Age or maybe WWII, but both of those sucked for women. I'm not sure what "peak womanhood coupled with peak societal capability" would be, probably the eighties through oughts?
"Male societal ideal" and "female societal ideal" might just be irreconciliable, because even if we start beating schoolboys again, and/or punching nerds, OR forcing women back into kitchens, we're still not going to be able to resolve a lot of our societal-level problems.
Which are, roughly: Regulatory capture, terrible K-12 schools that cost more than everywhere else and underperform for smart and dumb kids alike, declines in high human capital fertility, housing being impossible to build anywhere people actually live, the most expensive health care system in the world, increasing polarization, more commons being burned (figuratively and literally), and increasing lack of trust in our institutions and legal system.
Neither getting men to man up nor oppressing women is likely to solve any of those, but people sure do love pretending that they will!
And for what it's worth, neither will voting "your" side in, whichever side that might be, because none of them are going to fix any of those, either - notice how they're not even on the menu for either side's platform?
Societally, I think this is about the time that Yamnaya / Scythians / Huns / Mongols roll in and obliterate everyone and then establish a Yuan-empire-equivalent and sort of hard reboot the whole process - the societal equivalent of a dude getting punched for his faulty opinions, and the winner changing his mind / institutions.
Sadly, there are no more extant steppe nomads to do this much-needed societal punching. But maybe we can blame either men or women for that??
The Longhouse - this one weird trick has taken away steppe nomad vigor and masculinity!
Or modern men - everyone tells you to get a degree and a soul-crushing 9-5, but if you pursue the ancient wisdom of the Horde, you too can become an Alpha and crush your enemies beneath your iron boots while listening to the lamentations of their women! Sign up for my 6 week course today and join the Modern Mongols!
You literally live in the greatest era of the most successful country and culture on the planet. I’m so confused when westerners speak like they live in hell….
> You literally live in the greatest era of the most successful country and culture on the planet
Well, not me personally, I put my money where my mouth is a while ago and have been an expat for a few years now.
But yes, there are many things to admire and love about America, especially if you want to start a business or have an impact on the world. I think we have the most creative and innovative and entreprenurial people / culture in the world, but it's being steadily whittled away by regulatory capture, relentless bureaucratic growth, and systemic decay and corruption.
People are trying to hobble and drag down that "best in the world" slice of creative and entreprenurial people, and they're succeeding to a greater and greater extent, and I think it's a shame.
But you want to see a functional society? Go to Singapore or Tokyo. Everything is clean, the schools actually work, there's no homeless encampments, beggars, or fentanyl zombies ruining downtowns, there's no stores with locked sections everywhere, even traffic is much much better.
Aside from the minor problem that both of them are literally going extinct, it's superior on basically every front. 😂
So my husband is on a business trip on the west coast and just texted me to tell me his rental car was smashed into and stolen in the middle of the day in the parking lot of the fucking city convention center. He has been telling me what a dump it has become and overrun with drug addict homeless, but this takes the cake. I have kept hearing about it things being bad in the west coast cities but honestly I had assumed it must be at least a little exaggerated. Apparently not.
> I have kept hearing about it things being bad in the west coast cities but honestly I had assumed it must be at least a little exaggerated. Apparently not.
Yes, directly before I became an expat I lived in a very expensive part of a downtown and had only a single car garage, so my "street car" would get broken into roughly once a month, and have the windows smashed every 2-3 months.
This would actually happen routinely, to entire streets of cars. Literally 20-30 car windows smashed, for probably $200 of change and useless crap collected (obviously nobody kept anything in their cars).
That's ~$15k worth of damage happening every few months, for literally nothing.
The police? If you filed a report, they would literally laugh at you. Largely, nobody bothered.
I saw people overdose on the street a couple of times - it got to the point I'd carry narcan around just for that, and ambulance crews had special protocols because anyone who OD'd who got narcan would get violently angry when it hit and their high went away, because suddenly all the endorphins in their system are flushed out, and they're deeply addicted so it's like a one-way "hell" switch.
And it just never gets better, it only gets worse - stores close, neighborhoods decay, this is the west coast in a nutshell, home of the most valuable companies in the world, with some of the most valuable real estate in the world, but that's the daily environment EVERYONE there is living in.
Greatest country in the world, indeed.
If you run the cost / benefit, literally sending problem homeless somewhere remote and giving them all the drugs and alcohol they could ever want for free would be so vastly, comically net positive that JUST the increase in downtown real estate, or the reduction in policing, or the value of lives saved, would each individually pay for the whole thing.
Biggest problem in the world is too many people, not too few. We need to cut the whole world’s population by 50%. Instead of planning for grwoth all the time, we need to start planning for shrinking.
> I don’t think either of these countries are better than America.
Yeah, it really depends what you're optimizing. If you're optimizing "impact" or "ability to attract lots of genuinely top talent," or "good place to start a business," it's the best there is.
But if you're optimizing "quality of life" or "nice place to raise kids" or "not actively dystopian" it's definitely got some downsides.
And sure, there's plenty of places within the US that have those good attributes - the worst of the downsides are concentrated in a handful of big cities.
But they don't HAVE to be, is my point! Greater Tokyo is twice as big as any city or CBSA in the US. Singapore is comparable to SF or core LA or Manhattan plus 2 boroughs, or the Seattle or Denver CBSA's. They're both paradises compared to any of those places, while being big cities with every amenity (and great transit).
Doing "big cities" better is totally a choice, and the US is majorly self-owning on that front.
Doing big cities badly cannot be such a big crime. I agree with you that that is the case, but it’s still a very minor problem compared to everything else in the rest of the world.
You're right. One of the arguments I've seen is that because the USA couldn't be conquered we were stuck with an 18th-century political system that's inefficient and been unable to adapt. The Founding Fathers worship on the right kind of annoys me--I doubt even any of them would have wanted us to be obsessing over what they would have thought of X or Y 21st-century development. If brought to the modern day they would probably just throw up their hands in culture shock. (Though some of the more intellectual ones like Franklin or Jefferson might have enjoyed Wikipedia.)
And being a Mongol only works if you're part of a horde.
> One of the arguments I've seen is that because the USA couldn't be conquered we were stuck with an 18th-century political system that's inefficient and been unable to adapt.
I feel like the system the FF set up had the *capability* to adapt, we just didn't do it, and have gotten hung up on navel gazing and internecine struggles.
But I do seriously think future minds are going to look back on us in this time, and say "so wait, everyone smart stopped having babies, they set all the smart people onto coordinating together to milk rubes instead of actually solving any of their problems, and spent all the rest of their societal efforts and time on witch hunts and culture wars?? Well *there's* your problem right there!"
Like we're well past the "obvious self own" stage and barreling ever faster down that road.
They had amendments, we couldn't make them fast enough. If it sounds like I'm disrespecting them, I'm not. There's really no way they could guessed the problems we were going to have 250 years ahead. Today's world is totally unthinkable for them.
I suppose you're right. Still, as Kryptogal has said elsewhere, the whole pronatalist thing's pretty hard unless you can get women on board (gestation is unpleasant, painful, and expensive), and they really don't want to. The bright spots are places like Israel where everyone's motivated to outbreed an enemy.
Witch hunts and culture wars are results of elite overproduction in a stagnant society. I actually do think attacks on higher education would be useful if they can decrease the percentage of people going to college. At least now that debt is so high a lot of young people are saying no.
> Witch hunts and culture wars are results of elite overproduction in a stagnant society. I actually do think attacks on higher education would be useful if they can decrease the percentage of people going to college. At least now that debt is so high a lot of young people are saying no.
Yeah, I do genuinely wonder how much of this back and forth is really just "the process," and is how we adapt to better equilibria. Young people opting out of overpriced and crappy colleges, some people opting out of children and other people opting in, and so on.
But I also think that a process like this might have worked when the speed of communication was based on horses, but in our modern environment where everything happens at the speed of light and rapidly gets valenced and polarized, the process itself is more or less broken, because ingroup / outgroup dynamics is a stronger force than pretty much anything else, and the process of getting polarized is an attractor that eats everything and makes substantive and effective change more or less impossible in democracies.
In ours, anyway. Others have their own problems. The Europeans sat on the immigration thing for decades and wound up with their own populist wave.
I think you are basically correct, though. Well, we'll see. I chickened out of the kids thing. It's an open question whether that's a good thing or not: the IQ fetishists would say no, but I kind of wonder if spergs shouldn't breed. One way or another it's for someone else to solve the problems of the future. I have to say I'm kind of glad I wasn't born later. Between climate change, authoritarianism, and the rise of a peer competitor, I am not sure I'd want to be a young person now. I hoarded a reasonable sum of money on an upper-middle-class job, which is a lot harder to do now.
I get where youre coming from, but if your line of thinking was correct, the middle east would be a peacefull paradise for women and that clearly isnt the case.
Semi-tangential thoughts:
1. I get punched in the face as my main hobby. Yet I do find dealing with my wife, when she gets some crazy bullshit in her head, to be more stressful. (She very well may say the same to me.)
2. I loved reading. I was good at academics. And I fuckin' hated school. Just saying that it happens.
3. Maybe it's just me, but I kind of think part of the beginning of this is that some of us believed feminism. Or at least the 80's /90's version of it. I hear about second wave and third wave. I dunno what that crud means, but I'll call it "Agent Scully Feminism". Or perhaps "Elaine Benes Feminism". To wit: Women were more or less boys with different genitals. They more or less thought the same and more or less functioned the same as adults. Maybe slightly softer all the way around. Frillier outfits and a little nicer.
But otherwise we were basically the same. Various sides have had an interest in pushing this at various times. But it is utterly and completely false. You mention in the article about back when nerds were on the girls side. As a nerd I say, yes! That is correct! But it's because we thought you WERE us. You were just the slightly nicer boys. Then it turned out you were not that. You were something else entirely. I am not moaning and groaning about this. Im old and married and my hormones are declining. So all this is just mildly amusing abstract chit chat. But nevertheless I think thats the source of it. It confused the hell outta me for a few decades until I realized it was false.
Elaine Benes really was the height of the cool 90s chick who can hang, wasn't she? How can anyone not love Elaine?
Totally*. I just assumed that kind of thing was a common occurrence! Hence my confusion 🤣
* With the mild qualifier that nobody on Seinfeld was really "cool". But that's not specific to Elaine. It was just part of the aesthetic, intentional or not, of the show. I mean, their hippest music reference was like Trini Lopez or Don Ho, lol. It's hip to be square.
It's Benis. B E N I S. Yeah, that's right.
As a girl (nerd) who was raised through the 80s and 90s and believed every bit of that specific flavor of feminism, I have had the hardest time reconciling that with the fact that my learned background in medicine and (a little) psychology has to insist that it's just not true. I still believe women (and men) as individuals can do anything and be anything they want, yet I can't help but acknowledge that enough and women (in aggregate) are not the same and want different things from our shared society. All of this also makes conversations about gender identity/trans very problematic at every point for me.
Yes me too, same same.
Overlapping distributions. Masculinity and femininity are real, but there are masculine women and feminine men. Think of the graphs for height: men are taller than women on average, but some women are taller than some men, and some women are even taller than most men.
If you're a woman and you want to do man stuff, that's not abnormal or unnatural, it's just not being at the mean for your sex. Nothing wrong with that. Same with being a man for wanting to do woman stuff, though the other guys will pick on you more.
I'd add real life is very frequently problematic. The other side says 'fallen'.
People already forgot about tomboys? They were basically the ones who were just like us. Then puberty hit and things started rolling. Most of them still remained cool though, but they were female all along.
I think missing those times are like not wanting to grow up and remain a child/youngster forever. It is certainly an issue with millenials.
Well, I can't speak for anyone else but me. But I'd say what I'm talking about is more like the assumption that the natural state of girls WAS tomboy-ness (or something like it). That the girly-girl type was the aberration or the result of societal brainwashing that women were now waking up from.
(Edit: for the record I am absolutely an immature manchild. No doubt about it. Although thankfully i just missed being a millenial.)
Oh I understand it this way. It is ironic though that the tomboys never became the feminist types. Obviously I can only speak about my experiences too.
It's perfectly fine to be a manchild if you do it between the four walls and it's alright with your missus.
You lucked out on the millenial part though. Things are not looking good over here.
No guarantee on the four walls thing. Best efforts.
Some of them do, I think. A lot become gay and that's their on-ramp.
I agree with your points. Especially #3. I felt kind of betrayed too in what I'm guessing was the late 90s when they started talking about how sexist us geeks were. I'm sure they were inspired by something; I wasn't really involved in gaming culture so I may have missed the worst of it.
Elaine was added because the execs were worried about a show with just three men, so she is, realistically, written as the sort of woman who would hang around with a bunch of guys all the time. I think we can all agree she added a lot to the show.
Scully, well, that's every nerd's fantasy, right? A girl into geek stuff and she looks like Gillian Anderson. There was a funny book that came out in the 90s with 'geek ratings' for famous geeks and the Scully character was the second highest. (The highest was Bill Gates, with 256.)
I never got Scully. She was the "Islamic lady" type: never showed any skin other than her hands and face.
Kept her hair uncovered like a tramp, though, so there's that. Maybe that's what turned all of you on.
See, I liked that. She put on her suit and went about business.
Didnt have to worry about girly girl crap. That's the whole point!
Although I will note theres a purposeful almost boob shot in the episode "Humbug" s2e20. Yep I'm that much of a lonely geek.
The ancient Romans refused to take women seriously and treated them as adult-sized children.
From what we know today, they were largely correct.
After a half a century of feminism and unleashing women's true nature, our societies have a crashed birthrate beyond the level at which civilizations fall.
No war or plague ever wrought such destruction as listening to women.
Over thousands of years men built civilizations on limiting women's behavior and putting in place strict taboos and shaming on their most destructive tendencies. And then we liberated them.
Women immediately showed why those limitations were placed on them in the first place.
Nominated for a punch in the face
Always with the violent fantasies and threats.
While constantly accusing men of the same.
Classic psychological projection.
You can bemoan that women aren’t like men (whatever that means) and therefore feminism is fake, but you’re missing the main point of the article which is that in the halcyon past when sex differences were understood and respected men faced constant low level violence precisely so that they would act more like women.
See how clueless I am around broads?! 😉
Have you ever thought that maybe the reason why it bothers so many people is that society found a way to rule out the worst aspects of boys behavior but not the ones from girls behavior. A boy will face consequences for being aggressive or restless, but a girl will face no consequences for being too bitchy, manipulative, overly dramatic or gossipy.
This is a really obvious point, and it's shocking kryptogal doesn't bring it up. I agree with her that currently, the norm is that we can beat nobody up, but it seems her desired end goal is just to let women get away with things that nerdy men wouldn't, for mostly-unclear reasons. Maybe if she ever faced violence herself, she wouldn't be so cavalier about endorsing its return.
How are my reasons not clear?? It's so they stop blaming women for everything all the time, no matter how unrelated I never blame men for anything. That's why I do not need to be hit, I don't complain or whine about my life, ever. You see?
Mostly I complain about other people complaining too much. 😊
You know, when you jump so readily to glib humor in response to mundane criticism, it really calls your sperg credentials into question. :p
I really wanted to ask, "Do we get to punch YOU, too?"
You really missed the point. Boys and girls, men and women, are different. So, no, men punching women is a completely different thing. Did you think you were on Reddit?
I thought someone might say that.
The exoteric, rational point is if I think if you get more of one you get more of the other. There's evidence police officers (and military personnel, though not Kryptogal's sweetie) have higher rates of domestic violence and so on; that's been stated elsewhere.
The esoteric, gut point is, 'See how you like it when people suggest doing unpleasant things to *you*'.
We appear to be at a cultural moment where each gender wants to argue: "Men and women are just different. And sometimes YOUR gender has to suffer inequality because of that. Don't shoot the messenger, it's just a fact of life!"
What is a woman?
This is a question that has bedeviled our best scientists and politicians for two to three years now, and you're telling me that you, random internet person, have figured it out all on your own?
What degrees do you hold? From which universities? Where was your research published and how many times has it been cited?
It must be blatantly obvious by now why men used to reply to women's screaming irrationality with a hard slap across the face with the back of the hand.
Does her no permanent damage but gets her attention and calms her down.
Moreover there is the delicious *frisson* of pleasure at being disciplined by the man she respects. She crossed a line and she knows it, and the fact that he put her back in her place lets her know he really cares about her and wants what's best for her.
You don’t know any women
"Society found a way to rule out the worst aspects of boys behavior." Then why do most rapes go unreported and why do 1/3 of women get beaten by their partners? Doesn't sound very ruled out to me. Fuck that ridiculous horseshit.
I don’t know what the numbers are, but many men would be willing to execute rapists. On the other hand, you have the spectacle of many women defending the “innocence” of actual rapists (e.g., the Central Park 5) or other horrible men/boys.
Most men won't even stop being friends with rapists. The Central Park 5 were acquitted.
Most men? I don’t know any of these men/rapists, afaik. Again, many men would support executing rapists. Yes, the CP5 convictions were vacated but they were likely guilty. As I said, women will defend rapists when they are victims of PC dogma.
Men commit crimes at far higher rates, which is also why they get in trouble at school more. Male misbehavior is more socially destructive.
Socially harmful men get isolated from society and punished by being confined with other men just like them. We get along just fine with this system.
Meanwhile our birthrate has crashed to catastrophic levels the likes of which civilizations do not historically recover from.
Which is more socially destructive? Miguel whose hobby is cornering people in dark alleys with a knife, or Karen who did her part turning society into a winner-takes all market and maximizing incel production.
Women face no consequences for being bitchy and manipulative? Are you serious right now? There are huge social consequences if you’re discovered to be doing either of these things.
Yes it’s a bit harder to prove than outright aggression, but it’s also because in comparison you could lose all your friends and family vs. a man just being sent to therapy for being aggressive. Like look at what happened to Winona ryder for shop lifting. Vs Johnny depp for whatever he did (I don’t even want to get into it).
A man could even go to jail and still retain the love of his family and friends while a woman loses everything at even a hint of being proven as bitchy or manipulative.
Bring dramatic or gossipy is the same as being bad at reading social cues. It’s irritating or annoying at best and unless you’re really hot you’re gonna end up with a small social circle than if you were agreeable.
On the internet, being bitchy and manipulative gets rewarded with engagement and followers.
I've said before that in my experience, "women IRL" and "women on the internet" (or perhaps: "women who argue about gender on the internet") might as well be two separate genders. I like the first gender far better.
“On the internet, being bitchy and manipulative gets rewarded with engagement and followers.”
True of both men and women. The repulsive part of the internet is watching guys being bitchy and manipulative in ways so calculated that no woman could match.
We learned from the best 😉
Men bullying each other to death and coming up with sick terms like chad, rating all human beings in a number scale, talking about looksmaxing and looksmatching were taught these things by women.
Sure jan.
Lol 😆
I'm glad you're giving me concrete examples. That stuff comes across very differently for me.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/23/friendship-is-countersignaling/
I much prefer the thing men do, where they "bully" each other as a form of bonding, over the thing women do, where they self-righteously attempt to exclude or censor others.
This is the most important blog post I've seen on understanding gender differences: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/women-as-worriers-who-exclude
Anyways, if women have a genuine preference for female-style aggression, and men have a genuine preference for male-style aggression, maybe we'd just be better off with more gender segregation?
Yeah, the internet tends to reward the worst behaviours in both men and women. I wouldn't spend much time on what's rewarded online.
My point is that socially, boys' worst traits are much more frowned upon and punished than girls'. The consequences you pointed out are very small when compared to the ones a boy would face. A woman who shows the traits I mentioned will maybe have a smaller social circle, but it will probably still be larger than most men's (but that's because women have larger social circles by default). Btw, Johnny Depp only got away with that because he's a hugely famous actor and incredibly charismatic. A normal guy would have been crushed under those accusations (no matter what he did or not). Johnny Depp's case doesn't reflect what happens in the large majority of cases.
In most IRL cases I know abusive men have gotten away with things mainly because their social circles let them.
Good men get away with nothing because their social circles hold them to better standards. Would you rather have social circles that let you get away with stuff?
As for women having bigger friends group than men even with antisocial behaviours because women tend to have more friends - that’s also because women can have huge fights, call each other out and then accept their mistakes, work on fixing the behaviors and become friends again.
Johny depp got away with much worse things because he’s handsome charismatic and rich but Winona didn’t have a career for two decades because she’s more beautiful , rich and charismatic than the typical woman? Make it make sense. I specifically chose them both because they dated and were of the same star power. Johnny has probably been behaving like an asshole for a long time but has gotten away with it (no one becomes an asshole overnight). It’s just that he finally met a woman who’s as much of an asshole and decided to make him pay.
But Winona paid the price socially and professionally for one wrong thing she did all those years ago. Same with Lindsay Lohan, Britney- the number of women who paid horrific prices for things that were mild in comparison.
I don’t even know if Johnny should be taken to court for what he did, but there is literally no social punishment for fantasising about killing your girlfriend with Paul bettany on text - is there? His friends - no one cared to hold him accountable and just say hey, cut it out. And that’s true of men usually.
Either you are in a circle where anything goes or nothing. And with women it’s almost always a “nothing goes” circle. Men usually let things slide. Unless there are other women involved. It’s like how men who live together live like pigs until one of them starts dating and all of them start picking up the slack.
Men who resolve interpersonal conflict with other men with violence also solve interpersonal conflict with women with violence. That said, Sean Connery was onto something
I'd like to hope that people, even nerd boys, have within them the capacity to be decent without having to suffer the fear of violence, but also I've raise two boys (and a daughter) who are in their 20s now. I married a soft-hearted, sweet nerd boy who literally cried about having to enforce bedtime. One of us had to be the man, so discipline came from me and while my children love me, they do also fear me. I think they turned out better for it.
I think discipline and consequence-awareness are crucial to becoming a real person with real opinions that can contribute to society. I don't think that has to come about through actual violence, but if nothing else will work violence is kind of a shortcut to understanding cause and effect. Sort of like smacking a TV to fix picture quality. It doesn't make you an electrical engineer (or a good parent) but it did fix the picture.
Mixed review. For an angry tirade, you get a solid 9/10 (could be angrier). For an article offering helpful advice to solve problems, however, I'm gonna have to go like 6/10. But if nerds were afraid of getting punched they would probably spend less time hating women, so it does fix the picture.
Maybe someday we will have equality that is actually equality, instead of being either put on a pedestal or made a pariah for making everything terrible.
I give your mixed review a 5 star review. 😊 You right, you right.
Yeah I’ve met plenty of women-haters who have been punched. They probably needed better male figures in their lives but lack of violence was definitely not the problem.
There's a distinct difference between random violence and targeted physical punishment. And you're right, that is the job of Father figures.
I'm talking about people who were punished or bullied.
You shouldn't hit children, it's wrong and in many places illegal. I get that this is not entirely serious and that the larger point is that these manchildren needed discipline meted out by a male authority figure when they were younger. True. We don't need to return to corporeal punishment though, we really don't.
I don't really have a strong opinion on corporal punishment of children, but certainly would not favor it being anything but very mild and more of the scare them not hurt them variety, if it happens. However, I do get annoyed when so many people talk as if schools have suddenly become very mean to boys and that's why some are doing badly. When that is clearly not the case and we are nicer to them then ever before in the history of the world. If someone can get them to behave without hitting them, great, that would be wonderful. But I also don't think it's okay to just let them do some of the things they do nowadays and that any teacher will tell you about. Honestly, some of this seems like it should be so obvious I'm confused how schools are doing it so badly. Like how about granting privileges to the boys who consistently behave...like real privileges representing something they all actually strongly want and that the other boys would be jealous of and motivated to get for themselves?
Honest question: who do you mean by these people who say that schools have become very mean to boys and that's why some are doing badly? For instance Richard Reeves argues that many boys learn differently and that schools might be more geared to girls in some ways, and potentially making adjustments for the different rates that boys and girls develop at would be a good thing. Is it that kind of thing you mean? I get the sense it's something else?
Just the mass of commenters over on the NYT (there was on article on the boys/school topic three days ago, or here). Just seems like a common thread that school isn't suited for boys bc they need to run around more, they don't want to sit still, they want to do not learn passively or read. Which is all I true but doesn't explain why they used to perform better on school and now they don't (for what look to me like obvious reasons).
It's a good point. A lot of domestic abusers were often subjected to violence themselves in their use. Nerdy guys who might benefit from a few fights in school are mostly a different group.
Same here, the biggest misogynist I've known got in a lot of schoolyard fights as a kid.
The corporal punishment era that Kate waxes lyrically about was also an era of reduced women's rights relative to today. Perhaps those facts are related in more ways than one.
It seems like not only beating up but any direct confrontation between men is now unacceptable because of this.
During a recent family gathering, my brother-in-law insulted my wife: he yelled at her in public, on the street of her small town (where everyone knows each other). He had no reason to do this, and he refused to apologize. She was literally devastated after this.
As he hasn't apologized by evening, I confronted him and told him that what he did was wrong and he should apologize. Instead of talking it out, he complained to his wife, who complained to my wife, who got worked up about me "messing with their personal relationships".
In the past men were like "If you don't like something about me, come and say it, right in my face". Also, men were obliged to stand up for their wives if someone insulted them. Sadly, it seems like both are a thing of the past now.
How exactly would 'beating him up' help that situation? You seriously want to risk brain damage, becoming a criminal, or (god forbid) potentially killing someone over some words?
Yeah, men of the past probably beat each other up more. They were also beating and raping their wives more as well. None of this is properly in the past and if you would prefer those social circumstances there are plenty of places for you to live in
It's not about having men beat each other up. It's about the possibility. The deterrence factor.
He would surely think twice before insulting my wife if there was any realistic risk of getting beaten up for of this.
Squaring up to obnoxious dickheads does the exact opposite of mittigating violence - it's an invitation for them to initiatie it. Making these situations more permissable would just escalate petty squabbles into someone potentially getting killed.
This is wrong and Piotr is right. The deterrence factor and threat of violence reduces acts of aggression quite a bit. This is well shown among animals and humans, idk why solely in America and Europe everyone has forgotten this or believes otherwise. You seem to think that violence is out of control or happens frequently rather than rarely precisely bc people want to avoid it. I think maybe part of the reason you think this is bc now that we have made such things illegal, the only people stupid enough to do that are the truly dumb people with zero ability to control their own impulses anyway. So you now associate such things with morons with no impulse control, however, there is no reason it has to be like that. Look at something like BJJ or other martial arts. Those are all highly controlled and disciplined forms of violence.
I agree that the threat of violence is a detterence factor, such as from the state, but your post and most of these comments aren't talking about that. School-aged nerdy males getting assaulted, or being threatened with assault, by other unaccountable males as a roundabout way of solving a particular strain of misogyny is such an obviously stupid and frankly weird idea.
People in Europe and America haven't fogotten this, they're just aware of the obvious risks posed by extrajudicial violence against kids which can easily be life-threatening and have rightfully made the decision to not allow it. I personally think this because my family is from a part of the world where this behaviour is normal amongst men and the outcomes of it are terrifying, not least the high levels of violence against women. We don't need to risk this because of autistic incels on Substack.
Alright, alright, fine. You've convinced me. No Revenge of the Non-Nerds.
I think you can disentangle the two things here. One is:
- If we have a disagreement, we should communicate about it directly, resolve it directly, and if I have something negative to say to you, I'm not afraid to have own what I said and you're not afraid to hear it.
- The other is "we can resolve our dispute by punching."
The punching requires direct communication, but direct communication does not require punching.
This is the best encapsulation of the feminization of men.
I agree with this spiritually though not literally. I suspect many of the more toxic chuds who complain about a feminized culture wouldn’t last a day in a truly masculine one, where their behaviors simply wouldn’t be tolerated.
Shakespeare would agree with you on this one. The cuckold plays are a brilliant analysis of the type of man you’re describing. Merry Wives of Windsor comes to mind.
As a man, I’ve said in previous comments that I somewhat sympathize with these guys, in the sense that sometimes you’re just that frustrated with the opposite sex, but these guys also take it too far. They intellectualize too much and imagination takes over and soon enough it’s delusion. I’ve always followed a principle as a writer. If I’m writing something that in any way could be interpreted as the grand unifying theory of [fill in the blank], it means I’m projecting, and I’m not ready to write the piece. A lot of our male writers on Substack know how to think and argue but are not very introspective. They externalize everything (frequently onto women, as you noted).
Lastly, I do train Brazilian jiu jitsu. I don’t get punched in the face often but does getting choked out count? Haha. Nah, I took a few licks in my youth. Walked away totally fine. Actually, if there’s one thing you maybe forgot. Many of these guys, if they find themselves in a fight, they actually either fawn or pretend to be injured. They aren’t just afraid of other men, they’re afraid to use their bodies at all. They’ve never really learned about them and find it emasculating to go through the process of learning how to fight. They prefer the male version of female passive aggression/gossiping—writing long essays that often read like a cry for help.
Look, I wasn't joking, I seriously had a list in my head of all the male readers that I know have engaged in some type of physical fighting with other men, and ZERO of them are the ones who engage in elaborate woman-blaming. It's actually quite notable to me. So my theory about why could be wrong...but idk, it seems like a very strong correlation.
I probably should have noted that I have no beef whatsoever with nice non-violent men who have never been hit or fought, so long as they don't also regularly blame women for all of their grievances in life. It's only the blamer-boys I'm mad at. But that would've watered it down. 😊
I just did a rundown in my head and the same is true for me - 100%.
In my experience,
The physical men (especially ones who have been in the military or operate big machinery) who’ve punched and been punched have been the best of friends, once you make clear you are not interested in them sexually. They accept it no questions, no pressure — unlike the emo 🖤 assholes.
(But I was the tomboy girl who still loves hard scifi, video games and climbing a mountain just because it’s really hard.)
You know, we use 'tomboy' for both jock women and nerd women (and people like yourself who are a mix of both). I wonder how the experience is different for each of those.
I’m not disagreeing with you but men like the ones you describe live in a state of total objectification of women. (IMO, a porn issue is never the cause but usually the accelerant). I meant to draw some distinction between hatred of women and total ignorance on the subject of women. When women are totally objectified to non-existence in the male psyche, as misogynist as that may be to observe as a woman, it’s almost always insecurity in the masculine social order for the subject. By which I mean, just because the subject is blaming women doesn’t mean talking about women with him will lead to any improvement whatsoever. He’s turned women into a monster and a placeholder for insecurity he can’t own inside of himself. That release valve is so critical to his ego that facts/logic/etc, nothing will matter.
A punch in the face can actually be an acknowledgment. Being seen that much can be stepping up the ladder. Also it works because a punch in the face, or being shoved to the ground, or grappling, doesn’t hurt physically but it will force your dissociated emotional pain into your body where you can feel/process it naturally. Fighting amongst men is healthy to a certain extent because the insecure man learns how to fight and gains acceptance in the social hierarchy. What many men who feel rejected by the hierarchy don’t realize is that it’s them who are rejecting us. They are alone because they are too afraid to own the psychological construct of lies and delusions preventing them from maturing and setting aside these insecurities. A punch in the face, as literal as it is, can have immense metaphorical significance in male development.
I don't know, I'm pretty sure I was one of the ones she was describing and I don't see women as objects. More like the monsters of the Cthulhu Mythos--you can never really understand them, they have powers you can't access and can't understand, and they mean you ill. Or medieval nobility--you have to pay them deference, they can take your money, and they can hurt you and you can't hurt them back.
I agree with the criticism of that former culture. Most men Do. Not. Like. being told to shut up and sit still for hours a day.
Having said that, while I get that you're using hyperbole to make a point, I don't think being beaten up really does much to shape a nerdy kid's character in any kind of meaningful way. I was that autistic kid who got beaten up several times in my youth and it did nothing to build my character or confidence. What did help was play fighting with friends or playing football with my brothers. Boys need physical play but it needs to be in a positive, formational context.
And truth be told, there are cultures today which manage to root out the bullies and yet remain relatively patriarchal, mostly in east Asia. Singapore, Japan, China will literally execute violent males and enforce very tough disciplinary standards in schools yet also reward intellectual achievement and general nerdiness in the wider culture, whilst upholding a somewhat more traditional/patriarchal culture. Albeit in an unhealthy, extremely workaholic form which disrupts healthy family formation and drives very low birthrates.
I have no idea where I'm going with this but thank you for stimulating these thoughts. I think you're right that things are generally better for nerdy guys today than ever. If a guy wants to improve himself there are plenty of resources out there to help him do so. Taking up a martial art or joining a gym just for starters. I'm as anti-woke as the next guy but let's not pretend we don't live in a culture of limitless opportunity. You just have to try.
I also find it a shame that people don't get their asses kicked for things like shoplifting.
In some places in the U.S., mostly out west, it has essentially become legal to simply walk into a store and take whatever you want. I mean, there literally are not consequences anymore.
It is quite clear that this is not a net benefit for society.
Society would run better if people, upon being caught shoplifting, were immediately helped to several broken bones. It would make people think twice before shoplifting, and it would therefore remove the utterly absurd need for ordinary consumer staples to be locked behind gates and cages. Shopping in these areas has become cartoonishly ridiculous and laborious.
Yes, society works better when men are allowed to kick each other's asses. It's such a simple yet effective preventative social mechanism.
Hell, if we allowed ass kickings again, we wouldn't need as many police officers either. Every single thing about society would be better. We're too civilized for our own good.
The real irony is that many men would PREFER just taking a beat down to something like six months of court-ordered therapy or whatever. It would be less painful, or at least over sooner. So in a sense it would be both cheaper, more effective, and actually more humane. But see, this is not something that could possibly seem true to women. We would all rather the lengthy mandated therapy to getting hit. I don't think any of us will ever truly understand why hitting can be effective for men sometimes...I don't try to understand it anymore, I just accept it based on what I see and clear evidence of things like guys getting into a fist fight and then ending up as close friends shortly thereafter.
Lord knows I would prefer the beating. I've actually verbally advocated corporeal punishment as a mercy, not to be more cruel.
I think the option of judicial caning is a good idea.
Can I just register that I'm a woman on the matter despite my male body and lack of female gender identity? :D
Women do actually pay hundreds or thousands of dollars just to get themselves into lengthy therapy. And they love it.
Mean would literally have their ass and bones beat up instead of going to therapy.
I'd rather go to therapy, but I'm probably not a real man. (Have the equipment though.)
A fist fight is more therapeutic than therapy that treats men as malfunctioning women.
I believe Singapore uses this approach for a number of offenses. Can't speak overall as to its efficacy, but the place doesn't seem to have imploded yet, at least.
Paging Peter Moskos https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11233270-in-defense-of-flogging
You could just use judicial flogging or caning, maybe it gets expunged if you stay out of trouble for a year or two.
I think IRL you'd run into racial issues; ass-kickings would rapidly break along racial lines. (Amplify it and you're talking about a lynching.) This was at least part of the reason the 1950s order fell, after all.
Huh, I have never heard of anyone making that connection. Is that true?? I just thought it was a bunch of generally becoming warmer and fuzzier.
It's hard to pick cause and effect with large social changes like that, I agree.
But a big part of the moral impetus behind the cultural revolution of the Sixties was reaction against Jim Crow; it wasn't just hippies smoking weed and having free love. The Establishment wasn't just in favor of marriage before sex and women wearing dresses; it also supported segregation, at least officially. (If you're into conspiracies they secretly wanted to get rid of it because it was making them look bad in the Cold War.)
One of the big problems with allowing random ass-kickings is that the minute the parties are of different races, it's going to hit the Internet and go viral among people of the appropriate political polarity. Note in Singapore the police do all the ass-kickings.
No reason this wouldn't apply to your suggestions about violence being allowed among (male) minors as well.
https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/the-argument-for-ass-whoopings-prison
"They’re not afraid of their moms, because why would they be?"
I speak on behalf of all nebbish Jewish men when I say that we have an existential fear of our mothers which exceeds any Lovecraftian horror which you are capable of comprehending. A curse, but also a blessing that creates great self-deprecating comedy.
SAME! It is the mother who's scary.
You know, I lacked this. No fear at all--if anything I was contemptuous of her weakness. My dad wasn't Jewish, though. I was afraid of him.
Getting punched in the face in real life is actually life threatening. It also carries risk of brain bleeds and permanent disability. It is not like in the movies. It is not a good idea for anyone to be punched in the face. That’s why it is a crime to do it.
The article and comments are filled with people who have never been in an actual fight. Real fight leave cripples and dead behind them, that's why society decided to police them.
We used to have legal dueling, it also left cripples and dead behind them, and that's the same reason it was banned.
This is so funny because I happen to agree with both of you while also disagreeing with the reasons presented by both of you.
I don’t agree with him that women control the world - no they don’t. Powerful men still control the world- but the British belief in fair play has permeated the world making it a fair world for both women and nerds.
I also don’t agree with you that men need to be beaten up more. Men just need to learn to exist in a world with fair play. And great men, powerful men - already understand that. Weak men don’t.
I agree that it’s horrible to be diagnosed with autism on the fly by people just because they dislike you. Like it’s a parlour trick. But is it any worse than a woman being asked - are you on your periods? You just suck it up and go on.
This is the reason in my replies to him I spoke of an annoying nerd friend of mine who literally has no fucks to give about what people think of him. Vicious mole sadly cares too much what people think of him.
My final comment - rude people have a right to exist exactly as they are. But your social circles will shrink and you have to accept that. My rude friend lives in the countryside and has like 1 friend who he meets once a year. You have to be okay with that kind of situation. Rude people are disliked by most people. You can’t force them to like you. Modern society and fair play only means they’ll let you exist just as you are.
Well, I think Vicious Mole was just going off on a little ragey rant, because he talked about Rico Suave as if he had resentment there, but also he has other pieces explaining that he played the Rico Suave role to quite successful effect for many years. And also he's perfectly capable of being charming, as he notes. So I just saw this as him going off, and decided to do the same. Because it did make me mad when he blamed women for all of it, especially when I've had "normie" men react with similar disgust and anger when they deemed me too spergy and to be behaving the way they expected me to. And there are plenty of guys who wear their autism label like a badge of honor.
I agree with you. Everyone hates people who get a little ranty and don’t have the social graces to pick up the clues. It’s not just women. But most men don’t care to be accepted by the men who would mock /judge them. They care about women judging them because they want to be accepted by them. In his case I found it interesting that the first example he gave was of a girlfriend’s mom. Why did he care what she thought? Anymore than he would care what say Trump would think? Because he wanted her to like him and he wanted in on her social circle. But didn’t want to pay the price for it. And that is the main problem with nerds or incels. They don’t care that hot, successful men won’t let them into their social circles they care that women won’t.
I have often had a "one of us" vibe from you, but didn't want to mention it because I didn't want it to sound like some type of fawning come on. But now that you mention it here, it clicks into place.
I thought you were a member of the tribe.
Perhaps getting punched in the face would make nerds more empathetic to women. But then we'd still have to live in the world where the biggest bullies get to bully. And realistically, once those kids hit puberty, no schoolmarm with a ruler is going to keep them in line. Neither will their father with a belt, because they're bigger than dad now. That's another reason we have moved away from physical discipline. Not just because it isn't nice, but because there's a point where it isn't effective and then backfires.
Well then I guess we should just take the bullies out entirely, since they're causing the problems, but no one seems to have the stomach for that either. 😉
I'm not sure it's true about being bigger than your parents one day. I think when someone has been raised and trained through childhood so their brain is wired to view their father as an authority figure, it's not something one can just snap out of just because one day they're bigger. My husband is about twice the size of his dad who is several inches shorter than him, yet I guarantee he has never so much as said a cross word in his presence, and you probably couldn't pay him to be disrespectful, because it's so wired in not to be.
It's kind of like how my dog thinks I'm in charge just bc once upon a time he was a small puppy and I was a much bigger and more powerful entity. So even though now that my dog is full grown and I only outweigh him by 30 lbs or so, and he could easily murder me if he wanted to bc he's got the big teeth and the four-leg drive power...he doesn't in fact he does everything I say. Because he doesn't realize that I'm no longer a more powerful entity, the relationship has already been wired in. Not saying a man is like a dog (well, not exactly lol), just that however one is wired to relate to their parents tends to just stick around, even though eventually you get bigger and they get more frail.
My oldest son is 39. If I told him to, he would drop what he was doing and come help me. Now, with older grandkids, my wife and I have an army at our command. I run a small construction business, all the boys do an internship, and 4 of them still work for me. I'm sure one of them will take over if and when I ever retire. I'm hoping they'll let me stay on, schmooze with the customers, and bid jobs.
Don't know if you saw it, but I went into a little more detail about swats in school in reply to you.
"I'm not sure it's true about being bigger than your parents one day. I think when someone has been raised and trained through childhood so their brain is wired to view their father as an authority figure, it's not something one can just snap out of just because one day they're bigger."
I think this lives or dies on 'authority figure' - see Terry Real (who was severely physically abused by his father) in "I don't want to talk about it" describing the day he realized as a teenager that he was big enough that his father couldn't be unilaterally violent to him anymore.
Great post, it has me squirming.
It reminded me of a joke from the comedian Myq Kaplan:
“There were some bullies at school who knocked the books out of my hands.
And I’m like, ‘Great. Now neither of us can read.’”
Probably a lot of the tension revolves around the fact that "peak manhood coupled with peak societal capability" is probably around the Victorian Age or maybe WWII, but both of those sucked for women. I'm not sure what "peak womanhood coupled with peak societal capability" would be, probably the eighties through oughts?
"Male societal ideal" and "female societal ideal" might just be irreconciliable, because even if we start beating schoolboys again, and/or punching nerds, OR forcing women back into kitchens, we're still not going to be able to resolve a lot of our societal-level problems.
Which are, roughly: Regulatory capture, terrible K-12 schools that cost more than everywhere else and underperform for smart and dumb kids alike, declines in high human capital fertility, housing being impossible to build anywhere people actually live, the most expensive health care system in the world, increasing polarization, more commons being burned (figuratively and literally), and increasing lack of trust in our institutions and legal system.
Neither getting men to man up nor oppressing women is likely to solve any of those, but people sure do love pretending that they will!
And for what it's worth, neither will voting "your" side in, whichever side that might be, because none of them are going to fix any of those, either - notice how they're not even on the menu for either side's platform?
Societally, I think this is about the time that Yamnaya / Scythians / Huns / Mongols roll in and obliterate everyone and then establish a Yuan-empire-equivalent and sort of hard reboot the whole process - the societal equivalent of a dude getting punched for his faulty opinions, and the winner changing his mind / institutions.
Sadly, there are no more extant steppe nomads to do this much-needed societal punching. But maybe we can blame either men or women for that??
The Longhouse - this one weird trick has taken away steppe nomad vigor and masculinity!
Or modern men - everyone tells you to get a degree and a soul-crushing 9-5, but if you pursue the ancient wisdom of the Horde, you too can become an Alpha and crush your enemies beneath your iron boots while listening to the lamentations of their women! Sign up for my 6 week course today and join the Modern Mongols!
Peak womanhood with peak societal capability: I'll peg it to 1988 to 2013ish.
2014 is a reliably cursed year. I have gone on and on with friends about some shit going down about that time.
I've seen it cited as the year the Great Awokening took off if you look at all the trendlines.
You literally live in the greatest era of the most successful country and culture on the planet. I’m so confused when westerners speak like they live in hell….
> You literally live in the greatest era of the most successful country and culture on the planet
Well, not me personally, I put my money where my mouth is a while ago and have been an expat for a few years now.
But yes, there are many things to admire and love about America, especially if you want to start a business or have an impact on the world. I think we have the most creative and innovative and entreprenurial people / culture in the world, but it's being steadily whittled away by regulatory capture, relentless bureaucratic growth, and systemic decay and corruption.
People are trying to hobble and drag down that "best in the world" slice of creative and entreprenurial people, and they're succeeding to a greater and greater extent, and I think it's a shame.
But you want to see a functional society? Go to Singapore or Tokyo. Everything is clean, the schools actually work, there's no homeless encampments, beggars, or fentanyl zombies ruining downtowns, there's no stores with locked sections everywhere, even traffic is much much better.
Aside from the minor problem that both of them are literally going extinct, it's superior on basically every front. 😂
So my husband is on a business trip on the west coast and just texted me to tell me his rental car was smashed into and stolen in the middle of the day in the parking lot of the fucking city convention center. He has been telling me what a dump it has become and overrun with drug addict homeless, but this takes the cake. I have kept hearing about it things being bad in the west coast cities but honestly I had assumed it must be at least a little exaggerated. Apparently not.
> I have kept hearing about it things being bad in the west coast cities but honestly I had assumed it must be at least a little exaggerated. Apparently not.
Yes, directly before I became an expat I lived in a very expensive part of a downtown and had only a single car garage, so my "street car" would get broken into roughly once a month, and have the windows smashed every 2-3 months.
This would actually happen routinely, to entire streets of cars. Literally 20-30 car windows smashed, for probably $200 of change and useless crap collected (obviously nobody kept anything in their cars).
That's ~$15k worth of damage happening every few months, for literally nothing.
The police? If you filed a report, they would literally laugh at you. Largely, nobody bothered.
I saw people overdose on the street a couple of times - it got to the point I'd carry narcan around just for that, and ambulance crews had special protocols because anyone who OD'd who got narcan would get violently angry when it hit and their high went away, because suddenly all the endorphins in their system are flushed out, and they're deeply addicted so it's like a one-way "hell" switch.
And it just never gets better, it only gets worse - stores close, neighborhoods decay, this is the west coast in a nutshell, home of the most valuable companies in the world, with some of the most valuable real estate in the world, but that's the daily environment EVERYONE there is living in.
Greatest country in the world, indeed.
If you run the cost / benefit, literally sending problem homeless somewhere remote and giving them all the drugs and alcohol they could ever want for free would be so vastly, comically net positive that JUST the increase in downtown real estate, or the reduction in policing, or the value of lives saved, would each individually pay for the whole thing.
I wrote about that here: https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/an-incentives-based-problem-homeless?r=17hw9h
But you know, the odds of anything like that being implemented are essentially zero.
San Francisco, right?
Biggest problem in the world is too many people, not too few. We need to cut the whole world’s population by 50%. Instead of planning for grwoth all the time, we need to start planning for shrinking.
Bet you have no idea why you believe this other than it’s what you’ve heard your whole life.
I don’t think either of these countries are better than America. But then I’m an America fan girl without having ever visited.
> I don’t think either of these countries are better than America.
Yeah, it really depends what you're optimizing. If you're optimizing "impact" or "ability to attract lots of genuinely top talent," or "good place to start a business," it's the best there is.
But if you're optimizing "quality of life" or "nice place to raise kids" or "not actively dystopian" it's definitely got some downsides.
And sure, there's plenty of places within the US that have those good attributes - the worst of the downsides are concentrated in a handful of big cities.
But they don't HAVE to be, is my point! Greater Tokyo is twice as big as any city or CBSA in the US. Singapore is comparable to SF or core LA or Manhattan plus 2 boroughs, or the Seattle or Denver CBSA's. They're both paradises compared to any of those places, while being big cities with every amenity (and great transit).
Doing "big cities" better is totally a choice, and the US is majorly self-owning on that front.
Doing big cities badly cannot be such a big crime. I agree with you that that is the case, but it’s still a very minor problem compared to everything else in the rest of the world.
You're right. One of the arguments I've seen is that because the USA couldn't be conquered we were stuck with an 18th-century political system that's inefficient and been unable to adapt. The Founding Fathers worship on the right kind of annoys me--I doubt even any of them would have wanted us to be obsessing over what they would have thought of X or Y 21st-century development. If brought to the modern day they would probably just throw up their hands in culture shock. (Though some of the more intellectual ones like Franklin or Jefferson might have enjoyed Wikipedia.)
And being a Mongol only works if you're part of a horde.
> One of the arguments I've seen is that because the USA couldn't be conquered we were stuck with an 18th-century political system that's inefficient and been unable to adapt.
I feel like the system the FF set up had the *capability* to adapt, we just didn't do it, and have gotten hung up on navel gazing and internecine struggles.
But I do seriously think future minds are going to look back on us in this time, and say "so wait, everyone smart stopped having babies, they set all the smart people onto coordinating together to milk rubes instead of actually solving any of their problems, and spent all the rest of their societal efforts and time on witch hunts and culture wars?? Well *there's* your problem right there!"
Like we're well past the "obvious self own" stage and barreling ever faster down that road.
They had amendments, we couldn't make them fast enough. If it sounds like I'm disrespecting them, I'm not. There's really no way they could guessed the problems we were going to have 250 years ahead. Today's world is totally unthinkable for them.
I suppose you're right. Still, as Kryptogal has said elsewhere, the whole pronatalist thing's pretty hard unless you can get women on board (gestation is unpleasant, painful, and expensive), and they really don't want to. The bright spots are places like Israel where everyone's motivated to outbreed an enemy.
Witch hunts and culture wars are results of elite overproduction in a stagnant society. I actually do think attacks on higher education would be useful if they can decrease the percentage of people going to college. At least now that debt is so high a lot of young people are saying no.
> Witch hunts and culture wars are results of elite overproduction in a stagnant society. I actually do think attacks on higher education would be useful if they can decrease the percentage of people going to college. At least now that debt is so high a lot of young people are saying no.
Yeah, I do genuinely wonder how much of this back and forth is really just "the process," and is how we adapt to better equilibria. Young people opting out of overpriced and crappy colleges, some people opting out of children and other people opting in, and so on.
But I also think that a process like this might have worked when the speed of communication was based on horses, but in our modern environment where everything happens at the speed of light and rapidly gets valenced and polarized, the process itself is more or less broken, because ingroup / outgroup dynamics is a stronger force than pretty much anything else, and the process of getting polarized is an attractor that eats everything and makes substantive and effective change more or less impossible in democracies.
In ours, anyway. Others have their own problems. The Europeans sat on the immigration thing for decades and wound up with their own populist wave.
I think you are basically correct, though. Well, we'll see. I chickened out of the kids thing. It's an open question whether that's a good thing or not: the IQ fetishists would say no, but I kind of wonder if spergs shouldn't breed. One way or another it's for someone else to solve the problems of the future. I have to say I'm kind of glad I wasn't born later. Between climate change, authoritarianism, and the rise of a peer competitor, I am not sure I'd want to be a young person now. I hoarded a reasonable sum of money on an upper-middle-class job, which is a lot harder to do now.
I get where youre coming from, but if your line of thinking was correct, the middle east would be a peacefull paradise for women and that clearly isnt the case.
Deep down all women want to be subdued by a Taliban-like regime.